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early seventies, said.
    “There’s a lot of madness in my family,” David told biographer George Tremlett, who proceeded to suggest to him that he was merely talking about eccentricity. “No, madness—real fucking madness,” David shot back. “It worries me sometimes, because I don’t know whether it’s in my genes and if I’ll end up that way, too.”
    David’s salvation would prove to be his love of reading, which led him to R. D. Laing’s seminal reappraisal of schizophrenia, The Divided Self, published when David was thirteen, and which became one of his all-time favorite books. In it, Laing wrote, “It is the thesis of this study that schizophrenia is a possible outcome of a more than usual difficulty in being a whole person with the other, and with not sharing the common-sense (i.e., the community sense) way of experiencing oneself in the world.” Or, put more simply, Laing also said, “Insanity—a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
    Laing’s book, a sensation upon publication in Britain, was the first bulwark against David’s fear of inheriting his family’s insanity. The second was his ability to submerge his fear in his lyrics and thus disarm it.
    But he was a winsome baby, with blue eyes, blond hair; his photogenic little face is wreathed in smiles, and the only intimation of the future captured in the earliest photographs of him when he was ten months old, is his charisma. In short, he is the epitome of a happy bouncing baby. But as always, with David, everything is not what it seems.
    A quintessential moment in his childhood: “The very first memory I have is of being left in my pram in the hallway of 40 Stansfield Road, facing the stairs. It seemed to be a very, very long time and I was very scared of the stairs. They were dark and shadowy,” he recalled

 TWO 
    STARBOY
    W hen David was about three years old, his mother caught him putting on makeup for the first time. Not hers, but makeup belonging to the tenants in the apartment upstairs; lipstick, eyeliner, and face powder, which he daubed all over his little face.
    “When I finally found him, he looked for all the world like a clown,” Peggy Jones remembered in 1986.
    Shocked and amused, she rounded on David and told him in no uncertain terms that he shouldn’t use makeup. If that edict had been handed down to him by his father, whom he idolized, and whose calm temperament he appeared to have inherited, he might have accepted it. Instead, David said, somewhat reproachfully, “But you do, Mommy. . . .”
    In the spirit of fairness, Peggy agreed, but then hammered home her point that makeup was definitely not for little boys. It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to analyze the ripple effect that Peggy’s ruling had on the three-year-old David when he grew up, feeling as ambivalent about her as he did. . . .
    However, only a few years later, Peggy did back down and encourage David’s childish tendency toward theatricality, perhaps becauseshe saw her own passion for singing reflected in him, and perhaps also because she intuited his nascent talent. After she sewed David a robe and headdress, and his father made him a crook for his role as a shepherd in the nativity play put on by Stockwell Infants School, which he first attended when he was almost five, Peggy observed how much he loved dressing up. “It was then that we realized that there was something in David,” she said.
    That realization was compounded by David’s reactions when he listened to the radio, in particular to American entertainer Danny Kaye’s “Inchworm.”
    “He would tell everyone to be quiet and listen, and then fling himself about to the music,” said Peggy, adding, “In those days we thought he might become a ballet dancer.”
    However, David’s exhibitionist tendencies did not find favor with his aunt, Peggy’s sister Pat, who sniped, “He was a vain child, and he always tried to look different.” Clearly irritated by David’s