Bowie: A Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

the pub chatter was lulling, akin to falling asleep with the television or radio on today. Or maybe it was distracting. People do tend to say things after a few pints that a young boy might not want to know about. Did he hear soldiers and merchants talk about travel? Did this, coupled with the trains pulling in and out, also impossible to avoid from his bed, pique David’s interest in a world beyond this modest, white two-story house, with its stone walk and little square of lawn, now full of dandelions? The closeness to the pub’s back room and the station really do beg such questions. And if all of this did affect him, there were only two ways to escape such taunting: via one’s imagination and, eventually, by stepping onto a train at that railway station. This spot may very well be where the confluence of David Bowie’s need for intellectual stimulation and unmoored searching might have been formed in the young David Jones’s personality. Walk across the elevated concrete bridge and stare down at the tracks, and it’s hard not to wonder how strange it must have been for the adult David to return there from the city after a night performing at the Marquee Club in Soho. He lived here, after all, well into his career as a professional musician. I imagine that he could hear Peggy and John snore in their bedroom. On a Bowie-ist side note—and this probably means little to anyone living in Bromley—directly across from the Crown pub and facing the back fence of David’s house and the window of his room is a black storefront with a giant glass window full of mannequins attired in Renaissance costume or Victorian formal-wear. Its name: Larger Than Life Stagewear: Theatrical Costumes for Hire. While the store is obviously one of the newer developments on this slowly modernizing block, its wares are symbolic, as theatrical costume would essentially provide David with his H. G. Wells–ian ticket out of Bromley for good.
    In keeping with their new stature, the Joneses took pains to make sure that their child was exceedingly presentable. The class photo from hisprimary school, Burnt Ash in Bromley, dated 1958, shows David with a starched shirt and neatly parted hair, looking more like a miniature man than a tousle-haired kid. Every one of his classmates appears exactly the same.
    “David was always clean and tidy and spotless,” his aunt Pat Antoniou has said. “My sister made a thing of that. Every five minutes she would say, ‘Pull your sock up,’ ‘Have you washed your face?’”
    For all of his childhood and much of his adult life, the private David Bowie has been painfully shy. It’s naturally difficult to believe that any celebrity is shy, as the very prism through which we view them is public, loud and larger than life. Lots of performers claim to be shy offstage and freely acknowledge the paradoxical elements of their public and private selves. They invent personas who can speak and sing and be generally extroverted (Eminem’s “Slim Shady” and Beyoncé’s “Sasha Fierce” being the latest in a long line that most famously includes Ziggy Stardust), while their true shy selves lie buried and protected somewhere deep inside. Once he’d achieved a kind of perma-fame previously enjoyed only by movie legends, David began to reveal much about his own shyness. In a 1975 interview with Dinah Shore, for example, he admits, “The one thing I didn’t like was being terribly shy. An incredibly shy person. And so I over-compensated. I thought that if I gave myself an alarming kind of reputation then I would have to learn to defend myself and therefore come out of myself.” Henry Winkler, by the way, is one of Dinah Shore’s other guests on that show (Nancy Walker of the famous Bounty paper towel ads rounds the panel out). Dinah introduced Winkler as “the David Bowie
of Happy Days.”
(Eternally polite, Bowie says, “I’m a great fan of Fonzie.”) In the clip, while Bowie and Walker puff away on their