As Mr. Guare remembered it, Mr. Bowie was “in a actual aphotic place” (it was anon afterwards he had had a affection advance onstage in Berlin), and a alternate friend, the English ambassador Robert Fox, was aggravating to allure him aback to a artistic life. Mr. Guare anon said yes.
He and Mr. Bowie met at anniversary other’s homes in New York to bandy about ideas, and sometimes they went out. “We would yield walks about the East Village,” Mr. Guare said. “And I was consistently praying somebody would run into us so I could say, ‘Do you apperceive my acquaintance David Bowie?’”
It never happened.
Mr. Guare was at aboriginal puzzled and afresh afraid at how Mr. Bowie — the date creature, the persona, the guy he saw command an admirers at Radio City-limits Music Hall in 1973 with his annoying orange hair and snow-white tan — could airing the city-limits streets unrecognized.
“He catholic with this dark of invisibility — cipher saw him,” Mr. Guare said. “He just eradicated himself.”
People generally forgot, but up until his death, on Sunday at age 69, Mr. Bowie was a New Yorker. He said so himself, emphatically. “I’m a New Yorker!” he declared to SOMA annual in 2003, afterwards he’d been actuality a decade.
He and his Somali-born wife, Iman, who is a archetypal chatty in 5 languages, spent about their absolute marriage, added than 20 years, as association of the city. Anyone will acquaint you they were one of New York’s a lot of glamorous, adroit couples, fabricated all the added so by the aristocratic and clandestine way they lived.
And admitting Mr. Bowie was awfully wealthy, he wasn’t one of those affluent guys who kept an accommodation in the city, forth with a portfolio of all-around absolute acreage holdings, and flew in. Aside from a abundance retreat in Ulster County, N.Y., his Manhattan accommodation was his alone home.
You may not accept advised all this because Mr. Bowie was an bogeyman in the city, rarely glimpsed. You heard it mentioned that he lived here. Somewhere downtown, anyone thought. But seeing him out? Acceptable luck.
Michael Musto, the adept night activity columnist (and casual New York Times contributor), met him at a affair in the 1970s but saw him actual few times afterwards that, he said. Gerard Malanga, the artist and Warhol associate, who lived three blocks from Mr. Bowie and had accompany in common, declared himself as “one of the millions who never encountered David on the artery or anywhere.”
Mr. Bowie wasn’t a Garbo-level recluse. He got about abundant to abstain the abhorrent fate of accepting his aloofness draw added absorption to him. But if humans did atom him at Lincoln Center or out to banquet with Iman, they usually gave him advanced berth, out of account and aswell a faculty of intimidation.
“I had consistently anticipation he was unapproachable,” Mr. Musto said. “But he was absolutely admirable and accessible.”
“The aces identities he had,” Mr. Guare said — acceptation Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke and even the Bowie of the ’80s, who looked like the world’s a lot of alluringly dressed consecutive analgesic — “bore no absorption on the being who was accustomed them.”
“I anticipate he had complete admission to David Jones,” Mr. Guare added, apropos to Mr. Bowie’s bearing name. “And that’s who I knew.”
Mr. Bowie heard New York afore he anytime saw it. When he was 19 and still active in England, his manager, aback from the States, gave him an acetate almanac of “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” acquired anon from Andy Warhol.
“I was audition a amount of air-conditioned that I had no abstraction was humanly sustainable,” he afterwards wrote in an article for New York magazine.
He catholic to New York in 1971, about the time he appear “Hunky Dory,” his fourth album. One of the aboriginal New Yorkers he encountered was Moondog, the blind, flowingly barbate artery aerialist who dressed in a bootleg bathrobe and a horned Viking helmet and buried himself on West 54th Street. On that trip, Mr. Bowie visited the Factory; touchingly, he capital to play his song “Andy Warhol” for the man himself.
When he came for an continued break in 1972, he was accompanied by his aboriginal wife, Angie, and his new manager, Tony DeFries. Mr. DeFries, a cigar-chomping, Col. Tom Parker-like showbiz slickster, believed in success by way of publicity-generating spectacle. Aback then, Mr. Bowie did not canyon through the city-limits in a dark of invisibility. He took limos everywhere and presented himself like an abstruse canvas.
Here’s Bebe Buell, the artist and bedrock brilliant paramour, abandoning Mr. Bowie’s accession at Max’s Kansas City: “He absolved in cutting a powdered-blue clothing with orange hair, and just bedazzled us all.”
After he became Ziggy Stardust, and a huge star, Mr. Bowie begin ambush at the West 20th Artery accommodation of his publicist, Cherry Vanilla. In her memoir, “Lick Me,” she recounts how he would do brain-sizzling amounts of cocaine and alcohol milk for aliment (no solid aliment in those years), and they’d rap about “power, symbols, communication, music, the occult, Aleister Crowley and Merlin the Magician.”
Like a lot of bedrock stars, Mr. Bowie lived in hotels: aboriginal the Gramercy Park Hotel, afresh the Sherry-Netherland until the room-service bill became obscene. Throughout the 1970s, he was beneath a aborigine of New York than a abandoned tourist, administering his limo to Max’s, Paradise Garage and Reno Sweeney. Socially able and curious, he transited amid Studio 54 and CBGB, and afraid out with Mick and Bianca Jagger and Iggy Pop.
In the New York annual essay, Mr. Bowie wrote of that period, “I rarely got up afore apex and hit the sack afresh about four or 5 in the morning.” He saw the city-limits with “multicolored glasses.”
As had been broadly chronicled, Mr. Bowie larboard America for Berlin, partly to abscond his addict lifestyle.
In 1980, afterwards recording the albums “Low,” “Heroes” and “Lodger” — which became accepted as his Berlin leash — he was aback in New York, this time as the Elephant Man at the Booth Amphitheater on Broadway. (“He is splendid” The Times wrote.) In 1982, with Nile Rodgers producing, he recorded the anthology “Let’s Dance” at the Power Station on West 53rd Street, a sonic and bartering triumph. But for all his victories and nocturnal acceptable times in the city, Mr. Bowie seemed clumsy to accomplish to it.
When Iman met Mr. Bowie at a banquet affair in 1990, he was active in Switzerland as a tax exile, a aborigine of the world. She wasn’t accepting it, she already told The Guardian: “I’m a New Yorker. I was like, ‘Let’s go home.’”
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