Nine Juiciest Bits From New Bowie Biography

From Iman to drug use, The Daily Beast speed-reads Paul Trynka’s biography, ‘David Bowie: Starman,’ for the most revealing moments from the pop icon’s life and career.

1. Eye for an Eye

In Bowie’s later years, around the time when his behavior was most outrageous, the pop star had a favorite saying: “Everyone finds empathy in a nutty family.” Bowie painted his mother as a repressed, eccentric woman who caused him to rebel as a kid. But, according to David Bowie: Starman, Bowie was described by his teachers as a bright, charming young thing with good manners—the kind of boy every mother would be proud of. There was one indelible incident during Bowie’s adolescence that would forever change his clean-cut image. When his closest friend and bandmate, George Underwood, was about to go out with a girl Bowie secretly fancied, he sabotaged the rendezvous, planning to move in on her himself. The boys got into a heated fight, and Underwood threw an impulsive punch, accidentally scratching Bowie’s eyeball. The injury left his pupil permanently dilated, making that eye appear to be a different color than the other.

Robert E. Klein / AP Photo

2. The London Boy

In the mid-‘60s when Bowie was only in his late teens, he waltzed into London’s mod music scene as if he had been a part of it for years. It was during this period that Bowie wrote “The London Boys,” a “vignette of pill-popping boys dressed in their finery” that came to define Bowie’s gender-bending, man-child persona and set the precedent for later hits like “Lady Stardust” and “All the Young Dudes.” The mod scene was inextricably linked to the gay scene, and Bowie blended in seamlessly with both. But he was more admired for his unique image and charm than he was for his music.


Read the rest at The Daily Beast.