Icon no 13: David Bowie (part B)

(Singer, songwriter, actor: 8/1/1947 – 10/1/2016)

Warning: this post contains references to trauma, neglect and trafficking.

Bowie in his 1980s suited reinvention

In part A, I looked at the some of the strategies that we see in David Jones by the time he is a teenager. Whilst his friend George certainly had the musicality and looks to become an icon, it seems that emotional distance, drive, charisma and persona marked David out for success. David was different. But what had made him like this?

When we hear the term sex-trafficking, we imagine a scenario in which a person is forced and transported over large distances. Most trafficking, though, does not fit this picture. Clinical law professor, Bridget Carr says on Locked Up Living Podcast that human trafficking occurs “when someone with power exploits a vulnerability….That vulnerability can be a wide range of things …and I’ve even worked on cases where someone’s commitment to athletics in the Olympics system has been used as a way to exploit them.“¹ Does this happen in music? Can it be that someone who is vulnerable to sexual exploitation and who has a deep need to be famous, is sexually exploited? We would have to find evidence for both the desperate need for fame and an underlying vulnerability.

If we were to go back to 1965 and a basement flat in Belgravia, London, we might find two businessmen trying to strike a deal. Businessman A is younger and less experienced. In the corner, at a distance sits a young man whom he brought to the meeting. This 18-year-old does not join the conversation but is introduced by his first name. Two propositions are made to businessman B. The first is that the young man in the corner is going to be a superstar. The second proposition is that if businessman B agrees to co-manage him, “you can also have sex with him”. Businessman B gets the sense that the 18-year-old is “in on it and had agreed to the deal” but thinks that businessman A is “little more than a pimp”². Businessman B is one of the most respected music managers in the UK, Simon Napier-Bell. The silent 18-year-old is of course David Bowie. No deal, on this occasion, was agreed.

David’s life-long friend George said of David that “using sex to get what he wanted was just what David did…You have to use the currency that you have available, and if that is your sexuality well then, OK.”² In the Belgravia flat, David was technically an adult, and unlike most trafficking victims, we know that he did receive the fame that was promised. But was this technically sex-trafficking? What made David Jones so driven to be famous, and what might have primed this man to use sex as a way to achieve it? Was he just taking control of his own assets to gain success? Or was there something in David’s background that made him vulnerable, in a similar way to the child on a path to sex working?

We can think of those who reach high celebrity status as simply successful. We can think of their success not just in terms of their talent (music, acting, politics etc) but also in terms of self-actualisation. We admire, we support, and we are influenced. We may even elect them as our leader. Pop history portrays Bowie as someone who not only defined his sexuality on his own terms, but who redefined, for a generation how people could define their sexuality. He is portrayed as a trail-blazer of self-definition. Narcissism theory urges caution about taking this narrative on face value.

On the map of narcissism (below), performance, persona and idealisation are go-to strategies that are relied on intensely in too many kinds of situation in adulthood (along with judging and being emotionally dismissive). On the same map two kinds of overwhelming childhood experiences are implicated as primers. These are the kinds of experience that idealisation and admiration can serve to create distance from - in terms of how we feel. One of these traumatic childhood experiences is unmanageable emotional vulnerability. The need to be emotionally seen and considered as a child is neglected. The other experience is unmanageable shame³. Taking these in turn, was Bowie’s childhood marked by such experiences in an out of the ordinary way?

The map of narcissism³*

Escaping the cold

If we were to go back to March 19^th,1970 and the wedding of David Bowie and Angie Barnett, we might find photos being taken as the register is signed. The father of the groom is deceased. But we see the bride, the groom, and the groom’s mother. The mother is holding the pen, about to sign the register. There is one thing unusual about this scene. The groom’s mother was not invited to sign the register. And neither was this woman, David’s mother invited to the wedding². What had happened?

Haywood and Peggy

Haywood Jones was 18 when, having lost both parents, he came into an inheritance which he used on a series of ventures which all failed. First, he bought up a theatre troupe and took it on tour. Next, he bought a London nightclub. Here, Haywood met a singer, Hilda Sullivan, and “threw himself into making her a star.”² with little success. When the nightclub failed, Haywood left show business with Hilda the singer, now his wife. After an affair which birthed a daughter, Haywood began a new relationship with Margaret Burns, known as ‘Peggy’. Peggy became David’s mother.

Peggy had two children from previous relationships whom she was not looking after. When Peggy fell pregnant with Haywood’s baby, she, Haywood and his wife Hilda moved into a house in Brixton, south London. This was not a plan with long term prospects. Soon after David’s birth, Hilda left, but soon after this, Peggy’s son Terry nine years older than David, came to live with them.

David with his father, Haywood and mother, Peggy.

David’s relationships with his mother and father were very different. Till his death, David wore round his neck a gold cross received from his father as a child. On the map of narcissism, it is sometimes one parent figure who introduced the role of performance or idealisation and another who is the sources of more traumatic experiences. It was Haywood who had a “youthful obsession with the entertainment world.”⁴ It was Haywood who bought the saxophone. And it was he who wrote to David’s first manager, Les Conn, comparing his son with The Beatles.⁴

For some close to David, “his ‘dreaminess’…was his most powerful and charming character trait.”⁴ They thought he developed this dreaminess “to blot out the everyday details of life in Bromley.”⁴ But not everyone in Bromley needs to blot out their life. What, for David, were these details? George Underwood was David’s best friend from the age of eight. He said David’s mother was “not as nice as mine. She was quite difficult. There was no love in that house. That’s why he came round to mine all the time to get away from her….I used to think she had a chip on her shoulder about something…I don’t think she liked me very much. She didn’t like anyone. I don’t believe she even liked herself.”² When George learned some of Peggy’s secrets from David, he said “it made all sorts of sense about how he was with his mother and her dreadful coldness towards him and everyone else.”²

If we were to go back to this house in Bromley, in 1964, we might find David with his girlfriend Dana Gillespie, introducing her to his parents. Dana is finding the house “unbelievably cold… [There is] no love in it”. When his parents leave the room, David turns to the 15-year-old and says, “whatever it takes, I’m going to get out of here… I’ve got to get out of here.”²

We can see those who reach the highest levels of success as starting life from a place of high self-esteem. Early in David Bowie’s life, we hear about a source of urgent action and drive. But it is about getting away from home. As adulthood approached, the number of people in whose houses David would stay would increase dramatically. Increasingly, sex would be involved. The narrative that quickly built around David was one of ”shag-tastic promiscuity.”⁴ But by the age of 18, as in the Belgravia flat, specific sexual transactions are remembered.

As an iconic pop star, David said to a journalist, “Yeh well. I can pull anyone I want. But try getting someone to want you for the right reasons when you are me.”² This was no doubt true for the 43-year-old David Bowie. But it seems that it had also been true for the three-year-old David Jones. What does it mean to be wanted for the right reasons? To be wanted for who you actually are, with the emotional reactions to life that you actually have? And not for the masks you have had to create?

David Jones, centre at secondary school

Secrets and shame

It is hard to know why David did not attend the funeral of his half-brother Terry. He had died by suicide struggling with schizophrenia. It is hard to know why his mother at the funeral, exchanged no words with her sister, the only other family member present². David and Terry had most likely shared a bedroom for the first seven years of David’s life. They had been close. When he was asked why he missed the funeral, he said, “funerals are all about the people left behind. I had nothing to say to my Aunt or my Mother at that point”². I wonder what it would have been like for David to be at the funeral. Here was the mother whom he had felt unloved by. And here was a brother, whose death might, for David, speak loudly about his own painful experience.

But there was something for David that was separate to the coldness of his childhood home. The mental illness that Terry had suffered with came from Peggy’s side. Peggy’s mother was remembered as “angry and sometimes violent.”² She and three of Peggy’s sisters were referred to by David as “the mad aunts.”² It was a source of shame in the family. On the day David met his first wife, he said, “sometimes when I’m drunk or stoned, I can almost feel it in me.”² Despite his pop superstar potential, he didn’t feel far from the risk of being afflicted. A preoccupation with madness runs through many Bowie lyrics (Aladdin Sane, All the Madmen, I’m deranged).

In the Jones family, mental illness was not the only source of shame that could not be spoken about. One day at the age of 12, David confided in his friend George, after coming to school in an upset and “scared” state. He said, “I think my mother might be a prostitute”.² David had read some old letters to his mother which revealed a secret past. In part A, we saw how the appearance of David having different coloured eyes was caused by a punch from his friend George. But there might be something else that also made David vulnerable to this eye condition. One disease, commonly undetected and untreated in post war Britain, can be transmitted in the womb to the unborn child. This disease can create susceptibility specifically to this eye condition. It is syphilis.²

Did Peggy transmit syphilis, an occupational hazard of sex working, to her son? Later in David’s life, AIDS would devastate communities in which there was a lot of unprotected sex. When a journalist got round to asking David if he had been worried, he responded “I was treated for syphilis once - a long time ago.”² This most hidden of secrets may have left its mark in plain sight, incorporated into the persona for the world to see.

According to mentalization theory, it is not the existence of shame in a family that hinders emotional development in children. It is the inability of the family to mentalize it – to manage and speak about feelings. A family mentalizing culture would help to demonstrate that shame - the emotion - is not, in itself, dangerous. If unmanageable experiences of shame and condemnation are primers for narcissistic strategies, David Jones’s childhood contained heavy doses of such experience. David said later in life “I felt often – ever since I was a teenager – so adrift, and so not part of everyone else…With so many dark secrets about my family in the cupboard. It made me feel very much on the outside of everything.”²

“Surprised at who I am”

In his songs, the alien characters were there, David said, “to suggest that I felt alienated, that I felt distanced from somebody, and that I was really in search of some kind of connection.”² The most fundamental disconnection in his life, with another human being, was with his mother. Biographer Paul Trynka connects this missing connection in David’s life with the idea of narcissism and persona: “It went some way towards explaining the creation of characters behind which to hide.”⁴ In the mentalization theory of narcissism, there is a term used for something that grows within the mind of the child whose parents cannot meet its emotional needs. It’s called the alien self.⁵

During the second half of his life, something gradually changed in David, and his second marriage to Iman was different. He said, “I never thought I would be such a family orientated guy. I didn’t think that was part of my make up…I’m rather surprised at who I am.”²

Celebrities often create something of a backstory to explain how they became so successful. It seems from the celebrities I have looked at that these backstories can serve to deny the role of trauma and of desperation. And perhaps, as an audience, we also would prefer to idealise. Isn’t that what we pay for? As a whole, narcissism is a strategy of denying vulnerability and shame. So perhaps it should not surprise us that where vulnerability was a driver, this has to be replaced with another explanation. David’s first wife Angie said “the songs made us decide to become successful”.² But before the songs were good enough, David was ruthlessly driven. No, it wasn’t the songs that did it. David said he’d been to art college. But no, he never had². David said that he’d grown up in Brixton which had “left great strange images in my mind…all the jazz and blue beat clubs were in Brixton.”² But David moved away from Brixton when he was six years old. No, there was a pursuit of fame. And it was motivated by emotional neglect and sources of family shame that had come to feel unsafe. This emerging, driven boy was heavily committed to fame as his escape, and perhaps also vulnerable to exploitation – by himself and others.

The music industry noticed early on in David a charismatic energy that would pave the way to success. But narcissism theory says that such energy can emerge as a drive to find distance from traumatic emotional experiences. Even in its most shining examples, fame can be a kind of running away. In his running, David found himself an alien on Mars. Such was the need for distance from specific feelings. And the need for distance from home.

*Ryle did not apply this approach only to narcissism. If this mapping approach has been used in your own therapy, this does not mean that you have narcissistic difficulties.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.

Notes

1. Murphy, N., Jones, D. and Carr, B. (2025) How inability to recognise human trafficking fails victims. Locked Up Living’s Substack, 15^th January 2025.

2. Jones, L-A. (2017). Hero: David Bowie. Hodder

3. Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.

4. Trynka, P. (2011). Starman: David Bowie. Sphere.

5. Drozek, R.P. Unruh, B.T. & Bateman, A. (2023). Mentalization Based Treatment for Pathological Narcissism: A handbook. Oxford University Press