Free The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett Page B

implications. An artist has painted a portrait of a mysterious young man, and then finds the incarnation of his picture at his door. He is so unnerved by this apparition that he kills the youth, only for him to reappear continually in his house. The haunted artist then destroys his painting and immediately drops dead. Bowie’s role required nothing more demanding than a fixed expression and the ability to tumble down a few stairs. But he achieved this with sufficient panache for Armstrong to offer Bowie the lead role in a screenplay based around Offenbach’s opera Orpheus in the Underworld ; the screenplay updated the plot by centering it on a pop singer who is torn apart by his fans—an uncanny precursor of the Ziggy Stardust myth five years later. *
    â€œI want to act,” Bowie had announced in 1966. “I’d like to do character parts. I think it takes a lot to become somebody else.” His subsequent career as an actor, certainly until the early eighties, merely demonstrated the truth of what he was saying, as he found it difficult to escape a sense of self-consciousness that left the audience constantly aware that they were watching David Bowie rather than a fictional character. Yet in his music Bowie found it natural to “un-become” himself, or at least offer an array of different aspects to his personality.
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    IX
    Two other routes to that “un-becoming” were available to him in late 1967. Neither promised financial reward: despite Pitt’s moral and monetary support, Bowie was forced to take part-time jobs just weeks after his album was released, as a cleaner and an assistant in a West End photocopy shop. * Hence the attraction of escape, which led him to explore the possibility of becoming a Buddhist monk. He had befriended an American record producer, Tony Visconti, who introduced him to the guru Chimi Youngdong Rimpoche at the Tibet Society in Hampstead. By the end of the year, he and Visconti were at the Samye Ling Tibetan Centre in Scotland. “I was a terribly earnest Buddhist at the time,” he admitted in 1969. “I had stayed in their monastery and was going through all their exams, and yet I had this feeling that it wasn’t right for me. I suddenly realised how close it all was: another month and my head would have been shaved.” He embellished the story for William Burroughs in 1973: “About two weeks before I was actually going to take those steps, I broke up and went out on the street and got drunk and never looked back.” What had he learned from this episode? “To try and make each moment of one’s life one of the happiest, and if it’s not, try to find out why.” It was an admirable philosophy, though not one that he would be able to follow in the years ahead.
    â€œI decided that as I wasn’t happy,” he claimed in 1969, “I would get right away from it all. I vanished completely for a year. No one knew where I was.” He certainly wasn’t at the heart of London’s youth culture, at the UFO Club or at Middle Earth; neither was he visible in Grosvenor Square, protesting against US involvement in Vietnam, or joining the hippie campaigns against the repressive drug laws, or supporting black power, or lining up in the student revolts, fired into action by the tear gas on the streets of Paris, Berlin, or London. At the moment when many of his generation regarded their youthfulness as a revolutionary act, and their political activism as a basic function of being alive, he was absent, apparently uninterested, definitely uninvolved.
    So determined was Bowie to remain silent, in fact, that he began to experiment with a medium in which he would not be allowed to use his voice. In July 1967 he was introduced to dancer and mime artiste Lindsay Kemp, who was using Bowie’s album as interval music for a London show titled Clowns Hour . Besides his classical training and innate physical skill, Kemp