Free Bowie: A Biography by Marc Spitz Page B

stature, Meat-loafs girth, Joey Ramone’s gangly frame, Dolly Parton’s cup size—each of them probably found their unique feature to be a liability during their awkward teenage years but surely felt grateful for the distinction it provided once they were in their twenties.
    “We didn’t have the Web back then, had no way of knowing the details of why he had that bad eye,” Professor Camille Paglia, a Bowie fan since the early 1970s, told me. “Now we have much more info about what happened, but at the time, it gave him an abstract look. It made him look like a mannequin. Like Nefertiti. He really does. His face during the
Aladdin Sane
period has a strangled Nefertiti look. Mysterious. The idea of having one eye that sees and one eye that has been touched or blighted in some way, in myth and legend, it implies mystic powers. The bad eye sees within. Sees invisible things. It’s uncanny. It’s eerie that Bowie has the regular eye and this strange eye that’s always permanently dilated … always looking but not really seeing. He has a dual vision, really. To me that’s symbolic of major artists anyway. They see the physical world and they see the spiritual world. To me they are oracular. Often in legends the artists have a handicap. Homer was blind, so and so was lame. You are physically incapacitated in some way but it gives you this special gift. That blighted eye is the sign of Bowie’s special gift, the hallucinatory part of his imagination.”

4.
     
    D AVID LEFT B ROMLEY in the summer of 1963, when he was sixteen. Those who weren’t going on to college at that age were expected to get an entry-level job in an office, shop, food service establishment or factory. Despite his intelligence and creativity, David’s was a less than sterling academic record. He passed only two “O-levels,” or final exams. “I would have got three but they don’t award them for imagination,” he would later quip.
    Bromley Tech’s careers officer responded to David’s declaration that he wanted to find work as a professional musician by pointing him toward an open position in a nearby factory that produced harps, but David politely ignored this suggestion. John Jones found him temporary work as an electrician’s assistant but he only helped with minimal wiring before politely declining to show up for work ever again. Finally, Owen Frampton pulled some strings and found him work as a designer at the London branch of the famous ad agency J. Walter Thompson.
    J. Walter Thompson, or JWT as it’s commonly known today, was and is an industry giant, the first-ever global firm (founded in 1864), responsible for some of the best-known branding images in English and American pop history (from Prudential Life Insurance to Cadbury chocolates). Even a walk-in position at a prestigious corporation like this might have led to a long career in the field. The notion of a finely-tailored young David Bowie as modish
Mad Man
is certainly intriguing. However, David was only a bit more enthusiastic about this than he was about his part-time electrician gig and only because the position would enable him to spend his days in London.
    Sometimes he would stay in the city and walk around, browsing the cafés, record shops and boutiques that were springing up daily in light of the continuing economic boom that Britain was then enjoying. There was, however, always the specter of that last train back to Bromley at eleven thirty. If he’d meet a girl or a fellow rock ’n’ roller he found interesting, he knew he’d have to extricate himself from whatever experience in order to make it home.
    “The last train was a huge part of our lives,” says Hanif Kureishi. “The last train was a big deal for people from Bromley. If you got the last train you were lucky. Otherwise you had to sit at the station till morning. You know. You had to get the last train or you stayed up all night in London. You had to make this decision whether you’re going to pull