Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried Read Free Book Online

municipality and suburb, a certain number of people heard Bowie—or his character, Ziggy—speaking to whatever it was that made them feel different: their sexuality, their intellectual aspirations, their disaffection, their rebelliousness. It was mass marketing to those who wanted to be separate from the masses. And since Philadelphia had been among the first American cities to embrace the bisexual Barnum of rock, his cult of personality had grown particularly strong in the Delaware Valley. His fall 1972 shows were such a huge success that when he returned in February of 1973, local promoters were able to sell out seven nights at the Tower Theater, where audiences showed up in outfits that rivaled those worn by Bowie and his band, turning the whole scene into a rock ‘n’ roll performance art piece with a 3,072-member cast. When Bowie then announced his retirementfrom performance in July of that year, his marketed mystique was solidified.
    “He was a genuine guru, a rock star who seemed to hold some secrets in a way that nobody really expected of, say, the Beatles,” recalled Matt Damsker, Philadelphia’s reigning rock critic at the time. “Everyone was so caught up in the shared moment, and Bowie represented somebody so mysterious and so calculatedly brilliant. There was a power to his very best music that suggested a lot of withheld information: it seemed that if you got close to him, he might dispense it to you. He seemed to have a political and metaphysical program in mind. These weren’t stupid kids. They weren’t into Bowie just because they were bored with everything else. They were caught up in something that was pretty broad in its implications.”
    Bowie himself would recall of the time, “I never ever thought my songs would help anybody think or know anything. Yet it did seem that at that time there were an awful lot of people who were feeling a similar way. They were starting to feel alienated from society, especially the breakdown of the family as we’d known it in the forties, fifties and especially the sixties, when it really started crumbling. Then, in the seventies, people in my age group felt disinclined to be a part of society. It was really hard to convince oneself that you
were
a part of society. [The feeling was] here we are, without our families, totally out of our heads, and we don’t know where on earth we are. That was the feeling of the early seventies—nobody knew
where
they were.”
    For Gia, Bowie and adolescence would be interchangeable. Her first haircut since the age of eight—and the first time she ever chose her own hairstyle—was the bushy Bowie cut. It was executed by Nadine at Bonwit Tellers, almost perfectly replicating Bowie’s look on the
Pin-Ups
cover photograph. “She went from this beautiful long hair to this
Bowie
hairdo,” Kathleen recalled. “I couldn’t stand it. I avoided seeing her for two weeks.”
    Gia’s first experimentations with makeup were definitely not done to make her look more womanly. She and her Aunt Nancy spent an afternoon singing along to Bowie records and perfecting a red lightning bolt from Gia’s hairlineto her cheek, like the one on the cover of the just-released
Aladdin Sane.
Among the first clothes Gia bought for herself
by herself
were red platform boots, a white shirt decorated with black hands that appeared to be wrapped around her upper body, and a feather boa. The red satin jumpsuit had been handmade by her mother as a gesture to befriend this gawky space creature that had once been her adoring daughter.
    Even Gia’s handwriting was affected. She began dotting her
i’s
with circles and signing her notes and letters “Love on Ya!” It was the same way Bowie had scrawled his handwritten liner notes on
Pin-Ups
.
    To her parents, Gia seemed to have been transformed overnight after attending a Bowie show. “She got involved with rock concerts,
okay
?” her stepfather, Henry Sperr, recalled. “And a bunch of people who went to