Angie Bowie: 'Why I gave up my son Zowie'

Angie Bowie, the former wife of David Bowie

7 January 2016

David Bowie once said about his former wife, Angie, that living with her "was like living with a blowtorch". After less than five minutes with her, I think I know what he means. She shouts, she rages, she looks like she might walk out of this suite we're sitting in at Claridge's at any second, and she seems happiest when she thinks I'm terrified of her. I'm not (well, not really, although she is a big woman - 55 years old, with bleached-blonde hair and pink lipstick, and nearly six foot in heels that she kicks off as she lies back on the sofa we share).

She has come to London from her home in Tucson, Arizona, to promote a cultural festival she is hosting here next month for PlayStation Portable; a series of cult films and an exhibition on the theme of "Outsiders".

"During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country," she says. "And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth."

Mary Angela Barnett was born to an engineer father and his wife who were stationed in Cyprus. After being sent to school in Switzerland, she came to Britain to study marketing at Kingston Polytechnic.

She met Bowie in 1969 when she was 18; they married in 1970 and their son, Zowie, who later changed his name to Duncan, was born a year later. "Then we started touring," she says; she always refers to Bowie's career as "we". "By 1972, we were moving, we were starting to have an impact and people were paying attention."

"She definitely helped promote him," says someone who followed Bowie at that time. "He was already making music but she understood the power of his androgyny and ambiguous sexuality and pushed that side. Really, he was a voracious heterosexual but Angie promoted an image of him as a polysexual athlete. Where David had the diffidence of an Englishman, she had the brash confidence of an American."

Angie had been thrown out of a college in Connecticut for a lesbian affair ("because I'd promised my father I wouldn't get pregnant") and had embraced a bisexual lifestyle with Bowie (in her autobiography, she wrote that they had a threesome the night before they married at Bromley register office; another time she even claimed to have found him in bed with Mick Jagger).

"As soon as we started to do well, David started to take drugs," she says. "It was just the most aggravating, infuriating ... I was just watching him get brilliant. He was so good, we were getting so good, I was so excited, it was fabulous. And he just pissed it away being a jackass. I stayed away, I didn't want to watch it."

She has always maintained theirs was a marriage of convenience. "We got married so that I could work [to get a permit]. I didn't think it would last and David said, before we got married, 'I'm not really in love with you' and I thought that's probably a good thing. Then I think he fell in love with me because he got really mad when we broke up and he behaved like a bitchy queen."

Was she in love with him? "Not really. He was too much of an alleycat. I like people who are devoted to me, men who know I'm the most fabulous thing in the world and they just look at me with adoration. That's how my dad looked at my mom and that's how I expected to be looked at."

When they separated, Angie decided to leave Zowie with his father. "I just didn't want to get into a pissing match with David about custody. I really thought the best thing to keep David alive was to leave my son with him. It was the hardest thing I've ever done." She claims Bowie's drug habit was becoming out of control and believed that giving him the responsibility for their son's upbringing would stabilise him. Logical? Hardly.

Was she not wrestling with herself ? "I would never have deprived David of his son. I kept saying to myself, I've got to do this. I can't escape if I take my child with me, he'll fight me and it will be awful for my son. And I can have another child, it's not a big deal."

I find this extraordinary. It clearly is a very big deal. She looks really upset when she talks about her son. She must have expected to continue a relationship with Duncan after she and Bowie split up? "I saw him until he was about 12 or 13," she says. "He's the one who didn't want to see me any more. He came to New York and stayed with me and it wasn't what he was used to.

"He was used to staying with David in all these big houses and I had a sixroom apartment on Second Avenue over a restaurant. I understand. If you're a child, you want to be comfortable, you want to be where you're used to being. That's how it was."

She is still estranged from her son, who works in advertising and lives in London. In an interview with the Evening Standard last week, Duncan said: "I don't really have a relationship with her. It's not something I dwell on that much".

"He wrote to me a couple of years ago and that was very nice," says Angie. "I sent him a box of presents but he never wrote back. But what can I do? He's a grown man now, it's not a big deal."

But she must be very sad about it. "The answer to that question I think I'll leave alone," she says, then pauses. "No, there's no sadness. Sadness is weak, I don't believe in weakness." When does she have her weak moments? "I cry by myself. I just ..."

In her divorce from Bowie, Angie ended up with a settlement worth £500,000, a relative pittance considering Bowie was one of the most successful recording artists of his generation (he is now married to the supermodel, Iman, with whom he has a daughter and is worth £120 million).

"The divorce was bullshit because it wasn't a real marriage anyway. I thought £500,000 for a stupid marriage to get a work permit wasn't bad. What I was pissed about was my half of managing him because I had worked so hard."

She never speaks to Bowie now. She dealt with her anger, she says, by taking drugs and drinking. "I tried to blunt the sensitivity. It was like all of the nerves were on the outside, everything hurt. I just got mad as hell. Until I had my daughter."

Her daughter, Stacia, is now 25 and is studying art at college in Los Angeles (her father is the former punk musician Drew Blood - aka Andrew Lipka - with whom Angie had a relationship for three years). "Once I had her, I had my focus back again. I had a little pal, I didn't have to feel lonely. I didn't need a husband or anyone, I had her."

Angie had suffered from post-natal depression after the birth of her son. She says motherhood the second time around was far easier. "In your heart, when you feel like you've failed at something, I felt like I had failed my son. No matter how strong and logical the way I explain the decision I made is, it still hurts me, I cried a lot of nights and a lot of days. I didn't want to leave him and I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stay and suffer just to be near him."

And that's when I feel really sorry for Angie. She's clearly a difficult person to be around but she's created such a hard shell around her, it's a wonder that anyone can get through it. When I ask her why her relationship with her current partner, Michael, a construction engineer, has lasted 13 years, she says it's because he reminds her of her father.

"I think I needed someone to be nice to me," she says. "I was just so irritated with everyone else. I thought, god, how hard can this be?" Was she optimistic she'd meet someone who could handle her? "I think I was more conceited than that, I thought I could fix them. But you can't fix anyone. And David wasn't like that when I met him. I think I drive them to it. David started doing drugs and Andrew [Lipka] started drinking. Is this me? Am I driving them nuts?"

Michael has given her the time and support while she has worked on her book, Pop Sex, "an anthropological study ... this whole sex motivation for just about everything we do. It just consumed me, I enjoyed it so much. I'll be happy when it's published. Publishers love it, they just don't know what to do with it but that's okay, they never know what to do with me."

She even went back to college to learn how to carry out research properly. "I wanted to be an example to my daughter, she was busy running around being a jetsetter and not going to college and I was just infuriated." She has also released an album, Moon Goddess, is working on a science fiction film and has set up a construction company with Michael in Arizona.

"I'm very happy," she says. "I never really think about it [her life with Bowie], except when I have to talk to people like you." She still looks good, but in her youth she was very beautiful.

Does ageing make her sad? "I don't really think about it. If you start to think about it, you get old. I look fabulous. I guess I'm just far too conceited and arrogant." She is. She's also infuriating and very, very difficult - but I don't care, she's a legend.

For more information on PSP Outsider visit www.yourpsp.com

MORE ABOUT

Arizona

Angie Bowie: 'Why I gave up my son Zowie'

Read More