He was Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, Major Tom and the goblin king, a man who treated identity the way other musicians treated instruments. He reinvented himself so often that reinvention became his identity. But underneath every mask David Bowie ever wore was a man who wanted, more than anything, what the masks could never give him: a family, a home, someone to be ordinary with. His life offstage was a story of a chaotic first marriage, a son he fought to raise right, and a second love so steady and private that it surprised everyone who thought they knew him. This is the Bowie the spotlight never quite caught.
The Boy Named Zowie
On March 19, 1970, David married Mary Angela Barnett, a striking American model known as Angie, at the Bromley Register Office in London. Fourteen months later, on May 30, 1971, their son was born: Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones. Bowie did what came naturally. He picked up his guitar and wrote a song.
The song was “Kooks,” and it may be the most purely joyful thing he ever recorded. Written in the first flush of fatherhood, reportedly on the very day of Duncan’s birth, it is a lullaby for nonconformists, a promise to his newborn that it is fine to be strange. Bowie had been listening to Neil Young at home when the call came that Angie had given birth, and the song carries Young’s gentle, shambling warmth in every bar. Three days after the birth, Bowie premiered it at a BBC radio session, telling the audience, with audible delight, that he had written it about the baby. When “Hunky Dory” was released that December, the sleeve carried a dedication next to the song: “for Small Z.” It is a small detail, and it says everything. Before Ziggy, before the fame, there was a new father, giddy and sleepless, writing his son into the music.
The Marriage That Burned
The marriage to Angie, by contrast, was a wildfire. It was, by both parties’ admission, an open marriage, conducted amid the drugs and chaos of Bowie’s rise to fame. Angie was a force of nature in her own right, glamorous, sharp-tongued, and deeply involved in the theater of Bowie’s early career. Many who were there say she helped shape the ambition and the image of those early years, pushing him toward the stardom he both craved and feared. But the relationship could not survive the life around it. The fame, the infidelities on both sides, the sheer velocity of Bowie’s ascent: it burned through everything.
By the late seventies, the marriage was a battlefield. Divorce proceedings began, and on February 8, 1980, in Switzerland, it was over. Bowie received custody of Duncan, then eight years old. Angie received a reported £500,000 settlement and a gagging clause that kept her silent for a decade. She would later describe the union as a marriage of convenience, and the two remained largely estranged afterward. For Duncan, it meant growing up with his father, in the eye of the hurricane, while his mother watched from a distance.
Raising Duncan
Bowie took fatherhood seriously, and those who watched him with Duncan in the eighties describe a devoted, attentive parent. He formalized custody and raised his son through the years of global fame, trying to give the boy something like a normal life in deeply abnormal circumstances. It was not always smooth. There were years of distance, as there often are between famous fathers and their children. But the bond held.
Those years were not easy. The eighties were Bowie’s most commercially successful decade and, by his own later admission, his least artistically satisfying, the years of the Glass Spider tour and the long road. Through it all, Duncan was there, growing up backstage and in boarding schools, watching his father navigate a fame that never seemed to touch the man himself. Bowie was determined that his son would have what he had not: stability, attention, and the freedom to become himself. He did not push Duncan toward music or stardom. He simply showed up, again and again, the one constant in a life built on change.
The Custody Years
Duncan grew up to become Duncan Jones, the acclaimed film director behind “Moon” (2009), “Source Code” (2011), and “Warcraft” (2016), one of the most distinctive science-fiction filmmakers of his generation. The son of the man who sang about space became a man who films it, and the parallels are almost too perfect: “Moon,” Jones’s debut, is about isolation and identity, the very themes his father spent a career exploring. Bowie was enormously proud, and in his later years father and son were close, two artists who understood each other’s strange professions. When Bowie died, Jones’s tribute was simple and devastating, quoting his father’s own lyricism back at him. The boy named Zowie had become his father’s truest collaborator: the living proof that something real could come out of the chaos. And in a lovely symmetry, Jones named his son Stenton David Jones, Stenton after Bowie’s own father, Haywood Stenton Jones. The boy was born on July 10, 2016, exactly six months after Bowie died, and Bowie had known he was coming: Jones announced the pregnancy that Christmas with a drawing and the words “I’m waiting.” The Starman became a grandfather, delighted, one last time, by the most ordinary miracle of all.
Meeting Iman
In October 1990, a decade after his divorce, Bowie was set up on a blind date with Iman, the Somali-born supermodel. A mutual friend did the introducing, and the story has become legend: Bowie later said he was naming their children on the night they met. Iman, who had retired from modeling, was initially reluctant. She had seen the circus of fame up close and had no interest in joining another one. But the connection was immediate and overwhelming, and her reluctance did not stand a chance.
Bowie proposed in Paris, and they married on April 24, 1992, in a private civil ceremony in Lausanne, Switzerland, with only the closest of the close present. Six weeks later, on June 6, they celebrated again with a larger wedding solemnized in Florence, Italy. It was the opposite of the Angie years in every way: quiet, committed, and fiercely private. Both had been married before. Iman had a daughter, Zulekha, from her marriage to basketball player Spencer Haywood. They understood the cost of public life, and they chose, deliberately, to keep their love to themselves. They were rarely photographed together, appearing as a couple only in a single magazine shoot and one famous interview at home in New York.
Friends say Bowie was transformed. The restless shape-shifter, the man who had spent twenty years becoming someone new every album, found, at forty-five, the thing he had been looking for under all the masks: a partner, a home, a life. Iman gave him what fame never could: the experience of being loved for who he was when the makeup came off.
Lexi
On August 15, 2000, in New York City, Iman gave birth to their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, known as Lexi. Bowie was fifty-three, an age when most rock stars are grandfathers, and he approached fatherhood the second time with the wonder of a beginner. Iman later called it one of the happiest times of her life, saying that overnight, their lives had been enriched beyond belief, and that there was a joy and contentment between them that was almost palpable. Friends noticed the change in Bowie immediately: the restless innovator suddenly in no hurry at all.
Bowie adored being an older father. Those who saw the family in New York describe a man completely at ease, walking his daughter to school, living a life of almost radical normalcy. The alien had landed, and he liked it here. He kept working, kept creating, but the center of his life was no longer the next reinvention. It was Iman and Lexi, and the quiet apartment where David Jones, not David Bowie, got to be himself.
When Bowie received his terminal diagnosis, he told almost no one, shielding his family from the circus for as long as he could. He worked on “Blackstar” as a farewell, and he spent his final months as he had spent the best years of his life: private, devoted, and surrounded by the people he loved.
Iman, After
When Bowie died in January 2016, Iman faced the world’s grief with extraordinary grace. She has spoken since of their marriage with deep gratitude, of two people who managed to keep something sacred in the least sacred of industries, and of how they protected each other’s separate identities even in the closest of unions. She threw herself into her work and into raising Lexi, who was fifteen when she lost her father, guarding her daughter’s privacy as fiercely as she and Bowie had once guarded their own.
She has never remarried, and she speaks of Bowie still in the present tense of love. In interviews, she describes the small things: the laughter, the partnership, the ordinary days that were the real reward of their extraordinary life together. The masks made Bowie immortal. Iman keeps the man alive, not as a legend but as a husband, exactly as he would have wanted.
The Man Underneath
It is tempting to see Bowie’s life as a series of costumes, each discarded for the next. But the family story suggests the opposite. The masks were the performance. The man underneath was constant: a father who wrote his newborn son a song, who fought for custody and raised his boy through the storm, who fell so completely for Iman that he named their children on the first night, who walked his daughter to school in Manhattan like any other dad.
“Kooks” promised Duncan that if he stayed with his kooky parents, he would grow up pretty kooky too. It was a joke, and it was a vow. Bowie kept the vow. Through the divorces and the fame and the farewells, he stayed, in the ways that mattered, with the people he loved. He was there for Duncan’s childhood, there for Iman’s middle years, there for Lexi’s beginning. The world got Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and the Starman. Angie got the chaos. But Iman, Duncan, and Lexi got David Jones: the man who made the tea, who walked the dog, who showed up. And if you listen closely to the tenderest songs he ever wrote, the lullabies and the love songs hidden between the anthems, you can hear him telling you which one he preferred to be.
Leave a Reply