Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

6.
K
ENNETH PITT WAS already nearing his forties when he
took on the nineteen-year-old David Jones as a
personal management client. Although tall, quiet and
buttoned-down himself, much like John Jones, Pitt
admired the wit and audacity of performers. Given to
good tailoring, expensive books and travel, he was
no prissy intellectual. He was a war veteran, having
landed in France on D-day working within the British
army’s signals unit. Also unusual for those in his
show business circle, Pitt was openly gay (whereas
many of his peers remained in the closet long after
homosexuality was formally legalized in the U.K. in
1967). Pitt’s approach to his own sexuality was that
of a liberated arts enthusiast and committed equalrights
seeker, a quiet revolutionary.
While Pitt has published a detailed account of his
years with David, entitled Bowie: The Pitt Report, he
is taken to task in many Bowie books for guiding his
charge away from rock ’n’ roll and toward a career in
old-fashioned show business, essentially holding
him back from what is romantically thought of as his
destiny. “Pitt was quite prepared for David to turn
into a cabaret lounge singer,” Angie Bowie says
today. “He could have gotten him eight years in Las
Vegas in a smoking lounge and he would have