Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

care.
Bowie was devastated to be informed of Terry’s
latest misfortune and seemed to internalize his pain.
“Terry came home this morning,” he told Ken Pitt
casually one afternoon. Despite having met and
conversed at length with both David’s mother and
father, as well as his new client, Pitt reportedly had
no idea that David’s brother was mentally ill. “In my
subsequent visits I would sit talking with him in what
had become his bedroom cum music workshop,”
Pitt writes, “and it was the noise of his late-night
practicing that eventually caused his father some
discomfort and eventually resulted in his move to a
spare room at Manchester Street.”
Bowie was able to place a little bit of distance
between himself and the raw, painful goings-on on
Plaistow Grove as Terry’s illness built to a head.
Terry returned to Cane Hill, where he was formally
diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. John
Jones, who had warmed up to Terry in light of his
illness, would lead family trips to the hospital. They’d
bring fresh clothes and fruit and show him kindness
and concern. It was all they could do.
Shortly after Terry’s institutionalization, Bowie
began to seriously consider leaving London and
traveling north to a Buddhist monastery in Edinburgh,
Scotland, where Zen master Dhardo Rinpoche lived
and taught. He spoke frequently of giving up his pop
career, shaving his beloved long hair and turning his
life over to the abbot. Unlike his peers in the
consciousness-expanding summer of ‘67, to Bowie