Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

featured both dressed in powdered wigs and
eighteenth-century costume. Their courtship,
however, would be done while costumed in shawls
and beads and other hippie accoutrement.
Hermione, whose father was a well-to-do lawyer,
lived very comfortably in London in a small Victorian
house with a front garden. Before long they were
cohabiting, and both David’s parents and Ken Pitt
saw very little of him. Theirs was a life of hippie bliss
for a time. They’d prepare macrobiotic meals and
discuss art, Buddhist philosophy and Romantic
poetry, while the world outside seemed vulgar and
misguided. On weekends, they’d take a trip out to
the country and sunbathe in the nude. “We were
naturists for the day,” Visconti, who was also deep
into his hippie trip, recalled in his memoir.
It was his first adult relationship, and one that
demanded, even in those enlightened, free-loving
times, a bit more of a sacrifice or sense of
commitment than he was willing to give at his young
age and with his often opportunistic but still fearless
and enthusiastic attraction to both men and women,
something Hermione did not know about and would
not likely have approved of. She looked the part, with
her natural, flowing hippie hair, but like most hippies,
she was actually upper-middle-class, a well-to-do
lawyer’s daughter with values likely rooted more in
her parents’ world than in the fast-waning Age of
Aquarius. She certainly inspired the twenty-one-yearold
Bowie, and in an effort, perhaps, to ground both
his personal and professional endeavors, he and