Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

in a certain mood and I will say that the major artistic
project of the whole Ziggy exercise from spring of
’72 to summer of ’73, the major work of art, was
actually the media events. The records and the
shows were part of the superstructure. The real
masterpiece artwork was the media event.”
T h e Melody Maker interview made David,
technically still a one-hit wonder, a media star before
the Ziggy Stardust album even came out. “I bought
the paper and it looked all right,” he has said. “But
from then on, the way other papers picked up on it
and just tore at it like dogs on meat! They made this
enormous thing out of it.”
His mother, Peggy, never publicly commented on
David’s sexuality in her lifetime, and in private, it’s
likely that she did what she always did when
something troubling came up and simply refused to
address the issue. It must have been bittersweet for
her to observe his skyrocketing success after years
of struggle and not be able to fully embrace it.
(Bowie would tell Dick Cavett in 1974 that he and his
mother were not close but that they had “an
understanding.”) John Jones never lived to see his
son reach such professional heights, and while Terry
followed David’s career well up to his megastardom
in the early eighties, because of his
institutionalization and the growing phalanx of freaks,
fans, business partners and bodyguards surrounding
David, his access was severely limited, and there is
no record of him sharing any commentary on the
method and detail by which his younger half brother