Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

looking more like a miniature man than a touslehaired
kid. Every one of his classmates appears
exactly the same.
“David was always clean and tidy and spotless,”
his aunt Pat Antoniou has said. “My sister made a
thing of that. Every five minutes she would say, ‘Pull
your sock up,’ ‘Have you washed your face?’”
For all of his childhood and much of his adult life,
the private David Bowie has been painfully shy. It’s
naturally difficult to believe that any celebrity is shy,
as the very prism through which we view them is
public, loud and larger than life. Lots of performers
claim to be shy offstage and freely acknowledge the
paradoxical elements of their public and private
selves. They invent personas who can speak and
sing and be generally extroverted (Eminem’s “Slim
Shady” and Beyoncé’s “Sasha Fierce” being the
latest in a long line that most famously includes Ziggy
Stardust), while their true shy selves lie buried and
protected somewhere deep inside. Once he’d
achieved a kind of perma-fame previously enjoyed
only by movie legends, David began to reveal much
about his own shyness. In a 1975 interview with
Dinah Shore, for example, he admits, “The one thing
I didn’t like was being terribly shy. An incredibly shy
person. And so I over-compensated. I thought that if I
gave myself an alarming kind of reputation then I
would have to learn to defend myself and therefore
come out of myself.” Henry Winkler, by the way, is
one of Dinah Shore’s other guests on that show
(Nancy Walker of the famous Bounty paper towel