Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Bowie is clearly thinking too long and too seriously
about Cavett’s softball questions. He seems at first
earnest and then stuck. Slowly Cavett begins to sink
along with him, making one valiant attempt after
another, to the point of making the audience
uncomfortable, to ease his guest.
“I wasn’t comfortable but I know how to look like I
am,” Cavett says now. “I feel like if I go lower rather
than higher in intensity with somebody who’s having
trouble talking—or trouble breathing—that it works
best and makes it look less like an emergency.”
Cavett could have easily turned Bowie’s lack of
finesse into a punch line, but he does indeed take
the high road, and his intellectual curiosity seems
genuine, even as Bowie appears to be distracted by
his own cane (with which he seems to be drawing
something on the floor). “There was something
immediately likeable about him,” Cavett says.
“Although the cane was distracting. I always like it
when guests put their canes down and stop fucking
around with them.”
Cavett gamely asks him about flying (“It scares
me”), his parents (father deceased; he and mother
have “an understanding”) and “black noise,” which
Bowie explains is a sound so powerful it can destroy
buildings. “A big one could destroy a city,” he says.
Apparently the patent for the city-destroying device
is for sale somewhere in France, he adds. Cavett
nods politely. “I was drowning,” he says. “I had a
drowning feeling and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to get
through this whether he is or not,’ and decided to just