Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Bowie, Iman and their family closed ranks after the
episode. “He was really private about it,” says
neighbor Moby. They began to spend more and
more time at their property upstate. Bowie grew a
beard and began restructuring his diet and exercise
routine. Any semblance of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle
was chucked out. Three decades after announcing
his false retirement from the stage of the
Hammersmith Odeon, it seemed like the real David
Bowie was done. David Jones’s circulatory system
had demanded an actual and substantial hiatus.
Bowie being Bowie, however, he could not sit still
very long.
With no album or tour, Bowie seemed to be in a
position to pick and choose where he would pop up
next, as though he was functioning as his own
curator. He filmed a cameo as genius inventor
Nikola Tesla opposite Christian Bale and Michael
Caine in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a
surprise box-office hit. This, as with much of his post-
Labyrinth film work, like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with
Me, The Linguini Incident, Everybody Loves
Sunshine and Mr. Rice’s Secret, was a mere blip on
the culture radar. A pair of cameos in 2007 that
actually had more impact, given their circulation on
the Web, gained more attention than most Bowie
albums since the early eighties had. Both relied on
his eternally underappreciated sense of humor.
Bowie had long been a huge fan of the British
version of The Office and eagerly accepted an offer
to appear opposite Office creator Ricky Gervais in