Bowie Style

Bowie’s flagging creativity. Ignoring the pleas of
David’s record company, DeFries took him off to
New York where he inked a lucrative new deal with
RCA Records. Within a year, he’d tied up the
master-tapes of Bowie’s music with his company,
MainMan, and had begun to liken himself to MGM
movie magnate Louis B. Mayer.
Like all empires, MainMan cracked under the
weight of its own success. If excess and decadence
was the nature of Bowie’s game, MainMan more
than did its best to match it. By late 1974, with a
queue of debtors at the door, DeFries embarked
upon his final, magnificent folly – Fame, a Broadway
stage musical loosely based on the life of Marilyn
Monroe. It lasted one night and lost £250, 000. It was
the final straw for Bowie, who struck a secret deal
with his record company and then began the lengthy
process of disengaging himself from MainMan. The
settlement was painful: David was compelled to split
the earnings of his early Seventies records in
perpetuity and, even more galling, MainMan was
entitled to a 16% share of Bowie’s gross earnings
until September 1982. It was a huge sacrifice, but he
had little alternative.
Bowie’s attempt to exercise greater vigilance over
his business affairs foundered barely a year into his
partnership with Michael Lippman, who’d
engineered the split from DeFries. Los Angeles
lawyer Stanley Diamond helped him pick up the
pieces, advising him to move to Switzerland, and lay
some secure financial foundations. Bowie, too,
began to dabble in fiscal matters, and by the early
Eighties he had set up several companies and
helped negotiate a lucrative five-album deal with
EMI. He’d settled with his ex-wife Angie and now
stipulated loyalty clauses when recruiting new
musicians. By the mid-Eighties, Bowie was probably
worth £30 million; his two world tours during the
decade earned him another £50 million or so.
Current estimates put his wealth into the £200
million-plus bracket.