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STARDUST: The David Bowie Story by Henry & Tony Zanetta Edward

STARDUST: The David Bowie Story

By

Pub Date: July 27th, 1986
Publisher: McGraw-Hill

As with Jerry Hopkins' recent and less committed Bowie, the chameleon of pop is a hard sell to literate readers--a kind of unlovable alien who longs to be human. Despite exciting screen performances in various financial flops, and his very well-received Broadway dramatic role as The Elephant Man, Bowie today is the victim of his earlier masks, when he packaged himself as Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke and other flagrantly artificial human beings, and as a flippant bisexual. These were not masks so much as the real Bowie, an unabashed narcissist with a towering desire for money (though he has very little grasp of what money is), to which he would sacrifice all normal feelings for an outer perfection of Show Biz glamor and success. Now that he wants to go straight, who can believe him or even care?--especially when his object is to become the king of the yuppies and the megabucks superstar he has always slavered to be. In what is perhaps his most heartfelt role or public persona to date, he strikes the Frank Sinatra stance, among other ""serious"" stances, and hopes that this will attract the millions so far avoiding him. Meanwhile, he gives his backup crew a subtext for their stage appearance: they are secretly to be ""a 1950s Hong Kong bar band""--which would seem to be at cross-purposes to his yuppie image. Co-author Zanetta was the president of MainMan Ltd., and as Bowie's packager his closest professional associate. When they met, Bowie was still a composer/folk-singer, wondering whether he should follow the Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan route, when Bowie invented Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Zanetta was the mastermind behind the exploitation. Despite international celebrity, Bowie rarely had a financial breakthrough equal to his fame and parted from Zanetta in midcareer. Even so, he has nothing to carp about in Zanetta's bio of him, which will help anchor an American celebrity to match his secure fame in England. Brimming with first-magnitude luminaries as Mr. Stardust chums up with Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger. John Lennon and other shining giants in the mental half-world of Glitter Rock.