Ziggy Stardust and a Clown's Black-etched Face
Paper streamers and confetti fell upon our shoulders and the sawdust as Lindsay Kemp and the Great Orlando, white mime faces running with mascara, took their bows and then descended into the audience for drinks. I sat in my seat stunned by the “Turquoise Pantomime”, a honky-tonk, burlesque Kabuki, brilliantly camp, queer and disquieting performance that I happened on the last night of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Finally I got up the courage to approach Lindsay Kemp, his whitened bare chest damp with sweat, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other. I said I’d studied dance–gesture art in India but hadn’t ever seen anything quite so strange and fascinating as his performance. Lindsay, short, pallid and plumpish in his commedia dell arte bloomers, batted his blue-fringed eyelashes above bloodshot eyes. “I know fabulous things will happen between us. Come see me in London.” Lindsay flirted with people behind me while Orlando, not tall but all muscle, powerfully built, stared nowhere with open eyes. “He’s blind, dear, don’t let it bother you,” said Lindsay.
A year later, the spring of 1972, I moved to London where I hoped to earn enough translating guidebooks to pay rent and live nearer to my scholarly boyfriend who was studying in Cambridge, while I planned to finish my novel set in India. But all around, the street faire of swinging London was happening and I could hardly stay sitting with my pages. One day, returning to my room via Earl’s Court, I stopped before a poster with an image of a clown’s black-etched face and read the notice: Lindsay Kemp, internationally famous pantomime. Classes. I scribbled down an address in Battersea.
Lindsay flung open his cape and embraced me. “You’re here.” Despite the cold, his chest was bare. “Go be beautiful with the others, love.”
Class in a stone church near the embankment was never a dance class or a lesson in mime, rather exercises lead by Lindsay’s undulating figure around the pews and onto the street. Behind a half dozen young men and a few women, I raised my arms when Lindsay raised his, trying to become the sun rising over waters, the soaring albatross, the falling angel. I felt the weight of my body coming down at the feet of a priest-priestess with a crooked smile. “More, more, let yourselves go to the bottom of terror ecstasy,” he urged, pausing to drink gin, swallow pills and powders students provided. “You’re my oil-anointed fabulous sacrifices, not lumps of bodies.”
I remember staying at the back of the conga line to be as little visible as possible as we paraded behind Lindsay with our painted faces and our motley dress, doing our mime act in the faces of ordinary folks, though not really causing much surprise in London that was like one big stage. From the day I became his newest acolyte to the evening I fled from his flat, the inner circle of men revolved closely around Lindsay while women were outer satellites. When Lindsay encouraged an illusion a woman had about herself as the object of a man’s desire, he puffed you up before he burst your little bubble with a knowing wink, an humiliating gesture—the kind of break-down of personal space and privacy that therapists and gurus practiced on the west coast of California (where I came from) in the 1970s.
After a few weeks of having my confidence played with, of earning no money and hardly seeing my boyfriend, I was about to leave Lindsay’s band of street performers and return to my books when one morning he flew into our class. “My old sweetheart David Bowie gave a jingle.” Bowie, he said, wanted him to choreograph and stage a rock extravaganza for the recently released album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, at the Rainbow, once a classic cinema theater in north London.
Lindsay flew in his mime partner Orlando and a dancer named Annie from Edinburgh: they’d be the trio of performers with Bowie, Mick Ronson and the Spiders, while four of Lindsay’s pupils got jobs as back up mimes. I was an unlikely choice, not a fan of Bowie, only an onlooker, and curious enough about the bisexual, druggy glam rock scene to be around for Lindsay Kemp’s big chance to go beyond Fringe.
Orlando was not only blind but also epileptic and subject to visions, or as he said, visitors from other planets. He lived on a government pension, performed drag acts in clubs, toured with dance groups in provincial English towns. Kemp treated him in life much as he had in the “Turquoise Pantomime”—the strange other who could be bullied and tricked, harrowed with impatience and contempt, then showered with repentant kisses. Orlando seemed to take everything without blinking his unseeing eyes, and to feel at home with David Bowie’s Ziggy’s other-worldly personae in the big theater where we began rehearsing under bright lights the summer of 1972. The spotlight helped orientate Orlando on stage where he looked ten feet tall.
Annie, whose last name I never knew, was as singular and talented as Orlando. She had knee-length white-blond hair, no visible flesh on her frame, all limbs, knees, elbows. When she danced and mimed she used her body like one long, twistable finger, a Teutonic woodcut in motion, an ibis stalking a northern marsh under a midnight sun. She had a way of making her skin seem to slide along her spine, turning her nearly weightless body into an asexual yet erotic silhouette; when she partnered with the muscular, bald Orlando, they spun out wordless stories of primal temptation, a white serpent coiling around a trunk of flesh.
As we waited for rehearsals to start and stop and start again, I listened to the gossip about Kemp and Bowie, that they’d been lovers in the early sixties when Bowie was still David Jones, a 16-year-old who sang folk songs with a nasal, often sniffling voice, about to give up music when he met Lindsay. Bowie and Kemp had toured the British club circuit together with pianist Michael Garret and a ballerina named Hermione, performed an earlier iteration of the Turquoise called “Pierrot in Turquoise.” Kemp had learned mime with Marcel Marceau in Paris, Oriental travesty with Noh and Kabuki masters, and commedia dell arte in Italy; and would always claim he’d taught Bowie all he knew about dance and theatrical drama that made him a star.
Bowie married his look-alike Angela, left the low-life gay scene, wore beautiful clothes often hand-stitched by fans, had a country house or two and percentages in other artists’ futures. As the singer’s fame and audience grew, culminating in the creation of Ziggy and his mirror twin, Lady Stardust, Lindsay was living out his image as a down-and-out beggar for love, dope, drink and insult etched into lines of his sad clown’s face.
The impression I had during rehearsals was that no matter how raunchy and decadent Bowie’s words, “songs of darkness and disgrace…of darkness and dismay,” he was in control while Lindsay was not. Watching the two of them over the weeks in the Rainbow, Lindsay played on all the raw humiliations of his life and adoration of beauty while Bowie, always elegant to the tips of red-spiked hair, always gracious to others, planned every moment of sound and lights meticulously with the crew and musicians.
Bowie had offered Lindsay a free rein designing the Ziggy Stardust but ended up, as I remember, confining him to choreographing our small troupe because the mime turned up for rehearsals loaded or drunk just when he was expected to be ready to work. Lindsay must have felt exposed, scared, and perhaps resentful, to be given a chance in the big time by his former protégée. I saw that with all his talent and power to entrance, the part of him that was really dark and ironic couldn’t help self-sabotaging, as he’d been doing for years with agents, backers, producers who put money into his original ideas until the emotional price of dealing with him made them withdraw support.
Personally, I was scared by the big stage and the expectations; and though Bowie always encouraged us with words and smiles, I knew my dancing and miming talents were as minimal as the rehearsals. I wondered why I was there having my eardrums blown out by the amps but there was no going back—we were the two women and two men backing up Kemp, Orlando and Annie. While they stayed on the stage below us, we climbed 15-foot towers where we were to gesture, shake and be trapped in blue lights as the Spiders pounded drums and guitar.
Opening night, David Bowie in his Ziggy silver-shouldered astronaut suit seemed to descend from a dry-ice nebulae. Even though Kemp had hardly made it clear when and what we were to do, we climbed the ladders and shook and looked wild, according to my boyfriend who would only come one night because the noise deafened him.
“Ch-ch-che-changes,” Bowie wooed the mike and we descended to the stage, charged across it as if electrically shocked—the volume would be enough to melt your bones—where we writhed.
I wore a tiny leotard sprayed copper, my body and my hair sprayed the same, so I looked like a shiny manikin. My hair was double-sprayed to stand out several feet around me. From my eyes to my hairline I had black and white wings painted. The make up and body paint gave me cover to race all over as lights flashed, strobes whirled, dry ice smoked and Bowie pranced sexily with Mick Ronson and his guitar. Orlando and Annie, white and eerie, knotted and unknotted themselves in feats of acrobatics, balance and strength twisting on a rope ladder, extraterrestrials or revenants from the grave. For his last number, to The Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man,” we bounced off one another looking for our fix while Bowie played the Man, gyrating and writhing among us. At a certain moment, registering our hit, we shook until the music and the audience stamped and shouted in the aisles. Orlando made the best of the bombardment of light and sound, dancing a can-can like a bald King Kong.
After every show, David Bowie emerged cool and immaculate in a white sharkskin suit to greet celebrities—the Stones, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed among them, though I was so out of my element that I recognized no one but Jagger. Bowie never forgot the fans, some dressed like mutants from the planets Ziggy visited, fans who saw in him an expression, and inspiration for their own gender-shifts and outsiderness. When he departed after the fifth and last show with his wife and a guy who seemed a boyfriend, Bowie thanked us, making eye contact with everyone, and leaving cash in bigger pound notes than I’d ever seen—more than I’d make in a year of translating—and masses of flowers and champagne. There were promises to bring Kemp & Co on the forthcoming Ziggy American tour.
Lindsay changed into his harem pants and layers of lavender scarves and was packing up to leave the Rainbow when Orlando teetered. “Oh god, is he going to have a fit? Somebody catch him,” Lindsay cried. Annie knew what to do to keep Orlando from hurting himself or choking until we got them into a cab for the hospital. The last I saw of Orlando’s shiny bald head, he was peacefully sleeping in Annie’s white arms.
At his Battersea flat, with Annie gone, and no other women, I was alone with the gay and bisexual men with whom I’d play-acted erotic moves, always knowing we were watched over by Lindsay for anything that looked like real flirtation. Now Lindsay was dancing Salomé, removing veil after veil before flickering candles, revealing a hungry, taunting mouth and mascara eyes I felt were sending daggers in my direction. My skin prickled, my face felt hot but my feet and hands were cold. I remembered the altar in the church, the ritual of sacrifice. I got up, pushed my way out of the room and ran down the stairs into the alley, from there onto the Battersea Bridge beneath which the high waters of the Thames were slapping.
In the decades since the “Turquoise Pantomime” and “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” especially when David Bowie died, I’ve remembered the beautiful, kind man Bowie was. And Lindsay Kemp, not beautiful but authentic in his darker wordless art. I don’t have photographs of David Bowie in his silver astronaut wings, nor Lindsay’s tragic mocking clown face, nor of myself spray painted copper when I was in London at the Rainbow Theater the summer of 1972.
