I was reading more of these amazing Mirabelle magazine diaries of Bowie’s from the early-mid Seventies, and found what I thought was an amazing bit of Bowie trivia about the whys and wherefores of his famous eyepatch:
Well, I promised you last week that I would tell you about my recent trip to Amsterdam where I went to collect The Edison Award – a statuette presented to me as outstanding foreign performer. It was all great fun really and, of course, I travelled overland with Angie and little Zowie.
We stayed at the hotel where the award was being presented, and we all found it very attractive… But, unfortunately, I had a little trouble with my eye which had started watering quite a bit shortly after I arrived.
By the time of the actual presentation, I had to wear a patch over my eye – which, of course, didn’t distract from my natural good looks – and I wore green dungarees and a pair of high brown boots. Angie looked very stunning, really sophisticated in a chic beige dress with a roll neck and a super swirly skirt.
Unfortunately, a bit later I was scoping out the site a bit more, and found this more recent diary entry from Bowie just a decade ago:
Back in journal-land, I found the Bowie diaries on Little Wonderworld and, boy did they take me back. But did I write them? Well, here’s the awful truth. Not a word. This was a time when I had decided to give my public life over to an extraordinary woman called Cherry Vanilla an actress and performer whom I had hired to be my PR.
I had seen her in the London performance of the Warhol play ‘Pork’ (written of course by someone else). She had such a great sense of humor and imagination that I told her to make things up about what Ziggy/Bowie was doing and to publish it. Whenever these stories got back to me, I would just confirm them and the events would become part of my real/unreal life… So when this teeny magazine out of the UK wanted me to write for them, I just passed the job on to Cherry. And of course, she just wrote about her own life, like what shows she was seeing, where she ate and all that. If Cherry loved or hated something or someone it was Ziggy/Bowie who loved/hated it. You get the idea.
Goddam it! The journal entries were forgeries! Cherry Vanilla and Bowie knew back in the seventies that I would soon be born, and conspired to make me feel a fool. Now I know how the people who read the Hitler Diaries must have felt.
Still, I wonder whether being a sometime publicist of David’s, she might not have written the story based on his real recounting of the incident? What if the eyepatch was not a deliberate attempt to become a glam rock space pirate, but instead a divine accident caused by some sort of sexually transmitted pink eye? Funky funky indeed!
[...] The Origin of Bowie’s Eye Patch? I was reading more of these amazing Mirabelle magazine diaries of Bowie’s from the early-mid Seventies, and found what I thought was an amazing bit of Bowie trivia about the whys and wherefores of his famous eyepatch: Well, I promised you last week that I would tell you about my recent trip to Amsterdam where I went to collect The Edison Award – a statuette presented to me as outstanding foreign performer. It was all great fun really and, of course, I travelled overland with Angie and little Zowie. We stayed at the hotel where the award was being presented, and we all found it very attractive… But, unfortunately, I had a little trouble with my eye which had started watering quite a bit shortly after I arrived. By the time of the actual presentation, I had to wear a patch over my eye – which, of course, didn’t distract from my natural good looks – and I wore green dungarees and a pair of high brown boots. Angie looked very stunning, really sophisticated in a chic beige dress with a roll neck and a super swirly skirt. [...]
I think that was a brilliant move on his part, to have Cherry Vanilla help forge the Bowie/Ziggy myth. It’s a very Warhol thing to do, don’t you think? Plus I’m sure the inevitable occurred to some extent, and Bowie became what was written about him.