Angie Bowie was married to David Bowie from 1970 to 1980 — and the couple’s relationship was anything but conventional.
Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock PhotoAngie Bowie, the ex-wife of singer David Bowie, in 1978.
Angie Bowie was born Mary Angela Barnett in Cyprus to American parents. Growing up, she traveled around the world and fell in love with music, eventually immersing herself in the glam rock scene.
In 1969, she met David Bowie in London when she was 19 years old. The two got married just a year later. By all accounts, the couple had an unorthodox, volatile marriage that ended after 10 years. Around that same time, Angie Bowie claims, David’s drug use was out of control. While she had long been captivated by the rock star, she felt “free” once their relationship was over.
This is the story of David Bowie’s first wife.
The Early Life Of Angie Bowie
@angiebowie2020/XFive-year-old Mary Angela Barnett in Cyprus.
Mary Angela “Angie” Barnett was born on September 25, 1949, in Ayios Dhometios, Cyprus to Helena Maria Galas and George Milton Barnett.
Her father was a colonel in the U.S. Army and later worked as a mining engineer in Cyprus. Her mother was a gifted painter. Angie spent her early years with her family in Cyprus before leaving to attend schools in Switzerland and Britain. But that was far from her first time leaving Cyprus.
“I started traveling with my family at the age of nine months — we would return to America every three years. We’d travel through Europe to London or jump on a ship in the south of France or Italy and head for the United States,” Angie Bowie said in an interview with Artful Vagabond.
@angiebowie2020/XAngie Bowie’s parents.
Later on, she moved to the United States to study at the Connecticut College for Women, but she was soon expelled for having a relationship with a fellow female student. According to Bowie, school officials caught the two together and forced them into the school’s infirmary. In response, Bowie says she escaped the building by jumping out of the second-story window.
“I thought to myself, ‘I think I’ll leave,’ but my girlfriend spent four years at the Yale Psychiatric Institute being told she was a weirdo. That experience affected everything that happened later,” she told The Bay Area Reporter.
By her late teens, Angie had moved to London, where she quickly immersed herself in the avant-garde and glam rock scene and finally felt more at home. It was there that she met rising star David Bowie in 1969.
Angie Bowie Marries Rock Star David Bowie
Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock PhotoAngie and David Bowie in Paris in 1973.
In 1969, 19-year-old Angie met David Bowie (who was in his early 20s) through a mutual friend, record executive Calvin Mark Lee. She also attended one of David’s shows with his band The Feathers at The Roundhouse.
Months later, the two went on a date at a Chinese restaurant and danced together at a club. They slept together later that same night, and she noticed that her date was very quick to leave the next morning.
“That was David — he used sex the way a cat marks its territory. We became friends — I was his confidante,” Angie Bowie told the Daily Mail.
Before long, Angie was listening to demos that would later appear on David’s albums. She also helped him develop his famous persona Ziggy Stardust.
“I didn’t care about David’s lovers as long as they realized I was the queen.”
On March 19, 1970, Angie married David Bowie in Bromley, England. The pair had a non-monogamous relationship before getting married, and this arrangement would continue after they wed. In fact, Angie claims that the couple had a threesome the night before their wedding.
“Threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, I was never a one-man woman, or a one-woman woman either. For David, offers from men and women were abundant to the point of being overwhelming,” she told the Daily Mail.
Though much speculation has been made about David Bowie’s sexual orientation, with some conflicting statements coming from the singer himself, Angie claims that she and David had a frank conversation about their sexualities from the start and “we agreed we were bisexual.”
It was clear from the beginning that Angie and David Bowie had anything but a conventional marriage, which would ultimately last 10 years.
The Birth Of Duncan Jones And The End Of A Decade-Long Marriage
Roger Bamber/Alamy Stock PhotoAngie Bowie, David Bowie, and their son, Duncan “Zowie” Jones, in 1974.
Though Angie Bowie was enthralled with David Bowie, she maintains that she did not marry him out of love. She told The Standard, “We got married so that I could work [to get a permit]. I didn’t think it would last, and David said, before we got married, ‘I’m not really in love with you,’ and I thought that’s probably a good thing. Then I think he fell in love with me because he got really mad when we broke up and he behaved like a b*tchy queen.”
Despite the unorthodox nature of their relationship, the two outwardly appeared to be caring and supportive of each other as spouses. And Angie eventually became arguably as influential in the glam rock scene as her husband, making a name for herself as a model and actress.
On May 30, 1971, Angie Bowie gave birth to the couple’s son, Duncan “Zowie” Jones. By all accounts, David Bowie was ecstatic about being a father.
Meanwhile, Angie’s relationship with David Bowie teetered between romantic and professional for years, but it slowly changed, especially once David began heavily using drugs, as Angie explained to the Daily Mail:
“I think he wanted to forget about all the management problems at the office and the stuff that was being done in his name… It ended with some crazy scenes, such as the time he called me from L.A. saying he was being held captive by a warlock and two witches and Satan was coming. He was talking in slurred, hushed tones, hardly making any sense and crazed with fear. Yet again I got on a plane from London to fly to his rescue. He was deep in cocaine-induced paranoia; I feared he might have some neck-snapping seizure. It was far from the idea of cocaine as a quick showbiz toot.”
These incidents of cocaine-induced paranoia — and sometimes even psychosis — reportedly led to the couple’s relationship becoming increasingly strained. Then, in 1980, the pair divorced, after David allegedly told Angie Bowie, “You have to divorce me so that we can both be free.” Much like their marriage, the couple’s divorce was unorthodox.
“[After discussing divorce,] we went to his apartment and made love for the first time in years. It lasted three days and had a strange erotic quality. After we divorced I was very relieved. It was fabulous being free, to make my own decisions, to not be on call for him,” Angie recalled.
In the divorce settlement, Angie Bowie says she collected £500,000. Controversially, she left her son in David Bowie’s custody, claiming that she didn’t want to get into an argument with David over custody rights. As for her ex-husband’s drug use, she believed the responsibility of caring for a child would help “stabilize” him. And with that, their relationship was over.
Where Is Angie Bowie Today?
Phil King/Wikimedia CommonsAngie Bowie at the rock venue Satan’s Hollow in Manchester in 2010.
After the divorce, Angie Bowie began a relationship with musician Drew Blood and had a daughter, Stacia Larranna Celeste Lipka. After breaking up with Blood, she entered a relationship with electrical engineer Michael Gassett. The couple moved to Acworth, Georgia and are still together today.
Her son with David Bowie, Duncan Jones, currently works as a film director and even earned a BAFTA for the 2009 film Moon. However, Angie Bowie and Duncan Jones have long been estranged, and in recent years, Angie has confirmed that she is still not in contact with him.
While appearing on Celebrity Big Brother in 2016, Angie Bowie said that after she and David divorced, she felt like David needed to have full custody of Duncan to force him to kick his drug habit: “I didn’t not want custody. It was just I was never going to take him away from his father because they were tight as can be. It was just one of those things.”
Keith Bernstein/NetflixDuncan Jones directing Mute (2018).
Though Angie remained in contact with Duncan until he was 13 years old, it’s believed the two have not had any relationship since then. And Angie has no plans to reunite with him. She revealed that after David Bowie died from cancer in 2016, she still hadn’t been in touch with Duncan.
“My son? No, why should I be? I’m not interested. It stopped when my father changed his will to not include an educational trust fund for Zowie because David divorced me. When my father did that I followed precedent. It’s over. Nothing. Nothing to do with me,” she told The Times.
Still, years after David Bowie’s death, Angie continues to reflect on her life with one of history’s most recognizable artists in several books, magazine articles, and appearances in films and television shows.
“I don’t regret our years together,” Angie Bowie says. “I don’t wish I’d walked away earlier… Did he feel guilt about all that I’d invested and the limited return? I wonder. I don’t know. Now he’s gone, I never will.”