A Love That Never Learned the Past Tense
One evening during their courtship, the laces on Iman’s trainers came undone as they walked to dinner.
David Bowie got down on his knees on the pavement and tied them.
She thought to herself: this one’s a keeper.
She was right, for twenty-three years and then some. She still calls him her husband.
It began in Los Angeles in 1990, arranged by their mutual friend Teddy Antolin, a hairdresser who knew them both and thought they should meet. Iman arrived at the restaurant expecting a party. She found four people at a table. One of them was David Bowie.
She had a rule about rock stars.
“I did not want to get involved with a rock star,” she said later. “No way. It is not a sane thing to do.”
By the end of the evening, Bowie had offered to drive her home. She declined, took her own car, and accepted his invitation to tea the following day. When she arrived, she discovered that he did not actually drink tea. They went to a coffee shop instead, which is perhaps the most human possible beginning for one of the great love stories of the twentieth century.
Bowie, for his part, was not uncertain for a single moment.
“My attraction to her was immediate and all-encompassing,” he told Hello! magazine in 2000. “I couldn’t sleep for the excitement of our first date. That she would be my wife, in my head, was a done deal. I’d never gone after anything in my life with such passion. I just knew she was the one.”
He told people he was already naming their future children the night they met.
Iman took more convincing. She understood what the world of rock stardom did to relationships and she had no interest in participating in that particular experiment. But Bowie did not court her the way a rock star courts someone. He sent flowers to her hotel room in Paris when she left for a fashion show. He met her at the airport when she returned. He got down on the pavement and tied her shoelaces.
“This one’s a keeper,” she thought.
What she fell in love with, she was precise about this later, was not the legend.
“I fell in love with David Jones,” she said. “I did not fall in love with David Bowie. Bowie is just a persona. He’s a singer, an entertainer. David Jones is a man I met.”
They married twice in 1992.
The first ceremony was private a civil wedding in Lausanne, Switzerland on April 24. The second was a celebration at a villa in Florence on June 6, with guests including Yoko Ono and the designer Valentino.
They made their home in New York City. What they built inside it was largely invisible to the outside world, which was entirely the point.
Bowie, by all accounts from those who knew him well, was not the man his legend implied. He read constantly and seriously. He collected art with genuine knowledge and commitment. He preferred staying home to attending the parties people assumed he lived for. He went on school runs. He walked in the park. He had afternoon teas coffee, now with his wife.
“David and I were both very protective of our privacy,” Iman told The New York Times. “There were certain things nobody else was going to see. Our house, our bedroom, our daughter have always been off limits.”
Their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones Lexi was born on August 15, 2000. Iman described her as their miracle. She was born after years of hoping, and she grew up in a household that the outside world’s cameras never entered.
The world saw them on red carpets, apparently adoring, apparently at ease. What it did not see was the actual life quiet, bookish, protective of itself, built by two people who had both learned that privacy was not a luxury but a necessity.
In 2014, Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer.
He told almost nobody.
He continued working. He assembled the musicians and producers he trusted and recorded Blackstar in secret, completing it by May 2015. He worked on Lazarus, a stage musical. He filmed videos. He wrote a detailed plan for the management of his musical estate after his death. He did all of this knowing exactly what was coming and choosing, with characteristic deliberateness, how the ending would be shaped.
Blackstar was released on January 8, 2016 his sixty-ninth birthday.
Two days later, on January 10, 2016, he died at home, surrounded by his family.
The world had not known he was sick. The shock was total and immediate and genuine. Blackstar, which critics had already begun calling one of his finest works, was understood overnight as something else a farewell constructed by a man who had decided that his last gift to his audience would be made with full knowledge and full intention, and that it would be extraordinary.
It was.
Since his death, Iman has spoken about him with a consistency that resists every expectation of how grief is supposed to move.
When people refer to him as her late husband, she corrects them.
He is not her late husband. He is her husband.
She has said she will not remarry. She is not lonely, she has explained. She is simply still married. The marriage did not end because he died. That is not, for her, how it works.
Bowie said in interviews that when people asked him what his greatest achievement was, his answer was not Ziggy Stardust or Blackstar or any of the records or the personas or the decades of reinvention. His answer was marrying his wife.
If you have ever loved someone so completely that the question of whether they are still present feels almost beside the point you already know what Iman means when she says he is her husband and not her late husband.
He got down on the pavement in 1990 and tied her shoelaces, and she thought: this one’s a keeper.
She was twenty-three years of marriage right about that.
She has not revised the assessment.
He died on January 10, 2016, and she still introduces him in the present tense, because that is the only tense that feels accurate to her, and she has decided that accuracy matters more than the world’s expectations of how long a person is allowed to keep loving someone.
Twenty-three years and counting.
That is not nothing.
That is the whole thing.
