Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  “The only pipe I have ever smoked was a cheap Bewlay,” Bowie would write years later, explaining the cryptic title in London’s Daily Mail in the summer of 2008. “It was a common item in the late sixties and for this song I used Bewlay as a cognomen—in place of my own. Having said that, I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within it.”

  By the time you read this, there will be no Virgin Megastore on Broadway off Union Square, but I was recently browsing in the Virgin Megastore on Broadway off Union Square and happened to see Hunky Dory stocked along a wall marked “Lost Classics.” This seemed strange to me, as it’s been such an important record in my collection and the collection of just about anyone I’ve ever known or trusted. Classic, sure, but “lost”? The fact that The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars followed so closely after the original release of Hunky Dory (a minor commercial hit but a solid critical one) might have something to do with it. Or maybe it’s that “Changes,” the album’s best-known song, has since appeared on so many singles compilations. Hunky’s legacy suffers from timing. I have never seen it included in any of those “458 albums you need to hear before you die” lists that men’s magazines sometimes put out in an effort to convince their readers that they need to step up on that resolution to figure out who Vic Chesnutt is and really listen to Sketches of Spain. Ziggy Stardust is always on these lists. Deservedly so. But if you don’t own Hunky Dory, you must, because one day you too will die (or worse, find yourself in a too expensive London hotel with an uncharged iPod, like I did about ten months ago) and not be able to hear it whenever you want to. An album that sends you into a panic attack because you cannot immediately put your ears on it should be upgraded to simply Classic, if you ask me.

  12.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1971, at La Mama, a small theater space off Second Avenue in New York’s East Village, Pork, a play “written” by Andy Warhol and culled from two hundred tape-recorded hours of nightly telephone conversations between the artist and his best friend, the socialite Brigid Berlin (all transcribed by Warhol Factory speed freaks), had its world premiere. Originally conceived as the first twenty-nine-act play, it had no real plot but was (very) loosely concerned with the druggy downtown adventures of Amanda Pork, a thinly veiled Berlin, who earned the nickname Brigid Polk or “Poke” after publicly injecting herself and others with syringes full of amphetamine. The character of Pork (pronounced “Pawk,” as in “I’m Pawk from New Yawk”) was played by actress and Warhol star Cherry Vanilla. Warhol is named B. Marlow and was played by Tony Zanetta in white wig and black turtleneck. Wayne, now Jayne, County played Vulva, a take on another Warhol superstar, Viva.

  Adapted for the stage and directed by new theater visionary Anthony J. Ingrassia (an alumnus of Charles Ludlam’s pioneering Theatre of the Ridiculous), Pork featured masturbation, full frontal nudity, simulated shit-eating (actually chocolate pudding) and generally perverse gallivanting across sets designed to resemble the Warhol Factory and its habitués’ primary hangout, the back room of Max’s Kansas City. Each vignette concluded with a fade to black and the amplified sound of a busy signal. Pork received a favorable New York Times review, but to the great relief of Berlin’s mother, the well-connected Upper East Side socialite Honey Berlin, it closed after just two weeks. (Honey Berlin gave Warhol her own review, according to legend. She screamed at him: “You’re nothing but a fucking faggot. Fuck your fucking Factory!”)

  That might have been the end of Pork had it not coincided with Warhol’s first career retrospective, which was about to travel from the Whitney Museum in Manhattan to the Tate Museum in London. In an effort to promote the exhibit, enterprising English producers offered Pork’s director and cast a spot at the Roundhouse, the West End venue where David had supported the Who with Feathers and first met Angie. Pork opened on August 2, 1971, and immediately polarized the local media. It was impossible to be a well-connected Londoner without having some knowledge or opinion on the production. It was either a revolutionary piece of art or a blight on the nation, straight from the gutters of Manhattan. To the red-top scandal sheets, the cast of Pork was like Christmas in August: priceless copy. “They fanned the flames,” Zanetta said. Cast member Geri Miller (who can be seen in the Warhol film Flesh) exposed her breasts in front of the Queen Mother’s residence. “What’s the big deal? The Queen’s got ’em,” she quipped, to the delight of the half dozen reporters in attendance.

  The cast all stayed in an apartment complex called Langham Mansion in the Earls Court section of London. Reporters from the News of the World would come to dub it “Pig Mansion” and followed these kids wherever they went in hopes of getting a headline.

  “To be recognized by Warhol was to be recognized as art yourself,” Cherry Vanilla remembers. “We were living art for him.” Vanilla had the unlucky task of having to memorize Pork’s speed-freak logorrhea and act alongside actors who didn’t even bother to get off book. “I’ll tell you, every night was an adventure in Pork. When you’re memorizing a script you can often put some logic to it. You know, A goes to B goes to C. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ The next line is ‘Do you take sugar?’ But in Pork, the conversations were so disjointed. I was talking about having abortions one minute, and in the middle of the sentence I’d be going into what society ladies my mother was serving tea to, to go to what a bitch my maid was. Tony Zanetta played Andy and he’d be sitting there and all he had to say was ‘ Mmm-hmm. Interesting. Uh-huh.’”

  David Bowie, already besotted with Warhol’s discovery the Velvet Underground for nearly a half decade, was instantly drawn to the cast of Pork. He and Angie took in multiple performances, including opening and closing nights. The cast embraced the Bowies as well. They had much in common. Most of the Warhol crew were lapsed Catholics and turned the rituals and strictures of the religion into irreverent parody (best exemplified by “Pope,” Ondine’s sequence in the 1966 film Chelsea Girls). Their thick accents were so theatrical and extreme. They weren’t troubled by real emotions. They never cried; they only “cried” to again reference Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” They were always on, always performing. This was like catnip to Bowie. They had no trace of “Don’t say what you really mean” English politesse. “We had a lot more freedom,” Zanetta tells me. “And we had the freedom to be more self-expressive rather than to fit into a mold. We weren’t trying to be investment bankers.” Like Bowie, they were motivated by an almost biological hunger for fame and attention. “We were also very influenced when growing up by movies and TV and records, and a lot of us had stars in our eyes,” Zanetta says. “A lot of us were obsessed with this idea of stardom. Something that magical that was beyond our ordinary lives. We were into the magic of what we thought stardom was.”

  Angie, the theater student, who had admonished the slovenly members of the Hype to dress for success both on and offstage, found the Pork cast’s total commitment to theatricality equally inspiring. “It wasn’t really a policy, just a habit we had, as I said, of always being on,” says Leee Black Childers, who also went over with Pork and later worked with Bowie and the Stooges. “Whether we were onstage or offstage. So David very much clasped onto that idea of creating a personality and surrounding himself with similar outrageous people. He also got the idea of strength in numbers. That if you had a lot of crazy people around you then you’ll look crazy too.”

  Despite his significant creative leap, visually, Bowie didn’t look at all unusual discounting his natural androgyny. He was still in his long-haired folkie mode and did not perform in his “man’s dress,” but rather sat on a stool, Arts Lab–style, and strummed his new songs and old album tracks. This despite early American press like John Mendelsohn’s Rolling Stone piece (reported during Bowie’s visit to California that winter) that described him as wearing a dress. When the cast of Pork traveled to a local venue called the Country Club, where Bowie had agreed to a short residency, to take in a Bowie perfor
mance, Jayne County says, “He disappointed us visually because we expected something really bizarre. Because John Mendelsohn had written an article, very little tiny article, that just said he’d gotten in trouble for dressing in dresses. And I think he said ‘dresses,’ he could have said ‘women’s clothes.’ I thought his music was very folky. When we saw him it was all acoustic and sounded like Joan Baez on downs!”

  Cherry Vanilla is a bit more generous. “He definitely had something going on,” she says. “He definitely had poetry, he definitely had charisma, he definitely had sex appeal.

  “He definitely had musicianship. And that’s why we got so excited about him, at least I did, because we recognized, ‘Wow, this is something special.’ It wasn’t just another folkie.”

  “Well, we were not very impressed with him but we did like him and we kind of took him under our wing,” County admits. “And we all decided to help him out. You know, glam him up and make him more outrageous.”

  By and large they all found Angie to be much more impressive than her husband.

  “Angie was loud, aggressive and sometimes obnoxious but with a charm. We loved her. David was a drip,” County says. “He would be in his baggy pants and long hair and we would be in painted nails, makeup, glitter, outrageous clothes. We got all the attention and David was so jealous. I overheard Angie telling him that he needed to change his image and start getting some attention too.”

  “Angie was very, very smart,” Vanilla says. “Very observant of the world. I think she both educated him in a lot of ways and she complemented him in a lot of ways. She balanced him. And you know, they were very, very well balanced. I mean he himself had ideas about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to look and she brought him that much more. And I think that’s what—the whole success was just a matter of personalities and people coming together at the right time really. I think that the gay glitter scene was budding over there. And yes, us coming probably confirmed for them that they could even go further with their scene. That we were maybe miles beyond them in decadence. And that they were cool and could go further. On the other hand, we did drop a kind of bomb in that, uh, a lot of press hated the play and hated us and we had hecklers every night. And a lot of people thought it was just disgusting and it was like, ‘Go home, you filthy New Yorkers,’ you know.”

  “London was very dull and then we knocked the town off its ass,” County concludes. “No one was doing what we were doing and the drag queens there were all super-conservative. We were like aliens from another planet. The drag queens there were practically nuns! David and Angie Bowie were there every night and David was practically coming in holding a pen and paper!”

  In the interest of fair play, it should be mentioned that Bowie and Angie did have another equally powerful clutch of fashion-forward, outrageous and inspirational characters already in London. This revolving salon was centered around a gay bar known as the Sombrero Club. The Sombrero had a flashing dance floor like the one made famous by the film Saturday Night Fever. The DJ would play loud soul and proto-disco and glitter rock. The downstairs area was dark and discreet. “There were a lot of drag queens, a lot of people who might have been girls who might have been boys,” Childers says. “And there was a lot of picking up. David and Angie went there very much to party and had been going there before we went.”

  Bowie may have been inspired by the cast of Pork but later, when it came time to harness their energy into the Ziggy Stardust machine, it was the talent pool at the Sombrero, people like Freddi Buretti and Daniella Parmar, who would truly help him realize that vision. Their outsized personalities, dark wit and sincere commitment to a certain splendid kind of superficiality troubled some members of the more idealistic hippie Arts Lab set, like Mary Finnegan. “They were a very strange couple,” she says. “I was not happy with the atmosphere. There was a very funny sexual ambiguity going down. This guy Freddi and his girlfriend, they were completely interchangeable. Completely androgynous. It got to be very—I don’t know—decadent. It sort of made me not want to be there. I felt out of place. It was getting very showbizzy at that point. The David who became Ziggy Stardust, the one who left Beckenham, was an entirely different personality from the one I just met.” The Bowies, of course, had already moved on culturally, socially and sexually. They found Buretti and Parmar to be fabulous, easily seeing the Wildean soul and creativity behind their flamboyant aesthetic. They were not only happy to be a canvas for Buretti, but they saw him as one as well, one upon which Bowie could experiment with his new palette. Around this time Bowie renamed Buretti “Rudy Valentino,” an act that can certainly be seen in hindsight as Bowie space-monkeying around with name changes, alter egos and fabricated high-concept pop stars shortly before recasting himself as Ziggy Stardust. Buretti, backed by Arnold Corns, recorded some new, harder-edged Bowie-penned material, including the bluesy single “Looking for a Friend,” featuring the excellent lyric: “This semi-acoustic love affair is driving me to the brink.”

  Meanwhile, Tony Defries traveled to the RCA offices in New York City with tapes of both David Bowie and Dana Gillespie’s new material. He was confident that he would return to England with two major record deals, despite the fact that Gillespie had only a few failed singles to her credit and Bowie was a three-time loser as far as albums were concerned. He was so certain that Bowie would be the biggest new star, not just a Bob Dylan for the seventies but also a Marlon Brando, a James Dean and an Elvis Presley, that he made a grand gesture of securing the rights to Bowie’s then worthless Phillips/Mercury material. If most RCA executives did not know who David Bowie was, none of them had any idea who Tony Defries was. They would soon find out.

  “They brought me in to bring in the strange and freaky stuff, the underground stuff,” John Cale said of his tenure as an A & R man at Warner. “So there we were with Hunky Dory; the deal was on the table and everyone was trying to figure out how this cabaretish, Brit art rock could work. At Warner’s at that time, you had the Doobie Brothers and Alice Cooper and all of that, which they understood. But coming around to the art side of things, they just didn’t understand what David was doing. Everyone was scratching their heads, saying, ‘How do we do this?’ It’s a very difficult thing to fight for in a large corporation like that if nobody understands where they’re going with it. It really wasn’t fair, certainly not to David. There were certain things you knew you weren’t going to get your hands on in those days and that was one of them. You were struggling in the trenches most of the time. You’d see the writing on the wall during meetings, when you’d ask a question and people would just turn away from you. But I loved Hunky Dory. It was unique and strange and very unorthodox. But if you tried to explain British music hall tradition to the executives, they just wouldn’t get it. I was really disappointed I couldn’t do anything at Warner’s with him. I think later on in the seventies when I saw the thing build with Bowie, it all started to make sense to people.”

  Defries was undeterred by this rejection and remained confident that this material would result in a superstar deal. “David was an almost totally unknown name but Tony had grand ideas,” Gillespie says today. “Defries was good; he created this mystique, you know. He talked big and people became—they got hooked in on what he was talking about. They liked how he was talking.”

  Defries made good on half his claim. RCA’s Dennis Katz passed on Gillespie but could not deny the power of David Bowie’s new material. RCA at the time had Elvis Presley, but their rock division was lackluster as far as new young stars were concerned. Katz could see how Bowie would be perfect for the label and as a result found Defries’s bluster charming as opposed to off-putting. Still, even by record industry standards, this was an aggressive character.

  Upon his return to London, Defries informed David that he was on the same label as Elvis Presley. The RCA contract was modest. Two years, three albums, at just over thirty-seven thousand dollars each. The royalty rate was standard for the time. It hardly lived up to the rumor of
a million-dollar deal that Rodney Bingenheimer was spreading throughout L.A. music circles, but RCA had major power, and Defries had created a wedge into the music business and, even better, the American market. A devotee of Elvis’s audacious former carny turned manager, Colonel Tom Parker, Defries had gotten an artist signed to Elvis’s label. As far as he was concerned, the gilded doors were unlocked, and all he and Bowie had to do was storm through.

  His next order of business was dismantling and restructuring the publishing deal that Pitt had set up, which he attacked with the same lack of regard for English propriety. When it was done, he showed Bowie a piece of paper that indicated that he was already technically a millionaire. Forget that he hadn’t sold any hits or made the money yet. It was there. On paper. Again, all they had to do was go through the formality of actually doing it. And while they were carrying this out, Defries said, it would be good if David would act like a millionaire rock star. David and Angie were impressed that the success he’d been pursuing since his early teens was now just a matter of following instructions, like heating up a can of Heinz beans.

  Any suspicions were allayed when the Bowies placed Zowie in the temporary care of their neighbors in Haddon Hall and flew to New York to formally sign the RCA paperwork in the fall of 1971. RCA had gone out of their way to make the Bowies feel special. Mercury had put him up in a Holiday Inn. This time, RCA booked him into the Warwick Hotel on Fifty-fourth street, the William Randolph Hearst–built palace where Elvis, the King himself, stayed. Waiting for them in their suite was Presley’s full vinyl catalog, as if to say, “This is the good company you will be in.”