by Wendy Leigh
David had launched his relationship with Angie by putting all his cards on the table and bluntly telling her he didn’t love her—he warned her not to expect anything conventional of him.
“Because it can’t be that way,” he said, “I’m not made like that. I do things that other people might not subscribe to and I think it’s only fair that you should know that before we set out.”
Angie absorbed his words with a sense of mounting excitement. After all, hadn’t she been expelled from school for having a lesbian affair? Wasn’t she avant-garde, uninhibited, the ultimate sexual adventuress? Dazzled by the image of her own sexual bravado, Angie flung herself into an open relationship with David with abandon.
Afterward, in an interview with me conducted in the midseventies for my book Speaking Frankly, she would make the somewhat contradictory boast, “I kept a man like David by proving that he would never get anyone as magnificent—but it had nothing to do with bed. Although it is sexual, inasmuch as everyone else wanted you so he could always think: ‘Well, I am very fortunate, seeing as how I’ve got her.’ ”
In the early days at Haddon Hall, David would bring home boys, and Angie would bring home girls. Some Angie dressed in leather and fishnets and photographed in a variety of positions. Others, she and David enjoyed together, in the same bed.
Dana Gillespie, the schoolgirl who had been in David’s life since she was fourteen years old, was one of the girls who regularly had threesomes with David and Angie. In fact, Angie and Dana bonded to such a degree that today, Dana characterizes their relationship as being that of “bosom buddies.”
“It was always known that Angie and David were in an open relationship, that they were good pals, like brother and sister. She and I landed up in bed with him, but it wasn’t her and me,” Dana said, intimating that she and Angie had both catered sexually to David.
Another schoolgirl swept up in the world of Haddon Hall was seventeen-year old Nita Bowes, who went to school nearby and had first met David when he was singing at the Three Tuns.
“David was always very nice and openhearted, and was very supportive of the Arts Lab,” Nita remembered. “When Angie came along, she was far more exotic than David, and influenced the way in which he dressed. We all hung out together at Haddon Hall, and lots of people were always staying there.
“There was nothing predatory or improper about Angie and David. They didn’t lure me into bed; I wasn’t a groupie but just part of the art scene, and although we did have a cuddle in bed, it wasn’t wild, but just affection between the three of us, just friends. Fundamentally, David is just a sweet South London boy,” Nita said.
But despite their freewheeling lifestyle, Angie and David still tried to sustain an element of romance in their lives. In front of other people, they held hands, gazed into each other’s eyes, and whispered, “In your ear” to one another, their code for “I love you.”
Nonetheless, they were sometimes blatant about weaving a sexual web around those who took their fancy. Barbara Fulk, a secretary working for RCA, David’s record label at the time, was summoned to the Park Lane Hotel, only to be greeted by a braless Angie, in flimsy lingerie, and a naked David, lying on the bed, seemingly asleep, and stark naked. Before Barbara could make her apologies and leave, Angie made a pass at her.
Judy Cook, widow of British comedian Peter Cook, recalled a night when Angie and David invited her and Peter to a club. In the limousine, with blacked-out windows, as Judy remembered, “David was wearing lots of makeup and looked highly exotic, while Angie, tall, skinny, and muscular, looked masculine in a trouser suit.
“We joined them in the back of the car, and the driver covered our laps with rugs. Angie told me she liked my hair and suggested I dress like a boy, too. Almost immediately, I felt someone’s foot rubbing against my leg.”
Judy had no doubt whatsoever that footsie was going on, but she didn’t know whose foot it was. At the club, Angie asked her to dance.
“It was quite sexy and we carried on for a few dances,” Judy said, adding that on the way back in the limo, more footsie went on, but didn’t lead anywhere.
As Angie wrote in her books, she was also David’s advisor and his road manager, and accompanied him on an assortment of gigs, supporting him every step of the way. They would stay together, she vowed, and work toward making him into a pop idol, and then once he’d arrived at the very top, they would turn their attention toward making her into the star of stage and screen she firmly believed she was destined to be. David, too, for a time appeared to have genuine faith in her potential, later writing “The Prettiest Star” for her.
She was, he said, “one of the very few women I’d be capable of living with for more than a week. She’s remarkably pleasant to keep coming back to. And for me she always will be. There’s nobody more demanding than me. Not physically, necessarily, but mentally. I’m very strenuous.”
At times, she felt that he was more interested in his own future than in hers, and, disillusioned by him, at one point she escaped to her family in Cyprus, until, bereft, he sent her a postcard announcing, “This year I promise we’ll marry.”
He was true to his word, and proposed to her. In her first book Angie described in some detail the basis of their marriage, enthusing how much she had loved David and how much he reciprocated her emotions. At the time, Angie may well have had superstars in her eyes, because when George Tremlett attempted to interview David about his love for Angie, he laughed and said he didn’t see it like that. According to Ken Pitt, David repeatedly confided that he was only marrying Angie to stop her being deported from Britain, and that he didn’t love her.
After she and David were divorced, in a radio interview later to be reproduced in David Bowie: The Starzone Interviews Angie contradicted her original assertion that she and David had married for love and admitted that he had primarily married her to prevent her from being deported from England, and that when she was gone, he missed her managerial and organizational skills.
“David’s no fool,” she said. “He realized that every time I got sent out of the country he got two weeks behind.
“We got married because I was an American who needed to stay in London and he was a weak Brit who needed me to break down the doors and turn him into a star. I was wild and he needed me to help him be wild. It worked,” Angie said.
On March 18, 1970, she and David went to Kensington Market, where vintage clothes, as well as outfits by new designers, were on sale, and selected a 1920s silk dress for her to wear at her wedding. Then, on the spur of the moment, they decided to pay a call to their friend, a female artist. Angie and David ended up in bed with her, and, as a result, as both of them would boast afterward, they were late for their wedding the next morning.
The female artist, who to this day remains a friend of David and Iman, was witness at the Bromley Register Office ceremony, at which, in the eleventh hour, Peggy materialized, though David hadn’t invited her.
“She turned up on the day and I was delighted,” Angie said of Peggy’s surprise appearance afterward. “I thought David had a really silly attitude about his family. He thought he could get rid of them when he didn’t want them. And I kept explaining to him you can’t get rid of family.”
Resigned to his mother’s uninvited presence David graciously stood back and let her sign the register. And using four Peruvian silver bracelets instead of wedding rings (they would wear two each on their wrists) David Robert Jones married Angela Mary Barnett.
Ken Pitt, who had known about the wedding, was not invited. He was still besotted with David, so David, who had always used his sexual allure to manipulate Ken, and Ralph Horton before him, (the exact modus operandi of many a starlet winning fame and fortune via the casting couch) was quick to deny to Ken that he had emotions for Angie and to disparage their marriage.
Ken, however, was not naïve: “David was leading this double life,” he said. “It was rather Jekyll and Hyde–ish. He put on a different hat at Haddon Hall
and when he came to see me.”
Although Ken was sanguine about David’s juggling of their relationship with his marriage to Angie, Angie, who encouraged sexual but not emotional promiscuity in David, had no intention of allowing Ken Pitt to retain his role as David’s Svengali.
At first, Ken tried to view the strident American who had stormed into his protégé’s life as an asset, an ally. “I think she organized him and I should imagine she’s turned out to be very good for him. He needed something like that. Her personality, and what he called her intelligence, impressed him very much,” he said somewhat caustically.
However, despite the success of “Space Oddity,” which Pitt had financed and supported right from the start, their business relationship had started to sour. More and more, David had proved himself to be stubborn, contrary, and unwilling to listen to Ken’s advice, which had, until then, served him so well.
“When I wanted David to be extrovert he wanted to be an introvert. When I wanted him to wear beautiful clothes he wanted to wear dirty clothes,” Ken complained.
Dirty clothes or not, Ken was so devoted to David that, as Michael Armstrong remembered, “Ken always did David’s ironing.”
The end came when David, accompanied by manager Laurence Myers, who owned Gem Productions and the record label GTO, and his partner, Tony Defries, a twenty-six-year-old former legal clerk, came to see Ken and informed him that David wanted to end their business relationship.
“Ken was absolutely shocked,” Myers remembered.
Shocking as it might have been that David jettisoned his long-term, loyal, and faithful manager Ken Pitt in favor of the upstart Tony Defries, he had his reasons. For he had fallen under the spell of a consummate showman, a man who captivated anyone who crossed his path, much as David himself did.
“Tony Defries was one of the most mesmerizing people I’ve ever met. He was fascinatingly intelligent and could talk about everything. Everyone thought of him as if he were an ancient seer,” Tony Zanetta, who would go on to become president of MainMan, said.
In April 1970, David formalized the breach between him and Ken in a letter, telling him that he no longer considered him to be his personal manager. In retrospect, a shaken Pitt said that he had thought about his relationship with David a great deal, how David saw him, what he meant to David. “I’m pretty sure it was as teacher to a pupil, which was either good or bad. Certainly I saw it that way,” he said.
Down the line, David would compensate Ken for his dedication, hard work, and enduring belief in him by paying him what, in those days, was a substantial sum: £15,000. David stayed in touch with Ken through the years, and kept the lines of communication with him open to such an extent that he invited Ken to his May 1973 concert at London’s Earls Court, issuing the invitation with the words “Come and see what your boy’s doing.”
And in 2000, he paid tribute to Ken Pitt in “Bowie Interviews Bowie,” a mock interview in the Canadian Post in which David, age twenty-three, was “interviewed” by the then fifty-three-year-old David. In the mock interview, on the subject of Pitt, older David reminds younger David, “Don’t forget that although you both had completely different ideas about what you should be doing, he stuck by you. He lent you money whenever you needed it and showed a great deal of enthusiasm for all your crazy ideas.”
Now that David was signed to him, Laurence Myers renegotiated his record contracts and, until David decided that he wanted to conquer America and to eventually live there, he masterminded David’s career.
“I thought David was very smart, very commercially minded, very sure of what he wanted to do and be,” Laurence Myers said.
However, by the time he had spent £100,000 on David’s career, when Tony Defries came to him with the suggestion that Defries open a branch of Gem in New York and run it for Myers, Laurence demurred. “I knew I would lose David if he went to America. And I also didn’t want Tony to run my company because his style of business was to have a limousine on call all day, and to give an artist everything he wanted,” Myers said.
Ultimately, Defries repaid Myers his £100,000 and contracted to pay him £500,000 over the next five years, leaving Tony in total control of David’s career.
The son of a Spanish/Portuguese barrow-boy father and a Russian mother, Tony Defries grew up in the tough Shepherd’s Bush area of London. Though he was only four years older than David, he was a bear of a man and exuded an aura of experience and gravitas. By the time he first met David, Tony had honed his Hollywood tycoon act to perfection.
“When Tony Defries took me to dinner, I got the giggles,” Maggie Abbott, who was then David’s movie agent said a long time afterward. “He had a very shaggy beard, and a huge coat made out of dead rabbit. In retrospect, he was like someone out of The Producers. Next to him, poor Ken Pitt was completely out of his depth.”
It was Angie, of course, who—on the advice of record executive Oleg Wyper—had helped convince David to jettison Ken in favor of his new manager, Tony. She invited Tony and his brother, Nicholas, to Haddon Hall so she could romance them on David’s behalf, and vice versa. From the first, the clues about Tony Defries’s true nature and ambitions were transparent, as he was open that he modeled himself on Colonel Tom Parker, the former carnival huckster who had masterminded Elvis’s career. A coincidence, given that David was born on Elvis’s birthday, and one that Defries would work to his advantage.
“Tony was great,” Angie said. “He was a thief and a gangster, but if you want something done, who do you hire?”
Despite the fact that Tony had no qualifications as a lawyer, he promised David the world. David, who had blind faith in every utterance that Tony made regarding his future as an international superstar, concluded that his day had finally dawned.
Singer, composer, and music journalist Jonathan King was having dinner with DJ Alan Freeman when David and Mick Ronson, David’s new and gifted guitarist, walked into the restaurant. “I said hi to David, and he announced, ‘I’m going to make it! I’ve actually cracked it!’ ” Jonathan recalled. “I’d been championing him for a few years, but he still hadn’t made it. Now he seemed so certain, so sure. I went back to the table, to Alan, and this is what I said: ‘David says he is going to make it. He was so sure. He was utterly convinced. He had no doubt whatsoever that he was going to make it really big now.’ I felt as if he had sold his soul to the devil.”
He was partially right. For though Tony Defries wasn’t exactly the devil, in reality, David had sold himself to him, lock, stock, and barrel.
SEVEN
STARMAN
With the success of “Space Oddity” in Britain, David became more of a pampered prince than ever. Every morning, Angie would automatically run his bath, cook for him, clean for him, and generally treat him like a baby. Now and again, he was even heard to address her as “Peg,” “Ma,” or “Mother,” and she, in turn, called him “Nama-Nama,” the nickname evoking her propensity toward mothering. She opened Haddon Hall to any musicians who wanted to crash there, and served English breakfast 24/7, rather as if she was running a truck stop.
Although she later complained that half her day was spent trying to convince David to get out of bed and then persuading him to eat (“He was all coffee and cigarettes, coffee and cigarettes”), Angie succeeded in manipulating him where it was important.
“Remembering how things had to be his idea, I never actually suggested anything outright. No point giving him a chance to dig in his heels and balk the way he had with Ken Pitt,” she said sagely.
Instead, she went shopping and made sure to pick out things for herself that she instinctively knew would suit David as well. “More often than not he’d take the bait, come sniffing over from his side, see the new stuff hanging there.” At which point, she gleefully recalled, David would reach into the cupboard, grab an outfit she’d ostensibly bought for herself, and “take it down, look it over, try it on, thinking he was being naughty, pulling a fast one.” Meanwhile, she watched his mac
hinations, seemingly innocent, then burst out that the look was perfect for him and that he should have the outfit.
Aside from her skill at manipulating David, Angie was loud, abrasive, annoying, and histrionic, but her artistic instincts were good.
“Angie was wonderful,” said Maggie Abbott, adding, “She was so devoted to him, always pushing his career and image, had her eyes on everything, clothes, design, makeup ideas—she was brilliant with creativity.”
Haddon Hall was now a hive of activity, all centering on making David into the star that Angie, Tony Defries, and David himself believed him destined to be. In the midst of it, David composed songs, watched TV, and listened to music, while Angie waited on him hand and foot.
In January 1970, drummer John Cambridge had made a trip to Hull and convinced twenty-four-year-old guitarist Mick Ronson, who was then working as a gardener for Hull City Council, to come down to London and become the guitarist in David’s new band, the Hype, which consisted of Tony Visconti on bass, John Cambridge, and Mick “Woody” Woodmansey on drums.
From the first it was clear that the classically trained “Ronno,” who had been playing in bands since he was seventeen, had star quality. David recalled that when he first heard him play the guitar, “I thought, ‘That’s my Jeff Beck! He is fantastic! This kid is great!’ And so I sort of hoodwinked him into working with me. I didn’t quite have to tell him that he would have to wear makeup and all that.”
Mick Ronson, as Charles Shaar Murray, the journalist and seasoned Bowie watcher would point out in the documentary David Bowie: Five Years, was to become the only performer with whom David would ever share the stage on an equal and long-term basis. More than that, Mick immediately became a good mate, and moved into Haddon Hall, partly because he knew about Angie’s uncanny ability to bring home the most free-spirited of girls who were willing to make themselves sexually available to David, Angie, and anyone else in his orbit.
