Bowie

by Wendy Leigh

  Performing at the Hampstead Country Club one Wednesday night, David wore a big floppy hat, and theatrically twirled it around at the end of each song, while half the gay population of London, on hand to witness his performance, applauded his every move. That same night, three people who were in the audience would change the course of David’s career: Leee Black Childers, Cherry Vanilla, and Jayne (Wayne) County, part of Andy Warhol’s anarchic Factory in Manhattan and in London to appear in the play Andy Warhol’s Pork.

  At first, they were disappointed that David wasn’t wearing a dress, but after he announced, “And the people from Andy Warhol’s Pork are here tonight. Stand up,” they were mollified. So much so that Cherry took her top off. In the midst of their outrageousness, Angie, in particular, was charmed. After David’s show, the trio went backstage and invited David and Angie to see the play, which was about to open at the Roundhouse and was based on two hundred of Andy Warhol’s recorded telephone conversations.

  Given that David had written the song “Andy Warhol” for Hunky Dory, he was clearly fascinated by Andy, and it was a given that Angie and David would go to see Pork. Afterward, backstage, they were introduced to Tony Zanetta, who played the character based on Warhol. At first, Tony was surprised by David, as he wasn’t the kind of flamboyant rock-star-in-waiting he’d been led to expect him to be.

  “He wasn’t very colorful. He had a little pullover on, and he was pale. It was Angie who was dynamic and vivacious. We all moved on to the Sombrero, where David just sat at a table and watched,” Tony said.

  The following morning, Angie and David sent a car to ferry him and the others to Haddon House, where he found that Angie and David had inexplicably switched roles.

  “David was very, very engaging. Angie suddenly took a backseat and became the little wife. He and I talked about theater, fantasy, glamour, and I realized that he had been around in the music business for a long time and was no stranger to failure. He just got up and went to the next step, as he had total belief in himself and was obsessed by his work,” Tony remembered, adding, “As for sex, it wasn’t any big deal for him and Angie. It was like shaking hands at the end of the evening.”

  EIGHT

  ZIGGY

  In September 1971, the same month in which David started recording The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars with Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder, he flew to New York (with Angie, Tony, and Mick in tow) to sign with his new record company, RCA—the record label to which Elvis was also signed. When he and Angie checked into their suite at the Plaza, they were greeted with the glitter and glory of RCA: The suite was filled with gifts—the entire Elvis catalogue, the whole RCA album catalogue for that year, and countless “Welcome to New York” gifts.

  The writing was on the wall. RCA saw David as a star in the making and were treating him accordingly. Their thinking was, of course, heavily influenced by Tony Defries who, taking a leaf out of Colonel Parker’s book, had been marketing David as a star long before he actually was one, providing him with bodyguards, blanketing the city with posters featuring him, and generally acting as if David’s stardom was a fait accompli. Cherry Vanilla, Leee Black Childers, Jayne County, and Tony Zanetta—the Warhol people—had also contributed to convincing RCA ahead of time that David was already a star, when he wasn’t.

  “Tony Defries used to bring us up to RCA and we acted crazy, making demands for David, insisting that they treat him like a star. In a way, Tony used us to throw stardust in RCA’S eyes. That was part of his brilliance,” Cherry Vanilla said.

  During their stay in Manhattan, David and Angie made the pilgrimage to Andy Warhol’s Factory, expecting that Warhol would treat David as a peer, a fellow artist. But David was completely unprepared for Warhol’s way of interacting with fans, friends, and foes alike, which entailed a tongue-in-cheek, piss-taking approach. For example, when asked by this author to name his ideal woman in bed, he cracked, “Snow White.” And in the same vein, Andy didn’t take the earnest David seriously, not for a moment.

  That day at the Factory, David was wearing size-seven-and-a-half bright yellow patent leather shoes, a gift from Marc Bolan, and Warhol—dressed in jodhpurs and high-laced boots and brandishing a riding crop—began to photograph David with his Polaroid camera. After interminable minutes, during which Warhol obsessively snapped away at David’s shoes, David, close to his breaking point, cut in and told Warhol that he’d written a song about him, and proceeded to play it for him.

  Warhol made no bones about the fact that he hated the track, and David was deeply hurt by his reaction. His way of demonstrating his feelings to Warhol was subtle. All of a sudden, he launched into a mime in which he pantomimed disemboweling himself, as a dig at Warhol, whose cavalier treatment of him had been tantamount to gutting him, at least in David’s view.

  However, despite their lackluster first meeting, Andy Warhol would pay dividends to David, if only because some of the people clustered around him eventually transferred their allegiance to David.

  After signing his RCA contract, David joined Tony Defries, Tony Zanetta, Angie, music writer Lisa Robinson, and her husband for a celebratory dinner at the Ginger Man, across from Lincoln Center, where the real Lou Reed joined them. During dinner, while Lou talked and David listened, the basis of their friendship was formed and David did all he could to convince Reed, who was then retired, to relaunch his career—and succeeded. No minor feat, as Lou was a god among musicians, and in coaxing him out of retirement, David did a huge service to musicians and music fans.

  On that same fateful night, after dinner, Lou accompanied David, Angie, Defries, and Zanetta to Max’s Kansas City, the nightclub favored by both the Warhol and the music crowd, and Iggy Pop joined them there.

  “David wasn’t well known in America, but that night he and Lou Reed and Iggy Pop bonded,” said Yvonne Sewall, who was married to the owner of Max’s, Mickey Ruskin.

  “There was a certain spikiness between Lou and Iggy, and they obviously didn’t get on very well,” David remembered.

  While Iggy regaled everyone with stories about growing up in a trailer park and his forays into heroin and crystal meth, David’s bond with Iggy was forged. Years later, David said, “Iggy’s a lot more exuberant than I am. I tend to be quieter, more reflective. He’s always a little bit on the dangerous line. I’m not particularly; I’m much more of an observer. He’s more of a participant in things.”

  Iggy countered with, “We’re so opposite. He’s slick and I am what I am.”

  Most of the time, their friendship would be part Pygmalion, with David playing Professor Higgins to Iggy’s Eliza Doolittle: musical mentor and cheerleader, but also enabler. When Iggy was in a psychiatric hospital in 1975, trying to kick his drug habit, David, with Dennis Hopper, came to visit him bearing gifts.

  “We trooped into the hospital with a load of drugs for him,” David admitted, long afterward. “We were out of our minds, all of us. He wasn’t well: That’s all we knew. We thought we should bring him some drugs, because he probably hadn’t had any for days!”

  Years later, however, in Berlin, David would attempt to redeem himself by doing his utmost to save Iggy from his drug addiction, and together they would battle to kick their destructive drug habits.

  Today, Tony Zanetta isn’t completely sure whether what happened next happened after that first night at Max’s Kansas City, or on the following night. Other than that, he is certain of all the details of what transpired. “Angie was away in Connecticut, visiting a girlfriend, and when David and I left Max’s, he just gave me this look. So we went to my apartment on Fifteenth and Sixth, and we just talked and talked,” Tony remembered. “It was a very exciting time for David. He had just signed a record deal and was looking forward to the future. Then we went to bed.

  “David definitely was not gay, but he liked the gay world. When we were in bed together, he was more sensual and narcissistic. To him, it was about being adored. I think he was truly bisex
ual and I don’t think sex mattered to him.

  “But our night together established a kind of real kinship between us, and I felt we had something special between us. David was a real seducer. He made you feel that you are the only person who exists, the center of his universe. Then he had you in his pocket, so to speak, but after that, he would move on to the next level of the relationship,” Tony said.

  The next night, David continued to weave his silken web around Tony and suggested that the two of them go to bed with Angie.

  “It wasn’t hard-core sex, it was more romantic,” Tony remembered. “It was more cuddles and a lot of cunnilingus all round. But then Angie got pouty and moody. I don’t know if she was jealous or what.”

  “Angie talked a big game about sex and wildness,” Cherry Vanilla, who became MainMan’s office manager and publicist, said. “I think David could handle the open marriage, but although Angie talked about it, I think she did that just to keep him in love with her and interested, but really wanted a more conventional thing.

  “I remember once when David had an affair with Jean Millington, the singer in the band Fanny, Angie found out about it and got crazy with me because I’d mentioned it to the press,” Cherry said.

  After the wildness of America, David returned to England where, in September 1971, he played Aylesbury, and he wore full makeup when he performed on stage. Later in the year, though, he made a stab at playing the conventional traditional husband and accompanied Angie and Zowie to Cyprus, where they vacationed with her parents.

  Angie’s father, Colonel George Milton Barnett, was a fine, upstanding military man with a mustache who resembled Lawrence of Arabia. Now a successful businessman, he was canny about money, and as he attempted to advise David on how to negotiate the tricky and unscrupulous music business, David listened with respect.

  Angie’s mother, however, was quite another story. Only five foot two, stormy, feisty, and aggressive, Helena Marie Barnett hailed from Galicia in Eastern Europe and was such a firebrand that she actually once went as far as to hit her tall and imposing husband on the head with a frying pan. Observing the scrappy, bellicose Helena, David could not but have reminded himself that the daughter often evolves into the mother, and must have blanched at the prospect.

  After Hunky Dory was released in December, David’s stock rose considerably among the critics, who hailed the album as an artistic success. And as the ultimate accolade, popular DJ Tony Blackburn declared “Changes” to be his single of the week, January 7, 1972, and the more mainstream Peter Noone, of Herman’s Hermits, recorded “Oh! You Pretty Things” with considerable success, and it hit number 12 in the UK charts.

  With the dawn of 1972, everything was in place to unleash Bowie mania on the world. It all began with David’s twenty-fifth birthday party at Haddon Hall on January 8, 1972, at which he made his entrance as Ziggy in the quilted multicolor jumpsuit he and Freddie Burretti, now very much on his team (and, rumor has it, one of his sometime lovers), had designed, and which seamstress Sue Frost had made for him out of thirties furniture fabric.

  Lionel Bart was one of the guests, and when David played “Ziggy Stardust” for him, to his delight, Lionel pronounced it to be “a rock opera.” Later that same month, David took the first step in publicly launching Ziggy Stardust on an unsuspecting world when, on January 22, under the headline “Oh, You Pretty Thing: David Bowie,” Michael Watts’s interview for Melody Maker was published.

  Dubbing David “rock’s swishiest outrage: a self-confessed lover of effeminate clothes” and “a swishy queen,” Michael Watts described him as “a gorgeously effeminate boy,” announcing, “He’s as camp as a row of tents, with his limp hand and trolling vocabulary.”

  But it was David, himself, who delivered the coup de grâce in a line that he hadn’t even discussed with Angie, but which he had secretly nursed to himself. “I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones,” he announced with no hesitation.

  Even then, Michael Watts, who, like the rest of the world knew that David was married to Angie (but then wasn’t Somerset Maugham also married, with a daughter?) and that she had borne him a child (didn’t Oscar Wilde have two children and a wife?) was a little skeptical, noting, “There’s a sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth. . . . The expression of his sexual ambivalence establishes a fascinating game: Is he or isn’t he? In a period of conflicting sexual identity he shrewdly exploits the confusion surrounding the male and female roles.”

  Long afterward, Watts would elaborate, “I think he said it very deliberately. I brought the subject up. I think he planned at some point to say it to someone. He definitely felt it would be good copy. He was certainly aware of the impact it would make.”

  Chris Charlesworth, who wrote for Melody Maker and then went on to become a press officer for RCA, where he worked with David, said, “Personally, I think he was lying. I suspect that he is bi. I think he said it for effect as much as anything else. He is a master at misleading the press and creating headlines as a result.

  “I think he learned the PR trade from Ken Pitt, who was a press officer, and in the process realized that the worst thing was to be ignored by the media. He knew what he said would cause a stir, and it coincided with the release of his Hunky Dory album,” said Charlesworth.

  “Don’t you worry about me. I know what I’m doing” was David’s response after Laurence Myers broached the subject of David outing himself in print.

  Was David’s “I’m gay” announcement a cynical ploy he resorted to to promote Hunky Dory, and a way of starting the process of launching Ziggy on an unsuspecting world, or was it a genuine expression of his bisexuality, his drive for sexual freedom, his battle against sexual conformity?

  In a 1997 interview, Changes: Bowie at 50, a BBC radio program released in conjunction with his fiftieth birthday, he looked back at his revolutionary revelation that he was gay and said, “I did it more out of bravado. I wanted people to be aware of me. I didn’t want to live my life behind a closed door.”

  Whatever the truth about the original motivation for his controversial public statement, it is incontrovertible that David was proclaiming his bisexuality when he was only sixteen years old, as Alan Dodds, formerly of the Kon-rads and now a reverend, confirmed in an interview for this book. And by later going public, he became the first mainstream star to out himself, a shocking and brave move in a country where, less than fourteen years earlier, Liberace had sued a national newspaper for insinuating he was gay and won. From that moment on, David’s proclamation freed countless teenagers and young people throughout Britain (where being gay had been a crime less than a decade before) to indulge their sexual preference and even publicize it.

  And that, in addition to his penchant for wearing women’s clothes, sporting makeup, and flirting girlishly with the camera, served to make David a sexual revolutionary whose impact on society can never, even today, be minimized.

  One morning, in March 1972, after Angie had served him orange juice and coffee in bed, as always, he announced that he wanted to dye his hair red and cut it, simply because he wanted to look different. True to form, Angie immediately swung into action and, after some thought, concluded that if she settled on one of the many hairdressers who habitually hung out at the Sombrero, to the exclusion of all others, fists would fly and tempers would fray. So instead she opted for a hairdresser nearby, Suzi Fussey, who worked at the Evelyn Paget salon on Beckenham High Street, where she also did David’s mother Peggy’s hair every Friday.

  “Peggy was my 4:45 P.M. every Friday afternoon,” Suzi, who later married Mick Ronson, remembered. “She talked about David a lot whenever she came to the salon. She was really proud of him. And when Angie asked me to go over to Haddon Hall and work on David’s hair, I just thought of it as going to help the local band.”

  Then, as neither Angie, David, nor Suzi had a specific idea for revolutionizing David’s look via his hair, they thumbed through a series of f
ashion magazines and eventually evolved the iconic Ziggy Stardust hairdo, which would sweep the nation and live forever.

  Suddenly, there was no stopping David. Determined to smash every taboo, and to scale the heights of success and notoriety, during a June 17 show at Oxford Town Hall, he made a move that would revolutionize his image and his career, and become legendary in the history of rock. And British photographer Mick Rock, who had already photographed Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, and who would become David’s official photographer, was on hand to immortalize that taboo-breaking moment.

  “In the middle of the gig, David knelt down and started plucking at Mick Ronson’s guitar with his teeth, and from the back, it looked like David was giving Mick head. And I got the shot,” said Mick Rock.

  The photograph, published on the front cover of Melody Maker, made David a household name.

  “He loved it. He knew it would sell records,” Mick Rock said.

  But was it David Bowie who had simulated giving fellatio to Mick Ronson’s guitar, or was Ziggy Stardust doing it? Ziggy or David? David or Ziggy? It would soon become difficult to distinguish the difference.

  “David had to become what Ziggy was—he had to believe in him. Ziggy affected his personality, but he affected Ziggy’s personality. They lived off each other,” Mick Ronson later said.

  Millions of words have been written analyzing David’s creation Ziggy Stardust, and perhaps the best definition comes from David himself, who explained, “It was about putting together all the things that fascinated me culturally. Everything from Kabuki theater to Jacques Brel to drag acts. Everything about it was a hybrid of everything I liked.”

  And later on, he said, “I thought that was a grand kitsch painting. The whole guy. I can’t say I’m sorry when I look back, because it provoked such an extraordinary set of circumstances in my life.”