by Wendy Leigh
The day after the Oxford gig, the Ziggy Stardust juggernaut rolled on with a press conference at the Dorchester Hotel on London’s Park Lane, held for American journalists flown in especially for the event. Lou Reed, whose next album, Transformer (which included the iconic track “Walk on the Wild Side”), David would produce, was there, as was Iggy Pop, for whom David would coproduce Raw Power, and later on, The Idiot and Lust for Life, and with whom he cowrote “China Girl.” (Along the way, David would also write and produce Mott the Hoople’s album All the Young Dudes, which featured the track of the same name, not an anthem to youth, as the title intimates, but a harbinger of doom.)
Journalist Ron Ross was one of the members of the press flown over to London by RCA. He would write David’s first cover story for Phonograph Record Magazine and later go on to become his product man at RCA. As he recalled, “David was sweet and enthusiastic. But Iggy was a snotty kid taking advantage of what was on offer to him. And Lou was rather condescending to all. I remember Lou unnecessarily talking about taking a transsexual hooker ‘home’ the night before, but I’m not sure I believed him. There were press in the room,” Ross said.
Around the same time, musician Ron Asheton flew to London to play on Iggy Pop’s album.
“The first day I was there, I met David Bowie,” Ron said. “He showed up at the house, drunk, with these two Jamaican girls with identical David Bowie carrot-top haircuts, and they went down to the dining room to drink wine and stuff.
“David kind of got disoriented in the house, so I showed him to the front door, and then he grabbed me by the ass and kissed me. My arm went back to coldcock him, then I thought, Whoa, can’t do that. I didn’t hit him,” Asheton said.
On a brief visit to Manhattan with Mick Ronson, (the same one during which they caught Elvis’s show at Madison Square Garden), Tony Zanetta was on hand and observed a change in David, “He looked fantastic, but Ziggy neurosis had started to take over. He was a little more tense, a little more fearful,” Tony said.
During that same trip, David was also reunited with Cherry Vanilla, the Factory girl who, for his own reasons, Tony Defries had co-opted into MainMan, where her duties included managing the tour, plugging David’s records to DJs, and, later, ghosting a column in his name. Later on, acting in the role of his spokeswoman, Cherry confided to an L.A. radio host that David routinely made love to everyone who worked for him at least once. After that, she was deluged with people who wanted to come and work for MainMan.
Confirming the truth of Cherry’s words, and consolidating his new pattern of seducing those who worked closely with him as a way of marking his territory and reinforcing his power over them, he did indeed go to bed with Cherry Vanilla.
“He was always very flirtatious. He looked you straight in the eyes, but he wasn’t condescending. He treated women with the same equality as he treated men, and looked at your intelligence as well as your sexuality,” Cherry remembered.
“We were in Boston, in Tony Defries’s Howard Johnson hotel suite, which was on a high floor, and when I sat down in a chair, David squeezed in so I was sort of sitting on his lap. Then Tony and his girlfriend Melanie left David and me alone.
“Knowing that he had a phobia about heights, I asked him if he wanted me to close the drapes, but he told me to keep them open because he wanted to see the lights. He started taking his clothes off, and I thought he was beautiful. He reminded me of a satyr. His body was very underdeveloped in the upper regions, as he had a small upper body, arms, and chest, but his legs were very muscular. He had big hips in the thighs, almost like a Greek statue.
“I told him that I was embarrassed, because I had two big white bandages stuck on the inside of my thighs and he promised me he wouldn’t laugh when he saw them.
“Of course, the moment he saw the bandages he burst out laughing,” Cherry said, “And I just sat there looking down and laughing at them too, until he beckoned me, ‘Come ’ere.’ He was a better lover than I’d ever imagined. Not just in the physical sense. The sex was as dirty, rough, and aerobic as anyone could want, but it never felt like we were just having sex. It felt like we were really making love.
“He was amazing. He was a great kisser, and kissed me a lot, and was very tender, kissing my body all over and breathing on my neck, and although he was very butch and virile and could stay hard for a long time, for those moments, you felt as if he was making love with you,” Cherry said. “He was either a fabulous actor or a man whose emotions ran deep. But if it was acting, I couldn’t have cared less. It was lighthearted and hot; I was twenty-nine and I knew the score.”
Meanwhile, Tony Defries took to privately referring to David as “the product,” and to commissioning boxes of special MainMan matches with golden heads, to symbolize the company’s opulent image. Unaware of Tony’s machinations and wild extravagance, back in London, David carried on oblivious, with Tony Zanetta now working for MainMan as his road manager.
“We definitely liked each other a lot, and there was this closeness between us. One of my jobs was to get him up in the morning, but we didn’t do any drugs,” Tony said.
In London, after David’s Sheffield gig, to which David had invited singer Lulu, he took her to bed. “Some people have beautiful hands or beautiful necks, but I discovered that night that David had beautiful thighs—the best I’d ever seen, I had my own private viewing—up close and personal,” Lulu revealed in her autobiography.
On July 6, 1972, wearing a quilted multicolored jumpsuit and full makeup, complete with white varnished nails, David took the stage with Mick Ronson on the BBC’s flagship music show, Top of the Pops, and started to sing “Starman.” A few moments into the song, in the most leisurely, natural way imaginable, he slid his arm around Ronno, pulling him close to him while they sang “Starman” together, and David’s status as a sexual icon was assured forever. He was now a superstar, and his image and persona would remain enshrined in the seventies: David was the miracle worker who had single-handedly triggered a cultural earthquake.
Looking back, the impact of David’s cool, casual, homoerotic moment with Ronno, in full view of five million Top of the Pops viewers that night, and their palpable sexual chemistry, the ambiguity of their sexual orientation, with both Ronno and David exuding a macho swagger, can never be minimized. The next morning, all over Britain, David’s appearance was the talk of the country. Was he a freak? Was he “a queer”? In the parlance of the day, was he a “poofter”? There was no answer, only a call to freedom of dress, freedom of image, freedom of expression.
Shocking in the extreme, especially in dreary, decaying, stifling suburban Britain, David’s performance on Top of the Pops that July was a revelation and would transform him and his generation forever.
A major hit for David, and his first since “Space Oddity,” “Starman” was to indelibly engrave David’s image, his androgyny, his white-hot charisma onto the psyche of pop fans everywhere—nothing would ever be the same. His performance literally changed lives, his courage in wearing makeup on national television, whether motivated by his honest belief in sexual freedom or by PR, sparkled through, and to some, David Bowie would forever remain their shining light, their inspiration, even their spiritual guide.
The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which he began recording in September 1971, which was actually released a month before David’s seminal Top of the Pops performance of “Starman,” would go on to sell 7.5 million copies. It had taken David nine grueling years of paying his artistic dues, and now, at last, he had finally arrived.
NINE
SUPERSTARMAN
In September 1972, Angie, David, and his old school friend George Underwood and George’s wife, Birgit, sailed to Manhattan on the QE2. David dined in the ocean liner’s exclusive restaurant, dressed in full Ziggy regalia, only to be shocked immeasurably when many of the passengers stared at him openmouthed. Turning to George, he said, “They were all looking at me.”
“What do you expect?” George replied.
“After that, David took every meal in his cabin, alone. Another time, he came out of the bathroom and he’d shaved off his eyebrows,” George recalled.
It wasn’t the first time that he had done so, but here, amid the luxurious ambience of the QE2, it was yet another act of rebellion and self-assertion.
In America, David was scheduled to embark on a seventeen-day nationwide tour to promote Ziggy, traveling between cities via chartered Greyhound, with Angie, Birgit, and George in tow. By the start of the U.S. tour, according to Angie, she and David were more like business partners than like lovers. More to the point, she had set her sights on David’s handsome green-eyed Jamaican bodyguard, Anton Jones, and had selected him as her next paramour.
And David, too, had a new passionate interest of his own, Warhol’s prettiest, sexiest Factory girl, nineteen-year-old actress and model Cyrinda Foxe, who was introduced to David by Leee Black Childers at the Plaza, where Angie and David were each staying in separate suites. Cyrinda and David spent their first night together at the Plaza, and she found him tender, easy to be with, and a great lover who was happy to talk to her before, during, and after sex.
Five days later, David, Angie, Tony Zanetta, and the entire entourage moved on to a motel in Erie, Pennsylvania, where they were scheduled to stay the night before David played his first major American show in Cleveland the next evening. That night, Angie was discovered in the hotel pool, having wild sex with Anton Jones.
“The significance of that was not that Angie was in the pool with Anton, but that this was the eve of her husband’s first major show in the United States. David may have been supremely confident, but he was also nervous, and he needed her. But she wasn’t there. She was in the pool, having sex with his bodyguard, Anton Jones,” Tony Zanetta said.
David was hurt, but he was still determined to put on a bravura performance that night in Cleveland. Watching from the back of the theater, Cyrinda and Leee were overcome with admiration and understood that he was destined to become a superstar.
“Then Cyrinda said, ‘Look at those pants he’s wearing! Look at those earrings. They are just like mine!’ ” Leee Black Childers remembered. “Suddenly, Cyrinda realized that the pants and the earrings were hers! She and David were the same size, and he had decided to wear her pants and her earrings. She thought it was hilarious.”
During the tour, Leee now and again found himself alone with David and was charmed. “The two of us would be together, and he would sit on the bed and almost be like a little kid. He would sit there, with his legs crossed, and giggle. Then he’d tell stories about his early years in the music business and I would tell stories about growing up in Kentucky. I remember he told me how George Underwood damaged his eye, and as he told me, he giggled and giggled,” Leee said.
At the end of the tour, on September 28, 1972, David played Carnegie Hall, to great acclaim, introducing Ziggy Stardust to the city that never sleeps. That night, backstage at Carnegie Hall, nineteen-year-old groupie Josette Caruso made a play for David. What happened next casts a light on David’s life during that time, both the highs and the lows, and the nature of David himself.
“After the show, David’s bodyguard approached me and invited me to a party at the Plaza. I was wearing a silver dress that reflected rather like a mirror. David took one look at me and said, ‘I can see myself in you,’ which was a brilliant double entendre,” Josette remembered.
Then, and during their subsequent night together, David’s behavior gave the lie to his open marriage with Angie.
“After he said that about seeing himself in me, he suddenly said, ‘Oh dear, my wife is coming towards you and it looks as if she is going to dump a plate of pastries over you!’ Sure enough, she was walking towards me with the plate and looked about to do just that, so I walked away.”
Then David’s bodyguard secretly handed her a card with the name of the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, Philadelphia, and a room number on it, the date of his appearance there at the end of November, and whispered to her, “David is expecting you there.”
A seasoned groupie whose conquests included Jimmy Page, with whom she toured when she was only sixteen years old, Josette was determined to sample David’s charms, and traveled to Philadelphia to see him, as arranged.
“When I arrived at the hotel suite, which included a living room, a piano, and two bedrooms, David was sitting on a couch, wearing a black shirt and black pants. I sat next to him. He poured me a glass of wine and started talking about Catcher in the Rye and he told me that he identified with the book’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield,” Josette remembered. “He was in a very playful mood and sang ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ to me. Then there was a knock on the door, and Ian Hunter and some other guys from Mott the Hoople turned up and we all chatted. Then they left, and David and I went into the bedroom together.
“In bed, he was a wonderful lover, massively endowed, but the night wasn’t just about the sex act. David was very romantic, touching me, kissing me, holding me, calling me ‘Josie,’ whereas everyone else called me Josette. He was a wonderful lover, but it wasn’t about size, but about his technique. He didn’t just fuck, he made love. He was romantic, charming, but at the same time he liked to talk dirty, to ask me how much I was enjoying something, and I told him I was loving it all, which I did,” Josette remembered.
“But there was nothing gay about him, nothing effeminate. I wouldn’t have thought he was bisexual. He was all man. He was aggressive, took charge, knew all the moves, wasn’t kinky, but really controlled me in bed. He came twice during the night. The first time, he was loud and moaning, but the second time he came in silence, and afterwards he said, ‘That was a bit like Charlie Chaplin,’ (meaning the silent movie star), and giggled.
“After he went to sleep, I just lay there, looking at him while he was sleeping. His skin was so white, as white as snow, and he had two moles on his neck, rather like vampire bites.”
Only two things marred Josette’s night with Bowie. The first was when, during the night, Suzi Fussey, then traveling with David as his personal assistant, crept into the room to get his boots and saw her in bed with him. In the morning, when Josette told him that Suzi had seen them in bed together, according to her, “David said, ‘Oh, shit! She’s going to tell Angie!’ I wouldn’t say their marriage was open at all.
“But earlier that night, I experienced the most bizarre thing that’s ever happened to me in all my years as a groupie. There was a knock at the door of the suite. The bodyguard answered it and then called David.
“David was away for a few minutes, during which I could hear him very distressed and saying things like, ‘Oh no, oh no! Why me? Why do they think that about me?’
“When he came back into the bedroom, I could see that he was very, very upset and that something had really happened which really horrified him. Then he told me that the person at the door had offered the bodyguard to bring him a dead, warm body for David to have sex with, as if he were into necrophilia. David was horrified.”
Josette’s night with David was not completely spoiled by what happened, and in the morning, they parted, never to meet again.
“But I was happy. I had been to bed with David Bowie,” Josette Caruso said.
By the time David, Angie, and the entourage had flown to L.A. and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, along with more than forty other people who all made up the MainMan entourage, Cyrinda Foxe had become an accepted part of David’s universe. One night, at the hotel, she and David and Angie had a threesome. “We all kissed and licked one another,” Cyrinda remembered. “It was more interesting and curious than exciting.”
However, when Angie heard Anton come into the suite, without any further preamble she announced, “Excuse me, lovies, that was just grand,” and promptly departed for a night of sex with Anton. Meanwhile, David and Cyrinda carried on having sex together as if nothing had happened.
Cyrinda was now the most important
woman around him, although he still availed himself of groupie after groupie. Bored beyond belief, on one occasion while having sex with a groupie, he sent for Cyrinda to entertain him.
“She was so stupid, all he wanted to do was fuck her, and he needed someone to talk to, and that was me. I’d be watching the TV and talking with David, and he’d be screwing the groupie. Very nonchalant,” Cyrinda said.
David’s affair with Cyrinda continued for two months. She was partly the inspiration for “The Jean Genie,” although the melody came to him when he was on the Greyhound: George Underwood was strumming a John Lee Hooker riff on his guitar, and David reworked it. Cyrinda also appeared in the video for the song, but in San Francisco, after Tony Defries demanded she dye her hair red to match David’s and she flatly refused, her time on tour was over, as was her time with David.
In her book, Dream On: Livin’ on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith, Cyrinda remembered their last night together: “I had on this long Lady Godiva wig which fell down to my knees and lots of pearls. I got into the bathtub and David was watching me. I said, ‘Oh, don’t touch. I want to pretend I’m floating down a river.’
“He had a robe on, and he dropped it and stood there and started to jerk off. I told him to try and come on the pearls, because I had read once that body moisture helps them retain their luster.
“It was so exciting. We were looking into each other’s eyes when he came. It’s cool watching a guy come. David Bowie shot all over me, all over the pearls and into the bathwater,” Cyrinda said.
Meanwhile, he was exploring sex with boys, as well, and, according to Tony Zanetta, “in Pittsburgh, he had a black boy, and later on, in Japan, he had an Asian boy. He also loved those black girls, and he definitely had one night with Nina Simone. And in New York there were some well-known Puerto Rican transsexuals and David had sex with some of them.”
On October 20, after appearing at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and winning rave reviews, David attended a party with Wolfman Jack and met Kim Fowley again. Observing that no one was talking to David, other than Mercury employee and Sunset Boulevard club owner Rodney Bingenheimer, Kim declared, “I see you are blinding the hoi polloi with your charisma.”
