Bowie

by Wendy Leigh

  That same year, David’s movie agent, Maggie Abbott, flew to Manhattan to talk to him about a film project she had found for him, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Her suggestion that he star in a movie was not the first he’d received. He had set his sights on Hollywood, but had nonetheless turned down Elizabeth Taylor’s offer for him to appear in her movie The Blue Bird.

  “She said, ‘Read this and make it with me. Be my leading man,’ ” David remembered. “I was so excited when she handed it to me and I go through it and it was absolutely awful.”

  “She was a nice woman and all, even if I didn’t get much of a chance to get to know her. She did tell me I reminded her of James Dean—that endeared me to her—but her script was so . . . boring,” David said to Cameron Crowe afterward.

  Fortunately, Elizabeth didn’t take offense at his refusal, as they had already begun what the French would call une amitié amoureuse, an amorous friendship.

  Photographer Terry O’Neill, who knew Elizabeth well, had originally made the introduction at her request, and a meeting between her and David was set up at the Beverly Hills home of director George Cukor.

  “Elizabeth had a reputation for being late, but it was Bowie who arrived three and a half hours after the agreed time. It was the height of his cocaine addiction. Elizabeth was so angry she almost left,” O’Neill remembered.

  But, by some miracle, she did not, and during David’s few weeks in Los Angeles, he and Elizabeth became instant friends, and each morning when she woke up, she invariably called David at his hotel, the Beverly Wilshire, just to chat about makeup, hair, Hollywood, her marriages, her illnesses, while he usually listened in silence, rather like a geisha.

  At one point, he went up to her house. “Everything there was fake, and when he opened the bathroom door, the handle came off in his hand,” Tony Zanetta remembered.

  Back at the hotel, David still managed to evade Ava Cherry and sample a selection of the crowds of groupies who invariably stalked him wherever he went. Groupie Lori Lightning lost her virginity to David and told the tale to Pamela des Barres, who reported it in her book I’m With The Band.

  “He escorts me into the bathroom and takes off his kimono, gets into the bathtub, and sits there staring at me with those different colored eyes. You have to understand—he’s so gorgeous, his skin is so white and flawless,” Lori said.

  Ever the gentleman, and aware that this was Lori’s first time, David invited her to wash his back. After that, he was gentle with her, but she felt guilty about her friend, Sable, who was in the next room crying because she wanted so badly to have sex with David. Feeling sorry for her, David asked Sable to join him and Lori in bed, and she did.

  He took his pleasure wherever, whenever, and with whoever it was offered, and at the after-show party held at the Plaza in honor of his Madison Square Garden show, he disappeared into a closet with Bette Midler and Mick Jagger for an inordinate amount of time, leaving the hapless Ava Cherry sobbing in the next room.

  “The three of them were in the closet and spent the whole party in there, doing coke,” Tony Zanetta said, adding, “And I’d be very surprised if he didn’t have Bette Midler then or at one time or another.”

  That many of David’s sexual adventures were fueled by drugs was patently obvious. Hardly sleeping, he was ingesting massive amounts of cocaine, the quality of which was far stronger in America than it had been in England. His energy was at an all-time high, with groupies, fans, and roadies all ready and willing to supply him with endless grams of coke. Taking the drug became so habitual for him that he didn’t even balk at snorting it in full view of Ava Cherry’s parents when they invited him to dinner.

  Jean Millington of Fanny, still in love with him, saw him in L.A. and remembered of that time, “When I was first around David, we were offered drugs all the time, but he always said no. But now he’d gotten heavily into cocaine. He was producing a demo for Iggy Pop, on which I was playing bass, and we were recording it in a small L.A. studio. I stayed up for two days, but David was maybe up for five whole days. I thought to myself, ‘I can’t do this. He’s not in his right mind.’ ” Their relationship ended, and Jean went on to write “Butter Boy,” ostensibly about David.

  His drug addiction had ended his relationship with Jean, which, given his admiration of her work and that of the band, which he dubbed “one of the finest rock bands of their time—they were extraordinary,” he may well have regretted.

  Years later, looking back on that era of his life, he said, “I was undergoing serious mental problems . . . a young man with too much time on his hands and too many grams of amphetamine or PCP or cocaine, and maybe all three, in his system. It’s a blur, topped off with chronic anxiety, bordering on paranoia. However, I made some good music.”

  In another interview with Paul Du Noyer, David confessed, “I have an addictive personality. I’m quite clear on that now.”

  On the subject of cocaine, in the same interview, he went on: “And it was easily obtainable and it kept me working, ’cause I didn’t use it for . . . I wasn’t really a recreational guy, I wasn’t really an out-on-the-town guy. I was much more, ‘Okay, let’s write ten different projects this week and make four or five sculptures.’

  “And I’d just stay up twenty-four hours a day until most of that was completed. I just liked doing stuff. I loved being involved in that creative moment. And I’d found a soul mate in this drug, which helped perpetuate that creative moment.”

  Asked by Du Noyer if he meant cocaine, David said, “Yes, cocaine. Well, speed as well, actually.”

  His old bandmate Keith Christmas, who played acoustic guitar on the Space Oddity album, remembered hanging out with him in Manhattan and seeing him “doing amyl nitrate all the time,” and that “David took me to the loo, whipped out a double-sided razor, and slashed into a huge chunk of coke.”

  That same summer, for a brief spell, twenty-year-old British rock star Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple was afforded entrance into David’s drug-infested, star-crossed universe, and, in the process, gained insight into the man himself. He and David first met at the Wilshire, where they were both staying, and they spent a week together shooting the breeze, mulling over the business and black music, all the while drinking and taking drugs. They became good friends and began to talk on the phone on a weekly basis.

  In October, when David was playing Radio City Music Hall in New York, he and Glenn met again and their friendship intensified.

  “David never came on to me, but I always used to question what was really going on between us. He and Angie had a very open marriage and were staying at the Pierre, and I was staying at the Plaza,” Glenn Hughes said. “Suddenly David suggested that I should go back to the Plaza with Angie. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to be there while Angie and I were having sex, or if he even cared. But Angie and I were getting close; she was very attractive and very intimidating and we went back to my hotel together.

  “One thing led to another, and next thing she’s on top of me, and I’m just taking it, feeling pretty sad and morose and almost in tears, because although David wanted what was happening to happen, I felt bad that I was cheating on him.”

  After his night with Angie, Glenn nonetheless spent time with David and did cocaine with him.

  “He could handle cocaine better than I could,” Glenn said. “He could think and go on and on about the Nazis and that. But he also had his eye on my girlfriend and then on my wife. I don’t know if anything happened, but it was built around cocaine.”

  Around the same time, David took to hanging out with Cherry Vanilla, who was performing in cabaret and was no longer with MainMan. Reassured regarding her loyalty to him, he spent hours with her in her Chelsea loft.

  “I loved him when he was on cocaine. He was really interesting. He would tell stories about magic and fantasy, and come out with conspiracy stories and crazy theories that Tony Defries was Hitler reincarnated and Lou Reed was the devil, and that together, they were out to get him,” Cherr
y Vanilla said. “We had sex a couple more times, but most of the time we stayed up all night talking. He brought Jean Millington over to my place once, to fuck, and also Claudia Lennear, but I didn’t mind.

  “Mick Jagger came over to my place, and one time he was in the living room listening to music while David and I had sex in the bedroom. I think at that time in his life, David needed a lot of business and financial advice, and I think a lot of his talks with Mick were to do with that,” Cherry said.

  The extent of David’s drug use was evident in the December 1974 television interview he did with Dick Cavett. For although his charm was on display, he was clearly higher than the highest kite. That impression was intensified when Alan Yentob’s landmark documentary, Cracked Actor, aired the following January on the BBC, featuring David, clearly drugged up, clearly on the edge.

  With him during a limousine ride captured on film was a pretty girl in a white gypsy dress, gold chains dangling around her neck, her hair in curls—none other than Coco, looking for all the world like a hippie chick, head bobbing along to the music, eyes shining, and—for that moment, at least—playing the part of classic rock star girlfriend. There is also a stray shot of Tony Defries in a yellow suit, all shaggy hair and paunch, clutching a purse.

  Most of all, of course, there is David, painfully thin, with knife-blade-sharp cheekbones and jaw, emaciated, strung out, and still sniffling from his most recent line of coke.

  THIRTEEN

  CRACKING ACTOR

  In a 1997 BBC Radio interview, David admitted that the documentary Cracked Actor “is very painful for me to watch.” He later went on, “My drug intake was absolutely phenomenal. I was addicted.”

  Although Cracked Actor exposed his addiction to the world, the documentary would also serve another purpose: It would win him the role of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Maggie Abbott, who also represented Peter O’Toole, Sean Connery, Peter Sellers, Liza Minnelli, and Mick Jagger, among others, had known David since 1973, and had gone to all his concerts.

  “I went to Oakley Street a few times; we’d sit around in the conversation pit for long evenings, and people came by. The child [known then as Zowie] always stayed up very late,” she remembered.

  One of her clients, Donald Cammell, owned the rights to The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the director, Nicolas Roeg, and producer, Si Litvinoff, were determined that Peter O’Toole play the role of Thomas Jerome Newton, the Man of the title. When Maggie informed them that Peter was committed to another movie, the name Mick Jagger was bandied about for a moment until Nic Roeg judged that he was too strong.

  “Nic said that ‘we want somebody who is rather weak or slender or pale. He has to look as if he has no bones,’ ” Maggie remembered him saying before she chipped in with the name David Bowie. Si Litvinoff immediately knew who she was talking about and said afterward, “I thought it was brilliant, as I was a fan of Bowie’s and thought it would be great to get the film score from him to help promote the film and I believed that his fan base was ideal for this film. I was so happy that I could not stop singing ‘Space Oddity.’ ”

  But neither Nic nor Donald knew who David Bowie was, so Maggie suggested she first talk to Angie. With great foresight, Maggie also convinced a friend to sneak the video of Cracked Actor (which hadn’t, at that point, been broadcast) out of the BBC so that she could screen it for Donald and Nic. The moment they saw it, Donald and Nic immediately recognized that they’d found their Thomas Jerome Newton, their man who fell to earth, and Maggie was enlisted to help make the deal.

  On good terms with Angie, Maggie went to see her. “Angie really wanted David to have a successful career and do movies. She’s been totally underrated and undervalued. I remember us sitting round thinking what movies we could get for him, and Angie said, ‘Spider-Man!’ ” Maggie said.

  At Angie’s behest, Maggie had a conversation with David, who was interested in making The Man Who Fell to Earth and pleased that his contract with Defries did not stipulate that MainMan receive any commission for any work he might do in movies.

  Next, Maggie arranged to fly to New York with Litvinoff and Roeg to meet David at the brownstone he was then renting on West Twentieth Street. There, as Si remembered, “The door was opened by Ava Cherry, a striking black girl with orange hair wearing a Clockwork Orange sweater, which I considered a good omen, as I had optioned the book. And David was very gracious and seemed enthusiastic about starring in the movie.”

  Soon after, David, preparing to make the break with Defries, hired attorney Michael Lippman to represent him. By now, David had come to terms with the fiasco that had been MainMan. Confiding to Michael Watts during a Melody Maker interview, he said, “I’ll never condone completely what went on. I don’t know whether I was absolutely manipulated but I believe all my business was manipulated. I believe that a lot of what were very good ideas were cheapened for the sake of getting things out economically rather than going the whole hog and doing things properly.

  “Stage shows were never what they were supposed to be because suddenly the money was not there to pay for what I wanted initially. Things would always be done shoestring and I could never understand why, because apparently we were very, very popular and . . . where’s the money?”

  Asked whether he would ever consider going back to Defries, David erupted, “Oh, Lord no! That’s absolutely . . . It couldn’t be further from my mind. I have literally no idea of what he does, where he is, and what kinds of things he does anymore. It was an astonishing chaotic period.”

  Now that David was represented by Lippman and not Defries, Maggie Abbott found her role as David’s agent for The Man Who Fell to Earth being eradicated. “Lippman started to put a barrier between us, and asked for more money,” Maggie, who had negotiated a $75,000 deal for David to star in the film, plus another $75,000 to write the score, said.

  Finally, despite the fact that she had put the entire movie deal together, Maggie received a cease-and-desist letter from Lippman cutting her out of the project, and making it clear that she was not allowed to set foot on the movie location. And although she finally did get paid a $7,500 commission, that was the end of her involvement with the movie.

  “I felt quite bitter and annoyed at being banned from the set of a movie I’d made happen for the star,” Maggie Abbott said, adding, “David knew how to let go of people he didn’t want. He let go of me because he didn’t need me anymore. Overall, I felt terribly insulted by David’s behavior. He didn’t acknowledge what I had done for him, how it changed his career and really launched him in movies.”

  Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, plans for the movie proceeded apace, and David invited Si for lunch at an elegant French restaurant in West Hollywood.

  “It was clear that he was knowledgeable about French cuisine, and I believed he felt comfortable with me,” Si said.

  While he was preparing for the movie, David stayed at Glenn Hughes’s mansion behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, though Glenn, who was touring with Deep Purple, wasn’t there at the time.

  “I was calling the house every day and my house guy, Phil, said there was all kinds of birds up there, black girls, white girls. They were coming and going, and I think soul singer Claudia Lennear and Slash’s mother, Ola Hudson, were some of them,” Glenn said.

  “When I got back, I felt so close to David as a friend. He was in my closet; he threw away all my shoes and told me, ‘You have got to change forever.’ He was a great influence on me. But it was still all about drugs for him.

  “He had hidden all the knives under the bed, telling me that the Manson family was around. He was paranoid. Super intelligent. But super paranoid. He was moody, as you are on drugs, and I never saw him sleep. He was in a coke storm. We would both be up three or four days at a time. We were both addicted to cocaine but didn’t realize how addicting it was.

  “Later on, he moved to a house and Coco was with him. It seemed to me that she was constantly tending to him, giving him milk, trying to get him to sleep
. I’m not sure if he would still be here if it wasn’t for her. She absolutely loved him,” Glenn said.

  Glenn was also around when David made the album Station to Station. “Even though he didn’t let anybody in there, I was allowed in a few times, and he was as high as a kite,” he said.

  Glenn and David were to meet again the following year, when David played Wembley Stadium. “I went down in my Rolls-Royce, which David hated. He was like, ‘What are you doing in this machine? You should be driving a caravan!’ He was being funny. He would joke and people would laugh with him and it was all becoming old for me.

  “There was nothing emotional or sexual between us. He drew me and signed it ‘Ol Big Head.’ He would call me that, but I don’t know why. It sent me into a bit of a state because I had been so nice to the guy,” Glenn said.

  “When we last met, I took him to the Elbow Room, a nightclub, and we brought two birds back to the hotel, and we might have been drunk, but we weren’t on drugs. I thought we would talk, but he was more interested in getting these two birds in the sack. So it all ended between us, and I felt used.”

  Now that David was living in L.A., Winona Williams was back in his life again. After spending a great deal of time with David in Manhattan, she had decided to commit to Shep Gordon, after all, and had moved out to Los Angeles to live with him in Bel-Air. Despite that, David wasn’t prepared to let her go.

  “He would get Coco to call me and tell me that if I didn’t come to see him immediately, he was coming up to the house,” Winona remembered.

  “He asked me to go house hunting with him, and although I was trying to get away from him, he ended up renting a house on Stone Canyon Drive in Bel-Air, right down the road from where I was living. That’s when things began between us. I realized then that he was brilliant, a very sensitive man with a tortured soul. I went up to UCLA with him where he was learning about Kirlian photography,” Winona said, adding, “He has a very curious mind and he was exploring all things mystical and occult as well as scientific breakthroughs in the uncharted functions of the brain.”