Bowie (13 page)

“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

W
ith 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 machinations, 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.

As Angie told me during an interview for my book
Speaking Frankly
, part of which took place at the Oakley Street house that she then still shared with David, “I spend my happiest and best hours with my rorting team.
Rorting
means screwing chicks. There’s four or five guys and me and all we do is pick up chicks and see who can poke them first.

“We’ve been doing this for many years: You have to pick a chick up and she has to agree to be fucked with no one leaving the room—not in private. She has to understand that from the off—it’s a communal effort—like living theatre. She doesn’t have to be fucked by more than the one person she fancies. What she can’t do is lay down the conditions of how, when, or where. And everybody watches.”

Despite all the steamy sexual goings-on at Haddon Hall, David, Mick, and bassist/producer Tony Visconti still managed to find time to rehearse David’s
The Man Who Sold the World
, a hard rock and heavy metal album, there.

In the meantime, the Hype made its debut at the Roundhouse, the band dressed in comic-strip superhero silver suits, and David in silver lamé and a bluish-silver cloak, his hair dyed silver and blue—all a British prefiguring of the Village People. The audience that night (with the exception of Marc Bolan, who was practically the only person to applaud) was not prepared for David’s glam/glitter rock. Undeterred, a year later, thanks to David’s powers of persuasion, David and his band would all wear makeup onstage.

Telling Ronno and the other band members that they had looked a little green onstage and that maybe makeup would make them look more natural, David sealed the deal when, after the show, girls flocked to the band, obviously attracted to them by their sparkly makeup and androgynous images.

The Man Who Sold the World
was recorded at Trident and Advision Studios at the end of April, with Woody Woodmansey replacing John Cambridge, and Mick Ronson’s iconic guitar sound perhaps marking the birth of heavy metal. However, by now Tony Defries was calling the shots. Taking David aside, he made it clear to him that it was David Bowie he was representing, and that the band, the Hype, was irrelevant. The Hype was disbanded at the start of 1971, to be replaced by Ziggy Stardust’s Spiders from Mars (bass player Trevor Bolder, Woody Woodmansey on drums, and Mick Ronson on guitar) in July of the same year.

The cover of the album of
The Man Who Sold the World
shockingly—for the times—featured David with long, flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair, reclining on a chaise longue in Haddon Hall, wearing a dress designed by London’s Michael Fish. “I’m certainly not embarrassed by it or fed up with it or ashamed of it, because it [wearing a dress] was very much me,” David asserted. Then, turning his thoughts to the intricacies of fashion design, he said, “The dresses were made for me. They didn’t have big boobs or anything like that. They were men’s dresses. Sort of a medieval type of thing. I thought they were great.”

When the unsuspecting American executives at Mercury Records first set eyes on the cover, they were outraged, and immediately removed the cover picture from the sleeve of the U.S. edition of the album. Hearing the news, David erupted in anger, screaming all over Haddon Hall that the executives were philistines and fascists, to no avail.

So that while the picture of him in a dress remained on the cover of the UK album, Mercury insisted that David commission a new photograph for the American album cover. Consequently, he asked Mike Weller, an artist friend who had designed posters for the Arts Lab, to come up with an alternative cover photograph. In an eerie twist of fate, Mike’s cover design featured a sketch of a cowboy standing in front of the Cane Hill asylum, in Coulsdon, Surrey—the very same asylum where David’s half brother, Terry, was then locked away.

Strangely enough, Mike Weller’s cover concept was born out of his visit to a friend who was in Cane Hill, and he knew nothing about David’s brother being there, either. But though David might have been shocked by the coincidence, he saw that the cover reflected the somewhat dark lyrics of the album and, in particular, of the song “The Width of a Circle,” and so approved the use of the Cane Hill sketch on the cover.

I
n January of 1971, Tony Defries brought publicist Dai Davies on board, and one of his first jobs was to travel with David to Manchester, where David was scheduled to mime “Holy Holy,” a glam rock/hard rock song he’d written, on Granada TV.

“During the drive, David made it clear that he had studied what makes people stars, and that he knew all about the Hollywood star machine of the interwar years. Most people involved in the rock industry tended not to want to know all about that,” Dai said. “He told me he had read that if two people walk up to a door, one of them leans forward and opens the door for the other one, but stars stall for a second or two and then the other person will open the door for them.

“He explained that if you want to be perceived as a star, you start off with little bits of behavior like that, not opening the door yourself, waiting for someone else to do that. After reading that, I doubt that David ever opened the door for himself again.”

That spring, David would have the opportunity to test out his theories regarding stardom, when he made his first trip to America. At the time,
The Man Who Sold the World
, which in retrospect marks the birth of glam rock, didn’t afford David the big success in Britain for which he’d been working for so long. However, when the record was released in America, Mercury deemed it important enough to fund a promotional radio tour of the country for David, thus facilitating his
first visit to the United States and granting him the opportunity to conquer the land of his dreams at last.

The trip began with four days in Manhattan, where David stayed at the Holiday Inn, visited Times Square record shops searching for records that were unavailable in England, and afterward explored the Museum of Modern Art. Next, there were visits to a folk club, a short flight to Detroit, then to Chicago. Then a flight back to Detroit again, then another flight to Michigan—in those early days, David hadn’t yet developed his fear of flying.

That fear has often been disparaged by a segment of the media who suspected that David’s fear of flying might have been a Tony Defries production, created specifically because Elvis, too, had a fear of flying, and Tony felt that if David claimed to have the identical fear, that would enhance his mythology.

However, Woody Woodmansey, his Ziggy Stardust drummer, remembered, “We went on holiday to Cyprus and the plane got hit by lightning. He went white and fainted.”