Bowie (14 page)

Much later on, pianist Sean Mayes, who played on the Isolar tour, witnessed David’s reaction to flying and reported it in his book,
We Can Be Heroes: Life on Tour with David Bowie
. His description of David’s fear of flying paints it as uncontrived and sincere.

“On the plane I sat next to David and Coco, who was clutching a huge, fluffy grey elephant. We chatted a bit and the plane didn’t move. Then they announced a delay—they were running off fuel while they changed one of the engines,” Sean said.

“ ‘Oh God,’ David muttered, ‘that means the pilot’s drunk and they’re feeding him black coffee.’ As we waited, he and Coco got more and more nervous. I think David was on the point of leaving the plane when they told us they were ready—‘fasten seatbelts and extinguish cigarettes.’

“David was rigid, his hand whitely gripping the arms of his seat. I wanted to hold him tight for comfort, but I just put my hand on his arm and felt nearly as tense as he did as the plane threw itself into the clouds.”

In the middle of February 1971, still in the throes of his radio tour of America, David flew to Houston, and from there to San Francisco, where he was met at the airport by
Rolling Stone
reporter John Mendelsohn, who had flown there to interview him.

Afterward, Mendelsohn remembered, “The vision that got off the plane bore little resemblance to the one on the album covers. This one had long flowing hair, was wearing a dress and carrying a purse. At the baggage claim, he batted his eyelashes, and I reflexively offered to carry his heavy, wheel-less trunk for him.”

David had quickly realized that his Little Lord Fauntleroy charm and his pristine English manners would smooth the path for him in America, and he didn’t hesitate to use them to his advantage. According to John, when David was introduced to a certain groupie, “he asked with a gleam in his eye (the blue one, as I recall, but very possibly the brown), if she fancied a guitar lesson. I found that wonderfully debonair.”

And so, it would transpire, would countless other groupies, male and female, all over America. One of them, Queenie, later said of him, “David Bowie wears tons of makeup. He’s got a whole suitcase full of makeup. He put some on in front of me and he even painted my toenails blue. David is the sexiest one around. Like you’ll walk into a room and he’ll stare right into your eyes. And he’ll go, ‘Hello,’ and you’re at his mercy. I can’t help it. That’s just the way he is.”

By the time David landed in L.A., he was already infused by excitement regarding a character he was in the throes of creating, and brought with him some Holiday Inn stationery, on which he had begun to scribble some lyrics about a rock star named Ziggy Stardust. When Ziggy was finally unleashed on the world, David, mindful as always of the publicity value creating an aura of mystery, didn’t reveal the character’s genesis—it was only in 2007 that he finally did.

Claiming that he had based Ziggy on C-list rock star Vince Taylor, a failed musician who once came out onstage and swore that he was Jesus Christ, David said, “I met him a few times in the midsixties, and
I went to a few parties with him. He was out of his gourd. Totally flipped. The guy was not playing with a full deck at all.”

David’s impromptu account of his inspiration for Ziggy would ultimately be challenged, with biographer Peter Gillman claiming that Ziggy was either a composite of the U.S. performer the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Iggy Pop, or, more intriguingly, that David had actually based Ziggy on himself.

“Look at how the lyrics describe him. ‘Loaded,’ ‘Well hung,’ ‘God given ass.’ He was talking about himself,” Gillman said.

Gillman’s analysis may well be the correct one. However, David did let slip that during the midsixties he had seen Vince Taylor open a map on the pavement of a street, and kneel down and examine the map with a magnifying glass so as to point out the sites where UFOs were going to land. Given that David was fascinated by UFOs at that stage in his life, and that the street that he named was close to the Roebuck pub in London’s Tottenham Court Road, where he and the Lower Third regularly rehearsed, it is highly likely that he did meet him and that Vince made up a major element of the kaleidoscope that was Ziggy Stardust.

S
quired around town by eccentric DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, who also worked for Mercury, David spent two days and two nights in L.A. making the rounds of radio interviews, clubs, and parties. At a party in honor of Andy Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, David, sporting a Michael Fish dress, held court. Record producer Kim Fowley, whose “Alley Oop” (which he produced while still in high school) was one of David’s self-confessed favorite musical influences, observed his impact on the room.

“That night, David looked like Lauren Bacall, but with Noel Coward zest. Rudolph Valentino meets Ronald Coleman. He had humor, he had charm, and all night channeled Lionel Bart and Anthony Newley,”
Kim Fowley remembered. “And he was one of the best interrogators I’ve ever met: he got you to talk about yourself so that you got to say, ‘I’m doing this,’ ‘I’m doing that,’ and then he could use it afterwards.”

In the course of the conversation, David confided to Kim that he was interested in Brian Eno of Roxy Music, and in the premise of Bryan Ferry. Roxy Music, the band formed in 1971 by lead singer and main songwriter Bryan Ferry, was made up of bassist Graham Simpson, guitarist Phil Manzanera, saxophonist Andy Mackay, drummer Paul Thomson and, of course, Eno, who played the synthesizer for the band.

That David was interested in Bryan Ferry was hardly surprising, as, like him, Ferry was one of the few British musicians in the rock scene who exuded the style and elegance of the past. A working-class boy from Newcastle, in the industrial north of England, Ferry was handsome, debonair, and, for a time, appeared to rival David in terms of class, style, and sophistication.

Brian Eno, however, would excite David’s interest even more. A composer, producer, singer, and visual artist, Eno was at the forefront of ambient music—a new wave of music that emphasized tone and atmosphere over rhythm and structure. With his serious background in art (having studied at art colleges in England), and his anarchic, innovative approach to music, Eno was well matched to David, and David instinctively knew it.

F
lying back from L.A. to New York in March, David learned that the Velvet Underground were doing a gig at Manhattan’s Electric Circus. He decided to go, and as only a hundred seats had been sold, he managed to get one in the front row, where he sang along to all the songs, hoping to impress Lou Reed with his knowledge of the lyrics.

Afterward, given that the Velvet Underground were not famous enough to command security, David was easily able to sneak backstage
and knock on their dressing-room door, asking to speak to Lou. Within moments, Lou had slipped out, and he and David were sitting on a bench in the club, chatting. Enthralled, David informed Lou that he was his only fan in London and that he had owned a copy of the Velvet Underground record before it was even released in America. Then he plied Lou with questions about his lyrics and the rationale behind his musical choices. They chatted for more than fifteen minutes, and afterward, as David put it years later, “you float off into the night, a fan whose dream came true.”

Then, the next morning, a new friend in the music business informed David that Lou hadn’t been with the band for a while and that his replacement, Doug Yule, looked exactly like him. In David’s own words, he was “gutted.”

H
ome at Haddon Hall again, David began working obsessively on a new album, his fourth,
Hunky Dory
, which he would start recording in April at Trident, and which included “Changes,” “Oh You Pretty Things,” and “Life on Mars?” three of his most iconic compositions. With Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder, who replaced Tony Visconti on bass,
Hunky Dory
marked the first album featuring the group of musicians that would become Ziggy Stardust’s Spiders from Mars.

While working on the album, David was overcome with the certainty that now, at last, he had sown the seeds of his superstardom, and although
Hunky Dory
wouldn’t be released for another eight months, he already had intimations of the artistic triumph that lay ahead of him. George Underwood, his old school friend, was in the studio when David recorded “Life on Mars?” and observed afterward that when David had finished recording the song, he burst out crying.

F
or once, however, his career wasn’t his entire focus: On May 30, 1971, his son was born at Bromley Hospital, weighing just eight pounds, eight ounces. David had always longed for a boy, and when he first set eyes on the baby, he was overwhelmed. “It was the first and only time I saw David cry,” Angie remembered.

The baby was christened Duncan Zowie (after the Greek word for “life”) Haywood Jones. And, as Angie later recalled, his birth marked the happiest day of her life, and of David’s. However, just two weeks later, she was forced to admit that she was having trouble relating to her newborn son. “Poor little thing, he cried all the time. I had difficulty bonding. You feel your freedom has been taken away from you, totally and utterly,” she said. Instead of working through her feelings, she chose to run away and, probably suffering from postpartum depression, a condition not fully understood in those days, she packed her bags and departed for a vacation in Italy with Dana Gillespie.

“David would call every day, and in the end persuaded her to come back early,” Dana said, adding, “Which was unusual because he wasn’t normally prone to emotion.”

Dana’s supposition that David was missing Angie and longed for her to be by his side, couldn’t have been more wrong. Now that he was a father, he had suddenly unearthed the Victorian in himself, a deep vein of conventionality, and he was absolutely livid that Angie had abandoned his son, and, by extension, him. Their marriage would never be the same again, and, in retrospect, Angie understood that while she had gained a son, she had also lost her husband.

H
owever, once Angie returned from Italy, neither she nor David allowed the birth of Zowie or their new roles as parents to inhibit their propensity toward sexual adventuring. When David wasn’t playing a gig or working on Ziggy, he and Angie launched themselves on
the Sombrero Club, a gay dance club in a basement in the Kensington area of London, and conquered as many boys and girls as possible, bringing some of them home to Haddon Hall for more fun and sex.

In particular, David and Angie were both captivated by part-time rent boy turned fashion designer Freddie Burretti, and by his coterie of fellow rent boys, call girls, and hip, cool people. One night, David became enthralled by a young Spanish boy and brought him home to Haddon Hall, where he and Angie cavorted together with the boy. But the night, and the boy, belonged more to David than to Angie, and in the morning she woke up disillusioned.

Meanwhile, Dana was on hand to take part in some of David and Angie’s adventures and to record many of the proceedings on video. “I’ve got a short freeze-frame film sequence of things we did together in every aspect, but maybe they are not the right things to talk about,” she said.

Yet as discreet about the contents of the films as Dana still is, at the same time, she still revealed that once David came home brandishing a leather mask he’d bought from a sex shop, and that she took a photograph of him wearing it, which was subsequently published in Tony Zanetta’s biography of David,
Stardust.

“He’s naked, and I know it is him,” she said, “His body is strangely hippy. For someone with such a thin top half, he had big hips.”

Yet for all the sexual activity swirling around him, when he was working, David was capable of concentrating to the exclusion of all else.

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.”