Bowie (16 page)

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.

O
ne 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 fashion 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.”

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.

A
round 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.

O
n 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.

O
n 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

I
n 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.”