Bowie (17 page)

“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.

A
t 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.

B
y 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.”

David smiled and said, “Tomorrow they will all claim that they hung out with me all night.” Then, somewhat wistfully, he added, “I’d
really like to meet whoever is clever enough to get into this fucking party.”

For a while, he stood on the sidelines while Kim took to the floor and danced with an extremely sexy girl. Clearly attracted to her, David “embraces me with his arm around me as if we were two gay men,” Kim said.

After Kim made it clear that he wasn’t interested in pursuing anything with the girl, David invited her to go into the bathroom with him. The implication that he wanted to have sex with her then and there was clear, but she didn’t hesitate and walked across the lobby with him.

“They walked across the lobby, and two drag queens saw David take a real woman into the bathroom,” Kim remembered. “He immediately locked the door behind him and the girl, but the drag queens took their high heels off and started banging on the bathroom door with them, shouting, ‘We can suck cock better than she can!’ The door remained closed. Then the drag queens started again, ‘Open the door, we will take over, we can do a better job than she can,’ they screamed.”

But David ignored them and stayed in the bathroom with the girl for quite a while, Kim Fowley said.

D
avid’s seventeen-day tour of America had made him a star, at least to the press, if not in terms of box office receipts. He was on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. Bowie mania had begun in America in earnest, and his life would never be the same again.

David was flexing his star power now, exploring every sexual option on offer to him. However, drugs were not yet a part of his life. As he later put it, “Ziggy Stardust was actually drug-free, apart from the occasional pill: amphetamines, speed.

“When we first started doing Ziggy we were really excited and drugs weren’t necessary. Then I went to America, got introduced to real drugs, and that’s when it all went pear-shaped,” he said.

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