Bowie (19 page)

After years of knowing David, Stevens observed, “David is nonreminiscent. Doesn’t subscribe to nostalgia, mulling over the past, yakking with the lads about that time in Chicago and those hot honeys. But if he remembers you and your interests, he will come prepared with something to chat about. The last time we met, he told me of a film he read about that Kodak was creating in their labs, before they did a virtual belly-up. It could show the outline of an object after it had been removed.”

David had flown Fanny band member twenty-one-year-old Jean Millington to France to spend a few days with him at the château. “I was there with him for two or three days,” Jean remembered. “Then Angie flew in. She came swooping into the bedroom. She was very polite and offered me orange juice, but it was clear that was it. David seemed very matter-of-fact about Angie finding us there together. There was no guilt. No shame. The awkwardness was on my part. He
asked me very politely to go back to London. I did, and when he came back to England, we stayed together in various London hotels.”

A
fter the whirlwind of life between the start of his first major U.S. tour in September 1972 and the Hammersmith Odeon show, David settled down again to life in England.

“He had finally achieved his success, but now that he had retired, there was a sigh of relief. For the first time ever, he could live life in London as the superstar he had always wanted to be,” Tony Zanetta said.

However, his superstardom came at a price, and he and Angie moved out of Haddon Hall, where by now crazed fans and groupies besieged him night and day, so that they were forced to transform the house into a Beckenham Fort Knox. Nonetheless, a naked girl once succeeded in breaking in and made it as far as the dining room before she was apprehended. The phone rang morning, noon, and night, and bags of fan mail flooded in every day.

Drained by life at Haddon Hall, in October 1973, the same month
Pin Ups
was released and shot straight to number one, David and Angie rented a four-bedroom, three-bathroom, two-reception-room, terraced house at 89 Oakley Street, off the King’s Road, where there was very little space outside for fans to loiter or attempt to storm the house.

Once David and Angie were ensconced in the house, they set about creating a sexual cocoon for themselves, a London hybrid of Graceland and the Playboy Mansion, and the perfect environment in which to throw parties, even orgies. Consequently, as soon as she and David moved into the Oakley Street house, Angie presided over her own personal Sodom and Gomorrah, the focal point of which was ‘the Pit,’ a four-foot-deep fur-covered bed in the sitting room, where, in front of a series of audiences, who generally ended up participating themselves, all permutations of sexuality were explored.

Freddie Burretti and his girlfriend Daniella moved into the basement, and later, when Corinne “Coco” Schwab became David’s personal assistant, she commandeered the top floor as her domain. Zowie, of course, also lived at the house, staying up to all hours, according to one of the Oakley Street guests. By now, David and Angie’s marriage had degenerated into verbal battles, and Zowie would cower in the corner and burst into tears when they had one of their increasingly frequent screaming matches.

On other nights, both Angie and David were distracted by the sexual circus at which they were ringmistress and ringmaster, respectively. One of the biggest stars of Oakley Street excesses, literally and figuratively, was London gangster John Bindon, who had appeared in
Performance
with Mick Jagger and who had holidayed in Mustique, where he had taken the fancy of Britain’s Princess Margaret. Above all, Bindon was known for his overriding air of menace and his major asset, a gargantuan endowment that he used to display with five beer mugs hanging from it to emphasize both its length and its girth.

Bindon’s girlfriend for many years, model and socialite Vicki Hodge, said, “Angie and David used to have the most amazing orgies at Oakley Street. Everybody fucked everybody in the Pit. Mick Jagger used to come there and be involved with sexual things. Everybody was so sexually liberated. John said that David was totally nice and sweet, and very sexually aware. He told me that David watched while he had sex with Angie.”

John Bindon’s biographer Wensley Clarkson confirmed Vicki’s story, writing that “Bindon was allowed by David Bowie to make love to his wife while Mick Jagger was nearby.”

Clarkson also recalled that Bindon had told him that Angie arranged for him to have sex with five of her female friends on one afternoon. “He became like the hired stud,” a source confided to Clarkson.

Soon after, Bindon was promoted to bodyguard for the end of the Ziggy Stardust tour in America. But although Bindon was favored and
trusted by David, his sojourn as bodyguard on the tour didn’t always run smoothly. When Bob Dylan arrived at the show, Bindon, then working security, assumed Dylan was a hobo and mistakenly tried to eject him from David’s show.

Other than his brief stint as David’s bodyguard, John was primarily around for fun and sexual pleasure. “John enjoyed all the perks of being a huge Cockney stud and a sexual boy toy,” Vicki Hodge said, adding, “Angie and David’s marriage was totally free and open, and I think that because they were doing so many drugs, they could do anything they wanted.”

As far back as his Lower Third days, David had toyed with drugs, and in 1976, he confided to Cameron Crowe in a
Rolling Stone
interview, “I never got into acid either. I did it three or four times and it was colorful, but my own imagination was already richer. I never got into grass at all. Hash for a time, but never grass.

“I guess drugs have been a part of my life for the past ten years, but never anything very heavy. . . . I’ve had short flirtations with smack and things, but it was only for the mystery and the enigma. I like fast drugs.”

He certainly did, and cocaine is clearly the fastest drug of them all, and it had begun to be a part of his life. But it was only to dominate his life utterly and completely the following year.

 ELEVEN 

YOUNG AMERICAN

O
n April 11, 1974, David disembarked from the
SS France
in Manhattan and then checked in to the Sherry-Netherland, which, courtesy of MainMan, he would make his New York base for the entire year, in between stops on the U.S. Diamond Dogs tour, a glittering theatrical extravaganza that was performed on a dizzyingly dramatic re-creation of a city, David’s creation “Hunger City.”

This, the next stage in David’s conquest of America, was a vast enterprise, with the set weighing six tons and composed of more than twenty thousand moving parts. The U.S. Diamond Dogs tour lasted from mid-June to September, when it was simplified and renamed the Soul tour, continuing till December 1, 1974.

Meanwhile, David tasted every aspect of stardom, American-style. Dana Gillespie, whom Tony Defries signed to MainMan as well, recalled, “Tony fired David up to conquer America, and I used to be flown to America first class to join Angie and David at the Sherry-Netherland for the weekend, at MainMan’s expense. David had a huge grand piano in the suite, which he played at the wrong hours, and everybody did so much coke that you fell asleep wherever you could.

“David would be strutting around on the guitar and Mick Jagger and I would be playing duets, and then he and David would be mincing about.

“Angie and David were like my family, and MainMan was massive and over-the-top and paying for us to fly wherever we wanted on first-class tickets, and I ended up staying at the Sherry-Netherland with Angie and David for six months,” Dana said.

An American fashion model and singer who graced the cover of
Playboy
in 1974, Bebe Buell also hung out with Angie, David, and Mick Jagger at the Sherry-Netherland. “Mick was worried because David was doing so much cocaine that he would hallucinate,” Bebe remembered. “One time we were in David’s suite in the Sherry-Netherland hotel and he asked us if we could see the angels flying outside the window. He made us go and look. ‘Don’t you see them?’ he said. ‘They’re flying around.’ ”

According to Bebe, despite David’s burgeoning drug addiction, Mick still retained respect for him, “He didn’t like to mock David, because he still liked to have fun with him,” she said. “They used to love to pick up beautiful black girls and take them back to the hotel and have mad sex with them. . . . Mick and Bowie were mates. They would act very androgynous with each other.”

While David was living a hedonistic life in Manhattan, all the time assuming that Tony Defries was footing the bills, back in London, Ken Pitt was dismayed, and later told George Tremlett, “David’s made a great mistake. He’s very naïve . . . and he’s also trusting, innocent, and easily led. This man Defries is a shyster. He has no right to pretend to be a lawyer. . . . It’s all going to end in tears.”

For now, though, Defries and David were riding high. Ironically, by design, it was Defries who was riding highest of the two of them. Apart from having a penthouse on the Upper East Side, a duplex on East Fifty-eighth Street, a loft on the West Side, and an apartment at the Sherry-Netherland, he also rented a twenty-room fully staffed Greenwich, Connecticut, estate; a chauffeur-driven customized
brown Cadillac with a custom cream leather interior, which had been perforated so that he wouldn’t get overheated during the summer; and a fourteen-room Park Avenue office, where his staff of twenty-six worked.

In short, Tony Defries was acting as if he, not David, were the star. Moreover, every single MainMan bill was charged to the account of David Bowie, only David didn’t realize it at the time.

Set on conquering America with his
Diamond Dogs
album and tour, David had also embarked on a new relationship, with Ava Cherry, a blond black singer whom, on David’s suggestion, Tony had signed to MainMan. For a time, Ava, David, and Angie existed in a netherworld of ménage à trois and faux friendship. Then Angie started to crack under the pressure of sharing David with Ava on a permanent basis.

Down the line, Ava, too, would suffer virulent jealousy over David’s infidelity to her. “He was fascinated by black people. Black girls, any girls he would sleep with when I was with him were black. . . . I couldn’t stop him. I used to cry but he would always say ‘You can’t fence me in.’ I was very faithful, and he wanted me to be. It was the old double standard: He didn’t have to be, but I had to be. He was a male chauvinist—but I liked it,” Ava said.

“Ava was a sweet girl,” Tony Zanetta recalled, “but if David really fancied someone, he would send Ava back to her own room. She would go, because she was very young and she adored him.”

Back in England, David and Angie’s ménage à trois with Ava suddenly proved to be unworkable because of Angie’s jealousy, so he arranged for Ava to live in an apartment just a few yards away from Oakley Street, and for her to have singing and dancing lessons, a new wardrobe of clothes, and a weekly allowance, all funded by MainMan, or rather—although he still didn’t know it—himself.

Together, he and Ava saw Frank Sinatra perform in Las Vegas, and afterward, they waited backstage to see him, not just as fans, but because it had been bruited about that David was in the running to play Sinatra in a biopic.

David had always been fascinated by Sinatra, and in the early days of his career had written English lyrics for Claude François’s song “Comme d’habitude,” but was rejected, and Paul Anka went on to write the English lyrics for the song that became “My Way.” But if David thought that Sinatra was interested in having him play him in a movie of his life, he was due for a disappointment. Sinatra refused to see him, sending word that “no English fag” was going to play him in a movie.

Meanwhile, disenchanted with Cherry Vanilla as his PR and office manager during the mixing of the
Diamond Dogs
album, David demanded that she be replaced. Enter Corinne Schwab, henceforth known as “Coco.”

Today, Coco is as much a woman of mystery as David is a man of mystery, but in those early years, she was a shy, wide-eyed, fresh-faced ingénue, who was the daughter of Eric Schwab, a distinguished French war photographer, and his wife, whom he first met when she was working for French Allied Forces radio. Consequently, Coco’s family background, as well as the fact that she’d grown up partly in Haiti, India, and Mexico because of her father’s profession, lent an air of intellectual sophistication to her that must have appealed to David.