Bowie (15 page)

 EIGHT 

ZIGGY

I
n September 1971, the same month in which David started recording
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
with Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder, he flew to New York (with Angie, Tony, and Mick in tow) to sign with his new record company, RCA—the record label to which Elvis was also signed. When he and Angie checked into their suite at the Plaza, they were greeted with the glitter and glory of RCA: The suite was filled with gifts—the entire Elvis catalogue, the whole RCA album catalogue for that year, and countless “Welcome to New York” gifts.

The writing was on the wall. RCA saw David as a star in the making and were treating him accordingly. Their thinking was, of course, heavily influenced by Tony Defries who, taking a leaf out of Colonel Parker’s book, had been marketing David as a star long before he actually was one, providing him with bodyguards, blanketing the city with posters featuring him, and generally acting as if David’s stardom was a fait accompli. Cherry Vanilla, Leee Black Childers, Jayne County, and Tony Zanetta—the Warhol people—had also contributed to convincing RCA ahead of time that David was already a star, when he wasn’t.

“Tony Defries used to bring us up to RCA and we acted crazy, making demands for David, insisting that they treat him like a star. In a way, Tony used us to throw stardust in RCA’S eyes. That was part of his brilliance,” Cherry Vanilla said.

During their stay in Manhattan, David and Angie made the pilgrimage to Andy Warhol’s Factory, expecting that Warhol would treat David as a peer, a fellow artist. But David was completely unprepared for Warhol’s way of interacting with fans, friends, and foes alike, which entailed a tongue-in-cheek, piss-taking approach. For example, when asked by this author to name his ideal woman in bed, he cracked, “Snow White.” And in the same vein, Andy didn’t take the earnest David seriously, not for a moment.

That day at the Factory, David was wearing size-seven-and-a-half bright yellow patent leather shoes, a gift from Marc Bolan, and Warhol—dressed in jodhpurs and high-laced boots and brandishing a riding crop—began to photograph David with his Polaroid camera. After interminable minutes, during which Warhol obsessively snapped away at David’s shoes, David, close to his breaking point, cut in and told Warhol that he’d written a song about him, and proceeded to play it for him.

Warhol made no bones about the fact that he hated the track, and David was deeply hurt by his reaction. His way of demonstrating his feelings to Warhol was subtle. All of a sudden, he launched into a mime in which he pantomimed disemboweling himself, as a dig at Warhol, whose cavalier treatment of him had been tantamount to gutting him, at least in David’s view.

However, despite their lackluster first meeting, Andy Warhol would pay dividends to David, if only because some of the people clustered around him eventually transferred their allegiance to David.

A
fter signing his RCA contract, David joined Tony Defries, Tony Zanetta, Angie, music writer Lisa Robinson, and her husband for a
celebratory dinner at the Ginger Man, across from Lincoln Center, where the
real
Lou Reed joined them. During dinner, while Lou talked and David listened, the basis of their friendship was formed and David did all he could to convince Reed, who was then retired, to relaunch his career—and succeeded. No minor feat, as Lou was a god among musicians, and in coaxing him out of retirement, David did a huge service to musicians and music fans.

On that same fateful night, after dinner, Lou accompanied David, Angie, Defries, and Zanetta to Max’s Kansas City, the nightclub favored by both the Warhol and the music crowd, and Iggy Pop joined them there.

“David wasn’t well known in America, but that night he and Lou Reed and Iggy Pop bonded,” said Yvonne Sewall, who was married to the owner of Max’s, Mickey Ruskin.

“There was a certain spikiness between Lou and Iggy, and they obviously didn’t get on very well,” David remembered.

While Iggy regaled everyone with stories about growing up in a trailer park and his forays into heroin and crystal meth, David’s bond with Iggy was forged. Years later, David said, “Iggy’s a lot more exuberant than I am. I tend to be quieter, more reflective. He’s always a little bit on the dangerous line. I’m not particularly; I’m much more of an observer. He’s more of a participant in things.”

Iggy countered with, “We’re so opposite. He’s slick and I am what I am.”

Most of the time, their friendship would be part Pygmalion, with David playing Professor Higgins to Iggy’s Eliza Doolittle: musical mentor and cheerleader, but also enabler. When Iggy was in a psychiatric hospital in 1975, trying to kick his drug habit, David, with Dennis Hopper, came to visit him bearing gifts.

“We trooped into the hospital with a load of drugs for him,” David admitted, long afterward. “We were out of our minds, all of us. He wasn’t well: That’s all we knew. We thought we should bring him some drugs, because he probably hadn’t had any for days!”

Years later, however, in Berlin, David would attempt to redeem himself by doing his utmost to save Iggy from his drug addiction, and together they would battle to kick their destructive drug habits.

T
oday, Tony Zanetta isn’t completely sure whether what happened next happened after that first night at Max’s Kansas City, or on the following night. Other than that, he is certain of all the details of what transpired. “Angie was away in Connecticut, visiting a girlfriend, and when David and I left Max’s, he just gave me this look. So we went to my apartment on Fifteenth and Sixth, and we just talked and talked,” Tony remembered. “It was a very exciting time for David. He had just signed a record deal and was looking forward to the future. Then we went to bed.

“David definitely was not gay, but he liked the gay world. When we were in bed together, he was more sensual and narcissistic. To him, it was about being adored. I think he was truly bisexual and I don’t think sex mattered to him.

“But our night together established a kind of real kinship between us, and I felt we had something special between us. David was a real seducer. He made you feel that you are the only person who exists, the center of his universe. Then he had you in his pocket, so to speak, but after that, he would move on to the next level of the relationship,” Tony said.

The next night, David continued to weave his silken web around Tony and suggested that the two of them go to bed with Angie.

“It wasn’t hard-core sex, it was more romantic,” Tony remembered. “It was more cuddles and a lot of cunnilingus all round. But then Angie got pouty and moody. I don’t know if she was jealous or what.”

“Angie talked a big game about sex and wildness,” Cherry Vanilla, who became MainMan’s office manager and publicist, said. “I think
David could handle the open marriage, but although Angie talked about it, I think she did that just to keep him in love with her and interested, but really wanted a more conventional thing.

“I remember once when David had an affair with Jean Millington, the singer in the band Fanny, Angie found out about it and got crazy with me because I’d mentioned it to the press,” Cherry said.

A
fter the wildness of America, David returned to England where, in September 1971, he played Aylesbury, and he wore full makeup when he performed on stage. Later in the year, though, he made a stab at playing the conventional traditional husband and accompanied Angie and Zowie to Cyprus, where they vacationed with her parents.

Angie’s father, Colonel George Milton Barnett, was a fine, upstanding military man with a mustache who resembled Lawrence of Arabia. Now a successful businessman, he was canny about money, and as he attempted to advise David on how to negotiate the tricky and unscrupulous music business, David listened with respect.

Angie’s mother, however, was quite another story. Only five foot two, stormy, feisty, and aggressive, Helena Marie Barnett hailed from Galicia in Eastern Europe and was such a firebrand that she actually once went as far as to hit her tall and imposing husband on the head with a frying pan. Observing the scrappy, bellicose Helena, David could not but have reminded himself that the daughter often evolves into the mother, and must have blanched at the prospect.

After
Hunky Dory
was released in December, David’s stock rose considerably among the critics, who hailed the album as an artistic success. And as the ultimate accolade, popular DJ Tony Blackburn declared “Changes” to be his single of the week, January 7, 1972, and the more mainstream Peter Noone, of Herman’s Hermits, recorded “Oh! You Pretty Things” with considerable success, and it hit number 12 in the UK charts.

With the dawn of 1972, everything was in place to unleash Bowie mania on the world. It all began with David’s twenty-fifth birthday party at Haddon Hall on January 8, 1972, at which he made his entrance as Ziggy in the quilted multicolor jumpsuit he and Freddie Burretti, now very much on his team (and, rumor has it, one of his sometime lovers), had designed, and which seamstress Sue Frost had made for him out of thirties furniture fabric.

Lionel Bart was one of the guests, and when David played “Ziggy Stardust” for him, to his delight, Lionel pronounced it to be “a rock opera.” Later that same month, David took the first step in publicly launching Ziggy Stardust on an unsuspecting world when, on January 22, under the headline “Oh, You Pretty Thing: David Bowie,” Michael Watts’s interview for
Melody Maker
was published.

Dubbing David “rock’s swishiest outrage: a self-confessed lover of effeminate clothes” and “a swishy queen,” Michael Watts described him as “a gorgeously effeminate boy,” announcing, “He’s as camp as a row of tents, with his limp hand and trolling vocabulary.”

But it was David, himself, who delivered the coup de grâce in a line that he hadn’t even discussed with Angie, but which he had secretly nursed to himself. “I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones,” he announced with no hesitation.

Even then, Michael Watts, who, like the rest of the world knew that David was married to Angie (but then wasn’t Somerset Maugham also married, with a daughter?) and that she had borne him a child (didn’t Oscar Wilde have two children and a wife?) was a little skeptical, noting, “There’s a sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth. . . . The expression of his sexual ambivalence establishes a fascinating game: Is he or isn’t he? In a period of conflicting sexual identity he shrewdly exploits the confusion surrounding the male and female roles.”

Long afterward, Watts would elaborate, “I think he said it very deliberately. I brought the subject up. I think he planned at some point
to say it to someone. He definitely felt it would be good copy. He was certainly aware of the impact it would make.”

Chris Charlesworth, who wrote for
Melody Maker
and then went on to become a press officer for RCA, where he worked with David, said, “Personally, I think he was lying. I suspect that he is bi. I think he said it for effect as much as anything else. He is a master at misleading the press and creating headlines as a result.

“I think he learned the PR trade from Ken Pitt, who was a press officer, and in the process realized that the worst thing was to be ignored by the media. He knew what he said would cause a stir, and it coincided with the release of his
Hunky Dory
album,” said Charlesworth.

“Don’t you worry about me. I know what I’m doing” was David’s response after Laurence Myers broached the subject of David outing himself in print.

Was David’s “I’m gay” announcement a cynical ploy he resorted to to promote
Hunky Dory
, and a way of starting the process of launching Ziggy on an unsuspecting world, or was it a genuine expression of his bisexuality, his drive for sexual freedom, his battle against sexual conformity?

In a 1997 interview,
Changes: Bowie at 50,
a BBC radio program released in conjunction with his fiftieth birthday, he looked back at his revolutionary revelation that he was gay and said, “I did it more out of bravado. I wanted people to be aware of me. I didn’t want to live my life behind a closed door.”