Bowie (20 page)

“Coco wasn’t streetwise, like us. She seemed much more English and sophisticated,” Cherry Vanilla observed.

After answering an advertisement in a London newspaper, without knowing the nature of the job in advance, or that she would be working indirectly for David Bowie, Coco had been hired as receptionist/secretary at MainMan’s London office, where her primary job, it transpired, was to hold off MainMan’s multitude of creditors.

“Tony Defries didn’t pay bills, he just didn’t, so the London office was left struggling with bill collectors,” Tony Zanetta remembered. “But Coco became pretty stern at fending off bill collectors and was pleasant and intelligent. She didn’t dress to draw attention to herself, and was plain, but not unattractive, and she was no-nonsense.

“Tony Defries decided that David should have a personal assistant,
but although Suzi Fussey had played that role during the last tour, she was now involved with Mick Ronson. Suzi wasn’t prepared to lay her life down for David Bowie, but Coco was, so Defries asked her to do the job instead,” Zanetta said.

Coco had first met David in May 1973, at a party at Haddon Hall thrown to welcome him back from his tour of Japan. Afterward, she recalled, “My first impression was how tired and skinny he seemed! The famous red hair was a bit crumpled but his essence, the warmth and kind gentleness was there [through that worldly weariness] and he hugged Andrea [MainMan Fan Club assistant] and me and made us feel welcome.”

Ava Cherry, however, would be blunter in her appraisal of the birth of the relationship between Coco and David. “She was in love with Bowie from day one,” Ava said.

Angie Bowie, to her everlasting regret, was instrumental in recommending Corinne as David’s personal assistant. “I thought she was my friend, but she wrecked my marriage,” Angie said. “Gradually, she edged closer and closer to him—ordering the cars, ironing the shirts, making the breakfast. . . . Coco is ugly and frumpy. David doesn’t want good-looking girls. He wants a mother. And Coco is a mother substitute.”

Angie’s words might sound bitter and vindictive, but one only has to compare photographs of Coco Schwab with those of Peggy Jones to see that there is a striking visual similarity between both women. Moreover, Coco and Peggy were both strong women, both strident, both stormy, with Coco by far the more maternal of the two, but nevertheless, more than a little parallel in nature to David’s mother.

Sean Mayes gives a glimpse of Coco’s brand of mothering David; part maternal, part threatening, and totally manipulative, in his book
We Can Be Heroes: Life on Tour with David Bowie,
where he writes about witnessing David’s ersatz mother, Coco, in action:

“ ‘You ought to wrap up, David,’ said Coco.

‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ ”

‘He’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I’ve got all his woolen things packed. Oh well, I’ll just have to burn his shirts with the iron!’ ”

The unspoken subtext, of course, is that if she deliberately singed David’s shirts with an iron, he would be forced to wear his woolen sweaters after all, just as Coco had decreed, and her dominance over him in this particular context would be assured.

M
ainMan’s Leee Black Childers gave his judgment of Coco to Kerry Juby, who interviewed him for the radio show
David Bowie: In Other Words,
which was later to become a book, and, as he did, was acutely aware of the risk he ran in talking about Coco to the media.

“A very odd woman and still, to my knowledge, has not been evil to me. But she will after she reads this. But it’s the truth,” Leee said. “She seemed to pick people that she didn’t want to have anything to do with David, or have any influence on David, and would openly go for the throat and get rid of them.

“She was doing it even then though she had no real influence over David at all, but I think it appealed to him—that sort of approach, that sort of fierce protectiveness. He used to encourage jealousy amongst us to see who was closest to him, so I guess Corinne particularly appealed to him because she made no bones about it. She went right after it.

“So she grew in favor until she decided she was strong enough to take on Angela and she did, openly. Openly defied Angie for David’s affections and David’s favors,” Leee said.

Later on, when David had moved to L.A., according to Tony Zanetta, Coco became very lonely, and felt that not even David appreciated her. “She wanted reassurance that she was needed and loved and was also essential to David’s success,” he said, adding, “It was a terrible job, but she was glad to do it because David was so wonderful, and she loved him so much. Yet he paid so little attention to her.”

Coco was so successful in her single-minded campaign to become the most important woman in David’s universe that soon she had usurped Angie’s role as the wife/mother figure in David’s life to such an extent that wherever she and David were in the world, she established a morning ritual in which she woke him with orange juice, lit his cigarette, served him coffee, and handed him the newspapers. No prince of the realm had a more devoted retainer, no son a more loving mother.

“She had a lot of backbone, a lot of spine, but she was devoted to David. Did they have an affair? Well, whoever was the last man standing got to spend the night with David, so there was a lot of opportunity there for her. It was certainly love, and definitely devotion,” Tony Zanetta said.

David, of course, was intensely aware of Coco’s deep emotions for him and now and again, paid tribute to her. “Coco is the one person that has been a continual friend. She’s a very sweet and loving person,” he once said, and credited her with saving his life during the days of his coke-fueled existence.

During that time, she worked diligently to keep him healthy, to build up his immune system, to coax him to drink extra-rich milk, which she took great pains to find for him. Above all, she kept trouble and troublemakers, scroungers, and parasites away from him, so that he could concentrate on what really mattered to him: writing and performing.

Defending her, he once said, “It’s hard for her to sustain all the abuse one gets in the position of someone who’s close to a ‘personality’ figure like myself. Unfortunately, business affairs being what they are, everything that comes out of my camp goes through Coco, so she becomes both the receiver and the transmitter of bad tidings, so if I can’t be reached, then she is blamed. It’s a helluva position to maintain for this many years, but she does it very successfully.”

Despite David’s defense of her, through the years, Coco has consistently aroused deep-seated animosity in many who crossed her path.
And she was openly dubbed by some the woman who did David’s dirty work, who didn’t have her own life, whose every waking hour revolved around David and no one else. Their relationship was and is unprecedented. Never married, Coco disclosed in a rare interview that she has had boyfriends, but none have ever been seen in public with her, and so they cannot be identified. Instead, she has willingly made herself available to David 24/7.

“It was as if David and she had been married for a very long time,” Tony Zanetta said.

Indeed, according to Cherry Vanilla, there was definitely talk in the midseventies that David was on the verge of marrying Coco. Utterly dedicated to David, Coco appeared to live for him, and clearly she would also have killed or died for him. As his watchdog, his gatekeeper, she continued to build sky-high walls around him and alienate those who wanted to get close to him.

His agent Maggie Abbott remembered visiting David and Coco in New York at the brownstone on Twentieth Street in Manhattan where they were living around the time when MainMan was winding down: “It was very bleak; they didn’t have any food or money, as I think Defries had held it back, who knows? I felt sorry for her. At first she was cold and detached and I thought she was worried and anxious about David.”

Aware of Coco’s importance in David’s life, Maggie, while she was agenting David’s role in
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, made sure to include Coco in David’s contract for the movie.

“At my meeting with David, thinking like an agent, I realized that he would be more attracted to doing the movie if he didn’t feel alone. So I told him and Coco that I would put her into the deal officially as David’s assistant, and I stuck with that all the way. So it was because of me that Coco was written into David’s contract, guaranteeing her a job and a career and employment stability,” Maggie said.

A few years later, Maggie attended a music festival to which she had an all-access pass, and decided to go backstage to see David. But
when she got there, Coco announced, “I don’t know Maggie Abbott. I’ve never heard of her,” and refused to let her in to see David.

“That’s when I saw her as a really cold bitch. Maybe it was because some people don’t like to see people who know too much of them from the past. I’m sure she was in love with him. She definitely doted on him and she stayed the course,” Maggie said.

In contrast, when photographer Bob Gruen was hired to photograph David during
Tin Machine
in 1991, he dealt with Coco and reported afterward, “Coco was very pleasant. She’s very smart and a strong woman, a classic New York girl, very efficient and took care of business very well.”

“Coco was tough. She didn’t try to be personable, but just did her job and did it well,”
The Man Who Fell to Earth
producer Si Litvinoff said.

“Like the Japanese, David hated to say no,” Tony Zanetta commented. “So he needed Coco to be a buffer between him and the world. She has no problem getting rid of people and yet she is quite a lovely girl, and bright, with a softness about her.”

Throughout her forty years with David, in keeping with her
modus operandi
, perhaps learned from David, Coco has retained an enigmatic persona, and only once emerged out of the shadows, when, in 2001, she took part in a Q&A session on David’s website, and made a concerted attempt to defend herself against the barrage of criticism she had always faced. Commenting that when she began working for David she had not been prepared for the fact that she would be continually placed under a magnifying glass, she declared, “The only magnifying-glass aspect to being David’s assistant that I used to find difficult was the realization that everything one did was observed. I naively never even thought of that.

“Nor did I think to watch my back. I just did what I had been asked to do and what needed to be done. I found out the hard way that just as often what I did was either misinterpreted or misrepresented or just plain old slandered.

“My effort to get the job done was sometimes seen at best as overzealous or at worst as God only (and the tabloids) knows what! However, David’s friendship and understanding and the importance of what he tries to achieve helped me see fear and jealousy for what it is and not to take on other people’s stuff. Today I try and do the best that I can in a day, let go of the rest and have a pretty good life!”

A
lthough Coco did her utmost to try and temper David’s drug addiction, it was an uphill struggle. Nonetheless, the
Diamond Dogs
tour would prove to be a resounding success. Chris Charlesworth, who was
Melody Make
r’s American editor at the time, saw the tour and said, “It was a completely different concept of a rock performance. David didn’t acknowledge the audience and the band was on the side. He didn’t introduce any songs, and the whole thing was a theatrical experience.”

Chris, who went on to be an RCA press officer and had social contact with David through the years, developed the highest respect for him during that time, saying of David, “He was polite and gracious and good company and women loved him because of that. He is extremely intelligent, knows his own destiny, and is an immensely talented performer and songwriter. He is very bright. Most rock stars are philistines; all they care about is rock. They don’t read or go to the theater, but David is very culturally aware.”

He was all that and more. But at the same time, as he himself has admitted, he also had an addictive personality. And in his cocaine-riddled years, his addictions often meant that he suspended his intelligence and lost grip on one of the most crucial elements in his life: his finances.

“He was this hugely popular figure and didn’t have the cash in the bank to show for it. I think John Lennon gave him some tips, and Mick Jagger may have put in a word, because he is a businessman,” Charlesworth said.

David had met John Lennon when they were introduced in Los Angeles, at a party thrown by Elizabeth Taylor. “We went on to a great relationship over the years,” David said of Lennon. “Terrific guy, very, very funny guy.”

Back in Manhattan, John called David and asked if he could bring May Pang, with whom he was then having a romantic interlude, and Linda and Paul McCartney over to see David. According to Ava Cherry, who was there, the meeting between David and Linda did not go well. “I also don’t think she liked David very much, and the feeling was mutual,” May Pang said.

At that point, David made the unwise move of playing tracks from
Young Americans
(the soul-influenced album that he would ultimately release in 1975) to his guests, not only once, but twice, whereupon Paul McCartney asked for another album to be put on instead.

David ignored him and started to play
Young Americans
again, but John Lennon intervened and gently asked him to play another album. May Pang diplomatically did what John asked, and David left the room.

That same evening, David called John and the two of them talked for quite a while. Afterward, John confided to May that David had been really hurt when he’d asked him to change the album, but that he had managed to mollify him to such an extent that he and David had become friends.

According to Tony Visconti, David’s friendship with John developed to such a degree that the three of them often spent a night on the town together. “We stayed up with John Lennon until 10:30
A.M
. We did mountains of cocaine, it looked like the Matterhorn, obscenely big, and four open bottles of cognac,” Tony recalled, adding of David, “During the making of
Young Americans
, he was taking so much cocaine it would have killed a horse.”