Bowie (23 page)

At Angie’s behest, Maggie had a conversation with David, who was interested in making
The Man Who Fell to Earth
and pleased that his contract with Defries did not stipulate that MainMan receive any commission for any work he might do in movies.

Next, Maggie arranged to fly to New York with Litvinoff and Roeg to meet David at the brownstone he was then renting on West Twentieth Street. There, as Si remembered, “The door was opened by Ava Cherry, a striking black girl with orange hair wearing a
Clockwork Orange
sweater, which I considered a good omen, as I had optioned the book. And David was very gracious and seemed enthusiastic about starring in the movie.”

Soon after, David, preparing to make the break with Defries, hired attorney Michael Lippman to represent him. By now, David had
come to terms with the fiasco that had been MainMan. Confiding to Michael Watts during a
Melody Maker
interview, he said, “I’ll never condone completely what went on. I don’t know whether I was absolutely manipulated but I believe all my business was manipulated. I believe that a lot of what were very good ideas were cheapened for the sake of getting things out economically rather than going the whole hog and doing things properly.

“Stage shows were never what they were supposed to be because suddenly the money was not there to pay for what I wanted initially. Things would always be done shoestring and I could never understand why, because apparently we were very, very popular and . . . where’s the money?”

Asked whether he would ever consider going back to Defries, David erupted, “Oh, Lord no! That’s absolutely . . . It couldn’t be further from my mind. I have literally no idea of what he does, where he is, and what kinds of things he does anymore. It was an astonishing chaotic period.”

Now that David was represented by Lippman and not Defries, Maggie Abbott found her role as David’s agent for
The Man Who Fell to Earth
being eradicated. “Lippman started to put a barrier between us, and asked for more money,” Maggie, who had negotiated a $75,000 deal for David to star in the film, plus another $75,000 to write the score, said.

Finally, despite the fact that she had put the entire movie deal together, Maggie received a cease-and-desist letter from Lippman cutting her out of the project, and making it clear that she was not allowed to set foot on the movie location. And although she finally did get paid a $7,500 commission, that was the end of her involvement with the movie.

“I felt quite bitter and annoyed at being banned from the set of a movie I’d made happen for the star,” Maggie Abbott said, adding, “David knew how to let go of people he didn’t want. He let go of me because he didn’t need me anymore. Overall, I felt terribly insulted
by David’s behavior. He didn’t acknowledge what I had done for him, how it changed his career and really launched him in movies.”

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, plans for the movie proceeded apace, and David invited Si for lunch at an elegant French restaurant in West Hollywood.

“It was clear that he was knowledgeable about French cuisine, and I believed he felt comfortable with me,” Si said.

While he was preparing for the movie, David stayed at Glenn Hughes’s mansion behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, though Glenn, who was touring with Deep Purple, wasn’t there at the time.

“I was calling the house every day and my house guy, Phil, said there was all kinds of birds up there, black girls, white girls. They were coming and going, and I think soul singer Claudia Lennear and Slash’s mother, Ola Hudson, were some of them,” Glenn said.

“When I got back, I felt so close to David as a friend. He was in my closet; he threw away all my shoes and told me, ‘You have got to change forever.’ He was a great influence on me. But it was still all about drugs for him.

“He had hidden all the knives under the bed, telling me that the Manson family was around. He was paranoid. Super intelligent. But super paranoid. He was moody, as you are on drugs, and I never saw him sleep. He was in a coke storm. We would both be up three or four days at a time. We were both addicted to cocaine but didn’t realize how addicting it was.

“Later on, he moved to a house and Coco was with him. It seemed to me that she was constantly tending to him, giving him milk, trying to get him to sleep. I’m not sure if he would still be here if it wasn’t for her. She absolutely loved him,” Glenn said.

Glenn was also around when David made the album
Station to Station
. “Even though he didn’t let anybody in there, I was allowed in a few times, and he was as high as a kite,” he said.

Glenn and David were to meet again the following year, when David played Wembley Stadium. “I went down in my Rolls-Royce,
which David hated. He was like, ‘What are you doing in this machine? You should be driving a caravan!’ He was being funny. He would joke and people would laugh with him and it was all becoming old for me.

“There was nothing emotional or sexual between us. He drew me and signed it ‘Ol Big Head.’ He would call me that, but I don’t know why. It sent me into a bit of a state because I had been so nice to the guy,” Glenn said.

“When we last met, I took him to the Elbow Room, a nightclub, and we brought two birds back to the hotel, and we might have been drunk, but we weren’t on drugs. I thought we would talk, but he was more interested in getting these two birds in the sack. So it all ended between us, and I felt used.”

N
ow that David was living in L.A., Winona Williams was back in his life again. After spending a great deal of time with David in Manhattan, she had decided to commit to Shep Gordon, after all, and had moved out to Los Angeles to live with him in Bel-Air. Despite that, David wasn’t prepared to let her go.

“He would get Coco to call me and tell me that if I didn’t come to see him immediately, he was coming up to the house,” Winona remembered.

“He asked me to go house hunting with him, and although I was trying to get away from him, he ended up renting a house on Stone Canyon Drive in Bel-Air, right down the road from where I was living. That’s when things began between us. I realized then that he was brilliant, a very sensitive man with a tortured soul. I went up to UCLA with him where he was learning about Kirlian photography,” Winona said, adding, “He has a very curious mind and he was exploring all things mystical and occult as well as scientific breakthroughs in the uncharted functions of the brain.”

F
ilming of
The Man Who Fell to Earth
began in Lake Fenton, New Mexico, in July 1975, and over the six weeks of filming, David, who had refused the offer of a hotel room during the shoot, lived in a Winnebago trailer. He was still frighteningly thin, and it was obvious that he was still snorting cocaine on a large scale.

From the first, David and Nic Roeg got on extremely well, and afterward David said, “I’m ever so slow in forming human relationships. I don’t really have a circle of friends unless you consider Nic a circle.”

Nic was extremely impressed by David’s performance. “What’s extraordinary about David, as an artist he can’t be classified,” Nic said. “He can’t be singled out, ‘Ah that is Bowie,’ because that’s the way he always does that. He never appears the same way twice.

“And he’s got fantastic concentration and he’s also got an amazing kind of self-discipline. He seemed the perfect person for this.”

Nic, who had directed Mick Jagger in
Performance
, later compared him to David, saying that they were “very similar, very different . . . but they’re very similar in terms of their absolute concentration on the character they’re playing. They’re not just a singer with a band. Their whole magnetism comes out in acting.”

David’s female costar, Candy Clark, was initially apprehensive about working with him, but was relieved to find that he wasn’t spoiled and that he was totally involved in the movie. Unfortunately for Angie, although Candy was Nic Roeg’s unofficial girlfriend at the time, she seemed to be making a play for David, as well.

Initially, Angie had invited Candy and Nic to dinner at the home she and David were renting in L.A. so that they could read through the script with him.

“While I was playing housekeeper and serving wine, she [Candy] attacked my husband in my own house and was mauling him like a tiger,” Angie said, mindful that David would also be filming love scenes with Candy.

And although Candy was to enthuse of David, “His skin does reflect the light so beautifully. He does look like he’s from another planet,” producer Si Litvinoff was adamant that there was no romance between her and David. “She was always disappearing with Nic Roeg and didn’t spend any offscreen time with David,” recalled Si.

At the same time, on one occasion when David was too sick to film, Candy stepped in, and, wearing a big hat that overshadowed her face, played his part instead. May Routh, who designed the costumes for the movie, said that David was so thin that in some scenes he had to wear boys’ clothes.

“He usually stayed up very late at night composing the score,” Si said, although ultimately that score never survived, other than the track ‘Subterranean,’ ” which David released on his subsequent album,
Low
. “He was wonderful in the part. He told me he wasn’t going to do any drugs.

“There was one incident on the set when Rip Torn came in to do a shoot with David. Rip was very wound up. So I had to get some tequila for Rip and I got some NoDoz energy pills for David and, as he didn’t like to take pills, I ground them up and he snorted the powder,” Si said. “I saw David a lot when he wasn’t shooting. I had custody of my two young sons for the summer and he had Zowie with him. Zowie was adorable, with very long hair.”

At one point on location, David decided that he wanted to do some sculptures, and within a day, Coco had assembled all the necessary materials for him. “He was happy as a bunny,” May Routh remembered.

David also spent much of his time between takes reading the biography of silent screen star Buster Keaton, whom he was considering playing in a biopic. Around the same time, he was also having an affair with beautiful black costume designer and model Ola Hudson, whose son, Saul, would grow up to become Slash of Guns N’ Roses.

Slash was eight years old when he walked into a room in his home, only to find David there with his mother, stark naked. “He was always over. They had a lot of stuff going on, but my perspective was limited. Then it turned into some sort of mysterious romance that went on for a while after that,” Slash remembered, adding, “Looking back at it now, it might not have been that big of a deal, but at the time, it was like watching an alien land in your backyard.”

During his affair with Ola, David would often come by her house, bringing Angie and Zowie with him, as well.

“It seemed entirely natural for Bowie to bring his wife and son to the home of his lover so that we might all hang out. At the time, my mother practiced the same form of Transcendental Meditation that David did. They chanted before the shrine she maintained in the bedroom,” Saul said.

A
ware that, far from wanting to mother Zowie, Angie was much more intent on her own ambitions and her lovers, including bass player Scott Richardson, who was into drugs, and, afterward, actor Roy Martin, David hadn’t really played a part in Zowie’s life until then. “I was around so infrequently I can’t imagine what an abyss that has caused,” he said later, admitting, “My son’s seen me through some of the most awful depressing times when I was really in absolute abject agony over my emotional state, the heights of my drinking and drug-doing. He’s seen the lot.”

Fortunately, the boy had primarily been in the care of Scottish nanny. Marion Skene, and, as Angie later admitted, “David and I were away doing drugs, at first together and then later apart. Marion effectively became Zowie’s mother.”

“I’ve always considered her as my mum,” Zowie said years later, adding, “so I never felt I was missing out in any way.”

S
till dedicated to having sex with as many partners as possible, David compelled Ava to endure his multiple affairs, and even to listen when he rated the prowess of his sexual partners. Worse still, he even went so far as to give her details about his fling with one of The Three Degrees.

After the shoot was over, David came out to Si Litvinoff’s house in Malibu a couple of times. “He played music, we had dinner, and he didn’t drink anything. He was always with a beautiful black girl, but not Ava Cherry anymore,” Si noted.

During filming, Angie had paid a short visit to the location, but she left swiftly as it was finally clear to her their marriage had disintegrated almost beyond repair. And the writing was even more firmly on the wall, when, the following year, David squired Bianca Jagger (now separated from Mick) to a birthday party at the Manhattan disco Hurrah and photographers snapped them together, whereupon all hell broke loose with Angie.

David, of course, was well aware that by taking Bianca to such a public venue, it was inevitable that they would be photographed together. Beforehand, in a rare manifestation of conscience regarding his double-dealing with women, David made somewhat of a show of worrying about the feelings of the other women in his life, former girlfriends though they might be, and, for once, demonstrated a modicum of concern that they might suffer pangs of jealousy upon seeing him with Bianca.

On the night of the party, as Coco confided to Sean Mayes, “He was rather shy about coming here tonight as several of his exgirlfriends were here. But you should have seen their faces when we walked in!” she went on with some relish.

“David had walked in with Mrs. Jagger. And we missed it!” Mayes added.

For Angie, the blow of learning that David was dating Bianca was mortal, although he had also had a brief dalliance with Marianne Faithfull. He and Marianne had first met in 1964, during the Manish Boys’ tour, when they had performed on the same bill. Nothing had happened between them then, primarily because Marianne was enthralled with Gene Pitney, who was on the same tour with her.