by Marc Spitz
It will perhaps suggest the mood of those years if I tell you that during them I could not visit my mother-in-law without averting my eyes from a framed verse of a “house blessing” which hung in a hallway of her house in West Hartford, Connecticut.
God bless the corners of this house
And be the lintel blest
And bless the hearth and bless the board
And bless each place of rest—
And bless the crystal windowpane that lets the starlight in
And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin
This verse had on me the effect of a physical chill, so insistently did it seem the kind of “ironic” detail the reporters would seize upon, the morning the bodies were found. In my neighborhood in California we did bless the door that opened wide to stranger as to kin. Paul and Tommy Scott Ferguson were the strangers at Ramon Novarro’s door, up on Laurel Canyon. Charles Manson was the stranger at Rosemary and Leno LaBianca’s door, over in Los Feliz.
Too much money, too many drugs, too many powerful people and far too many disenfranchised angry spurned poor people around them. When I am in L.A. on assignment, and not at the Chateau Marmont or the Sunset Marquis, where the sheer cost of the room is almost enough to make me feel safe, I double-check that the door is locked. The nights in those hills are so dark. Add to that rampant creepiness enough Bolivian marching powder to stroke out a Himalayan yak, and your awareness of the illusion of calm is heightened to levels that almost guarantee prolonged psychic pain.
“There was something horrible permeating the air in LA in those days,” Bowie told Robert Palmer during their Penthouse interview in 1983. “The stench of Manson and the Sharon Tate murders.”
In Kenneth Anger’s 1975 book Hollywood Babylon, one I’ve read more than once, he talks about the evil roots of the industry. “Yet for the vast public out there H-o-l-l-y-w-o-o-d was a magic three syllables invoking the Weirder World of Make Believe. To the faithful it was more than a dream factory where one young hopeful out of a million got a break. It was Dreamland, Somewhere Else; it was the Home of the Heavenly Bodies, the Glamour Galaxy of Hollywood. The fans worshipped, but the fans also could be fickle, and if their elites proved to have feet of clay, they could be cut down without compassion. Off screen a new Star was always waiting to make an entrance.”
“There’s a form of desperation,” Kim Fowley, a lifelong denizen of L.A., says in typically verbose yet ultimately accurate summation. “Look where we are. A lot of people south of the border think we stole the land. You have a melting pot not by choice but by circumstances. Then there’s the pressure cooker of Hollywood. The rats eating each other in the bottles. If you’re totally fake and totally materialistic and selfish, you get an erection when you walk into town—‘Goddamn, I belong here. This is where I’m destined to be Billy the Kid, Jesse James. I get to be a motherfucker here and they applaud me as I ravage the countryside.’”
18.
UPON HIS ARRIVAL in Los Angeles in the spring of 1975, Bowie crashed at the home of fellow British rock star Glenn Hughes. Hughes was then the bassist in Deep Purple, which had enjoyed several hit singles, including 1968’s “Hush.” Their proto-metal album Machine Head, and its titanic single “Smoke on the Water,” released in 1972, the same year as Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album, had made them arena-filling stars thanks to that riff. Worldwide engagements kept him on the road much of the year, so Hughes was happy to share his mansion just behind the famed Beverly Hills Hotel in Benedict Canyon. When he left Bowie alone, however, he did not realize the extent of his pal’s paranoia.
“My house was four homes from the LaBianca house,” Hughes recalls, referencing one of the city’s most notorious crime scenes, where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were randomly slaughtered by the Manson family just two days after the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends. “And I guess David found out about that. When I came off tour I found all the knives and all the sharp objects under the bed.” Hughes was, at the time, leading a somewhat debauched lifestyle but soon realized his new best friend was taking such decadence to extremes uncommon even for a rich rock ’n’ roller. Unlike Hughes, Bowie was not ingesting blow for the fun of it. He remained awash in neurosis and fears and obsessed with using occult magic to attain success and protect himself from demonic forces. A self-induced cocaine psychosis was, addiction aside, maintained in part because it was a mental instability that he could control, unlike the one that he was convinced was still encoded somewhere in his DNA, waiting to unfold and claim him as it had his aunts and half brother. Regardless of the motives, Bowie’s laundry list of pathology could fill reams.
“David had a fear of heights and wouldn’t go into an elevator,” Hughes recalls. “He never used to go above the third floor. Ever. If I got him into an elevator, it was frightening. He was paranoid and so I became paranoid. We partied in private.” Fortunately in Los Angeles, anything can be couriered in. Soon Hughes’s home became a sort of bunker, and rock stars like Keith Moon, John Lennon, winding down his notorious dissolute “Lost Weekend,” and cohort Harry Nilsson, used to catching Bowie out and about, stopped seeing him almost completely.
“If you really want to lose all your friends and all of the relationships that you ever held dear, that’s the drug to do it with,” Bowie has said. “Cocaine severs any link you have with another human being. Maintaining is the problem. You retain a superficial hold on reality so that you can get through the things that you know are absolutely necessary for your survival. But when that starts to break up, which inevitably it does—around late 1975 everything was starting to break up. I would work at songs for hours and hours and days and days and then realize that I had done absolutely nothing. I thought I had been working and working but I had only been rewriting the first four bars or something.”
While planning the follow-up to Young Americans, Bowie would sit in the house with a pile of high-quality cocaine atop the glass coffee table, a sketch pad and a stack of books. Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune was his favorite. Its author describes the book as a “safeguard for protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence.” Psychic Self-Defense’s instructions (“Sever all connections with suspected originators”) seem like a paradigm for the isolated and suspicious mode in which Bowie conducted himself during this period, except, of course, for one of Fortune’s key tenets: “Keep away from drugs.” Using this and more arcane books on witchcraft, white magic and its malevolent counterpart, black magic, as rough guides to his own rapidly fragmenting psyche, Bowie began drawing protective pentagrams on every surface.
“It was very speedy coke,” Hughes says. “David never slept. Never slept. He was in a coke storm. We would be up three or four days at a time. I’d leave and come back and continue the same conversation we left off.”
“I’d stay up for weeks. Even people like Keith Richards were floored by it,” Bowie would later recall. “And there were pieces of me all over the floor.”
Hughes increasingly had no idea what Bowie was talking about. “Do the dead concern themselves with the affairs of the living? Can I change the channels without using the clicker?” Bowie jokes during his episode of VH1’s Storytellers, taped in 1999 and released to retail a decade later. Other obsessions included an obscure form of photography called Kirlian, which is supposed to capture the aura as well as the flesh.
“He felt inclined to go on very bizarre tangents about Aleister Crowley or the Nazis or numerals a lot,” Hughes says. “It’d leave me scratching my head. He was completely wired. Maniacally wired. I could not keep up with him. He was on the edge all the time of paranoia, and also going on about things I had no friggin’ idea of what he was talking about. He’d go into a rap on it and I wouldn’t know what he was talking about; remember, I was pretty loaded. I was thinking about sex and he was thinking about … whatever.”
“My other fascination was with the Nazis and their search for the Holy Grail,” Bowie later clarified. “There was this theory that they ha
d come to England at some point before the war to Glastonbury to try to find the Holy Grail. It was this Arthurian need, this search for a mythological link with God. But somewhere along the line it was perverted by what I was reading and what I was drawn to. And it was nobody’s fault but my own.”
People down on the streets knew Bowie was up in the Hills. Groupies came and went, along with dealers, hustlers and hangers-on. “I had certainly collected a motley crew of people who would keep turning up at the house. A lot of dealers. Real scum,” he recalled. Strangers at the door. “Women coming and going,” Hughes says. “A lot of sex and debauchery going on. We were going for it. My dealer was always at the house. We never ran out of cocaine.”
“I paid with the worst manic depression of my life,” Bowie has said. “My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twenty-four hours a day … I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth.”
Occasionally, David would reach out to people from his past who had recently been excommunicated, former MainMan employees like Tony Zanetta and Cherry Vanilla. According to his old Arts Lab co -founder Mary Finnegan, there are reports that he even rang Chimi Rinpoche, his Buddhism instructor. “When he was having a very rough time in L.A., he apparently phoned Chimi,” says Finnegan. “He told Chimi he was in deep trouble and asked would he come out and talk to him. Chimi said no. He said, ‘If you want to talk to me you come to me; I don’t go to you.’”
Angie was in London with their son during this time and received several desperate phone calls, some frightening enough for her to book a flight. “He sounded like he might just as well have been off in the emptiness of some awful cold black hole, out there in the timeless infinity far beyond the reach of warmth and earthly human feeling,” she writes.
Increasingly, Bowie was convinced that there were witches after his semen. They were intent on using it to make a child to sacrifice to the devil—essentially the plot to Sharon Tate’s husband Roman Polanski’s 1968 supernatural classic Rosemary’s Baby. Cherry Vanilla, who no longer worked for Bowie but had recently been discussing plans for him to produce an album that might launch her singing career, recalls one such desperate phone call. “He had been calling me from California saying he was gonna produce a record for me,” she says. “But he had this whole thing about these black girls who were trying to get him to impregnate them to make a devil baby. He asked me to get him a white witch to take this curse off of him. He was serious, you know. And I actually knew somebody in New York who claimed she was a white witch. She was the only white witch I ever met. So I put him in touch with her. I don’t know what ever happened to her. And I don’t know if she removed the curse. I guess she did.”
The witch that Vanilla is referring to was a semi-famous Manhattan-based intellectual named Walli Elmlark. Elmlark taught classes in magic at the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences, then located on Fourteenth Street, just north of Greenwich Village. She wrote a gossip column in then-popular rock magazine Circus and had become friendly with Marc Bolan and the late Jimi Hendrix. She’d even recorded a spoken-word album with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp (who would later add his distinctive circular guitar sound to Bowie’s “Heroes”) and even published a cosmic paperback full of collages, poetry, personal confessions and observations entitled Rock Raps of the Seventies. When she was practicing witchcraft, according to Rock Raps, she’d wear a “floor length clingy high necked long sleeved black jersey, and a floor length chiffon over dress that floats around me like a mysterious mist of motion,” adding, “Usually I am in pants … always black and silver.”
“She was known as The White Witch of New York,” says Timothy Green Beckley, a paranormal book publisher and friend of Elmlark’s. “She had a large clientele which came to her for advice on various subjects in their own personal life. She was into personal power. Candle burning. Whenever she did a spell for somebody she always made sure they protected themselves by surrounding themselves with a white aura of protection. She didn’t dabble in Satanism or black magic or gris-gris. She was very positive and always worked with the light and with positive vibrations and always sent people in a good direction. A lot of musicians turned to her for spiritual guidance.”
Elmlark had met Bowie once before at a New York City press conference during the first Ziggy Stardust tour. Summoned to Bowie’s residence, she quickly and apparently successfully exorcised the pool. Angie, who was living there at the time, noted that it started to bubble and smoke (but then she also insisted that it was only raining outside David’s window while the rest of the L.A. sky was clear). Elmlark wrote a series of spells and incantations out for Bowie, in case the demons return for a dip, and remained on call for Bowie as he continued to wrestle with the forces of darkness. “He took her word as gospel,” Beckley says. Elmlark departed from this plane of existence in 1991.
What might have actually saved David Bowie from the clatter inside his old head is the same thing that had always been there for him when things grew desperate and dark: his uncommonly strong work ethic and creative discipline. While hopelessly addicted to coke, he managed to act in his first major motion picture and was intent on composing the film’s score as well. The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg (who’d already created a pair of seventies classics in Performance and Don’t Look Now), is perhaps not a classic seventies film in the sense of being revolutionary and bold, but it is certainly classically seventies, as it’s based on an obscure literary property (a novel by science fiction writer Walter Tevis), it’s an indictment of corporate greed (in this case the media giant World Com), has scads of gratuitous nudity and boasts the participation of seventies icons Buck Henry and Candy Clark. It’s also, like the blunter end of seventies “classics,” rife with ham-bone symbolism (footage of sheep being led off to the slaughter). “Although Roeg and his screenwriter, Paul Mayersberg, pack in layers of tragic political allegory, none of the layers is very strong, or even very clear,” legendary critic Pauline Kael wrote of the film. “The plot, about big-business machinations, is so un-involving that one watches Bowie traipsing around looking like Katharine Hepburn in her transvestite role in Sylvia Scarlett and either tunes out or allows the film, with its perverse pathos, to become a sci-fi framework for a sex-role-confusion fantasy. The wilted stranger can be said to represent everyone who feels misunderstood, everyone who feels sexually immature or ‘different,’ everyone who has lost his way, and so the film is a gigantic launching pad for anything that viewers want to drift to.” Kael really nails the lasting appeal of the film in that last bit, not to mention the lasting appeal of the David Bowie myth itself.
Performance had starred Mick Jagger as doomed rock star Turner, and Bowie’s competitive edge, one he maintained with the Stones singer through much of his career, certainly helped motivate him to keep his head long enough to out-Roeg his rival. Roeg originally thought of Peter O’Toole and the author and director the late Michael Crichton (Westworld, Jurassic Park) for the role of Newton, the alien who travels to Earth in an effort to transport water to his wife and family on their dry, dying planet. After seeing the BBC documentary Cracked Actor, he was convinced that Bowie was the ideal Newton. Roeg heard rumors about Bowie’s drug addiction but did not make it an issue, and for much of the shoot, away from his dealers and hangers-on in the mountains of New Mexico, Bowie was clean and professional.
“I decided to not do anything or say anything [about it],” Roeg says. “To try to adopt a manner that if anything happened, it would shock me. You can’t reason someone out of anything. The one thing you can try to do is make them conceal it more, give them a sense of love. I’m not into the guilt thing or trying to cure anybody of our humanity. Especially in a societal way, everybody has a sense of shame, guilt, secret happiness, accusation or praise. There are certain things I wouldn’t want to know about someone anyway, even those nearest and dearest. And I wouldn’t want them to know certain things about me. It all goes back to this idea of
exposing yourself. You have to live with yourself first.”
Roeg and Bowie drew as much as they could from the actor’s real life to bring Newton into focus. His real-life bodyguard Tony Mascia, for example, plays Newton’s bodyguard. The limousine in which Newton cruises through the burnt-orange desert is the same limo from Cracked Actor. Each detail fed the kind of “He’s just playing himself” critiques that would later be used to dismiss Madonna in her 1985 debut Desperately Seeking Susan and Eminem in his film debut 8 Mile. This downplays the actual work, which both Candy Clark and Roeg attest to.
“What was really neat about Bowie was that he always wanted to run dialogue and rehearse, which I attribute to him being a musician,” Clark said of the rehearsal period. “We wanted to get it right and Nic wanted it word for word. So that was our challenge.”