Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Convinced that signing David was crucial to his movie, Roeg won him over by his gentle persistence, for David had forgotten their meeting and was busy, says Roeg, in a recording session. Roeg waited for most of the day, and when Bowie eventually arrived late that evening the pair talked for only a few minutes before David agreed to sign up.

  Roeg was an undeniably impressive character, and his assiduous courting of David together with the completion of ‘Fame’ both represented hope, for the thought of Defries’ control over his work – which culminated in attempts by MainMan to injunct the release of Young Americans – made David feel like a helpless, naive child. David’s encounters with John Lennon, through January and early February, brought out the best in him – his unaffected joy and enthusiasm – for he was impressed with how down to earth and ‘un-starry’ Lennon was, and acted the same in his company. John, too, had come to genuinely like David; for all his quirks, he was a committed rock ‘n’ roller, like John, and once the stand-offishness had faded away, he seemed simply like a younger brother who needed counselling.

  But the influence of other stars was far less benign. Cherry Vanilla had left MainMan before David’s split, and kept in regular touch; she had introduced him to Norman Fisher when he’d first moved to New York, and would have brief chats with David quite regularly, the two of them gossiping away before David got to the point – which was usually a request if he could ‘borrow’ her apartment for sex sessions, away from the watchful eye of Ava, or Angie, who lived briefly nearby before returning to London. Then, one evening, Vanilla saw David hurrying down the street, asked if he was OK, and he blurted out that he’d just been to see Lou Reed. ‘Don’t ever go near him,’ he warned her. ‘He’s the devil.’

  Vanilla was only briefly worried. ‘He was on this trip, whatever Lou had done to him had freaked him out that day.’ By then it was well known that David was living solely on a diet of ‘coke and milk’ but like most of her circle, she was convinced that cocaine had no downside. ‘We didn’t think of it as ill then. We thought of it as fashionable.’

  David’s encounter with Led Zep guitarist Jimmy Page in February was even more unsettling. Their acquaintance went back to The Manish Boys days, but during a night with Ava at Bowie’s house, the atmosphere was strained, and then when Page spilt wine on some silk cushions and tried to blame Ava, Bowie turfed him out, spitting out, ‘Why don’t you take the window.’ The two glared at each other; Page seemed to be invoking dark forces against David, who in turn, says Ava Cherry, ‘wanted to show Jimmy that his will was stronger. Then all of a sudden, after that night, David has all these books around and is reading them.’

  David’s battle of wills with Page helped inspire a deeper investigation of the works of ‘the wickedest man in the world’. Jimmy Page’s devotion to the work of occultist Aleister Crowley was well known – he had bought and restored Crowley’s famed magical headquarters, Boleskine House, in 1971. Crowley’s work was popular in hippie circles from 1969; Graham Bond, Elton John’s old employer, released Holy Magick, an album devoted to Crowley, in 1970; Sombrero regular Robert Kensell was another devotee. David himself had name-checked Crowley in ‘Quicksand’, and possibly ‘Holy Holy’, too; those close to him in 1971, like Dai Davies, believe that back then Bowie had a ‘fashionable, but fleeting interest’ in dropping Crowley’s name, as he did with Nietzsche. The meeting with Page seemed to convert what had been shallow name-dropping into a full-blown obsession.

  Over the course of 1975, David embarked on a journey that would take him into the heart of psychic darkness. One key text in this journey was – according to Gary Lachman, an acquaintance of Bowie who has written on the occult – Trevor Ravenscourt’s The Spear of Destiny. Published in 1973, the book explored Hitler and Himmler’s harnessing of occult powers, notably the Holy Grail and its partner artefact, the lance that pierced Christ’s side. Other Bowie influences almost certainly included the hugely fashionable Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Together with works by Crowley and his acolytes, these formed the core of Bowie’s reading list. Lachman debated such subjects as the occult interests of Outsider author Colin Wilson with Bowie, and believes ‘he is interested in lots of such ideas, and can speak intelligently about them. Jimmy Page went into it more deeply and was a serious devotee – Bowie picked lots of different elements, and gave them a twist.’

  By the time Bowie met Page, the Led Zep guitarist had spent over six years investigating Crowley’s work; David’s immersion was comparatively brief. Rather than seek to harness dark powers, he would embark on a coke-addled quest for meaning. In 1993, Bowie would explain his fascination with Himmler’s search for the Holy Grail and Spear of Destiny as an ‘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.’

  Like The Rolling Stones, who’d danced with the devil in the guise of Crowley disciple Kenneth Anger, Bowie’s new, dangerous aura would take a heavy toll on him, and those around him. Obsessed and scared by the ominous forces he saw gathering around him, David started planning his escape from New York. It wasn’t just people like Jimmy Page or Lou Reed he wanted to flee; even normally well-behaved musicians seem to resent his presence. Aretha Franklin had mocked him at the Grammys (‘I’m so happy I could kiss David Bowie’), ruining his mood for weeks, and at a party thrown by Alice Cooper’s manager, Shep Gordon, Bob Dylan had delivered one of his trademark put-downs: ‘Glam rock isn’t music,’ he had sneered, before turning his back on David, as the watching industry heavyweights and their flunkies gasped.

  A move to LA, ready for The Man Who Fell to Earth shoot – later delayed as Roeg and producer Si Litvinoff looked for backers – represented a clean break with such nastiness. It meant he’d be closer to his new, Hollywood manager, Michael Lippman; it also meant he could escape Ava Cherry and her complaints about his obsessive womanising. (Angie, in comparison, had given up, and seemed content to pursue a mostly separate existence.)

  The move also meant David would be close to LA’s raconteur and coke dealer par excellence, Freddy Sessler. Geoff MacCormack, who flew over to join David a couple of weeks later, would characterise this period in LA as a time when ‘a common form of greeting was for someone simply to say, Hi, and stick a silver spoon under your nose’. Freddy would arrive, not with a vial of cocaine, but a plate. The potency and quantity of Sessler’s wares were unrivalled: they would contribute towards David’s marked mental deterioration over the summer of 1975.

  Glenn Hughes, a twenty-three-year old English bassist and singer who’d recently joined Deep Purple, had become fast friends with Bowie in LA the previous year. During their long phone conversations, Glenn – then about to start on Deep Purple’s last tour with guitarist Ritchie Blackmore – had offered David refuge at his house in Beverly Hills. With a sizable coke habit himself, Glenn was well aware of David’s increasing problems; staggered to hear that David planned to make the train trip on his own, he arranged for his driver to pick up David from Union Station, when he arrived in LA around 16 March, 1975. He wanted to make sure that David wasn’t left alone – but it was a vain hope. ‘David was on his own a lot over that period,’ says Hughes. ‘He could be in a room of five or six people, with a book, and be on his own.’

  Over the following months, Glenn’s relationship with David would be deepened and tempered by their mutual obsession with cocaine: ‘It was a dark year – for him, and for me. I know he doesn’t like to think about it now, but this is the service we have to give back to people. We have to acknowledge the dark side of what happened.’

  Throughout their friendship Bowie and Hughes would have, at fleeting moments, the time of their lives: rapping wildly about music, arguing about clothes, mapping out the future. They were both still young, ‘invincible’, and Bowie was a good friend, advising Hughes, teaching him how to use his influences but to keep moving on. He was also ‘a funny son of a bitch’ – unusuall
y for coke addicts, they’d spend some of their time laughing uproariously. But the enduring image of their time together is the two of them, sitting alongside each other, isolated, Glenn obsessively working out riffs on the guitar, and David watching the same dark, disquieting movies, over and over, both of them lost in their own world: ‘It was miserable. It always is miserable.’

  Within a couple of days of his arrival in LA, David re-encountered a paradigm of the West Coast lifestyle’s corrosive effects, in the subdued shape of Iggy Pop. Since he’d last seen David, an attempted partnership with ex-Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek had fallen apart, and Iggy had been abandoned by his self-proclaimed manager, Danny Sugerman. Late in 1974 he’d ended up at the Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) at UCLA’s Westwood complex, after being forced to choose between jail and hospital by a cop who’d found him drooling aggressively at the customers in Hamburger Hamlet.

  When David arrived at NPI to visit, Iggy was in a pathetic condition, withdrawing from the cocktail of drugs that had permeated his system for the last year. During his stay on the wards he had fascinated the psychiatrists, who diagnosed an excess of narcissism and, more seriously, an underlying bipolar condition. Ex-Stooge James Williamson had visited, but friends like Sugerman, who had publicised his descent into oblivion, stayed away. ‘Nobody else came, nobody,’ Iggy recalled two years later. ‘Not even my so-called friends in LA. But David came.’

  Even Iggy was surprised at David’s opening words: ‘Hey, do you want any blow?’ Being Iggy, he took a toot. On his first visit, David was accompanied by actor Dean Stockwell; later, Dennis Hopper tagged along, as did Ola Hudson, the clothes designer who became David’s main companion over the summer. She was accompanied by her son, Saul – aka Slash, later the top-hatted, guitar-slinging founder of Gun N’ Roses. The nine-year-old was still distraught at his parents’ separation, and understandably disorientated by his recent move from Stoke-on-Trent, the homely centre of England’s pottery industry, into the mental wildlands of Los Angeles: seeing his mom with Bowie was, says Slash, ‘like watching an alien land in your back yard’.

  In truth, David was equally adrift in an alien landscape. The city fascinated him – ‘LA is my favourite museum,’ he had quipped to writer Cameron Crowe while driving him on a mad jaunt around the city in a borrowed yellow VW bug – but in the weeks between April and June 1975 his mental condition deteriorated from excitable but rational, to near-delusional. Glenn Hughes had regular phone conversations when he was out of LA on tour, and checked in with his house-minder, Phil, who informed him, ‘There are birds of every colour, coming and going at all hours of the night.’ David’s own description of what was going was a good deal less jolly. ‘The conversations were scary,’ says Hughes. ‘This black magic theme crept in; and my house was near where the Sharon Tate murders were, he was convinced the whole Manson family was still around, and I found he’s hid all the knives in my house. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was learning all about cocaine psychosis – which I would go through myself soon.’

  In May, David took Iggy into Cherokee Studios for a set of later-abandoned recordings. James Williamson, one of the few people who persevered with Iggy, accompanied him to the sessions. By now Iggy was ‘pretty far gone’, says Williamson. Bowie, in comparison, looked together. ‘He always was this reserved, almost aloof kind of a guy – so he just looked like a more wasted version of that.’ What struck Williamson most was the ‘dreadful’ noise on the recordings, an earth hum that would make them useless. Bowie’s obliviousness to the noise was the main clue things weren’t well. ‘But hey,’ points out Williamson, who’d narrowly evaded a smack possession charge that same year, ‘everybody was in trouble in LA then.’

  Iggy’s own recollections of Bowie from that time seemed rather conventional (compared to his own existence, perhaps it was). ‘Sometimes I would go over to his house for a couple of days. There would be books all over the floor and Dennis Hopper stopping by – and David always had ideas. He was about to do Man Who Fell to Earth, and he had a great book, a slim volume about a group of people for the government who faked a Mars landing in a TV studio, a wonderful little idea for a movie, he was keen on talking about that. Then he had an idea for a rock ‘n’ roll move in which I would play a character called Catastrophe. I indulged him in that ‘cause, well … I am open to a lot of things.’

  Sadly, no detailed memories of the household antics of Dennis Hopper, Iggy Pop and David Bowie survive, for each of the participants’ recollection of this period is patchy. Iggy by now was like a sad child, profoundly depressed at the failure of his own career. Hopper was in his own coke-fuelled professional tailspin: with his non-linear conversation, occasionally profound insights into art and movies, and his fondness for boasting about his acquaintance with Charlie Manson, the actor was another walking embodiment of Hollywood burn-out.

  For Ava Cherry, who felt compelled to track David down, her ex-lover too seemed another burn-out – the charming, driven man she’d met at a New York party in 1973 seemed to have ‘cracked’. After David’s departure from New York, Ava had disappeared to Jamaica with her friend, ex-Playboy model Claudia Jennings, and sometime in June managed to locate David at Michael Lippman’s villa, where he’d moved from Hughes’ house. Ava instantly recognised ‘it was over between us’. Their relationship seemed a relic of the past, and on occasion she was simply scared. For a short time that summer, David came to stay at Claudia Jennings’ house; Claudia was always light-hearted and positive, but Ava ‘felt kind of afraid. David would talk about ghosts and I didn’t know how to take it. One day we were talking, he started to cry and had a glass in his hand. And it suddenly shattered. He is an intense person, there was this energy … you read about people who sit in a chair and self-combust. Claudia wasn’t afraid – I was.’

  Bowie’s own fear of occult forces was only equalled by his fascination. His conflicted emotions were epitomised by his visit to Kenneth Anger, the film-maker and friend of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. Bowie brought Ava along with him for the meeting, but the pair could only stomach around twenty minutes of Anger’s presence. ‘I don’t remember exactly what happened,’ says Cherry, ‘I kind of blotted it out. But then David started [to] tell me stories about something that happened with Angie, that there was a ghost in the house when they lived in Beckenham.’ It seemed David saw ghosts wherever he looked; later he invited Ava to another house. ‘It’s Marilyn Monroe’s old house, but it’s haunted,’ he told her. ‘Another haunted house. I went there, but it never was the same between us. We made love after I left there but that was it.’ Their relationship would peter out a few weeks later.

  Around the same time – probably early June, although the date and details vary across different accounts – David phoned Cherry Vanilla at her apartment in New York. His voice was slurred, he skipped halfway through a sentence to the next one, and it was hard to know what he wanted. And then Cherry Vanilla realised that ‘He got it in his head that these girls were out to make a devil baby with him, to have him impregnate them. Nothing could convince him that this was fantasy on his part, ‘cos he was coked to the gills. So he called me at my apartment and he asked me if I knew any white witches?’

  Fortunately, Vanilla’s social circle did include one white witch – Wally Elmlark, a fellow contributor to Circus magazine. David took Wally’s phone number, and then, before he put the phone down, promised he’d produce Vanilla’s solo album.

  Like many such yarns, the details of David’s exorcism vary with the telling; many years later, Angie would describe how she was called in to perform a ceremony at David’s house on Doheny Drive, conducted on the phone with Wally Elmlark, who talked her through the ritual, like the control tower guiding in a novice pilot. Ava Cherry remembers David burning a bracelet he’d been given by a singer he’d been dating – another suspected witch. Other tales, including the one of David storing bodily fluids in his refrigerator, look to be myths that exaggerate a situation that was al
ready bizarre. When Cameron Crowe, Rolling Stone’s seventeen-year-old star writer, came to interview him at Lippman’s house, Bowie lit a black candle and informed him, ‘Don’t let me scare the pants off you … I’ve been getting a little trouble from the neighbours.’

  Paranoia, and ultimately psychosis, is a well-known side-effect of heavy cocaine use, usually found in combination with sleep deprivation; heavy users might well stay up for three days at a stretch, in which case, says Harry Shapiro of the Drugscope organisation, ‘heaven knows what you will see’. Beyond visual and auditory hallucinations, heavy users – the wealthy ones, on upwards of one gramme a day – often experience ‘ideas of reference’: delusions that others are plotting against them, or a narcissistic conviction that they are the focus of worldly, and other-worldy, events. This is the condition in which David spent most of the summer of 1975, a period compellingly sketched by Crowe in his article, published the following February.

  The ease with which Bowie flitted from one subject to another in the interview and – most striking – the moment when he pulls down a blind, momentarily convinced he’s seen a body fall from the sky, are disturbing, classic depictions of a rock-star encounter. Bowie was an old-hand at overawing – or, more accurately, bullshitting – journalists, and any rational person would conclude that much of his bizarre behaviour was motivated by his unerring instinct for good copy. But the crayoned marks on the blinds meant to ward off evils spirits were genuine – Glenn Hughes found them all over his house on his return from Europe. The fractured, disconnected state that Bowie displayed to Cameron Crowe was ‘for real’ too, according to Ava Cherry.