by Wendy Leigh
As Angie told me during an interview for my book Speaking Frankly, part of which took place at the Oakley Street house that she then still shared with David, “I spend my happiest and best hours with my rorting team. Rorting means screwing chicks. There’s four or five guys and me and all we do is pick up chicks and see who can poke them first.
“We’ve been doing this for many years: You have to pick a chick up and she has to agree to be fucked with no one leaving the room—not in private. She has to understand that from the off—it’s a communal effort—like living theatre. She doesn’t have to be fucked by more than the one person she fancies. What she can’t do is lay down the conditions of how, when, or where. And everybody watches.”
Despite all the steamy sexual goings-on at Haddon Hall, David, Mick, and bassist/producer Tony Visconti still managed to find time to rehearse David’s The Man Who Sold the World, a hard rock and heavy metal album, there.
In the meantime, the Hype made its debut at the Roundhouse, the band dressed in comic-strip superhero silver suits, and David in silver lamé and a bluish-silver cloak, his hair dyed silver and blue—all a British prefiguring of the Village People. The audience that night (with the exception of Marc Bolan, who was practically the only person to applaud) was not prepared for David’s glam/glitter rock. Undeterred, a year later, thanks to David’s powers of persuasion, David and his band would all wear makeup onstage.
Telling Ronno and the other band members that they had looked a little green onstage and that maybe makeup would make them look more natural, David sealed the deal when, after the show, girls flocked to the band, obviously attracted to them by their sparkly makeup and androgynous images.
The Man Who Sold the World was recorded at Trident and Advision Studios at the end of April, with Woody Woodmansey replacing John Cambridge, and Mick Ronson’s iconic guitar sound perhaps marking the birth of heavy metal. However, by now Tony Defries was calling the shots. Taking David aside, he made it clear to him that it was David Bowie he was representing, and that the band, the Hype, was irrelevant. The Hype was disbanded at the start of 1971, to be replaced by Ziggy Stardust’s Spiders from Mars (bass player Trevor Bolder, Woody Woodmansey on drums, and Mick Ronson on guitar) in July of the same year.
The cover of the album of The Man Who Sold the World shockingly—for the times—featured David with long, flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair, reclining on a chaise longue in Haddon Hall, wearing a dress designed by London’s Michael Fish. “I’m certainly not embarrassed by it or fed up with it or ashamed of it, because it [wearing a dress] was very much me,” David asserted. Then, turning his thoughts to the intricacies of fashion design, he said, “The dresses were made for me. They didn’t have big boobs or anything like that. They were men’s dresses. Sort of a medieval type of thing. I thought they were great.”
When the unsuspecting American executives at Mercury Records first set eyes on the cover, they were outraged, and immediately removed the cover picture from the sleeve of the U.S. edition of the album. Hearing the news, David erupted in anger, screaming all over Haddon Hall that the executives were philistines and fascists, to no avail.
So that while the picture of him in a dress remained on the cover of the UK album, Mercury insisted that David commission a new photograph for the American album cover. Consequently, he asked Mike Weller, an artist friend who had designed posters for the Arts Lab, to come up with an alternative cover photograph. In an eerie twist of fate, Mike’s cover design featured a sketch of a cowboy standing in front of the Cane Hill asylum, in Coulsdon, Surrey—the very same asylum where David’s half brother, Terry, was then locked away.
Strangely enough, Mike Weller’s cover concept was born out of his visit to a friend who was in Cane Hill, and he knew nothing about David’s brother being there, either. But though David might have been shocked by the coincidence, he saw that the cover reflected the somewhat dark lyrics of the album and, in particular, of the song “The Width of a Circle,” and so approved the use of the Cane Hill sketch on the cover.
In January of 1971, Tony Defries brought publicist Dai Davies on board, and one of his first jobs was to travel with David to Manchester, where David was scheduled to mime “Holy Holy,” a glam rock/hard rock song he’d written, on Granada TV.
“During the drive, David made it clear that he had studied what makes people stars, and that he knew all about the Hollywood star machine of the interwar years. Most people involved in the rock industry tended not to want to know all about that,” Dai said. “He told me he had read that if two people walk up to a door, one of them leans forward and opens the door for the other one, but stars stall for a second or two and then the other person will open the door for them.
“He explained that if you want to be perceived as a star, you start off with little bits of behavior like that, not opening the door yourself, waiting for someone else to do that. After reading that, I doubt that David ever opened the door for himself again.”
That spring, David would have the opportunity to test out his theories regarding stardom, when he made his first trip to America. At the time, The Man Who Sold the World, which in retrospect marks the birth of glam rock, didn’t afford David the big success in Britain for which he’d been working for so long. However, when the record was released in America, Mercury deemed it important enough to fund a promotional radio tour of the country for David, thus facilitating his first visit to the United States and granting him the opportunity to conquer the land of his dreams at last.
The trip began with four days in Manhattan, where David stayed at the Holiday Inn, visited Times Square record shops searching for records that were unavailable in England, and afterward explored the Museum of Modern Art. Next, there were visits to a folk club, a short flight to Detroit, then to Chicago. Then a flight back to Detroit again, then another flight to Michigan—in those early days, David hadn’t yet developed his fear of flying.
That fear has often been disparaged by a segment of the media who suspected that David’s fear of flying might have been a Tony Defries production, created specifically because Elvis, too, had a fear of flying, and Tony felt that if David claimed to have the identical fear, that would enhance his mythology.
However, Woody Woodmansey, his Ziggy Stardust drummer, remembered, “We went on holiday to Cyprus and the plane got hit by lightning. He went white and fainted.”
Much later on, pianist Sean Mayes, who played on the Isolar tour, witnessed David’s reaction to flying and reported it in his book, We Can Be Heroes: Life on Tour with David Bowie. His description of David’s fear of flying paints it as uncontrived and sincere.
“On the plane I sat next to David and Coco, who was clutching a huge, fluffy grey elephant. We chatted a bit and the plane didn’t move. Then they announced a delay—they were running off fuel while they changed one of the engines,” Sean said.
“ ‘Oh God,’ David muttered, ‘that means the pilot’s drunk and they’re feeding him black coffee.’ As we waited, he and Coco got more and more nervous. I think David was on the point of leaving the plane when they told us they were ready—‘fasten seatbelts and extinguish cigarettes.’
“David was rigid, his hand whitely gripping the arms of his seat. I wanted to hold him tight for comfort, but I just put my hand on his arm and felt nearly as tense as he did as the plane threw itself into the clouds.”
In the middle of February 1971, still in the throes of his radio tour of America, David flew to Houston, and from there to San Francisco, where he was met at the airport by Rolling Stone reporter John Mendelsohn, who had flown there to interview him.
Afterward, Mendelsohn remembered, “The vision that got off the plane bore little resemblance to the one on the album covers. This one had long flowing hair, was wearing a dress and carrying a purse. At the baggage claim, he batted his eyelashes, and I reflexively offered to carry his heavy, wheel-less trunk for him.”
David had quickly realized that his Little Lord Fauntleroy charm and his pristi
ne English manners would smooth the path for him in America, and he didn’t hesitate to use them to his advantage. According to John, when David was introduced to a certain groupie, “he asked with a gleam in his eye (the blue one, as I recall, but very possibly the brown), if she fancied a guitar lesson. I found that wonderfully debonair.”
And so, it would transpire, would countless other groupies, male and female, all over America. One of them, Queenie, later said of him, “David Bowie wears tons of makeup. He’s got a whole suitcase full of makeup. He put some on in front of me and he even painted my toenails blue. David is the sexiest one around. Like you’ll walk into a room and he’ll stare right into your eyes. And he’ll go, ‘Hello,’ and you’re at his mercy. I can’t help it. That’s just the way he is.”
By the time David landed in L.A., he was already infused by excitement regarding a character he was in the throes of creating, and brought with him some Holiday Inn stationery, on which he had begun to scribble some lyrics about a rock star named Ziggy Stardust. When Ziggy was finally unleashed on the world, David, mindful as always of the publicity value creating an aura of mystery, didn’t reveal the character’s genesis—it was only in 2007 that he finally did.
Claiming that he had based Ziggy on C-list rock star Vince Taylor, a failed musician who once came out onstage and swore that he was Jesus Christ, David said, “I met him a few times in the midsixties, and I went to a few parties with him. He was out of his gourd. Totally flipped. The guy was not playing with a full deck at all.”
David’s impromptu account of his inspiration for Ziggy would ultimately be challenged, with biographer Peter Gillman claiming that Ziggy was either a composite of the U.S. performer the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Iggy Pop, or, more intriguingly, that David had actually based Ziggy on himself.
“Look at how the lyrics describe him. ‘Loaded,’ ‘Well hung,’ ‘God given ass.’ He was talking about himself,” Gillman said.
Gillman’s analysis may well be the correct one. However, David did let slip that during the midsixties he had seen Vince Taylor open a map on the pavement of a street, and kneel down and examine the map with a magnifying glass so as to point out the sites where UFOs were going to land. Given that David was fascinated by UFOs at that stage in his life, and that the street that he named was close to the Roebuck pub in London’s Tottenham Court Road, where he and the Lower Third regularly rehearsed, it is highly likely that he did meet him and that Vince made up a major element of the kaleidoscope that was Ziggy Stardust.
Squired around town by eccentric DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, who also worked for Mercury, David spent two days and two nights in L.A. making the rounds of radio interviews, clubs, and parties. At a party in honor of Andy Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, David, sporting a Michael Fish dress, held court. Record producer Kim Fowley, whose “Alley Oop” (which he produced while still in high school) was one of David’s self-confessed favorite musical influences, observed his impact on the room.
“That night, David looked like Lauren Bacall, but with Noel Coward zest. Rudolph Valentino meets Ronald Coleman. He had humor, he had charm, and all night channeled Lionel Bart and Anthony Newley,” Kim Fowley remembered. “And he was one of the best interrogators I’ve ever met: he got you to talk about yourself so that you got to say, ‘I’m doing this,’ ‘I’m doing that,’ and then he could use it afterwards.”
In the course of the conversation, David confided to Kim that he was interested in Brian Eno of Roxy Music, and in the premise of Bryan Ferry. Roxy Music, the band formed in 1971 by lead singer and main songwriter Bryan Ferry, was made up of bassist Graham Simpson, guitarist Phil Manzanera, saxophonist Andy Mackay, drummer Paul Thomson and, of course, Eno, who played the synthesizer for the band.
That David was interested in Bryan Ferry was hardly surprising, as, like him, Ferry was one of the few British musicians in the rock scene who exuded the style and elegance of the past. A working-class boy from Newcastle, in the industrial north of England, Ferry was handsome, debonair, and, for a time, appeared to rival David in terms of class, style, and sophistication.
Brian Eno, however, would excite David’s interest even more. A composer, producer, singer, and visual artist, Eno was at the forefront of ambient music—a new wave of music that emphasized tone and atmosphere over rhythm and structure. With his serious background in art (having studied at art colleges in England), and his anarchic, innovative approach to music, Eno was well matched to David, and David instinctively knew it.
Flying back from L.A. to New York in March, David learned that the Velvet Underground were doing a gig at Manhattan’s Electric Circus. He decided to go, and as only a hundred seats had been sold, he managed to get one in the front row, where he sang along to all the songs, hoping to impress Lou Reed with his knowledge of the lyrics.
Afterward, given that the Velvet Underground were not famous enough to command security, David was easily able to sneak backstage and knock on their dressing-room door, asking to speak to Lou. Within moments, Lou had slipped out, and he and David were sitting on a bench in the club, chatting. Enthralled, David informed Lou that he was his only fan in London and that he had owned a copy of the Velvet Underground record before it was even released in America. Then he plied Lou with questions about his lyrics and the rationale behind his musical choices. They chatted for more than fifteen minutes, and afterward, as David put it years later, “you float off into the night, a fan whose dream came true.”
Then, the next morning, a new friend in the music business informed David that Lou hadn’t been with the band for a while and that his replacement, Doug Yule, looked exactly like him. In David’s own words, he was “gutted.”
Home at Haddon Hall again, David began working obsessively on a new album, his fourth, Hunky Dory, which he would start recording in April at Trident, and which included “Changes,” “Oh You Pretty Things,” and “Life on Mars?” three of his most iconic compositions. With Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder, who replaced Tony Visconti on bass, Hunky Dory marked the first album featuring the group of musicians that would become Ziggy Stardust’s Spiders from Mars.
While working on the album, David was overcome with the certainty that now, at last, he had sown the seeds of his superstardom, and although Hunky Dory wouldn’t be released for another eight months, he already had intimations of the artistic triumph that lay ahead of him. George Underwood, his old school friend, was in the studio when David recorded “Life on Mars?” and observed afterward that when David had finished recording the song, he burst out crying.
For once, however, his career wasn’t his entire focus: On May 30, 1971, his son was born at Bromley Hospital, weighing just eight pounds, eight ounces. David had always longed for a boy, and when he first set eyes on the baby, he was overwhelmed. “It was the first and only time I saw David cry,” Angie remembered.
The baby was christened Duncan Zowie (after the Greek word for “life”) Haywood Jones. And, as Angie later recalled, his birth marked the happiest day of her life, and of David’s. However, just two weeks later, she was forced to admit that she was having trouble relating to her newborn son. “Poor little thing, he cried all the time. I had difficulty bonding. You feel your freedom has been taken away from you, totally and utterly,” she said. Instead of working through her feelings, she chose to run away and, probably suffering from postpartum depression, a condition not fully understood in those days, she packed her bags and departed for a vacation in Italy with Dana Gillespie.
“David would call every day, and in the end persuaded her to come back early,” Dana said, adding, “Which was unusual because he wasn’t normally prone to emotion.”
Dana’s supposition that David was missing Angie and longed for her to be by his side, couldn’t have been more wrong. Now that he was a father, he had suddenly unearthed the Victorian in himself, a deep vein of conventionality, and he was absolutely livid that Angie had abandoned his son, and, by extension, him. Their marriage would never be
the same again, and, in retrospect, Angie understood that while she had gained a son, she had also lost her husband.
However, once Angie returned from Italy, neither she nor David allowed the birth of Zowie or their new roles as parents to inhibit their propensity toward sexual adventuring. When David wasn’t playing a gig or working on Ziggy, he and Angie launched themselves on the Sombrero Club, a gay dance club in a basement in the Kensington area of London, and conquered as many boys and girls as possible, bringing some of them home to Haddon Hall for more fun and sex.
In particular, David and Angie were both captivated by part-time rent boy turned fashion designer Freddie Burretti, and by his coterie of fellow rent boys, call girls, and hip, cool people. One night, David became enthralled by a young Spanish boy and brought him home to Haddon Hall, where he and Angie cavorted together with the boy. But the night, and the boy, belonged more to David than to Angie, and in the morning she woke up disillusioned.
Meanwhile, Dana was on hand to take part in some of David and Angie’s adventures and to record many of the proceedings on video. “I’ve got a short freeze-frame film sequence of things we did together in every aspect, but maybe they are not the right things to talk about,” she said.
Yet as discreet about the contents of the films as Dana still is, at the same time, she still revealed that once David came home brandishing a leather mask he’d bought from a sex shop, and that she took a photograph of him wearing it, which was subsequently published in Tony Zanetta’s biography of David, Stardust.
“He’s naked, and I know it is him,” she said, “His body is strangely hippy. For someone with such a thin top half, he had big hips.”
Yet for all the sexual activity swirling around him, when he was working, David was capable of concentrating to the exclusion of all else.