by Wendy Leigh
Freddie Burretti and his girlfriend Daniella moved into the basement, and later, when Corinne “Coco” Schwab became David’s personal assistant, she commandeered the top floor as her domain. Zowie, of course, also lived at the house, staying up to all hours, according to one of the Oakley Street guests. By now, David and Angie’s marriage had degenerated into verbal battles, and Zowie would cower in the corner and burst into tears when they had one of their increasingly frequent screaming matches.
On other nights, both Angie and David were distracted by the sexual circus at which they were ringmistress and ringmaster, respectively. One of the biggest stars of Oakley Street excesses, literally and figuratively, was London gangster John Bindon, who had appeared in Performance with Mick Jagger and who had holidayed in Mustique, where he had taken the fancy of Britain’s Princess Margaret. Above all, Bindon was known for his overriding air of menace and his major asset, a gargantuan endowment that he used to display with five beer mugs hanging from it to emphasize both its length and its girth.
Bindon’s girlfriend for many years, model and socialite Vicki Hodge, said, “Angie and David used to have the most amazing orgies at Oakley Street. Everybody fucked everybody in the Pit. Mick Jagger used to come there and be involved with sexual things. Everybody was so sexually liberated. John said that David was totally nice and sweet, and very sexually aware. He told me that David watched while he had sex with Angie.”
John Bindon’s biographer Wensley Clarkson confirmed Vicki’s story, writing that “Bindon was allowed by David Bowie to make love to his wife while Mick Jagger was nearby.”
Clarkson also recalled that Bindon had told him that Angie arranged for him to have sex with five of her female friends on one afternoon. “He became like the hired stud,” a source confided to Clarkson.
Soon after, Bindon was promoted to bodyguard for the end of the Ziggy Stardust tour in America. But although Bindon was favored and trusted by David, his sojourn as bodyguard on the tour didn’t always run smoothly. When Bob Dylan arrived at the show, Bindon, then working security, assumed Dylan was a hobo and mistakenly tried to eject him from David’s show.
Other than his brief stint as David’s bodyguard, John was primarily around for fun and sexual pleasure. “John enjoyed all the perks of being a huge Cockney stud and a sexual boy toy,” Vicki Hodge said, adding, “Angie and David’s marriage was totally free and open, and I think that because they were doing so many drugs, they could do anything they wanted.”
As far back as his Lower Third days, David had toyed with drugs, and in 1976, he confided to Cameron Crowe in a Rolling Stone interview, “I never got into acid either. I did it three or four times and it was colorful, but my own imagination was already richer. I never got into grass at all. Hash for a time, but never grass.
“I guess drugs have been a part of my life for the past ten years, but never anything very heavy. . . . I’ve had short flirtations with smack and things, but it was only for the mystery and the enigma. I like fast drugs.”
He certainly did, and cocaine is clearly the fastest drug of them all, and it had begun to be a part of his life. But it was only to dominate his life utterly and completely the following year.
ELEVEN
YOUNG AMERICAN
On April 11, 1974, David disembarked from the SS France in Manhattan and then checked in to the Sherry-Netherland, which, courtesy of MainMan, he would make his New York base for the entire year, in between stops on the U.S. Diamond Dogs tour, a glittering theatrical extravaganza that was performed on a dizzyingly dramatic re-creation of a city, David’s creation “Hunger City.”
This, the next stage in David’s conquest of America, was a vast enterprise, with the set weighing six tons and composed of more than twenty thousand moving parts. The U.S. Diamond Dogs tour lasted from mid-June to September, when it was simplified and renamed the Soul tour, continuing till December 1, 1974.
Meanwhile, David tasted every aspect of stardom, American-style. Dana Gillespie, whom Tony Defries signed to MainMan as well, recalled, “Tony fired David up to conquer America, and I used to be flown to America first class to join Angie and David at the Sherry-Netherland for the weekend, at MainMan’s expense. David had a huge grand piano in the suite, which he played at the wrong hours, and everybody did so much coke that you fell asleep wherever you could.
“David would be strutting around on the guitar and Mick Jagger and I would be playing duets, and then he and David would be mincing about.
“Angie and David were like my family, and MainMan was massive and over-the-top and paying for us to fly wherever we wanted on first-class tickets, and I ended up staying at the Sherry-Netherland with Angie and David for six months,” Dana said.
An American fashion model and singer who graced the cover of Playboy in 1974, Bebe Buell also hung out with Angie, David, and Mick Jagger at the Sherry-Netherland. “Mick was worried because David was doing so much cocaine that he would hallucinate,” Bebe remembered. “One time we were in David’s suite in the Sherry-Netherland hotel and he asked us if we could see the angels flying outside the window. He made us go and look. ‘Don’t you see them?’ he said. ‘They’re flying around.’ ”
According to Bebe, despite David’s burgeoning drug addiction, Mick still retained respect for him, “He didn’t like to mock David, because he still liked to have fun with him,” she said. “They used to love to pick up beautiful black girls and take them back to the hotel and have mad sex with them. . . . Mick and Bowie were mates. They would act very androgynous with each other.”
While David was living a hedonistic life in Manhattan, all the time assuming that Tony Defries was footing the bills, back in London, Ken Pitt was dismayed, and later told George Tremlett, “David’s made a great mistake. He’s very naïve . . . and he’s also trusting, innocent, and easily led. This man Defries is a shyster. He has no right to pretend to be a lawyer. . . . It’s all going to end in tears.”
For now, though, Defries and David were riding high. Ironically, by design, it was Defries who was riding highest of the two of them. Apart from having a penthouse on the Upper East Side, a duplex on East Fifty-eighth Street, a loft on the West Side, and an apartment at the Sherry-Netherland, he also rented a twenty-room fully staffed Greenwich, Connecticut, estate; a chauffeur-driven customized brown Cadillac with a custom cream leather interior, which had been perforated so that he wouldn’t get overheated during the summer; and a fourteen-room Park Avenue office, where his staff of twenty-six worked.
In short, Tony Defries was acting as if he, not David, were the star. Moreover, every single MainMan bill was charged to the account of David Bowie, only David didn’t realize it at the time.
Set on conquering America with his Diamond Dogs album and tour, David had also embarked on a new relationship, with Ava Cherry, a blond black singer whom, on David’s suggestion, Tony had signed to MainMan. For a time, Ava, David, and Angie existed in a netherworld of ménage à trois and faux friendship. Then Angie started to crack under the pressure of sharing David with Ava on a permanent basis.
Down the line, Ava, too, would suffer virulent jealousy over David’s infidelity to her. “He was fascinated by black people. Black girls, any girls he would sleep with when I was with him were black. . . . I couldn’t stop him. I used to cry but he would always say ‘You can’t fence me in.’ I was very faithful, and he wanted me to be. It was the old double standard: He didn’t have to be, but I had to be. He was a male chauvinist—but I liked it,” Ava said.
“Ava was a sweet girl,” Tony Zanetta recalled, “but if David really fancied someone, he would send Ava back to her own room. She would go, because she was very young and she adored him.”
Back in England, David and Angie’s ménage à trois with Ava suddenly proved to be unworkable because of Angie’s jealousy, so he arranged for Ava to live in an apartment just a few yards away from Oakley Street, and for her to have singing and dancing lessons, a new wardrobe of clothes, and a weekly allowance, all
funded by MainMan, or rather—although he still didn’t know it—himself.
Together, he and Ava saw Frank Sinatra perform in Las Vegas, and afterward, they waited backstage to see him, not just as fans, but because it had been bruited about that David was in the running to play Sinatra in a biopic.
David had always been fascinated by Sinatra, and in the early days of his career had written English lyrics for Claude François’s song “Comme d’habitude,” but was rejected, and Paul Anka went on to write the English lyrics for the song that became “My Way.” But if David thought that Sinatra was interested in having him play him in a movie of his life, he was due for a disappointment. Sinatra refused to see him, sending word that “no English fag” was going to play him in a movie.
Meanwhile, disenchanted with Cherry Vanilla as his PR and office manager during the mixing of the Diamond Dogs album, David demanded that she be replaced. Enter Corinne Schwab, henceforth known as “Coco.”
Today, Coco is as much a woman of mystery as David is a man of mystery, but in those early years, she was a shy, wide-eyed, fresh-faced ingénue, who was the daughter of Eric Schwab, a distinguished French war photographer, and his wife, whom he first met when she was working for French Allied Forces radio. Consequently, Coco’s family background, as well as the fact that she’d grown up partly in Haiti, India, and Mexico because of her father’s profession, lent an air of intellectual sophistication to her that must have appealed to David.
“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.
MainMan’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 s
ome 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.