by Wendy Leigh
A few years later, Maggie attended a music festival to which she had an all-access pass, and decided to go backstage to see David. But when she got there, Coco announced, “I don’t know Maggie Abbott. I’ve never heard of her,” and refused to let her in to see David.
“That’s when I saw her as a really cold bitch. Maybe it was because some people don’t like to see people who know too much of them from the past. I’m sure she was in love with him. She definitely doted on him and she stayed the course,” Maggie said.
In contrast, when photographer Bob Gruen was hired to photograph David during Tin Machine in 1991, he dealt with Coco and reported afterward, “Coco was very pleasant. She’s very smart and a strong woman, a classic New York girl, very efficient and took care of business very well.”
“Coco was tough. She didn’t try to be personable, but just did her job and did it well,” The Man Who Fell to Earth producer Si Litvinoff said.
“Like the Japanese, David hated to say no,” Tony Zanetta commented. “So he needed Coco to be a buffer between him and the world. She has no problem getting rid of people and yet she is quite a lovely girl, and bright, with a softness about her.”
Throughout her forty years with David, in keeping with her modus operandi, perhaps learned from David, Coco has retained an enigmatic persona, and only once emerged out of the shadows, when, in 2001, she took part in a Q&A session on David’s website, and made a concerted attempt to defend herself against the barrage of criticism she had always faced. Commenting that when she began working for David she had not been prepared for the fact that she would be continually placed under a magnifying glass, she declared, “The only magnifying-glass aspect to being David’s assistant that I used to find difficult was the realization that everything one did was observed. I naively never even thought of that.
“Nor did I think to watch my back. I just did what I had been asked to do and what needed to be done. I found out the hard way that just as often what I did was either misinterpreted or misrepresented or just plain old slandered.
“My effort to get the job done was sometimes seen at best as overzealous or at worst as God only (and the tabloids) knows what! However, David’s friendship and understanding and the importance of what he tries to achieve helped me see fear and jealousy for what it is and not to take on other people’s stuff. Today I try and do the best that I can in a day, let go of the rest and have a pretty good life!”
Although Coco did her utmost to try and temper David’s drug addiction, it was an uphill struggle. Nonetheless, the Diamond Dogs tour would prove to be a resounding success. Chris Charlesworth, who was Melody Maker’s American editor at the time, saw the tour and said, “It was a completely different concept of a rock performance. David didn’t acknowledge the audience and the band was on the side. He didn’t introduce any songs, and the whole thing was a theatrical experience.”
Chris, who went on to be an RCA press officer and had social contact with David through the years, developed the highest respect for him during that time, saying of David, “He was polite and gracious and good company and women loved him because of that. He is extremely intelligent, knows his own destiny, and is an immensely talented performer and songwriter. He is very bright. Most rock stars are philistines; all they care about is rock. They don’t read or go to the theater, but David is very culturally aware.”
He was all that and more. But at the same time, as he himself has admitted, he also had an addictive personality. And in his cocaine-riddled years, his addictions often meant that he suspended his intelligence and lost grip on one of the most crucial elements in his life: his finances.
“He was this hugely popular figure and didn’t have the cash in the bank to show for it. I think John Lennon gave him some tips, and Mick Jagger may have put in a word, because he is a businessman,” Charlesworth said.
David had met John Lennon when they were introduced in Los Angeles, at a party thrown by Elizabeth Taylor. “We went on to a great relationship over the years,” David said of Lennon. “Terrific guy, very, very funny guy.”
Back in Manhattan, John called David and asked if he could bring May Pang, with whom he was then having a romantic interlude, and Linda and Paul McCartney over to see David. According to Ava Cherry, who was there, the meeting between David and Linda did not go well. “I also don’t think she liked David very much, and the feeling was mutual,” May Pang said.
At that point, David made the unwise move of playing tracks from Young Americans (the soul-influenced album that he would ultimately release in 1975) to his guests, not only once, but twice, whereupon Paul McCartney asked for another album to be put on instead.
David ignored him and started to play Young Americans again, but John Lennon intervened and gently asked him to play another album. May Pang diplomatically did what John asked, and David left the room.
That same evening, David called John and the two of them talked for quite a while. Afterward, John confided to May that David had been really hurt when he’d asked him to change the album, but that he had managed to mollify him to such an extent that he and David had become friends.
According to Tony Visconti, David’s friendship with John developed to such a degree that the three of them often spent a night on the town together. “We stayed up with John Lennon until 10:30 A.M. We did mountains of cocaine, it looked like the Matterhorn, obscenely big, and four open bottles of cognac,” Tony recalled, adding of David, “During the making of Young Americans, he was taking so much cocaine it would have killed a horse.”
John and David bonded over drugs, music, and a shared quirky British sense of humor. And when David made a speech to the Berklee College of Music’s class of 1999, he told of a time when he and John were in Hong Kong together: “During one of our expeditions, on the back street a kid comes running up to him and said, ‘Are you John Lennon?’ And he [John] said, ‘No, but I wish I had his money,’ ” David recalled, before going on, “Which I promptly stole for myself. [Imitating a fan] ‘Are you David Bowie?’ ‘No, but I wish I had his money.’ It’s brilliant. It was such a wonderful thing to say. The kid said, ‘Oh, sorry. Of course you aren’t,’ and ran off. I thought, This is the most effective device I’ve heard.
“I was back in New York a couple of months later in SoHo, downtown, and a voice pipes up in my ear, ‘Are you David Bowie?’ And I said, ‘No, but I wish I had his money.’ ‘You lying bastard. You wish you had my money.’ It was John Lennon,” David said.
In contrast, however, going back to January 1975, when David cowrote and recorded “Fame” (which would be added to Young Americans at the eleventh hour) with John, he played the first cut for Maggie Abbott, and she remembered, “The track was really great, John and him singing. When it was released, I noticed that John’s voice was less prominent in the final cut. I guess David just wanted to downplay John in favor of himself.”
Nonetheless, in September 1975, “Fame” was to become David’s first number one hit in the U.S.
From the time that David first met John, John warned him about Tony Defries.
Years later, looking back, David said, “I always thought there was somebody better at doing this kind of thing [managing me]. It wasn’t until Lennon pointed it out to me that I realized maybe the artist is as good at managing somebody as anybody else.
“It was John that sorted me out all the way down the line. He took me to one side, sat me down, and told me what it was all about, and I realized I was very naïve. I still thought you had to have somebody who dealt with these things called contracts, but now I have a better understanding of show-business business.”
Ever since he signed his deal with Tony Defries, he had refused to examine his contract closely. “None of us bothered to check our contracts in those days,” Dana Gillespie confirmed, but David, of course, was less likely to do so than any of them. His father had always managed every aspect of his finances, paying his bills, his taxes, his insurance, so that David had been eager to relinquish c
ontrol of his finances to another father figure, without checking his contract.
Now, though, in the midst of all his cocaine-fueled haze, toward the end of his Diamond Dogs tour David was forced to confront reality.
Continually short of money, he was now so broke that he had been forced to cancel the standing order by which the bank paid his mother £50 a month. Enraged, Peggy had called David’s number one cheerleader in the British press, Charles Shaar Murray of the august New Musical Express, and complained bitterly about David.
Labeling him “a terrible hypocrite,” Peggy lambasted David for neglecting her and the family. Outraged, David struck back and, as Peggy’s sister, his aunt Pat, remembered, “he phoned her and warned, ‘If you ever speak to the papers again you won’t see me, your grandson, or any of my money ever again.”
Chastened, Peggy would never talk to the press about David again, but her slurs against him left their mark. Although he would eventually reinstate her allowance, for most of the decade he restricted his contact with his mother to the minimum.
Nonetheless, after he shipped all his gold records and awards to her, Peggy erected a virtual shrine to him in her apartment in Beckenham and hoped against hope that he would contact her, but he rarely did.
By the time the Diamond Dogs tour hit Manhattan, the fact that David was truly short of money while Tony Defries was living the high life at his expense had hit him hard and he was ready to do battle with Defries.
Although Angie was spending much of her time in London with Zowie, now that she had been married to David for four years, she was intent on forging a career of her own as an actress. In quest of that, she traveled to America, where she hoped Defries would manage her to professional success. Treating her ambitions with disdain, Tony was unaware that Angie was making mental notes regarding his lavish lifestyle, in contrast to hers and David’s.
“I think Angie saw that Tony had a penthouse, a mansion in Connecticut, yet he was always on at her about spending too much, and I think she put a bug in David’s ear regarding Tony,” Cherry Vanilla said.
After Defries made the fatal mistake of berating Angie about the $100,000 she’d spent on airfare in the past year, David, ever the chivalrous husband when the crunch came, sprang to her defense, and on the second night of the Diamond Dogs show at Madison Square Garden summoned MainMan president Tony Zanetta to the Sherry-Netherland for a meeting. There, he proceeded to interrogate Zanetta about the terms of the contract, which he, David, had signed with Defries. Over and over, he insisted to Zanetta that he owned 50 percent of MainMan, and Zanetta over and over recited the litany: “You are to receive fifty percent of the profits after your expenses are deducted, of the monies generated by you and you alone. You own no portion of MainMan. MainMan belongs exclusively to Tony.”
In his drug-infused miasma of shock, David flatly refused to believe Zanetta. As if they were a mantra, he repeated the words “I own fifty percent of MainMan.”
But money wasn’t the sole bugbear between David and Tony Defries. “David felt Defries had abandoned him,” Tony Zanetta said, “They had been very close, but once Defries set foot in America he started to move on with me and Cherry. It became Defries’s world, and it no longer orbited around David so much anymore.
“David had only been a vehicle for Defries to get where he wanted to go. And that was to become head of a studio and rich. That’s what Tony wanted, but David expected him to revolve around him a hundred percent, like it had been in the beginning. But now he was no longer the most important client in Tony’s life and we were no longer a family.”
Finally, when dawn broke over Manhattan and David began to think more clearly, he was compelled to confront reality: Tony Defries, the man in whom he had put all his trust, at whose disposal he had put all his talents, had used and abused him, and, ultimately, had played Tom Parker to his Elvis Presley. It was too much for David to bear.
However, although he would spend the next few months attempting to extract himself from Defries’s web, he refused to be diverted from the only things that truly mattered to him: his music, his career, and his future.
TWELVE
FALLING
Throughout 1974, as David spent much of his time ensconced at the Sherry-Netherland in Manhattan, he encountered many of his rock contemporaries—not always with the best of results.
Author Steven Gaines, then ghosting Alice Cooper’s autobiography, remembers visiting David at the hotel: “David was kind of weird, reserved, and I couldn’t tell if he was stoned or not. He certainly wasn’t especially clean.
“He had a color Xerox machine in his suite, which, in those days hadn’t been around long, and he made each of us put our face forward onto the Xerox machine and told us to keep our eyes open while he made portraits of us. He did that to anybody who came up to the suite,” Steven said.
“I don’t think he and Alice really hit it off. Alice was really drunk at the time. I think Bowie was more into drugs. It was really odd.”
On December 12, 1974, David, Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, Coco, and the group Manhattan Transfer went to Reno Sweeney’s to see Dana Gillespie perform, and at one point in the evening, were joined by twenty-seven-year-old Wilhelmina model Winona Williams. Winona, who had already met David at a Melba Moore show at the Café Carlyle, invited him and the entire table to her Ninth Street house, where she lived with Shep Gordon, Alice Cooper’s manager, who was then out of town.
“David seemed very impressed by Dylan, and put on Young Americans, looking for some sort of endorsement from him, but Dylan wasn’t complimentary at all,” Winona remembered. “David was visibly upset, and I took him to my bedroom to try and calm him down. He put his head in my lap, rather like a child.
“When he started feeling better, he tried to get a little sensual, and his hands started moving. I told him that no, that was not going to happen, as this was my man’s house and doing anything with him there was out of the question, and David said, ‘Nobody’s ever had that much respect for me.’ ”
After he failed to persuade Winona to let him stay the night with her, he went back to the Sherry-Netherland, still devastated about Dylan, and later said, “I think he hates me.”
The following morning, he dispatched a limo to take Winona and her nine-year-old daughter, Mia, to him at the Sherry-Netherland.
“When I got there, Coco opened the door to the living room, where Zowie was alone, playing, and Mia joined him. Then Coco said, ‘David is in the bedroom,’ and led me in there. It was almost as if she were procuring me for him. She knew that he was interested in me, and she was fulfilling his need. So she left me alone with him in the bedroom.
“He was naked in bed, with newspapers and magazines all around him. He was drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice, and had some of his white powder around. I stayed talking to him for a couple of hours, and although the sexual desire was there, I was involved with Shep Gordon and was trying to be good,” Winona said.
“David and I saw each other a few more times, and although I knew he was seeing other women, when I was with him, everything was rumor and he made me feel as if I were the only woman in the world. He showed me the artwork for the Diamond Dogs album, which I thought was very bizarre, and also showed me a deck of tarot cards which he was designing.”
David had always been riveted by the tarot, by astrology and psychic phenomena. According to Bowie biographer Christopher Sandford, author of Bowie: Loving the Alien, “Bowie’s mother had taught him to be passionate about memory, and he shared with her the ability to experience various fragmentary moments of mental telepathy.”
So convinced was David of his own telepathic abilities that he once challenged a friend to concentrate on a five-figure number, which David would then repeat to him.
“After ten minutes, just when his friend suspected an anarchic hoax, Bowie opened his eyes and spoke in a high, reedy voice. Four of the sequence of five were correct,” Sandford said.
While he was in Manhattan at the
Sherry-Netherland, David made an attempt to forge a professional relationship with teen idol and Partridge Family star David Cassidy. He called him, suggesting that he produce an album for him, that he and various other people would write. Consequently Cassidy flew to Manhattan and met with David at his suite.
In his memoirs, Cassidy remembered of David Bowie, “I found that he lived in a very subterranean New York, an avant-garde kind of world of transsexuals and transvestites. It was like a carnival at his place. There were some people in other rooms doing mime. He had a whole bunch of people around him who, I guess, made life interesting for him, including some whom I couldn’t tell the gender of—and perhaps they weren’t sure either. Bowie just enjoyed feeling part of this very hip, inside, New York, artistic scene. To me it held no fascination at all. It felt false and posed.
“We were different ends of the spectrum, two guys sitting by history—one’s success in the pop music field largely behind him, the other’s largely in front of him. He was very enthusiastic over the next album he had coming out [Diamond Dogs] and all of the touring he would be doing to promote it.”
To Cassidy, the idea of touring was anathema, and there was no way he was about to make the album that David had suggested and then promote it on tour. But according to Cassidy, David felt very differently. “He really craved all of the mass adulation that I’d had enough of. My own take on him was: I don’t want to be where you’re headed. Been there. Done it. Thanks.
“He played me a couple of songs that he’d written, and that Lou Reed had written, for the album he wanted me to do. I just didn’t think they were interesting enough,” Cassidy said.