by Wendy Leigh
Filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth began in Lake Fenton, New Mexico, in July 1975, and over the six weeks of filming, David, who had refused the offer of a hotel room during the shoot, lived in a Winnebago trailer. He was still frighteningly thin, and it was obvious that he was still snorting cocaine on a large scale.
From the first, David and Nic Roeg got on extremely well, and afterward David said, “I’m ever so slow in forming human relationships. I don’t really have a circle of friends unless you consider Nic a circle.”
Nic was extremely impressed by David’s performance. “What’s extraordinary about David, as an artist he can’t be classified,” Nic said. “He can’t be singled out, ‘Ah that is Bowie,’ because that’s the way he always does that. He never appears the same way twice.
“And he’s got fantastic concentration and he’s also got an amazing kind of self-discipline. He seemed the perfect person for this.”
Nic, who had directed Mick Jagger in Performance, later compared him to David, saying that they were “very similar, very different . . . but they’re very similar in terms of their absolute concentration on the character they’re playing. They’re not just a singer with a band. Their whole magnetism comes out in acting.”
David’s female costar, Candy Clark, was initially apprehensive about working with him, but was relieved to find that he wasn’t spoiled and that he was totally involved in the movie. Unfortunately for Angie, although Candy was Nic Roeg’s unofficial girlfriend at the time, she seemed to be making a play for David, as well.
Initially, Angie had invited Candy and Nic to dinner at the home she and David were renting in L.A. so that they could read through the script with him.
“While I was playing housekeeper and serving wine, she [Candy] attacked my husband in my own house and was mauling him like a tiger,” Angie said, mindful that David would also be filming love scenes with Candy.
And although Candy was to enthuse of David, “His skin does reflect the light so beautifully. He does look like he’s from another planet,” producer Si Litvinoff was adamant that there was no romance between her and David. “She was always disappearing with Nic Roeg and didn’t spend any offscreen time with David,” recalled Si.
At the same time, on one occasion when David was too sick to film, Candy stepped in, and, wearing a big hat that overshadowed her face, played his part instead. May Routh, who designed the costumes for the movie, said that David was so thin that in some scenes he had to wear boys’ clothes.
“He usually stayed up very late at night composing the score,” Si said, although ultimately that score never survived, other than the track ‘Subterranean,’ ” which David released on his subsequent album, Low. “He was wonderful in the part. He told me he wasn’t going to do any drugs.
“There was one incident on the set when Rip Torn came in to do a shoot with David. Rip was very wound up. So I had to get some tequila for Rip and I got some NoDoz energy pills for David and, as he didn’t like to take pills, I ground them up and he snorted the powder,” Si said. “I saw David a lot when he wasn’t shooting. I had custody of my two young sons for the summer and he had Zowie with him. Zowie was adorable, with very long hair.”
At one point on location, David decided that he wanted to do some sculptures, and within a day, Coco had assembled all the necessary materials for him. “He was happy as a bunny,” May Routh remembered.
David also spent much of his time between takes reading the biography of silent screen star Buster Keaton, whom he was considering playing in a biopic. Around the same time, he was also having an affair with beautiful black costume designer and model Ola Hudson, whose son, Saul, would grow up to become Slash of Guns N’ Roses.
Slash was eight years old when he walked into a room in his home, only to find David there with his mother, stark naked. “He was always over. They had a lot of stuff going on, but my perspective was limited. Then it turned into some sort of mysterious romance that went on for a while after that,” Slash remembered, adding, “Looking back at it now, it might not have been that big of a deal, but at the time, it was like watching an alien land in your backyard.”
During his affair with Ola, David would often come by her house, bringing Angie and Zowie with him, as well.
“It seemed entirely natural for Bowie to bring his wife and son to the home of his lover so that we might all hang out. At the time, my mother practiced the same form of Transcendental Meditation that David did. They chanted before the shrine she maintained in the bedroom,” Saul said.
Aware that, far from wanting to mother Zowie, Angie was much more intent on her own ambitions and her lovers, including bass player Scott Richardson, who was into drugs, and, afterward, actor Roy Martin, David hadn’t really played a part in Zowie’s life until then. “I was around so infrequently I can’t imagine what an abyss that has caused,” he said later, admitting, “My son’s seen me through some of the most awful depressing times when I was really in absolute abject agony over my emotional state, the heights of my drinking and drug-doing. He’s seen the lot.”
Fortunately, the boy had primarily been in the care of Scottish nanny. Marion Skene, and, as Angie later admitted, “David and I were away doing drugs, at first together and then later apart. Marion effectively became Zowie’s mother.”
“I’ve always considered her as my mum,” Zowie said years later, adding, “so I never felt I was missing out in any way.”
Still dedicated to having sex with as many partners as possible, David compelled Ava to endure his multiple affairs, and even to listen when he rated the prowess of his sexual partners. Worse still, he even went so far as to give her details about his fling with one of The Three Degrees.
After the shoot was over, David came out to Si Litvinoff’s house in Malibu a couple of times. “He played music, we had dinner, and he didn’t drink anything. He was always with a beautiful black girl, but not Ava Cherry anymore,” Si noted.
During filming, Angie had paid a short visit to the location, but she left swiftly as it was finally clear to her their marriage had disintegrated almost beyond repair. And the writing was even more firmly on the wall, when, the following year, David squired Bianca Jagger (now separated from Mick) to a birthday party at the Manhattan disco Hurrah and photographers snapped them together, whereupon all hell broke loose with Angie.
David, of course, was well aware that by taking Bianca to such a public venue, it was inevitable that they would be photographed together. Beforehand, in a rare manifestation of conscience regarding his double-dealing with women, David made somewhat of a show of worrying about the feelings of the other women in his life, former girlfriends though they might be, and, for once, demonstrated a modicum of concern that they might suffer pangs of jealousy upon seeing him with Bianca.
On the night of the party, as Coco confided to Sean Mayes, “He was rather shy about coming here tonight as several of his exgirlfriends were here. But you should have seen their faces when we walked in!” she went on with some relish.
“David had walked in with Mrs. Jagger. And we missed it!” Mayes added.
For Angie, the blow of learning that David was dating Bianca was mortal, although he had also had a brief dalliance with Marianne Faithfull. He and Marianne had first met in 1964, during the Manish Boys’ tour, when they had performed on the same bill. Nothing had happened between them then, primarily because Marianne was enthralled with Gene Pitney, who was on the same tour with her.
Later on, David hired Marianne to sing on his 1980 Floor Show, which, confusingly enough, was actually recorded in October 1973, for the NBC TV show The Midnight Special, and invited her to the Rolling Stones’ Wembley concert. But conscious that being seen in public with David would give the impression that they were having an affair (which they weren’t at the time), she went to the concert with his entourage and not with him.
However, with her boyfriend, antiques dealer Oliver Musker, Marianne eventually began to spend a lot of time with Angie and Da
vid and was drawn into their sexual web.
In her memoirs, she recalled, “One night, we were all a bit drunk at David’s house and David began coming on to me. We went into the corridor. I unzipped his trousers. I was trying to give him a blow job, but David was scared to death of Oliver. Oliver does have this Gestapo officer vibe to him. Absolutely terrified of Oliver David was, and so he couldn’t keep it up.”
Angie, however, told another story and in her second autobiography, Backstage Passes, wrote of Marianne at Oakley Street “playing naughty with David, Ava, or Amanda or some combination thereof.”
Marianne was wild and untrammeled, and later on seduced Angie, but in Angie’s eyes that very wildness made Marianne less of a threat to her. But Bianca Jagger, however, cold, remote, elegant, was Mrs. Mick Jagger and to Angie appeared to be a much more serious threat to her marriage.
Worse still for Angie, after Cannes, Bianca and David, who had Zowie with him at the time, vacationed together on the Spanish Riviera and afterward were the guests of Prince Hohenlohe at his exclusive Marbella Club. Angie did her utmost to ignore David’s burgeoning romance with Bianca and instead carried on carousing at Oakley Street, taking drugs.
At the time, David was in the throes of acting out his roles as the Thin White Duke, his final stage persona after Ziggy Stardust, and that of Aladdin Insane, a strange hybrid of a thirties cabaret star and a Rat Packer, which was clearly born out of David’s cocaine paranoia. Suitably pale and emaciated, in his guise of Thin White Duke, David would perform in a foppish white shirt, black waistcoat, and trousers, and exude a combination of icy malaise and lounge-lizard cynicism. With a high degree of self-hatred not unrelated to his mega–drug use, he would label his Thin White Duke “a very Aryan fascist type. A would-be romantic with no emotions at all.”
David had a brief fling with Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, whose description of her moments with David in her book, Be My Baby, paints a snapshot of his life in Manhattan during his Thin White Duke years. At a reception after the Isolar tour (aka the Thin White Duke tour, which was in support of the album Station to Station, which began in February 1976 and ended in May of the same year) at Madison Square Garden, with a show that Ronnie attended with May Pang, David sent one of his gofers to invite Ronnie to join him at dinner. Afterward, he invited her back to his suite at the Plaza. There, Ronnie was faced with a room full of people, and a coffee table covered in cocaine. Within minutes, she was summoned into David’s vast bedroom, where she found him sitting on the floor, naked, and surrounded by music cassettes.
“One look at this guy and I could see how excited he was to see me. Very . . . Sure enough, we made love right there on the floor, and we didn’t even bother to kick the cassettes out of the way,” Ronnie said.
Afterward, they lay in bed drinking cognac, but the noise from outside the suite was so loud that Ronnie put on her clothes and informed David that she was going home. “Then he asked if he could come along. He said he could do with a little peace and quiet himself, but I got the feeling that wasn’t all he wanted,” Ronnie said.
After David’s limousine ferried them to her apartment on York Avenue, they had just started making love when they heard water running in the kitchen. In shock, Ronnie realized that it was her mother, who had the key to the apartment and must have come by unexpectedly.
“ ‘Your mother?’ Bowie asked. He looked at me like I was joking. But when he saw that I wasn’t, he started laughing out loud. ‘Your mother?’ he said, still chuckling. ‘Oh, Ronnie. That’s so quaint,’ ” Ronnie remembered him saying.
His dalliance with Ronnie was lighthearted, but away from that, his drug taking had increased and his grip on his own sanity was clearly weakening considerably. Looking back, he admitted, “I never fully kicked until the mid-eighties. I’ve an addictive personality, and it took hold of my life. I’m ambivalent about it today. It was an extraordinary thing to have to go through. I certainly wouldn’t want to go through it again, but I’m sort of glad I did.”
Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe interviewed him at various stages at the height of his addiction and described the scene: “[David] pulled down the shades at one point to reveal strange symbols on the curtains of his bedroom and, for a time, he saved his urine in bottles.
“There was an odd belief system at play—a kind of white magic he was exploring,” Crowe wrote.
When David attempted to read Crowe’s article thirty years later, he found that he couldn’t finish it. “It was probably one of the worst periods of my life,” he said. “I was undergoing serious mental problems.”
At the time, his libido was set aflame by his excessive cocaine use, David continued to indulge every aspect of his sexuality. When he played Vancouver in February 1976, he conducted an orgy with four women and orchestrated the entire evening, positioning the women, including cocktail waitress Cheryl Hise, almost as if he were art-directing a movie.
Now giving every appearance of being resolutely heterosexual, the following month, David was interviewed by Chris Charlesworth for Melody Maker, who ended the interview by asking him about his bisexuality.
“Momentary shock. Oh Lord, no. Positively not. That was just a lie,” David said, and disingenuously went on: “They gave me that image so I stuck to it pretty well for a few years. I never adopted that stance. It was given to me. I’ve never done a bisexual action in my life, onstage, record, or anywhere else. I don’t think I even had a gay following much. A few glitter queens, maybe,” he said to Charlesworth, having suddenly morphed into a Dr. Goebbels of pop propaganda.
Clearly unnerved by David’s blatant dissimulation, Chris said nothing. He was past being surprised. David had begun the interview—which he was giving in a suite at Detroit’s Hotel Pontchartrain, where he was dressed in a designer suit, while in the street outside, a Mercedes was on constant call for him—with the words “I’m just doing this tour for the money. I never earned any money before, but this time I’m going to make some. I think I deserve it, don’t you?”
Chris remembered, “He clearly wasn’t broke, but he knew that if he said he was broke it would be the headline of my story. And it was a good headline. David was very wise about how to manipulate the press and create a headline.”
However, his next headline—the one that hit the newspapers on March 22, 1976: “How Bowie Copped It at Pop Rave-Up,” for once, was not engineered by him. As the newspaper reported, he and Iggy Pop and two friends had picked up two women in the bar of the Flagship Americana hotel, where they were staying in Rochester, New York, little knowing that both women were undercover cops.
After David invited them up to his seventh-floor suite, one of the women made a call to waiting police, who raided the room and found half a pound of pot there. David and Iggy and their friends were all arrested and locked up in a jail for the night. In the morning, David posted bail for all of them.
Nothing else came of the incident—an irony, as everyone who knew David at the time agreed: He generally used harder drugs than pot.
“He called me after he was booked and was freaking out. He used to hate pot, so I don’t know why he got booked for using it,” Glenn Hughes said.
After David sailed through the drug bust, untouched by the bad publicity, on May 2 of the same year, he ignited a controversy that finally did tarnish his image, almost irrevocably. Arriving in London on the Orient Express, he was met at Victoria Station by a chauffeur driving his newly acquired black convertible Mercedes, which Coco had only lately purchased on his behalf from the estate of an Iranian prince who had been assassinated.
Fans and photographers crowded the station, desperate for a glimpse of David. After he finally emerged from the train, wearing a black shirt, which, to some, recalled the attire of Oswald Mosley’s followers, once so admired by David’s mother, he proceeded to stand up in the open-topped Mercedes, raise his arm, and make what to some looked like the Nazi salute. Afterward, he flatly denied that he had made it, and insisted that he was merel
y waving to the crowds.
However, New Musical Express ran the photograph under the headline “Heil and Farewell”—and, given that David had once said of Hitler: “His overall objective was very good, and he was a marvelous morale booster. I mean, he was a perfect figurehead.” Although Bryan Ferry, who had always exhibited similarities to David in terms of his style and image, in 2007 also made the mistake of expressing the sentiment that “the way the Nazis staged themselves and presented themselves, my Lord! I’m talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags,” the outcry against him didn’t match that against David. Although David went on to qualify his remarks regarding Hitler with, “He was a nut and everybody knew he was a nut,” in some quarters, he was damned as a Nazi supporter.
All of which was ironic, given that his best friend, Coco Schwab, was of Jewish origin: Her father had been a legendary photographer of the concentration camps and had liberated his own mother from one of them.
After the Victoria Station debacle, David did all he could to mitigate the damage to his image, and, in an interview with Allan Jones of Melody Maker, he swore, “That didn’t happen. THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. I waved. I just waved. Believe me. On the life of my child, I waved. And the bastard caught me. In MID-WAVE, man. . . . As if I’d be foolish enough to pull a stunt like that. I died when I saw that photograph.”
David may have sounded devastated by the dent in his image, but not so much so that he allowed his plans to be derailed: He spent the next year or more living in relative seclusion in Berlin.
Long afterward, he defined his motives for moving there: “I needed to completely change my environment and the people I knew. I had a small handful of what one might call normal friends. The rest were dealers. It was extremely unhealthy. Stereotypical rock-and-roll behavior,” he said.