Bowie: A Biography (30 page)

Zanetta was made MainMan’s “president.” Childers was vice president. Vanilla was press secretary.

“We had a sense of show business,” Childers says. “You know, we knew how to mount a show very well. And we knew how to sucker a sucker. That’s the same thing, the record companies were the suckers and we were the pickpockets. We knew how to do that.”

“You’re spreading goodwill for David Bowie,” the late Cyrinda Foxe (who would star in Bowie’s “The Jean Genie” video two years later) writes in her Danny Fields–coauthored autobiography
Dream On
. “‘Fine. I’ll have a magnum of Veuve Clicquot. I promise to think very highly and often of David.’ It was unbelievable. People who couldn’t pay the rent on their squalid flats a few months before were now spending thousands a week on frivolities.”

“Everybody we knew, this guy is the next biggest thing. You’re gonna die, you’re gonna freak out, he’s so sexy, he’s so hot, he’s so talented,” Cherry Vanilla recalls. “And a few writers we did let get to him began to make a little buzz and then the press started calling us. And when they would call us, for most of them we would say he wasn’t going to do any interviews. But I would talk to them because I had had these things published. And I would even send out pitch letters to radio stations and things saying, ‘I’m Cherry Vanilla.’ And I’d send copies of my poetry that had been published in things and say, ‘If you want I’m available to do interviews on your radio station.’ So I was the one now doing the interviews for him. Because I naturally like to talk about him and like to talk in general. I hardly knew that much about him, to tell you the truth. I made up stuff. I didn’t push the bisexuality, I pushed the sexuality. He was creative. Theatrical. Innovative. Fashionable. He was breaking ground. He was new and different and all of that kind of stuff. I pushed mostly that he was really sexy. I mean, that’s what I was selling was sex appeal. Because that’s what I felt. I personally found him very sexy. I’ve always found sort of delicate boys sexy.”

Rumors began to circulate among the gossipy Warhol set about the source of Defries’s cash. The manager must have been tickled pink about the whispered chitchat.

“I don’t mean to say anything bad about him but there were rumors about him dealing Krugerrands and unpleasant international activities,” Fields says. “There are only rumors and I don’t know firsthand, and they could’ve been put out there by people who just didn’t like him. I had no idea.”

Max’s Kansas City is now the Green Deli, adjacent to the W hotel on Union Square. There’s nothing about it that suggests the counterculture vanguard or the crucial old New York art elite. It’s a place for cold mashed potatoes, cheap sushi, coffee and the papers. It’s hard to imagine just how excited David Bowie must have felt being ushered inside by genuine Warholians, how it must have seemed like all of New York City was unfolding for him. It must have felt a little like that party at Tom Ayres’s house in the Hollywood Hills, only a million times more inspirational, as this was not L.A. This was New York in the fall, almost obliging him to unveil his next and most lasting creation. Ziggy was ready.

13.

T

HE OLD-STYLE PHONE BOX
in which David Bowie stood on a cold, rainy night in Soho in January of 1972 is gone, but an exact replica has been placed in the secluded alleyway off Heddon Street. This is exactly where
Hunky Dory
sleeve photographer Brian Ward brought Bowie, ill with flu, to shoot the back sleeve for its follow-up. Today, the box smells very strongly of urine. Much of the plastic window space has been covered in graffiti: Ziggy-era song lyrics such as “Put your ray gun to my head” from “Moonage Daydream” and “Breaking up is hard but keeping dark is hateful” from “Time.” If Bowie were an American high school student, this would be his yearbook page. “Thanks, David, I hope you in Spain,” someone writes. “I hope you”
what
exactly seems to be left, possibly forever, to the imagination. This box, or booth, as we Americans call it, as
well as the spot just around the corner where Bowie posed for the front sleeve, is hallowed ground, not just for Bowie fans but for rock ’n’ roll fans in general. Short of the site where the Beatles’
Abbey Road
cover was shot, it may be the most famous locale in the city’s rock history.

David Bowie posed for these iconic photos with little way of really knowing whether his Ziggy Stardust concept was going to succeed. When Bowie first had the notion to fashion together the songs he’d written in the spring and summer of 1971 into a loose narrative about a doomed rock star messiah, a character he would actually embody onstage and before the media, one wonders if, like anyone might, there was a moment where he said to himself, “Oh, no, I’ll just go the safe route and release a proper album. Maybe I will get lucky and have another big chart hit,” or if he could have imagined just how far he would take this new persona—all too far, as it happened; he actually became Ziggy for about a year. Nobody had really done this kind of thing before. Mick Jagger sang “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in the first person. John Lennon did the same with “I Am the Walrus,” but both those alter egos ended when the recording sessions ended (and anyway, the Walrus was Paul). Alice Cooper had a bit more fidelity to his stage transformation but he didn’t really sing about being Alice Cooper very frequently. There was no context. And Peter Gabriel, then of Genesis, could put on a fox head, but when he took it off, most everyone resumed yawning.

The sleeve itself might be a hint. Bowie is still David Bowie, not Ziggy, on the album’s cover. He is blond and, despite the flu, looks as dewy-fresh as he does on
Hunky Dory’s
cover. Ziggy, the saturnine mutant with the red rooster cut, would grace the covers of the next three albums
(Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups
and
Diamond Dogs)
. On
Ziggy
Bowie wears no theatrical makeup, only a clinging blue jumpsuit, open almost to the navel. On the front sleeve, he carries his guitar and exposes his calf-high boots as he props a foot up on a stack of boxes. He is merely a fragment of Ziggy on this first sleeve. Other people were pieces of Ziggy as well, whether they knew it or not. Meeting Iggy Pop, and to a slightly lesser extent Lou Reed, put him in the mind of fallen rock stars: larger than life personalities gone down unlit detours. American singer Vince Taylor, who started as something of a quasi-Elvis figure with a huge following in France and ended up a demented, Jesus-touched, raving lunatic, was
someone who also came to mind. “The guy was not playing with a full deck at all,” Bowie, who encountered Taylor on the club scene when he was still a struggling musician, has said. “He used to carry maps of Europe around with him and I remember very distinctly him opening a map out on Charing Cross Road outside the tube station and putting it on the pavement, and kneeling down with a magnifying glass, and I got down there with him, and he was pointing out all the sites where UFOs were going to be landing over the next few months.”

Ziggy’s first name is, of course, an alteration of Iggy. His surname is a tribute to the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, whose record he was given on his first U.S. trip in early 1970. From Lubbock, Texas, Buddy Holly’s hometown, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy is best known for his twanging sci-fi single “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Space Ship,” which was released in ’69 (Bowie covers it on 2002’s
Heathen)
. The “Ledge” published his own autobiography to accompany the single, full of wiggy selfdescriptions like “My favorite type of girl is a blue-eyed blond. I like blonds because I have blond hair. A blue-eyed blond is the most beautiful thing in the whole universe besides the stars in the night sky. If I had the opportunity, I would kiss every blue eyed blond in the world.” “Stardust” may also be an homage to the Hoagy Carmichael pop standard, another provocative mix of the fringe and the mainstream.

There was a bit of his memory of playing with crippled and odd-looking rock ’n’ roll pioneer Gene Vincent at Tom Ayres’s house in the Hollywood Hills in the Ziggy mix as well. All those whom Bowie drew from seemed to have one foot in the grave and another in the future. Bowie knew he could never be like them without permanently damaging his body, his psyche and, more crucially, his hard-won career, but what if he wrote himself a part and acted it out? Then he could be them when he needed to be—during performances—and remain himself, a fabulous rock ’n’ roll artiste, committed to his project but safe from any real harm. Like Dr. Frank enstein, he severely underestimated the power of his creation. Strictly as a symbol, Ziggy Stardust could not have enjoyed the same impact in the sixties. He was not a utopian figure, but rather the cracked and not entirely legit messiah that the debauched humankind of the seventies had come to deserve. He’s the “all right, this will do” savior and the perfect antihero for the seventies because he is the embodiment of the
dead sixties dream. Ziggy is the space-race anticlimax, Manson and Altamont and Nixon’s reelection and the breakup of the Beatles made sexy. Rock ’n’ roll ecdysis is a crucial element of his appeal. Ziggy says to all those in pain, “You have failed as human beings, but it’s all right. We will succeed as slinky, jiving space insects. Let all the children boogie!”

To be in England in 1972 was to believe that the end was near. “There was a sense of not so much apocalypse as entropy in that there’d been the first great miner’s strike,” Charles Shaar Murray says, “the one the miners actually won, which caused serious power outages and the three-day week. There was a period when for several long periods of time, hours, London was without power.” Ziggy was literally born in darkness. Superficially, he would look like no other rock star before or since. Bowie’s Bromley Tech friend and ex-bandmate the artist George Underwood started making sketches of Ziggy shortly after the concept was mooted, and Bowie’s Sombrero Club muses, costumers Freddi and Daniella, started sketching looks for the antihero as well. In creative sessions fortified with barley wine, cigarettes and hash joints, there under the stained glass in the great living room in Haddon Hall, Ziggy Stardust started to spread his leathery wings. Ideas were thrown out and almost never shot down. It was more like “dare we?” If someone suggested a pair of lace-up wrestling boots, calf high and red vinyl, they could certainly be found somewhere in London (in this case ordered by boot maker Russell and Bromley) and all that was required was the conviction of Bowie pulling them on and pulling it off. Much like Johnny Rotten walking around the King’s Row four years later in his homemade
I HATE PINK FLOYD
T-shirt, chutzpah and conviction was all one really needed to alter fashion forever.

With the portals opened, any number of influences fell into the cauldron of images, visions, and characters they were mixing together for Ziggy. Kubrick, as he had with
2001: A Space Odyssey
, figured into Bowie’s new vision.
A Clockwork Orange
had opened in London and Bowie was inspired by the androgynous but brutal Malcolm McDowell as Alex. In his February 11, 1972, review of the film, critic Roger Ebert wonders, “What in hell is Kubrick up to here? Does he really want us to identify with the antisocial tilt of Alex’s psychopathic little life? In a world where society is criminal, of course, a good man must live outside the law. But that isn’t what Kubrick is saying. He actually seems to be implying
something simpler and more frightening: that in a world where society is criminal, the citizen might as well be a criminal, too.” This was basically the debased state of affairs in which Ziggy would breed: suburban drudgery and shockingly violent youth energy. “It’s no world for an old man any longer,” a drunken vagrant moans before Alex and the Droogs stomp his guts. “You can feel the mean streets of England,” film writer David Thomson observes in his 2008 compendium
“Have You Seen …?
,” “where young people have grown steadily more callous.” Ziggy had his own Droogs in Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and Irever Bolder, the latter two redubbed Weird and Gilley on a whim. This street gang would be called the Spiders, and they would move like tigers on Vaseline. Ziggy’s concerts would, in further tribute to
Clockwork
, open with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” from the film’s iconic moog-tinged soundtrack.

The
real
key to Ziggy Stardust was the hair. Suzi Fussey, later Mick Ronson’s wife, was a hairstylist who worked in a local salon next to the Three Tuns pub. She did Bowie’s mother Peggy Jones’s hair every Friday. Mrs. Jones, who traveled in from Bromley, never let on that the local cross-dressing kooks who would parade up and down Beckenham High Street were of any relation.

“I remember him and Angie and the baby would walk down the street past the hairdressers,” Suzi continues. “He had long hair and wore a dress. She had a butch little crew cut. They’d push their pram through the Beckenham High Street.”

One day Angie walked into her shop alone and asked for a new look. Fussey gave her red, white and blue Bomb Pop stripes. She styled it short and spiky and passed the test. Angie invited Suzi back to Haddon Hall and there Bowie, with his long, blond hair, asked her, “Do you like the way my hair’s been cut?”

Fussey observed, “It’s a bit boring.” Fussey, weary of greasy hippie locks, suggested short hair for Bowie as well. Magazines were produced and pored over. The cut comes from three different models in three separate fashion spreads. Today this cut is infamously dismissed as a shag mullet. In 1972, however, it was fabulously different. Angie claims it was she who suggested, “Let’s dye it red;” however, this has been, like much in Bowie lore, the subject of more debate. What’s agreed on is the name of the color, which was called Red Hot Red, and that it fit with the shape of
the cut and Bowie’s pale complexion perfectly. Defries reportedly stated, succinctly, “It’s very marketable.” In fact, at one point, Defries tried to get all MainMan employees to wear the Ziggy haircut but ended his campaign early when most of the New York–based Warhol kids declined. Still the hair unlocked something in Bowie. The same way Jane Fonda’s
Klute
cut transformed her from sixties ingenue to seventies radical around this very same time.