Bowie: A Biography (42 page)

“I do remember one afternoon being in the office when Defries had some contracts for David to sign,” Mick Rock says, “and he said to one of his secretaries, ‘Take these to David and don’t worry it won’t take long, David will sign anything.’ I told David about that many years later and he said Yeah it’s true. I would. I had my eyes on the star prize. Nothing else mattered. Of course later on I realized what I’d done.’”

On “Fame,” written during this period, Bowie sings, “What you need, you have to borrow,” with the same venom that Jimi Hendrix (another signer of a contested contracts with opportunistic managers, among them former Animals bassist Chas Chandler) sang, “Businessmen they drink my wine,” on his cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” There’s a segment in Tony Zanetta and Henry Edwards’s book
Stardust
that best illustrates this odd, cash-poor rock star purgatory. He’d recently sold out a residency at Radio City Music Hall and debuted his new single on national television … and Bowie didn’t have enough money to go
downtown and buy some records. He had to call his office and have Tony Zanetta loan him some petty cash.

“I have no idea what I’ve got. I don’t know what I’m worth,” he told the MainMan executive. “I don’t know who’s paying for everything. Where’s the money coming from for all these projects?”

Defries figured that Mick Ronson would be the next big star after Bowie. To promote Ronson’s 1974 debut
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
, the company paid for a huge billboard on the Sunset Strip. Despite his good looks and obvious talent, Ronson lacked front man DNA and the album fizzled. “It just didn’t happen,” says Suzi Ronson. “It was too soon. People said the record sounded too much like David Bowie without David Bowie. It
was
David Bowie without David Bowie. Mick should have been allowed to be given some time to meet other people. The relationship with Bowie after that was nonexistent. Bowie promised he’d come by the studio. Never did. We never spoke with David, never hung out with him that much afterward. He’d had enough of what we had to give him.”

“Mick was a great second banana for Bowie,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “He had everything you needed to be a front man except the temperament. Mick did not have the necessary degree of megalomania. He was comfortable riding shotgun, taking care of the musical details.”

Fame
, a muted Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe (and directed by
Pork’s
Tony Ingrassia) also failed. Wayne County’s
Wayne at the Trucks
tanked, Dana Gillespie did not make a mark; each one was a money pit, swallowing up cash that might have put the Bowies on the lifestyle level of his new social circle.

“One of the things David probably objected to was there was no money because it’d all been spent on lifestyle,” former Defries partner Laurence Myers says today. “This happened very often with artists. They loved driving around in the limos, then they get the bill because their contract says they pay for those things. Then they say, ‘Well, I haven’t got any money.’ Well, you chose to drive around in limos. You’re also often surrounded by a hundred different people every day wanting to party. These people, they either want to become your new manager themselves or they just want to be your friend, so what they do is they say to you, ‘You’re wonderful, you’re marvelous, you are brilliant and you are a genius and you are not being served. Why haven’t you got this? Why haven’t you got
that?’ Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they’re wrong. And then, from the artist’s point of view, it’s ‘Jagger’s got a bigger house than I do,’ or ‘I’m fed up with my old guy telling me what to do and running my life.’ It’s like a marriage. And David was doing loads and loads and loads and loads of cocaine. None of which helps.”

Back in New York, work continued on
Young Americans
through January of 1975 at the Power Plant in midtown Manhattan, with Tony Visconti producing. Bowie had already palled around with Lennon in L.A. Given his near constant coke paranoid state, it’s amazing that Bowie pursued Lennon so doggedly. The prospect of becoming matey with an actual Beatle clearly outweighed the risk of drawing FBI attention to himself—as it was suspected and is now well known that the agency had been monitoring Lennon closely for most of the first half of the decade. Bowie decided to record a cover version of the Beatles track “Across the Universe.” He invited Lennon, then also back in New York City, to come to the studio to play on it. During a jam session, Alomar produced a chicken-scratch guitar lick and an orbital riff that recalled the old R & B hit “Foot Stompin’” melted down into a slow, molten groove. Lennon and Bowie came up with the lyrics on the spot, with Bowie taking lead and the ex-Beatle providing falsetto backing vocals.

“I got to know David through Mick really, although I’ve met him once before,” Lennon told Mike Douglas during one of his famous guest spots on that other iconic seventies talk show. “And the next minute he says, ‘Hello, John, I’m doing ‘Across the Universe,’ do you wanna come on down?” So I says, ‘All right,’ you know, I live here. I pop down and play rhythm. And then he had this lick. The guitarist had a lick and we sort of wrote this song. It was no big deal. It wasn’t sitting down to write a song. We made the lick into a song.” Visconti, also a Beatles obsessive, was not at the sessions. “I would have jumped on the Concorde at my own expense to be there,” he later said. While he mixed the finished songs from the Sigma sessions in London, Bowie, Alomar and Lennon created a pair of last-minute additions with “Fame” and “Across the Universe.”

Involving an ex-Beatle at the eleventh hour could be seen as Bowie building up antibodies or fortifying his stock value for what now seemed like an unstoppable clash with Defries. With the help of his new personal assistant Corinne “Coco” Schwab, a onetime MainMan secretary, Bowie
hired a lawyer, Michael Lippman (who declined to be interviewed for this book). On January 29, 1975, Bowie went to the RCA offices with Lippman to let them know of his professional intentions. Bowie was visibly shaken and paranoid during these meetings. He’d recently taken the master tapes for
Young Americans
and secured them in a bank vault so that Defries could not manipulate them in any way. He’d then sent a copy to RCA to make sure if he broke from MainMan they would be loyal to him and not his imperious manager. Bowie relaxed only after RCA executives assured him in person that they would back him and not Defries whatever transpired. A week later, Defries, like Kenneth Pitt before him, received a memo of severance. According to legend, when the furious Defries asked RCA why they sided with Bowie instead of MainMan, Glancey responded, “Because you can’t sing.” Predictably, Defries sent RCA an injunction to prevent them from releasing the album in America, England and France, freezing all Bowie activity. Laurence Myers, Defries’s old partner, who was now doing separate business with RCA, was brought in since both parties trusted him.

“Those meetings between Bowie and Defries was like the Vietnam peace settlement,” Laurence Myers says. “We had Michael and David in one room, and we had Tony in another room, and the middle room was me and RCA.” A settlement was eventually reached, details of which have been widely reported, though the agreement remains confidential. What is believed by most is that Defries would own a piece of David Bowie’s recordings from approximately 1972 up until 1982 (but not, crucially, any of his blockbuster 1983 album
Let’s Dance
and beyond). The long-delinquent MainMan accounts would be settled by RCA, who insisted on having their own staff auditors make sure the checks were indeed paid out.

Defries would go on to discover John Mellencamp (renaming him Johnny Cougar). He would resurface in the nineties when Bowie was working out a deal to securitize the RCA material as “Bowie Bonds.” Neither has publicly spoken about the details of the split, although sources have indicated, off the record, that the bad blood has not gone away some thirty-three years on.

“There are the rumors. And the rumors are very, very powerful,” Dave Thompson, Defries’s biographer, says. “That Tony screwed Bowie all the way down the line, and then when they broke up Bowie screwed him back, and then they’ve had this sort of acrimonious gimme gimme
gimme relationship ever since. David has been content to let people believe what they will, and Tony, I don’t think, paid any attention to what was being said. So we’ve had this incredible game of Chinese whispers for the last thirty years about the nature of their relationship, the nature of their contract, the nature of their parting. And I think we’re gonna find that
none
of it is basically true.”

With regard to his personal life, David was increasingly replacing both his longtime MainMan retinue as well as Angie with one of the company’s secretaries Corinne Schwab. Schwab, who is still Bowie’s assistant, is considered by some the bête noire of the Bowie story, a figure so devoted to him, or supposedly void of her own personality, that she gave over her entire life to facilitate whatever it is David needs.

“There is no Coco. There is only David,” Zanetta writes. “She’s the one who does all the dirty work. She is a very, very sad case. The woman does not have her own life. She’s his alter ego, his devil in disguise.”

“Coco was definitely a force to be reckoned with,” Carlos Alomar has said. “She was definitely branded the biggest bitch in the whole world, which she was. But apparently she loved David very much and she was very dedicated to him so I could never fault her for that. She would forsake her own needs to please David.”

“She’s laid down her whole life for him,” Natasha Korniloff has said. “David has only to utter the words ‘I’m hungry’ and in the middle of nowhere Coco can cook a meal over a candle and put it in front of him. He can be cold, tired, hungry—but put something warm around him, feed him, and he’s happy. He just sits there receiving everything and he doesn’t really care where it’s coming from.”

This perception is fueled by the fact that in four decades, Schwab has not turned to the media to respond to such portrayals and conduct personal damage control, something even former vice president Dick Cheney eventually took pains to do in an effort to allay long-standing whispers about his dark personal character. In a 1993 cover story on David in the UK men’s magazine
Arena
, Schwab granted one rare interview to journalist Tony Parsons, but this reads more like a prepared release than an actual tape-running, all-questions-permitted sit-down. “His singular vision as an artist also incorporates the ability to transform and to give focus to outside ideas. He moves, progresses, changes and grows with
every project,” she says, or “says.” What is certain is that the fastidious and preternaturally disciplined woman provided some sense of order in Bowie’s increasingly unhinged day to day existence in 1975.

The petite Schwab is from a highbrow New York family and was already worldly and fluent in multiple languages. This clearly made Bowie feel comfortable and intellectually matched, but it was likely the consistent efficiency with which she handled his affairs without creating distraction or drawing attention to her own issues that brought her to power. Virtually nobody in Bowie’s circle could make similar claims, not his lovers and certainly not his managers or even his band and producers. Even better, Coco had developed a series of tricks and psychological devices to keep the ever-increasing list of personae non grata away, a list Angie Bowie had, by 1975, certainly made. “After four or five years I had really worn out my welcome with David,” Angie says today. “He didn’t like me anymore.” Angie lives with the fact that it was she who recommended hiring Coco in the first place, impressed by her work ethic when she first showed up as a temp in MainMan’s London offices. The Bowies’ split had been coming for a long time. In her memoir, Angie heartbreakingly writes of tracking David’s postfame activities through the press, as well as sending him messages the same way, by being photographed while out and about. With their child in school or in the care of a more or less permanent nanny, and Ava Cherry and Coco occupying the role of female companions, David and Angela were free to carry their estrangement to its furthest ends. Angie continued to try to make headway as an actress and a writer, and even a singer, only to find herself rejected at every turn. “As David and I broke up he made sure that I was blacklisted in the entire entertainment business,” she claims. “I felt betrayed. I felt that I would now never be able to work anywhere doing anything. I just kept thinking about my father and how he would have fought this battle. And I fell down a lot.”

“Angie was probably the most affected because she was really different than all those other rock girls,” says Tony Zanetta. “David wasn’t a star when she met him. She wasn’t a groupie like a Bianca Jagger. Angie was very much a part of building the success. And she was kind of left hanging. Because what
is
an Angie Bowie? Her identity has totally been Angie Bowie. It’s never been Mary Angela Barnett again. She was wacky, but she
was a super-intelligent woman and had lots and lots of potential but got stuck. She could never really bring Angie Bowie to another level.”

David Bowie, meanwhile, was further peeling away the artifice of the Ziggy-era.
Young Americans
, released in March, was the first Bowie album in nearly three years to feature David Bowie and not “Ziggy” on its sleeve, and looking handsome with a retro matinee-idol haircut and smoldering cigarette to boot. It was rumored that Bowie initially approached Norman Rockwell to paint his portrait for the cover. As a musical experiment the album succeeds because it’s at heart a symbiosis and not some parasitic venture—not “Bowie does black music,” but rather “Bowie and black music do each other.” Unlike Robert Plant on early Led Zeppelin songs, Bowie never resorts to a stereotypically black voice; he is
always
David Bowie. The title track borrows the piano glissando from the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” and Vandross’s vocal arrangements are pure church; but Bowie’s lyrics are, as they remain throughout the record, angsty and disquieted, the transmissions of an outsider looking in honestly, never an imposter. Black songwriters often addressed their listeners—as Marvin Gaye does on “What’s Going On” or Curtis Mayfield did on “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go”—as sisters and brothers. Bowie never assumes an easy brotherhood, and as a result he comes very close to enjoying one. Black listeners accepted this tribute in the right spirit.