Even Mick Jagger was worried by how much cocaine David Bowie was doing
DURING his 1970s heyday, David Bowie struggled to establish any lasting relationships with women – but there was one affair that would endure.
His relationship with cocaine, the drug he described as his “soul mate”,
proved to be one of the defining loves of his life.
At one point he was “taking so much it would have killed a horse,” according to record producer Tony Visconti.
Looking back at his decade-long addiction, pop icon David, who died in 2016, said: “It was easily obtainable and it kept me working . . . I wasn’t really a recreational guy, I wasn’t really an out-on-the-town guy.
“I was much more, ‘OK, let’s write ten different projects this week and make four or five sculptures.’
“And I’d just stay up 24 hours a day until most of that was completed. I loved being involved in that creative moment.”
As with sex, David did not do cocaine in moderation. His transvestite lover Romy Haag, who first met him in 1976, complained: “He was doing coke at the time — not lines but bowls of it.”
While David had toyed with drugs as a teenager, they did not become a major part of his life until his 1972 US tour.
As he later put it: “Ziggy Stardust was actually drug-free, apart from the occasional pill — amphetamines, speed.
“When we first started doing Ziggy we were really excited and drugs weren’t necessary. Then I went to America, got introduced to real drugs and it all went pear-shaped.”
He told Rolling Stone magazine in 1976: “I never got into acid. I did it three or four times and it was colourful, 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 of them all. It went on to dominate his life.
In 1974, David checked into a lavish suite in Manhattan’s Sherry-Netherland hotel, which would become his New York base for a year.
Here he entertained friends, lovers and fellow rock stars with impromptu jam sessions — and masses of coke.
His childhood friend, singer Dana Gillespie, recalled: “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.”
Playboy model Bebe Buell also hung out with David, his wife Angie and Jagger at the hotel.
She said: “Mick was worried because David was doing so much cocaine that he would hallucinate.
“One time we were in David’s suite and he asked us if we could see the angels flying outside the window.”
On another occasion, David invited Alice Cooper to the hotel.
Author Steven Gaines, who was ghost-writing Cooper’s autobiography, said: “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 in his suite a colour Xerox machine, which in those days hadn’t been around long, and he made each of us put our face forward on to the 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.
“I don’t think he and Alice really hit it off. It was really odd.”
David got on better with John Lennon, and they bonded over drugs, music and a shared quirky sense of humour.
They often spent a night on the town with Tony Visconti, who recalled: “We stayed up until 10.30am.
“We did mountains of cocaine, it looked like the Matterhorn, obscenely big, and four open bottles of cognac.”
But David’s most enduring friendship was with Iggy Pop, the troubled singer with whom he became obsessed.
When Iggy was in a psychiatric hospital in 1975, trying to kick his drug
habit, David came to visit him bearing gifts.
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Long afterwards he admitted: “We trooped into the hospital with a load of drugs for him. We were out of our minds, all of us.
“He wasn’t well, that’s all we knew. We thought we should bring him drugs, because he probably hadn’t had any for days.”
Meanwhile, David’s own drug use continued to spiral, fuelling many of his wild sexual adventures.
Taking cocaine became so habitual that he did not even baulk at snorting it in full view of girlfriend Ava Cherry’s parents when they invited him to dinner.
David took his pleasure wherever, whenever and with whoever it was offered.
At an after-show party in 1974, he disappeared into a closet with Bette Midler and Mick Jagger, and tour manager Tony Zanetta recalled: “The three of them
spent the whole party in there, doing coke, and I’d be very surprised if he didn’t have Bette Midler then, or at one time or another.”
By then addiction was taking a toll on his health. Frighteningly thin and staying awake for up to five days at a time, he only stayed alive thanks to his loyal assistant Coco Schwab.
She worked to keep him healthy, to build up his immune system, to coax him to drink the extra-rich milk she took great pains to find.
The extent of David’s drug use was evident in landmark 1975 documentary, Cracked Actor, which showed him emaciated, strung out and still sniffling from his most recent line.
In a 1997 BBC radio interview, David admitted that the documentary “is very
painful for me to watch.”
He went on: “My drug intake was absolutely phenomenal. I was addicted.”
In 1975 he stayed at the Beverly Hills home of Deep Purple star Glenn Hughes, who recalled: “David had hidden all the knives under the bed, telling me the Manson family was around. He was paranoid — super-intelligent but super-paranoid.
“He was moody, as you are on drugs, and I never saw him sleep. He was in a coke storm.”
Things came to a head in March 1976, when David and Iggy picked up two female undercover cops in a New York bar, and David invited them up to his suite.
One made a call to waiting police, who raided the room and found half a pound of pot.
David and Iggy were arrested and locked in jail for the night.
Nothing else came of the incident — ironic, as David generally used harder drugs than pot.
Glenn Hughes said: “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.”
Later that year, David packed up and moved to Berlin, later saying: “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.”
He took Coco and Iggy with him, hoping to help Iggy kick his drug habit, as well as his own. It was a mission doomed to failure, given the propensity of drugs in the city.
Iggy once confided to Rolling Stone that in a typical week, he and David spent two days intoxicated, two days recovering and three days sober.
David later said: “I didn’t have any idea until I got there that Berlin was the smack capital of Europe.”
He finally got properly clean after being awarded custody of his son Zowie in 1980, following his divorce from wife Angie.
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 now. It was an extraordinary thing to have to go through. I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but I’m sort of glad I did.”
In his later, sober years, David spent much time and energy helping young people face their drug habits, including Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash and
make-up artist Carolyn Cowan, who he met on a video shoot.
She said: “I’m so grateful for his intervention. David saved my life. He was never judgmental, just kind.”
Years later, David said of his drug-fuelled years: “I was undergoing serious mental problems . . . a young man with too much time on his hands and too many grammes of amphetamine or PCP or cocaine, and maybe all three, in his system.
“It’s a blur, topped off with chronic anxiety, bordering on paranoia. However, I made some good music.”
— Adapted by EMILY FAIRBAIRN from Bowie: The Biography by Wendy Leigh. Copyright © 2014 Wendy Leigh. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.