EXCLUSIVE: How singer’s seventies heyday was nearly destroyed by drugs

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 on Sunday

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.”

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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.

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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.

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“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.