Costume designer Ola Hudson, with whom David had a three-year affair, begged him to talk to her son Saul (Slash of Guns N’ Roses) about drugs.
“David was engaging and wise in the ways of chemical abuse. He asked me about what I was doing drug-wise and what I was going through emotionally, psychically, and with the band,” Slash said. “I rambled on for a while, but once I started talking about my little translucent friends, David interrupted me.
“ ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘You are not in a good way. If you are seeing things every day, what you are doing to yourself is not good at all. You are at a very spiritual low point when that begins to happen. You are exposing yourself to the darker realms of your subconscious being. You are making yourself vulnerable to all kinds of negative energy.’ ”
Slash wasn’t the only person struggling with addiction whom David tried to help.
Famously, Iggy Pop was another, but David didn’t just try to rescue those close to him. Makeup artist Carolyn Cowan was in Dublin in 1991, working with David on a video he was shooting there. She was battling with her addiction to crack cocaine and drinking far too much, as well. Though he hardly knew Carolyn, David immediately sensed that she was in trouble. From then on, every day of the shoot, he asked her if she had managed to stay sober the night before. The truth was that she hadn’t, and David knew it.
“By the third day, he had persuaded me to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Everything he’d said had finally got through to me and now I’m so grateful for his intervention,” she said. “David Bowie saved my life. I have no doubt about it. He was never judgmental—just kind,” Carolyn said.
And photographer Joe Stevens, who first met him in the days of Ziggy Stardust, also remembered his kindness and generosity: “A close friend had a triple bypass operation, and as he was an uninsured artist, he was unable to pay his medical bills. Bowie covered them, secretly,” he said.
A brief, kaleidoscopic overview of his conquests: Bette Midler (reportedly an isolated incident in a closet); record executive Calvin Mark Lee; Playboy model and actress Bebe Buell; Nina Simone (who inspired him to record “Wild Is the Wind,” which she had recorded first); Charlie Chaplin’s widow, Oona, (twenty-two years his senior); dancer Melissa Hurley (twenty years his junior); singer Ava Cherry; Jean Millington, of the rock band Fanny; and model Winona Williams, whom he invited to live in Berlin with him.
Along the way he paid court to Monique van Vooren (twenty years his senior), had an affair with Dana Gillespie (who was then fourteen to his sixteen) and a dalliance with Cyrinda Foxe (a glamorous Monroe doppelgänger who sported a string of pearls she put to good use during their last sexual encounter), and—in the spirit of his continuing rivalry with Mick Jagger—toyed with Jagger’s onetime girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, backing singer Claudia Lennear (the inspiration for Mick Jagger’s song “Brown Sugar,” and about whom David wrote “Lady Grinning Soul”), and briefly dated Mick’s first wife, Bianca Jagger.
According to David’s ex-wife, Angie, who has hawked a variety of negative stories about David since their divorce, there may also have been more than a moment with Mick Jagger himself. In Angie Bowie’s version of the alleged event, first published in her 1981 autobiography, Free Spirit, she returned from a trip to find Mick and David in bed together, only not sleeping, something which David has taken the rare step of denying.
However, David’s girlfriend in the early seventies, Wilhelmina model Winona Williams, also says, “I remember walking in on David and Mick, and tending to think that they had just finished doing something together.”
Other of his conquests—never denied—include Susan Sarandon; Tina Turner; Lulu; Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes; one of the Three Degrees; Ralph Horton, his second manager; and possibly Ken Pitt, his third manager, who was clearly in love with him, although there is no conclusive evidence that their relationship was ever consummated.
Sexually voracious, David conducted simultaneous affairs with dancer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp and Natasha Korniloff, Kemp’s costume designer. He also had a much-publicized affair with transsexual Romy Haag, and affairs with sundry staff employees of MainMan (the company that spearheaded his onslaught on America), consolidating a pattern repeatedly characterized by observers as being David’s way of marking out his territory, and with an array of groupies both male and female, as well. As he put it in a 1997 BBC radio interview, “I was hitting on everybody. I had a wonderfully irresponsible promiscuous time.
A very sad week, but also the only week of my life I'll ever hear the full nine minutes of Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise) while out at the pub. God bless you David Bowie.
PS I skim-read/misread Droid's list and thought it was the younger Oona Chaplin who was being referred to as one of Bowie's conquests, and was both jealous and confused (surely Iman would have minded?). Reassured to realise that it was her grandmother. It's been a v confusing week too.
PS I skim-read/misread Droid's list and thought it was the younger Oona Chaplin who was being referred to as one of Bowie's conquests, and was both jealous and confused (surely Iman would have minded?).
The ONLY negative thing I've read regarding Bowie was on a FB comment, concerning him deflowering a 14 year old groupie (presumably when he was an adult). I guess if this IS true it is dodgy, but then again it seems like that sort of thing might have been rather par for the course in the 70's with rock stars.
It's a shame they didn't fit Bowie, as Jareth, into GoT. He could have been mates with the White Walkers or something.
That’s why we weren’t surprised to hear that his last album was majorly inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: ”I’m a black star / Not a rock star.'