BOOKS
Suzi Ronson on her serendipitous journey to create David Bowie’s iconic hairstyle
AT 15 YEARS OLD, I STARTED TRAINING AS A HAIRDRESSER AT THE evelyn paget College in Bromley. While I enjoyed working at the salon and liked the other girls, the spirit of the Swinging Sixties led me to leave twice in search of excitement – first for Rome at 18 and later for America. Each time I returned, to Mum and Dad and Evelyn Paget’s, I was a little more deflated. This is when I met Mrs Jones.
Mrs Jones came to me by accident – the stylist she was booked with wanted to leave early, so I covered for her – but she liked the way that I did her hair and became my regular on a Thursday afternoon. The salon was a warm, comfortable place for women to come and, when sitting under the dryer, they would enjoy a coffee while reading Woman’s Own or Reader’s Digest. To most of my clients, I was a confidante; someone who would listen to them without any judgement.
One day, Mrs Jones brought her daughter-in-law Angie Bowie into the salon, and I did her hair with streaks of bright pink and blue alongside soft, frosty silver. Angie later invited me to Haddon Hall, the nearby Victorian mansion she lived in with her husband, David, whom I was curious to meet as there was a buzz about him locally. He played folk music on Sundays at the Three Tuns on Beckenham High Street. It was 1971; he’d had a hit with ‘Space Oddity’ a couple of years before, but nothing since. I thought he might be a one-hit wonder.
Meeting him, I could immediately sense that he was an unusual man. He showed me a hairstyle in a magazine and asked if I could
