AN ENCOUNTER WITH DAVID BOWIE IN 1973, BY CADY CHRYSLER
BY CADY CHRYSLER
"Oh, David, give me your hands.” That’s what I whisper, in my mind, as I set down his Campari and soda. It’s freaky cold in LA, for March, the pink trumpet blossom still nipped in the Valley. He’s touring as this new character, Aladdin Sane, a burnt Ziggy Stardust who’ll trash Ziggy’s band one day, maddened by the violence he’d known in America.
He first visited last fall, laying on a $100,000 performance of playing the Hollywood star, under the green-striped awnings of the Beverley Hill Hotel. Forty-six guests: Scientologists, Iggy Pop, Mick Rock doing headstands. “To eat baba ganoush and be himself, that’s why he comes to us at the Larrabee,” says Russell, the owner. Himself? David laughs goatishly – “har-harhar” – at the idea.
A Capricorn blazing under Saturn, Bowie trains that Black Star on himself like a spotlight. Even his drink is a warning that everything is choreographed, its boozy flare styled to the orange of his hair.
I wasn’t going to ask if he remembered me, the dancer from Ohio, reading his palm then passing out in the black hash fog of Lindsay Kemp’s apartment. But when he said, “Thank you, how are you?” in what Armstrong used to call his ‘Piccadilly men’s loo voice,’ I knew he’d seen me for one of his ghosts.
Oh, David, give me your hands. He needs earthing. He’s going by boat to Japan, because of a premonition he’ll die in a plane crash. Everything’s symbolic with him, as if he’s sleepwalking through a drawing, like his favourite German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Word is, last night he dressed like a geisha to fuck two baby groupies, playing out the song he’d written in the hotel last October, ‘Cracked Actor’, about a 50-year-old Hollywood legend getting starlets to “suck, baby suck”. It’s bitch’n fabulous, a stomping hangover of hard rock, you know? But you don’t go and do that, for real. David portrays art killing the artist. Maybe it will.
The Image (1969), directed by Michael Armstrong, was David’s first film, about a portrait that comes to life to haunt its artist. Armstrong called it a study of “the illusory reality” of the “schizophrenic mind of the artist.” That reads now like an omen of what Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane are doing to David, you copy? A black-and-white, vaguely eerie short horror, David’s acting, coming on like a homoerotic, perplexed mannequin, didn’t help its vacancy. He was stabbed so violently (and sexily) by the artist, the film got an X rating. A
