I Discover David Bowie - Part 2

Back in San Francisco, I photographed Bowie, in his dress and flowing hair and handbag, in front of the Holiday Inn. He was unnervingly pretty, and I found myself flustered, as I'd never before found another man unnervingly pretty. He, very much more sophisticated in such matters, detected my discomfort and mischievously played the coquette, resulting in my becoming even more unnerved. Bastard.

We went upstairs to his room. You're expecting this sentence to get juicy, but all I did was interview him. Actually, he pretty much interviewed himself. I was still reeling from discovering myself capable of finding myself attracted to another man, I hadn't found his music irresistible, and he was speaking of things of which I knew nothing. He talked about having been a mime and a Buddhist. A part of me yearned for a whoopee cushion, as, perhaps wrongly, I believed mime and casual Buddhism to be the provinces of the very pretentious.

He referred to pop music as the Pierrot medium. I hadn't a clue what he meant, but, rather than revealing myself to be a hayseed, confined myself to an occasional murmur of acknowledgment. He seemed to have an extensive agenda, and was quite happy to pose his own questions. He said something about being caught in bed with Raquel Welch's husband that I thought quite saucy. I suspect he thought it would make it into print and get him some attention. It made it into print, in Rolling Stone.

We flew down to Los Angeles, where Rodney Bingenheimer first collected him at the airport, and then, with another scenemaker, threw a party for him in the hills above the Sunset Strip. Bowie happily unnerved a number of luscious young starlets who arrived in the height of Valley of the Dolls chic, enormous at the time, by greeting them effeminately. Some sort of legal snafu had precluded his performing in an actual venue, but this was his party, and he'd play his guitar and sing if he wanted to. To the considerable discomfort of many of his guests, he did indeed want to. Many an eyelid got heavy during his interpretation of Jacques Brel's "Amsterdam". An apparently rather more swinging party, without Brel, for the Andy Warhol superstar Cherry Vanilla was said to be raging somewhere up the hill. Many murmured of abandoning the one for the other, Bowie among them.

He was said in the following days to be cavorting with a young groupie called Kasha who had a remarkable physique. He didn't bring her to my band's rehearsal on the A&M soundstage. He did, though, ask if we might play the Velvets' "Waiting for the Man" together. A couple of months later, he generously listed my band as one of his three favorites in an NME poll of C-list rock stars. He admired my Porsche, not least because it was much like the one in which James Dean had perished.

The day he flew back to Britain, Kasha was on the phone to me, inviting herself over, hardly before he'd taken his seat in coach. We spent a steamy couple of days together, and then I determined she was 16.

The following September, my girlfriend P— and I holidayed in Britain, and stayed in London at the Portobello Hotel, whose extremely trendy staff were ritually sniffy with us until the evening we and the Bowies shared a minicab home from the chic Kings Road bistro where Bowie and I renewed our friendship and Angela was all over P— like a rash. He played me a test pressing of the album he'd just helped produce for Lou Reed. I thought it wasn't very good, and still do.

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