One Saturday morning early in the summertime of 1971, Suzi Ronson was busy at work on the Evelyn Paget hair salon on Beckenham Excessive Avenue when a pair walked previous pushing a pram. The lady was carrying black denims and a furry jacket, the person was in a flowing gold midi gown. “All people rushed out to take a look,” remembers Ronson, who then glided by her maiden identify Fussey. “Everybody was like nudging, poking one another, asking, ‘Who’s that?’ Then somebody whispered, ‘It’s David Bowie.’”
Ronson had vaguely heard of Bowie: the success of his Area Oddity single had made him an area celeb and the singer’s mom was a consumer. However she remembers: “He was in an arty clique, not my world.” Nonetheless Ronson would find yourself turning into a part of Bowie’s world, the one working girl in his touring social gathering – as her new memoir Me and Mr Jones relates.
Bowie and his spouse Angie lived on the center flooring of a mansion known as Haddon Corridor, within the south London suburb of Beckenham. Stepping inside it felt like coming into one other world. “I’d by no means met folks like this earlier than,” says Ronson. “There have been homosexual guys – I had by no means met anybody overtly homosexual earlier than – and there was Daniella, who was West Indian with a cockney accent, hair the color of an egg yolk with large brown eyes. I used to be solely three miles from residence however it may as nicely have been a overseas land.”
And on the centre of all of it have been the Bowies. Ronson had been invited to Haddon Corridor by Angie, whose hair she had minimize. “They wished to alter David’s look,” says Ronson, “and Angie knew I used to be prepared to experiment.” Bowie confirmed Ronson {a magazine} {photograph} of a mannequin utilized by the Japanese clothier Kansai Yamamoto. The mannequin had quick, crimson spiky hair and the singer requested if she might copy that. So Ronson set to work. “It was the color that basically offered them,” she says. “I used fantasy colors – Schwarzkopf Purple Sizzling – from the salon. God is aware of why we had them in Beckenham. Nobody used them.” That day, the Ziggy Stardust coiffure was born.
Ronson was welcomed into Bowie’s circle, discovering it each unsettling and intoxicating. “I didn’t have a very joyful childhood,” she says. “My household have been slightly fucked up so I left faculty at 15 and was all the time on the lookout for an escape.” Bowie provided that escape and shortly Ronson was on the payroll as hairdresser for the band. It’s clear from Me and Mr Jones simply how influential Angie was on Bowie’s and Ronson’s lives and careers.
“Angie was American, she was tall, cool and as daring as brass,” remembers Ronson. “I couldn’t consider how wonderful she was.” Angie championed Ronson, to make sure she was given a paid place by Bowie’s supervisor – making the very fact Ronson slept with Bowie considerably awkward. Bowie had invited her to Haddon Corridor ostensibly for a haircut however had different intentions. “It was scary as hell,” says Ronson. “I might have misplaced my job if I slept with him, or if I didn’t. David marked his territory. He slept with everyone. I imply, everyone slept with David – and Angie appeared to encourage it.”
When Ronson went on tour with Bowie, her function stretched past hairdressing: she would dye his jockstrap crimson and iron the sweat from his stage outfit. “There have been many costume adjustments,” she says. “So David would come to the wings the place I’d be standing with a glass of crimson wine and a Gitanes cigarette. Whereas Mick [Ronson] was enjoying his guitar, I’d change David’s garments.”
By the point the tour reached the US, Bowie’s fame was rising, as was his feminine fan base. “They have been insane and so they had cash,” remembers Ronson. “They’d observe us round. They’d catch the airplane – and so they had their very own rooms in our lodge.”
Ronson was answerable for deciding which feminine followers have been invited to fulfill the band. “I’d say, ‘Do you need to come and meet the blokes?’ I’d inform them I might get them on to the tour bus.” She would stand on the bus steps waving the prettiest women and boys aboard. Ronson writes about introducing a 16-year-old woman to Bowie. They find yourself in Bowie’s lodge room after which the woman’s mom involves the lodge angrily demanding to know the place her daughter is.
In her e book, Ronson describes the scene in nearly comedian phrases however absolutely wanting again … “Oh God,” she says, earlier than I may even kind the query. “Horrified. Are you able to think about if it had been my daughter?” Did she remorse her function as “tour madam” (her phrases)? “I ought to’ve age-checked women as they received on the bus,” she says, “‘however that woman had full make-up on and appeared about 20.”
Did she have any regrets? “I used to be simply caught up in that entire world and so they actually wished to be there,” she says. “I used to be not dragging anyone in there.” However, she provides, “I used to be a bit complicit with that woman – if I had not facilitated it, that woman would have gone residence after the live performance along with her mum.”
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The Ziggy Stardust tour started in Britain and visited the US and Japan earlier than returning to the UK. The ultimate present was on the Hammersmith Odeon in London on 3 July 1973. Ronson remembers being backstage in direction of the top of the gig as Bowie advised the viewers this was “the final present that we’ll ever do”. She had been tipped off that Bowie was intending on killing off Ziggy, however for the remainder of the band the information got here as a shock. “He had had sufficient and he was exhausted,” says Ronson, “however he was a dick for not telling Woody and Trevor.” She is referring to Mick “Woody” Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder, the respectively drummer and bass-player with the Spiders from Mars.
In her e book, Ronson describes Bowie’s remedy of his band as a show of “uncooked, bare ambition, and a bloody-mindedness that’s explicit to a couple folks”. Mick Ronson, who later turned her husband, was vastly influential in Bowie’s rise however was handled and paid poorly. “David was a folks singer earlier than Mick got here alongside,” she says. “Mick reworked him each on stage and within the studio. Mick had accomplished all of the preparations and he discovered the members of the band, however we later discovered he was being paid 50 quid per week. I used to be being paid £20 and I used to be the hairdresser.”
The demise of Ziggy Stardust additionally marked the top of Suzi’s working relationship with Bowie. She went on to hitch Mick on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, discovering herself across the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Joni Mitchell earlier than shifting to Woodstock after which Lengthy Island. Regardless of being at his aspect in the course of the Ziggy days, that last evening in Hammersmith was the final time she noticed Bowie.
The e book ends in 1977 with Suzi marrying Mick. Since then, she has spent her time elevating their daughter Lisa and dealing in numerous music trade jobs. Lisa has but to learn the e book. “I by no means advised her I slept with David Bowie,” says Ronson, “so that’s going to be a little bit of a shock.” Mick died in 1993 from liver most cancers however, simply earlier than that, Bowie requested him to play on his album Black Tie White Noise. He carried out on a canopy of Cream’s I Really feel Free, and the album was launched in April 1993. Mick died later that month.
Me and Mr Jones concludes with a coda: Suzi Ronson studying by way of a telephone name that Bowie had died. It was January 2016. Not lengthy after that, she was contacted by a producer at the Moth, a New York-based nonprofit group devoted to the artwork of storytelling, asking if she wished to inform her story in entrance of a reside viewers. Ronson wrote a 15-minute story known as The Lady from Beckenham, which she later carried out in London. Its success is what impressed her to work on a full-length e book, revisiting her previous and re-evaluating the person who so modified her life. “David used to say he would promote his soul to be well-known,” she says. “However he was additionally otherworldly – and also you couldn’t take your eyes off him.”
Me and Mr Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars by Suzi Ronson is revealed on 4 April (Faber & Faber)
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