When Suzanne Fussey left school, in 1965, to train as a hairdresser in a quiet London suburb, there was nothing to suggest what lay ahead for the 15-year-old. Almost 60 years later, Suzi Ronson, as she now is, is talking from her home in the West Village, in New York City, about her time as David Bowie’s stylist in the early 1970s, during the singer’s Ziggy Stardust era, and her marriage to Bowie’s musical collaborator Mick Ronson, guitarist in The Spiders from Mars.
How did she make the leap from one to the other? It was, as she explains in her new book, all down to cutting the hair of a “woman of about my mum’s age, wearing a tweed skirt, with sensible shoes and the ever-present English cardigan”. Her name was Mrs Jones, and she went on to tell Ronson about her son, “such an artistic boy”, who’d had a song in the top 10. The track? Space Oddity. Her son, as Ronson immediately realised, was Bowie – who, despite his hit, was underappreciated enough still to be playing at the Three Tuns pub on the local high street.
One day in 1971, Mrs Jones, by then a regular client, brought her daughter-in-law, Angie Bowie – cool, confident and keen to do “something outrageous” with her hair – to the salon, where Ronson created “short stripes of bright pink, soft blue and frosty silver”. A few months later Ronson went to style her hair at the Bowies’ home, Haddon Hall, where she met David for the first time. He was sitting in the mansion’s huge midnight-blue livingroom, “flicking through a magazine, wearing a soft velvet shirt with rolled-up sleeves and fitted trousers”.
Conversation was minimal to begin with – “He was a quiet person. Angie was great for him, as she just filled in all of the gaps,” Ronson says – but then, on one visit, “he showed me the photograph of a model in a magazine with this short, red spiky hair and said to me, ‘Can you do that?’” Yes, she said immediately, even though she wasn’t entirely sure. After two evenings’ work, the result was brilliant-red hair that stood up like a brush. “Angie screamed and David danced round the room, posing, shaking his head, loving it.”
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Ronson describes the Bowies as an intoxicating duo. “David wasn’t anybody at that particular point, but they were so interesting. They talked about people I had never heard of,” she says. “I didn’t know what life was like until I met those two. I was just a suburban kid from Beckenham. It was hard to keep up with their conversations – I would just listen most of the time, and laugh when they said something I thought was funny.”
Ronson adored Marc Bolan, of T Rex. When the Bowies brought him up in conversation she thought she finally had a chance to gain some credibility. “I said I loved him, the way he looked. I went on and on. When I finished the conversation there was silence. What I didn’t realise was that even though David and Marc were friends, they were also fierce competitors at that time. David did not love it that I was so enamoured of Marc Bolan. That shut me up again for another six months,” she says, laughing.
As time went on, Bowie became more interested in Ronson – to the point, she says matter-of-factly, that eventually they slept together. “He slept with everybody. It was just like marking his territory. I wasn’t in love with David. I was curious. He was an attractive bloke. We are talking pre-Aids, and I had just got the pill, so it was a completely different era. Everyone was going a little crazy.”
Angie never asked her about it, Ronson says, adding that she wasn’t smitten by her encounter with the singer. “I told Angie I wanted to go on the road with them. I didn’t want to be a groupie. I wanted a job. I didn’t want to be seen as that kind of girl.”
And get a job she did. Ronson helped to create the band’s look, from that spiky hairstyle – which Ronson was astonished to see become the basis for his cut on the cover of his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars – to their make-up and costumes. It’s also how she met her future husband – although they didn’t officially become an item until after Bowie shed his Ziggy Stardust persona, in the run-up to Mick making the Pin Ups album with him.
You might imagine, given Mick’s magical guitar riff on Starman, among other examples of his musicianship, that Bowie would have had as much respect for his guitarist as the musician had for him. But that wasn’t the case, according to Ronson. “David really needed Mick but never gave him the credit,” she says. ”Mick had no clue about how good he was. Mick thought if he kicked up a fuss about anything, David would fire him.”
The imbalance spilt into the studio, Ronson says. “I would love to have been in the room when they were writing songs. Mick comes up with a lick, David comes up with a lyric – it’s David’s song.” She adds that Mick’s pay was £50 a week – only £30 more than her own.
But there were many high points. “Ah, the Beverly Hills Hotel in California. It was stunning. We were there for over a week, because David was driving” – Bowie had a fear of flying – “and we had to wait for him. Iggy Pop was there too. We did those two Santa Monica shows and they blew it out of the park!”
Groupie culture was at its height, especially on the American tours, she says. “We would arrive at the Riot House on Sunset Strip and the groupies were there from the last band that had just left. It sounds kind of icky, but that’s the way it was. They were all with Iggy [Pop], Zepp [Led Zeppelin], The Who, whoever was in town.”
Of all the stars she met, Bob Dylan stands out. “He’s incredible – the force field around that man. His charisma is so overpowering. David had it, but Bob had it in spades.” Not that they saw a lot of him even when Mick played on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975 and 1976. “Dylan was in his own Winnebago. Mick said that he never spoke to him. Sometimes Dylan wouldn’t speak for three weeks.” She laughs. “He’s an odd bloke.”
It could be a challenge on stage to keep up with Dylan, who had become notorious for unpredictable set lists and strange reworkings of his own material. Suzi impersonates Mick grappling with Dylan’s contrariness: “It’s not my fault if I can’t recognise Like a Rolling Stone if it’s done fast with a reggae beat.”
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If these experiences were a zenith, a nadir had come on July 3rd, 1973, with Bowie’s abrupt final Ziggy Stardust show, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. “It was so sad to say goodbye to Ziggy,” Ronson says. The Spiders from Mars “thought they were going to America in September. It was a very David thing to do. If they had some warning they at least could have had some time to think about what they were going to do next. It was a pretty nasty thing to do to them. The heartbreaking thing is that they thought they were a band, but they weren’t. These were kids from Hull who lived in council houses.” They naively thought, she says, that they’d be staying together for good.
As it happened, Ronson had heard about the plan to disband three months earlier. As a stylist, she could almost fade into the background when Bowie was having private conversations, including the one he had with Tony Defries, his manager, and Mick backstage in Tokyo in April 1973. “Mick was promised a career. That made sense. They were talking about breaking up the band, and I prayed they would change their minds. No one else knew. I couldn’t talk to anyone else about it – I wasn’t that close to Mick at the time that he would have wanted to talk about it. I thought they would have told the other musicians, but they didn’t. That was a shock.”
The Bowies figured little in the Ronsons’ life after that final Ziggy Stardust night. “David called me, sobbing, the day after Mick died” – from liver cancer, in 1993 – “and I was just pissed that he hadn’t reached out to me” when Mick was ill, she says. “I was in London. I never had much time for David [then], as he hadn’t done anything to help Mick. He had given us some money, but it was, like, ‘F**k you’. Mick helped make David, and I thought he should have been more kind and generous whilst he was sick, not the day after he died. Back then David was only worried about David.”
Ronson was flat broke when her husband died. “I was destitute. I had no money,” she says. After Bolan died, she adds, Bowie had paid for the singer’s son to be educated. “Where was my money to put my daughter through school? Then I got fired, and then I got cancer.” It’s surprising to think that her husband, who produced Lou Reed’s album Transformer with Bowie, and played the iconic piano part on Perfect Day, wasn’t as comfortably off as you’d expect.
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Ultimately, however, Ronson is grateful for Bowie’s role in their lives. “Mick would have been in Hull, marking out school gardens; I would have been a hairdresser somewhere. If it hadn’t been for David, my life may have been very boring. He changed my life completely. I know Mick would have thanked him too. They were amazing together, they really were.”
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Me and Mr Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars, by Suzi Ronson, is published by Faber & Faber on Thursday, April 4th; Suzi Ronson is due to appear at Belfast Book Festival on Sunday, June 9th
