I chopped off his blond locks and David became Ziggy
Suzi Ronson met Bowie after giving his mother a perm and would not only create his bold new look, but enjoy a one-night stand with the star. Yet as her brilliant new memoir reveals, the iconic red hairdo started off more flop than pop
IT WAS the haircut that changed her life as much as his – and it was almost a disaster. When Suzi Ronson styled David Bowie’s hair into a spiky bright red barnet, it was a key part of the alien persona that set the suburban singer on the path to superstardom, and helped change the course of pop music on the way. But as her engaging new memoir reveals, Ziggy Stardust’s trademark hairdo nearly crashed and burned before it could send his career stratospheric.
“It takes me about half an hour to chop off his long blond hair and as it falls around my feet, I am cautiously optimistic,” she writes in Me and Mr Jones.
“The feeling’s short-lived though, as when I finish, his hair won’t stand up – it just flops to one side.
“I’m panicking and David doesn’t look too bright, so I say with a confidence I don’t feel, ‘Don’t worry, Dave, as soon as we tint it, the texture will change and it will stand up’.”
She adds, almost unnecessarily: “I’m praying I’m right.”
Ronson, then Suzi Fussey, had been introduced to David and wife Angie after giving the singer’s mum, Margaret, a perm in 1971.
She met them shortly before Christmas at the bohemian flat the couple shared on the ground floor of Haddon Hall, a huge Victorian mansion in Beckenham.
The day after chopping off Bowie’s golden locks, leaving him looking like a “schoolboy”, Ronson was back in the high street salon in which she worked, experimenting with colours, landing on the Fantasy range by Schwarzkopf: Red Hot Red.
“Angie calls me at the salon a few days later and says in a bright but slightly strained voice that David isn’t happy; she asks when I’ll be back. ‘Tonight’, I say, and with hair dye and confidence I go back to Haddon Hall.”
The outcome, fortunately for all involved, was spectacular. “Any doubts David might have had disappear the second he looks in the mirror at his short, spiky hair,” she recalls. “He looks amazing. It’s standing up like a brush on his head. I start to smile as Angie screams and David dances round the room, posing.”
Although he’d enjoyed a huge hit with Space Oddity a couple of years earlier, Bowie had been struggling to establish a new image. This was it.
Ronson soon became essential as his career took off with the single Starman. Then 22 and somewhat unsophisticated, today the striking 74-year-old looks back on those heady days with an air of experience and smiles: “Can you imagine we’re still talking about this haircut after more than 50 years? It makes me chuckle.”
HAVING become a crucial part of the star’s entourage, her life was to change forever. Not least of all when she enjoyed a one-night stand with the singer. It was sanctioned, she believes, by Bowie’s equally wild wife, who revealed her own fling with T Rex star Marc Bolan’s drummer, Mickey Finn.
“Looking back it was like being given permission by her,” says Ronson today. “Angie made it very clear both she and David were free to play as they wanted.”
But she had a shock when, after their love-making, Bowie told her he’d have fun telling Angie. “I freeze,” she writes. “‘You’re going to tell her?’ ‘Of course,’ he replies. ‘I tell her everything and she me – we have no secrets.’ Shame washes over me. How can I face Angie? ‘She’ll understand,’ he says. ‘She expects it – we have an understanding. It’d be worse if I didn’t tell her.’”
For the softly spoken girl from a modest working-class background, the outrageous became the new normal.
But there were no more bedroom antics after that. “David was a very attractive man, it was very exciting, but he knew what he wanted – that was to mark his territory,” recalls Ronson. “I was terrified it was going to upset my position with them. I didn’t want to be seen as a girlfriend you could go to bed with and then leave, I wanted to be part of their world, and it turned out fine.”
The story – “He’s a tender, romantic lover who tells me my body is Rubenesque,” she writes – is related in Me And Mr Jones.
Her years of journal-keeping create the sense of peeking behind the curtain during a glamorous, seminal period in UK music.
From being responsible for the hairdos of Bowie and his band, The Spiders From Mars (including guitarist Mick Ronson, who she would later marry), the stylist, who’d left school at 15, became central to proceedings as Bowie, clad in androgynous satin outfits, colonised everywhere from America to Japan.
“Sometimes you’d do two shows a day and I’d have to iron the sweat out of the clothes to get them ready for the evening,” she continues. “And those costumes were so drenched they could almost stand up by themselves.” By comparison, dyeing his jockstrap red on her mum’s kitchen stove to match a particularly skimpy new stage outfit was a doddle.
Suzi’s own world really changed at an early party, where fashion designer Freddie Burretti, busy creating the Ziggy Stardust costumes, was a guest. As she tells it: “I’m confused and more than a bit shocked when David leans over and kisses Freddie full on the mouth, a proper kiss!”
Freddie (“tall and slim with ashblond hair”) wasn’t the only stand-out figure.
“Everybody else was outrageously dressed too – like Freddie’s girlfriend Daniella, West Indian with gorgeous coffee cream skin and egg yolk-coloured hair,” says Ronson, adding: “You didn’t see people like that in Beckenham.”
On tour, there were also other duties. “I used to bring fans who wanted to meet the band to the hotel, drop them in the bar,” she says. Often picked out by Bowie, they were mostly girls. Not least one whose mum came to find her and Ronson had to pound on his door. “She looked 20, not 16,” she says sheepishly.
On another occasion, she was in the back seat of the group limo with a boy she was taking to the hotel to meet David.The band erupted from the stage door, amid scenes resembling Beatlemania, and leapt in.
“David throws himself into the car and launches himself at the boy… pushing his tongue down the boy’s throat,” she says. “That boy was dying to get in the car with David. He wasn’t a kid, maybe 20.
“If he’d been scared I wouldn’t have taken him to David. That was the only time that I saw David with a guy like that.
“David never came across as a gay man, although he would horse around with his friends. He never had a boyfriend on the road. He didn’t have any gay mannerisms although he was very feminine-looking with that white skin, slim body and dancer’s legs.
“He was gorgeous – he was what he said he was, bisexual.”
RONSON is charmingly understated about meeting other musicians. Lou Reed, in town in 1972 to join Bowie at a Save The Whale fundraiser at the Royal Festival Hall, is “pale and sweaty”, but she finesses his dark, curly hair anyway. “I think of it as a halo.”
The softer look eased Reed to mainstream acceptance, armed with his breakthrough album Transformer, produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson.The matter-of-fact storytelling is the same whether they’re playing 10,000seat arenas in Cleveland or raising eyebrows on the Russell Harty show.
It’s a frenetic crescendo and yet the climax was sour and, as quickly as it started, it ended. In 1973, Bowie suddenly announced the end of Ziggy and the Spiders on the final night of a tour – as much a surprise to the band as the audience.
“It was a pretty cold thing to have done that on stage in front of the world. Nasty, horrible,” she says. “Change for most people is hard but for David it seemed to come easily. Glam was already on the way out; we didn’t know it but David knew it, he came
out with Rebel, Rebel and Diamond Dogs, pure theatre. He left Ziggy behind him… cut him off and threw him away.Very astute.”
Mick Ronson and Suzi were still in the team when the covers album Pin Ups was recorded at a French chateau – then they went with Bowie, Angie and friends for a break in Rome. Bowie was distant, but she and Mick found their fondness for each other turning to love. Back home, the pair found a flat but soon realised they’d been cast adrift from their former life. Bowie was moving on to a more transatlantic sound, bringing in funk and soul, first on Diamond Dogs then more fully on Young Americans – a sound that didn’t involve Mick Ronson, a down-to-earth rocker from Hull.
So had fame changed Bowie? “I don’t think he changed, I think he was always like that. I just don’t think it was apparent to me, I just didn’t think he would be so cruel.
“But none of us would have been there without David, let’s not forget that. I was disappointed, very upset, very naive.
“Mick was making his record and I thought David was going to come along and they were going to be this team again. It coincided with David starting to get heavily involved with cocaine. When you’re in the grip, you don’t want anything else.”
The couple moved on and while Ronson’s solo career was erratic, there were high points. He worked with Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople.
Her memoir also recalls how at an impromptu Bob Dylan show at a New York club, she persuaded the organisers to invite Ronson on stage – and he ended up with a role on the singer’s mid-70s all-star Rolling Thunder Revue tour. “Bob was very different from David, but the charisma...” she recalls.
NOW living in upstate New York, she and Ronson were married in 1977. But she only saw Bowie again once, briefly, when Ronson, suffering from cancer, recorded with him shortly before his death in 1993, aged 46.
“He wanted to talk to Mick, knew he wasn’t well, so I didn’t have much interaction,” she says.
If the chance had arisen, would she have liked a longer intimate relationship with Bowie? “No! I didn’t want to be in love with David Bowie, I wanted the job, the experience of going on the road. David was a fickle person, I wouldn’t have done very well. If I’d have said ‘David, I love you’ he wouldn’t have tolerated that!”
When Bowie himself died of cancer in 2016 aged 69, it was well over 40 years since they went their separate ways.
“David was like that, when he was done with you he was done with you,” says Ronson. “He’d throw you out like an old shoe. I think it was part of the creative process. I’d done that haircut but he was going to change it, so I wasn’t required any more.
“He had his core group of friends but I wasn’t one of them. I would have liked to have seen him again. I was grateful to David, he took a chance on me.There were no other girls on the road at that time, only girlfriends. My world was black and white then it went to technicolour because of David…”
● Me and Mr Jones: My Life With David Bowie and The Spiders From Mars by Suzi Ronson (Faber, £20) is published on Thursday. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25