Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies by Pamela Des Barres Read Free Book Online Page A

see, and come back and tell me about it.' He was very voyeuristic and adorable, and wanted to hear stories. He would bolster your ego, saying, `You are so fabulous. If only Hollywood knew who the real stars are, it would be a different world.' Other people had problems with him. I think they became dependent on him for money, but I never did. This was an Equity play and we got a salary and didn't expect Andy to pay our rent. When I auditioned for him I discovered he loved advertising. I had done an ad for Yodora deodorant for black people, which would be so racist now. But we used to say it was made for Negro skin. And he just ate it up! The other subject he loved was Catholicism, so he asked me all about Catholic school."
    Cherry diligently rehearsed for the play, but Andy just wanted to hear her sing "Our Lady of Fatima." "I sang terribly, I'm sure, because I was nervous. Probably the worse I sang, the better Andy loved it. I got the part and walked out of there, thinking, `Wow, I just auditioned for Andy Warhol. And I'm going to London to play the lead in his play!"

    It was much more difficult in 1970 for a woman to make her mark in the music world. "I wanted to be necessary, I wanted to be needed, so I thought, `Wow, I'm getting in there. I'm really a part of show business.' Oh, it was the most magical summer! The cast lived together. Rod Stewart came to our apartment, and the band America. A lot of local bands would sleep at our flat. We had a ball. Andy came for a couple of days before we opened. And we had a fabulous opening night party."
    Cherry was already an underground star in her own right, playing the lead in Pork, when she saw David Bowie perform for the first time. "I played Brigid Polk, or `Pork: She was supposed to be gross and freaking out on speed. There was a gesture I did all through the play, which was to pop out a tit. Bowie was a Warhol fan and knew we were in town. So at the end of Bowie's show, he introduced us in the audience: Leee Childers, Jayne County, and myself-and I popped out a tit. Bowie had long hair and yellow bell-bottoms and played an acoustic guitar. Mick Ronson was on electric guitar and Rick Wakeman played piano. Angie was pregnant, and running the lights. So we all got to be friends and started hanging out." When the play ended, Bowie's new manager, Tony DeFries, kept in contact with Cherry and Leee in New York, eventually asking them to help bring David to America to get a record deal. "In September '72, he brought Bowie to America, and we became the core of MainMan-the management agency. I was the only one with some structured Madison Avenue experience, so I organized the office, did all the contract typing; I was the `everything girl.' DeFries had this ploy to make David more desirable: he wasn't going to let him talk to the press. `You can't talk to him. But you can talk to Cherry.' So I was yap-yap-yappin' with the press. I'd had poems published in magazines, and was colorful enough to keep people interested and entertain them a bit. Basically, I started doing David's interviews. I had no idea what I was doing, but it worked beautifully."

    Here's a revealing little nugget from Bowie's Web site in 1998:
I had decided to give my public life over to an extraordinary woman called Cherry Vanilla, an actress and performer whom I had hired to be my PR. And of course, she just wrote about her own life, like what shows she was seeing, where she ate and all that. If Cherry loved or hated something or someone it was Ziggy/Bowie who loved/hated it. Some of the events she wrote about did happen to me but you can assume that most of anything that is taking place in New York is happening to Ms. Vanilla. The cute thing is that every now and then she'd write how I had just come from seeing this great new performer whom everyone should know about ... Cherry Vanilla.
    Cherry continues with her intrepid tale: "We were in Boston one night, Angie wasn't there, and I ended up in bed with Bowie. And