She’s the ex-hairdresser who turned Bowie into Ziggy Stardust, then set off around the world in his entourage. Ronson relives those wild days – and recalls seeing a darker side of David
‘Bowie said he’d sell his soul to be famous’: Suzi Ronson on sex, ruthless ambition – and dyeing David’s hair redne Saturday morning early in the summer of 1971, Suzi Ronson was busy at work at the Evelyn Paget hair salon on Beckenham High Street when a couple walked past pushing a pram. The woman was wearing black jeans and a furry jacket, the man was in a flowing gold midi dress. “Everybody rushed out to have a look,” recalls Ronson, who then went by her maiden name Fussey.
Bowie and his wife Angie lived on the middle floor of a mansion called Haddon Hall, in the south London suburb of Beckenham. Stepping inside it felt like entering another world. “I’d never met people like this before,” says Ronson. “There were gay guys – I had never met anyone overtly gay before – and there was Daniella, who was West Indian with a cockney accent, hair the colour of an egg yolk with big brown eyes. I was only three miles from home but it might as well have been a foreign land.
Ronson was responsible for deciding which female fans were invited to meet the band. “I would say, ‘Do you want to come and meet the guys?’ I would tell them I could get them on to the tour bus.” She would stand on the bus steps waving the prettiest girls and boys aboard. Ronson writes about introducing a 16-year-old girl to Bowie. They end up in Bowie’s hotel room and then the girl’s mother comes to the hotel angrily demanding to know where her daughter is.
In her book, Ronson describes Bowie’s treatment of his band as a display of “raw, naked ambition, and a bloody-mindedness that is particular to a few people”., who later became her husband, was hugely influential in Bowie’s rise but was treated and paid poorly. “David was a folk singer before Mick came along,” she says. “Mick transformed him both on stage and in the studio.
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