my husband had seen my performance on the mike douglas show he told me and had written a new song for me golden years he sang it over the phone for me just the way all those years before he'd sung me the prettiest star it had a similar effect i bought it even if david was never actually there with me i thought we'd always be together just as in the song i had a very great need you see for things to feel all right i didn't take any action then i remained mrs bowie and stayed at
my post things were not just fine at all though they were in fact going to hell literally i found that out once again via transatlantic telephone call this time it was david on the other end or at least the creature david had become a friend abusing sense mangling money money-bleeding full-fledged vampire of velocity like coke addicts long before and after him he'd learned to travel far and fast to keep his mind spinning in tight little circles even when standing perfectly still to arrange an existence almost entirely devoid of daylight to assume a world view of
utter paranoia in his case no great stretch and to start slowly sucking the life out of everybody close to him he was calling me from los angeles only half a world away from oakley street but from the way he sounded he might just as well have been off in the emptiness of some awful cold black hole out there in the timeless infinity far beyond the reach of warmth and earthly human feeling he said he was with the devil or more specifically that he was about to be with the devil he was in a house somewhere
he didn't know exactly where except that it was in la and three people a warlock and two witches were holding him for some terrible satan related reason he kept trying very incoherently to explain he wanted to get away he said but he didn't have any money and he didn't know where he was and anyway the witches wouldn't let him leave he was talking in slurred hushed tones and hardly making sense and was crazed with fear he sounded really spooky i'd heard david speaking from some pretty cold strange places both by telephone and in person but
this sounded different worse than i'd heard before i got scared and insisted that he give me the number where he was telling him he couldn't keep it a secret the way he liked to it's a measure of how frightened he was that he gave it to me before he hung up the phone or someone hung up for him rattled i called los angeles immediately and much to my relief reached michael lippman the new manager with whom david was rearranging his affairs i should i guess relate to you the story of michael's entrance on the scene
and the sorry tale of david's ultimate disaffection with tony defrees but not in detail it's entirely too tedious essentially david tired of having no access to his money particularly since he needed such large amounts of it so frequently in cash without a paper trail for his part tony tired or so i gather of the way david resented him refused his advice and behaved in the standard out-of-control addict fashion which is to say paranoid compulsive abusive and irrational michael lippman saw an opportunity opening in david's career and took it but back in los angeles where we
left david still detained by witches in an undisclosed location me on the phone with michael lippman giving him the telephone number david had given me since michael was both on good terms with david and in the same city i told him maybe he should call the number maybe he could get a better fix on the situation than i could he agreed and i hung up and waited when he called me back he too was worried he hadn't liked the way david had sounded he said so he told him just to walk out into the street
wherever he was find a taxi and go straight to the lipman's house in the hollywood hills michael could pay the taxi off and he and his wife could help chase the witches away if they followed david had agreed to that praying that david had taken michael's advice and determined to motivate him out the door if he hadn't i called the witch's number a woman answered but i couldn't get any sense out of her and i could hear people laughing crazily in the background i listened to the gibberish coming at me across the atlantic from that
house in california feeling a great sense of dread and right then i decided to catch a plane duty very plainly unavoidably had called i left that night looking down at the receding lights of heathrow i knew i was saying goodbye to civilization and heading into who knew what hell on earth in hollywood it's not as if the beast is any stranger in the hollywood hills wherever you have a concentration of exceptionally ambitious utterly a moral egomaniacs locked in throat slashingly ruthless competition with each other which is as good a description of the los angeles movie
community has any i can think of some genius is going to hit on the idea of a career boost from satan i'm not kidding hollywood is very likely the most active occult area on the planet and it's been that way for decades the black arts are established to the point of being ingrained and in the mid 70s they were thriving as never before or since i knew that so it wasn't any great surprise when transported intercontinentally to michael and nancy lippman's house i heard david's explanation of what went on between him and those witches from
whom he'd escaped just as michael had advised by walking out and hailing a cab the deal he said was that those people wanted his semen they wanted to hold him and cast a spell over him again i'm not kidding so that he could inseminate one of the witches in a ritual ceremony on all saints eve and thereby bring an offspring of satan into the world well i thought fancy that the things a few grams of cocaine can do to inspire people david's tale had lots of color and even greater grandiosity but like most coke fantasies
it lacked any real spark any true imagination you watch rosemary's baby then spend two days snorting three-inch lines every 15 minutes in the company of some scumbag dealer in his co-course and presto you're a poor little mia pharaoh and the big old power procreating beast man rolled into one an exceptionally interesting outing for the lance of love even in his paranoid fantasies david was leading with his dick i didn't know whether to laugh in his face or go cry in a corner the idea of anyone thinking they'd actually have to force david bowie to exercise
lance was pretty funny under any circumstances on the other hand the spiritual degradation demonstrated by his story was really sad so i just straightened up and did my job angie would fix things be the nurse and the cook and the voice of reason make it all okay until next time that was the way it went despite my unsuitability as a drugging companion david found me very acceptable even indispensable when too much got to be too much and he started scaring himself my first task i perceived was to get some food into him the idea being
that food might slow him down enough to consider the even better idea of sleep i had to buy and prepare the food myself though since so david explained michael and nancy would try to poison him if given the chance having communicated that essential item he went off to the guest room to do some more toot i went off to the supermarket when i came back loaded with all his favorite delicacies he was in a state of utter panic because i had been gone so long i calmed him down a little then put a foot wrong
babe i think it might be a good idea if you stopped doing the cocaine for a little while you know how it takes your appetite away and you need to eat so you might want to let up until you've eaten dumb mistake don't tell me what to do he yelled don't you tell me what to do and he went into his room slamming the door sniffing noises ensued as the afternoon wore on he wouldn't come out of his room finally after endless soothing talk from michael and me he opened the door very soon we wished
he hadn't the problem was straight across the hallway on the wall of a room michael and nancy were using as a home office a photograph of david and me taken in paris in happier times with him in a white suit and me in a white dress david took one look at the photograph and freaked right out he stood there death white rigid and shaking pointing at the picture with a look of total horror on his face and it got worse the shaking intensified very quickly and i began to lose it it occurred to me in
a wave of sudden fear that david was plunging into a cocaine-induced epileptic seizure which could kill him people die in such states literally shaking themselves to death snapping their heads back and forth so hard that they break their necks it didn't get that far though with michael nancy and me and his face demanding to know what was going on david was able to spit it out in the photograph he told us in his terror stricken tremor his arm encircling my waist was black well so it was or at least it was dark and although there
was no big deal to anyone else it was a shadow a quirk of exposure or printing whatever who cared to david it was the kiss of death in his scheme of things the fact that his arm around my waist was black meant that the witches were going to kill me as a way of getting to him it signified moreover that their thrall had penetrated into his immediate environment so back into his room he ran and the door slammed shut again creative solutions were called for now if david couldn't save himself by making a transition to
my rationale then i had to adopt his i had to jump into that nest of spooks and demons with him and deal with them on his terms fortunately i had the means of doing that in my address book was the telephone number of wally elmark a very respectable white witch whom david and i had met in london while she was working with robert fripp on some weird esp album project wally was great she really knew her stuff and she even looked the part very pale and gothic with good gypsy slavic cheekbones and to my great
good fortune she was home to take my call i explained the situation to her and she gave me a prescription over the phone the ritual scattering of household herbs she said together with certain readings from the tibetan book of the dead which david had kept handy since his buddhist monk wannabe days should temporarily restore a relatively even keel the news that i had a plan from wally was in itself comforting to david and he began to calm down he even agreed to eat if that is i and only i touched his food i went into
the kitchen prepared him a tray and took it to his room i didn't notice it at first david had to point it out to me on a nice balmy hollywood late afternoon a storm was going on outside his window rain thunder lightning the works outside all the other windows in the house there was calm and sunshine i stood there looking at this thing sort of numb then snapped out of it resumed my angie fix-it roll and proposed reassuring points about the eccentric california climate and the deceptive topography of the hollywood hills i did a pretty
good job but all the same it took a long time to pacify david after this latest manifestation he didn't get to sleep until quite late that evening david finally began to break free from his satanic obsessions it seemed as if we were to be spared further problems with demons warlocks and witches at the same time a threat already in place began really asserting itself the awful corrine schwab fired up her campaign for exclusive rights to david bowie body and soul my troubles with witches may have been over but my troubles with had only just begun
