Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

“My first memory of him was meeting him in the
Marquee Club; I suppose I was about fifteen maybe,”
says singer Dana Gillespie, a longtime friend from
the sixties through the mid-seventies, when she was
an artist with Bowie’s management company
MainMan (she would later appear in bed with Art
Garfunkel in future Bowie director Nicholas Roeg’s
1980 film Bad Timing). “I had waist-length peroxideblond
hair then, and I was brushing my hair outside
the dressing room in the long mirror there and
somebody came up and took the brush out of my
hand and carried on brushing and said, ‘Can I take
you home?’ And that was him. So I smuggled him
past my parents’ bedroom into the house where I
lived, which was about twenty minutes away from the
Marquee Club. And then we spent the night together,
but I mean, I was still at school. And I introduced him
to my parents the next morning. And they hadn’t
realized it was a boy until I said the word ‘David.’
Because nobody had sort of Veronica Lake–style
hair. You know, primrose-yellow blond.”
Unlike most Marquee habitues, Gillespie had an
aristocratic background. She was the well-traveled
daughter of a wealthy Austrian baron. Still, with all
her cosmopolitan polish, she’d never met anyone
like David Jones.
“Even his eye, you know, the eye that’s discolored,
he always said he’d got it in a crash while playing
American football. And that was an unusual thing to
be interested in. And he always dressed differently.
In knee-length suede trousers with fringe boots and