Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

as he would tell Cameron Crowe the following year,
Bowie made arrangements to leave his unofficial
second home behind as well. After drifting from Ava
Cherry, he had started dating actress and Playboy
Playmate Claudia Jennings. Jennings, who was
killed in a 1979 auto wreck, is the willowy blonde
who appears briefly in The Man Who Fell to Earth,
naked and making out with Bernie Casey after he
emerges from a swimming pool (also naked). She
also appeared in the Roger Corman cult film The
Great Texas Dynamite Chase and continues to be
a cult figure among B movie enthusiasts. By year’s
end, Bowie, more popular than ever, became both a
genuine movie star and a death-and sleep-defying
Babylonian.
W
hile it’s an eternal magnet for rained-on English
rock stars, there is something eternally foreboding
about Los Angeles. I’m not actually sure what the
source of it is. I lived there for five years in the early
nineties. I cowrote a book about L.A. punk. Worse,
I’ve walked in L.A. after selling my Toyota for drug
money (again, early nineties). It is, with apologies
to my many friends who do so, “dubious” to stay
there for any length of time, as David Bowie keenly
notes in the Cracked Actor documentary. Hearing a
siren on Sunset Boulevard, he blanches and
explains to director Alan Yentob that there is “an
underlying unease; you can feel it on every