Mick Jagger’s affair with David Bowie revealed in new book: They ‘were really sexually obsessed with each other’

Christopher Andersen is the author of revealing, often scandalous, bestselling biographies of the likes of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana. “Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger” lays bare rock’s Satanic Majesty’s sexual forays, including this exclusive excerpt about his dalliance with icon David Bowie.

BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN

MICK JAGGER and David Bowie fascinated each other, both as stars and as men. Jagger was just four years older than Bowie, and yet Bowie was now being hailed as the hot new star. Ziggy, in spandex and gold body paint, hugged Mick when Jagger paid him a backstage visit in the spring of 1973. When Bowie and his companion Scott were invited to a Stones concert a few months later, Mick not only paid for the couple’s hotel room but sent along roses and champagne with a note signed “Love, Mick.”

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Where Jagger was still coy about his own sexual preferences, Bowie made no effort to conceal the fact that both he and his wife were bisexual and often shared partners. “Mick looked at David and wondered if maybe this was the wave of the future,” said Leee Black Childers, former executive vice president of MainMan, the management firm that handled Bowie. “Mick was very conscious of doing whatever it takes to stay hot; David was the hottest thing around at the time.”

“It was the glitter era, and everybody wanted to be part of the bisexual revolution,” explained singer Chuckie Starr, who ran into Mick at a party in Beverly Hills the week that “Angie” hit number one. “Mick was no different. He was wearing rhinestones, blue eye shadow, and platform shoes.”

Why the offstage getup? Starr asked.

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“Because,” Mick answered, “I have a lot of respect for David Bowie.”

Keith Richards, for one, was mystified by his friend’s apparent obsession with Bowie.

“The fact is,” Keith said, “Mick could deliver ten times more than Bowie in just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Why would you want to be anything else if you’re Mick Jagger?”

Angie Bowie also looked askance at the blossoming relationship between Mick and David, but for very different reasons. She thought her husband had nothing to gain from cozying up to Jagger, and that such a friendship might even cost him credibility with his hip, young fan base.

Bowie, who called Jagger Mike — never Mick — thought differently. Not only was he in awe of Mick’s ability to electrify audiences year after year, but he respected the veteran rocker’s songwriting talent and business savvy. “He thought Mick was a financial genius,” Angie said. “We all did.”

Bowie and Jagger were soon spotted everywhere together without their wives: sitting ringside at the Muhammad Ali-Ken Norton bout, hanging out at the London disco Tramp, yelling and stomping their approval at a Diana Ross concert, or just cuddling up together on a hotel room coach. Neither superstar complained when one enterprising photographer snapped the two men in a moment of repose, Bowie tenderly cradling Mick’s head in his lap. Bowie also took Mick to gay films. “David,” said British TV producer Kevin Kahn, “is a born proselytizer.”

By October 1973, the Bowies were living on Oakley Street, just a stroll from Cheyne Walk. Angie had been out of town for a few days when she returned home one morning and went straight to the kitchen to make some tea. The Bowies’ maid, who had arrived about an hour earlier, approached the lady of the house with a peculiar look on her face. “Someone,” she told Angie, “is in your bed.”

Angie went upstairs to her bedroom, slowly pushed the door open, and there they were: Mick Jagger and David Bowie, naked in bed together, sleeping. Both men woke up with a start. “Oh, hello,” said Bowie, clearly taken by surprise. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Angie replied. “Do you want some coffee?”

Mick, blinking awake, remained silent. Angie returned a few minutes later with coffee and orange juice on a tray. While it was not a case of coitus interrupts, Angie “felt absolutely dead certain that they’d been screwing. It was so obvious, in fact, that I never even considered the possibility that they hadn’t been screwing.”

Angie was upset at the time, unsure if David was serious about Mick — and, if he was, how she could ever compete with him. “Even though I cared,” she said, “there wasn’t much I was going to do about it . . . Maybe,” she tried to joke later, “they were writing ‘Angie’ when I caught them in bed together.”

She left to do some errands, and when she returned that afternoon, Mick had already left. Oddly enough, while she attempted to discourage David from having an affair with Mick, Angie herself was vying for Jagger’s attention.

“I wish it had been me with Mick,” she said. “I’ve always thought Mick must be a wild man in bed. He is a very sexy guy.”

In truth, she had her chance and blew it. When he did try to seduce her, Angie inexplicably “could not stop giggling.” Mick’s former love Marianne Faithfull had no such difficulty: she and Bowie carried on an affair in late 1973, arguably when his relationship with Mick was at its most intense.

Indeed, none of these dalliances seemed to have an effect on the feelings Bowie and Jagger had for each other at this time. Ava Cherry, a backup singer who lived with the Bowies for a time, reportedly told a friend that “Mick and David were really sexually obsessed with each other. Even though I was in bed with them many times, I ended up just watching them have sex.”

According to Cherry, the relationship was more than just sexual. The two men became “very close” emotionally and “practically lived together for several months.” Shrugged Leee Childers: “Everyone knew what was going on between them. It wasn’t something either one of them was trying to hide.”

LA disc jockey and music industry insider Rodney Bingenheimer scoffed at later attempts to downplay the relationship between Jagger and Bowie. “Mick and David were lovers, of course,” he said. “They didn’t exactly make a secret of it.”

Perhaps no one was in a better position to assay the relationship between Bowie and Jagger than Bebe Buell, the tall, stunning Playboy centerfold who conducted affairs with both men that lasted several years. She didn’t stop there. Over time, Buell’s amorous escapades involved Elvis Costello, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler, Todd Rundgren, and Prince. (She claimed that Prince wrote the song “Little Red Corvette” about her.)

Buell was just eighteen and dating Rundgren, whose biggest hits were “Hello It’s Me” and “I Saw the Light,” when she caught Bowie’s eye at the club Max’s Kansas City in New York in 1973. David quickly seduced her. Not long after, she met Mick at an Eric Clapton concert. At the postshow party, Mick seemed to be reconnecting with his old friend Clapton while at the same time doing his best to lure Buell into bed. “He was flirting outrageously,” she recalled. “He kept coming over and telling me to ditch Todd.”

Rundgren “hit the roof” when he watched Jagger follow his girlfriend into the kitchen. “We’re going home now,” Rundgren told Buell, and on the way home, he gave her a stern lecture about “guys like Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger.”

Eventually Mick talked her into joining him for dinner. “Here is a man who can go slumming downtown with the gutter pigs and have high tea with Baron so-and-so,” she said after he introduced her to her first taste of sushi. “Mick is very versatile, very multifaceted. I was impressed.”

Finally, he convinced her to join him at his suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Mick wasted no time stripping off his clothes and climbing into bed.

“I was very, very shocked by his smallness, his fragility,” she recalled. “Such tiny little bones. But Mick was not fragile or demure as a lover. Being with him was not like sleeping with a bag of bones. He was very aggressive as a lover, very strong and confident.”

As for the part of Jagger’s anatomy Keith would later describe as his “tiny todger,” Buell was more charitable. “I’d say he was more than adequate in that department.”

Once Bowie and Jagger realized that they were both carrying on affairs with Buell (“Nobody was monogamous. Everybody was sleeping with everybody,” she said), the two stars teamed up to lure her into an orgy or two. “I used to get some pretty strange phone calls from Mick and David at three in the morning,” she said, “inviting me to join them in bed with four gorgeous black women.” Or, she added, “four gorgeous black men.”