Ava Cherry met David Bowie in New York at a party for Stevie Wonder. Photo / Getty Images
Ava Cherry met David Bowie in New York at a party for Stevie Wonder. Photo / Getty Images
Ava Cherry is remembering how mesmerised she was by the cover of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album in the early 70s. “I fell in love with David before I met him”, she says. “And, you know, I just had this idea that our paths were somehow going to cross.”
That path was a long way from Chicago’s rough South Side, where she grew up. But Cherry was fiercely determined – her mother had named her after Ava Gardner, whom Cherry describes a “tough broad”. Together Cherry’s mother, who worked on an army base, and father, a jazz trumpeter whose band had opened for Count Basie in the 1940s, encouraged young Ava to follow her dreams.
She joined a grade-school vocal group, spent a brief spell as a Bunny in Hugh Hefner’s original Playboy Mansion, then embarked on a modelling career in New York. It was there she met David Bowie, becoming his lover, muse and mentor. “It was a meeting of minds and of kindred spirits,” she recalls, half a century later. “An instant connection.”
Cherry’s voice has lost none of its crackle or pop as she calls in from Chicago. She’s preparing to perform at 2024′s iteration of the David Bowie Fan Convention in Liverpool, alongside the last surviving Spider From Mars, Woody Woodmansey. “It’s still very raw for a lot of people that he’s gone,” says Cherry. “It can be quite exhausting, emotionally, to be the conduit for their grief. But I can sing his songs and channel him a little bit.”
For the crucial period of 1972-75, Cherry was around Bowie more than most. She was in the studio with him and John Lennon while they were recording Fame (that’s her high backing vocal at the end); she was sitting across the room when Bowie was writing Rebel Rebel (“I might have suggested a few words here and there,” she says, chuckling); and she was the one who delivered the script of The Man Who Fell to Earth into Bowie’s hands when Nic Roeg couriered it around to his house. That she maintained a sangfroid throughout was down, she says, to her early “training” at the Playboy Mansion, where she went when she was 16 (in her memoir, All That Glitters, she admits to playing backgammon with Hefner and kissing Warren Beatty in a closet, but “nothing heavier”). “By the time I got to New York, I wasn’t phased by anything,” she says.
David Bowie pictured with Ava Cherry during his last show as Ziggy Stardust in 1973. Photo / Getty Images
She first met Bowie at a party Cherry had organised for her friend Stevie Wonder; she’d had her hair close-cropped and bleached for the occasion and was wearing the kind of silver lamé ensemble that would garner her the nickname Black Barbarella. She and Bowie were introduced. “He said, ‘I like your hair,’ and I said ‘likewise,’” Cherry says, laughing. “All I could think was, yeah, he’s a freak like me.”
The chemistry was instant, but Cherry was in for a morning-after shock when the doorbell rang in Bowie’s hotel suite. “I’m standing there in a bathrobe, and this woman comes in, kisses me, and says ‘Hello darling.’ And David introduces her as his wife and says don’t worry, we have an open marriage, she sleeps with who she wants to and so do I,” says Cherry, recounting her first incongruous meeting with Angie Barnett. “I was like, ‘hmm,’ but by that time I was already smitten.” Bowie seemed equally taken, inviting Cherry to join him as a backing vocalist on a forthcoming tour of Japan in 1973. She accepted, only to learn a few weeks later that Bowie was ill, and the tour was postponed. “I had blown up my life for this,” she says. “I felt destroyed.”
Cherry decided to simply decamp to Europe and wait to run into Bowie again. She moved in with a wealthy Monégasque who’d taken a shine to her: “I was no gold-digger,” she says, “but at that point, I’d have done anything to get to David but kill someone.”
The fact that the Monégasque also turned out to be married proved unexpectedly advantageous when his wife suggested to Cherry that she resume her modelling career in Paris, “and I should sit on the Boulevard St Germain because that’s where all the stars hung out.” There followed eight months of haunting the terrace at the Café de Flore, before Bowie turned up in a nearby club called Chez Castel. “We picked it up as if nothing had happened.”
Then ensued what Cherry describes as “an idyllic period,” staying in the 18th-century Château d’Hérouville, outside Paris, recording Bowie’s Pin-Ups album, before moving back to London and Bowie’s house on Oakley St in Chelsea, where Angie, her commitment to free love perhaps fraying a little, put her foot down: “About a month in, she was screaming ‘get her out of here’,” Cherry says. “So he moved me into an apartment a block away, near the King’s Road.” (Cherry won’t be drawn on rumours that Barnett, at the affair’s height, threatened to jump out of a window: “I never heard anything about that”).
Cherry is keen to disabuse anyone of the notion that there was a glaring power imbalance in the relationship: “David never played the big guy, and he certainly wasn’t chauvinistic. It was more like, he can teach me things. And I was a sponge, eager to learn.” Bowie may have introduced her to Baroque music and German Expressionism but Cherry also ushered him into his Young Americans period – via her dad’s wardrobe.
“He asked to borrow one of my dad’s pale-blue zoot suits,” she says. “He loved it so much that he asked his designer, Freddie Burretti, to make a “Bowie-esque” knock-off with more pronounced shoulder pads. And that’s how he got that look.”
The music followed, with Cherry taking Bowie to Harlem’s Apollo Theatre and introducing him to the likes of Carlos Alomar, who would co-write many of Young Americans’ most indelible songs, and a then-unknown Luther Vandross, who would provide vocal arrangements and sing back-up (alongside Cherry). “I think it opened him up to a more inclusive way of thinking about American culture,” she says. “But David was already a huge fan of Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin, and he didn’t have a racist bone in his body. When we’d go out together, he’d stare people down, daring them into saying something about the two of us being together. He was very protective of me.”
Through all their time together, says Cherry, Bowie wasn’t into anything Class A – “maybe a spliff here, a glass of red wine there” – but that changed around 1975, during the recording of Station to Station. “The drugs got heavier and the paranoia grew in him. He thought everyone was stealing his money.” It also didn’t help that Cherry went to Montauk where The Rolling Stones were rehearsing (her best friend Claudia was dating Ronnie Wood at the time), and found solace in the arms of Mick Jagger. “David was really mad. And he didn’t talk to me again after that.”
“I went back to my mom in Chicago,” she says. “She told me to get tough, because I had stuff to do.” That included working with Curtis Mayfield and Luther Vandross, and releasing a bunch of solo albums, including, years later, some tracks she recorded with Bowie under the Starman-nodding name of Ava Cherry and the Astronettes. It was the closest she would get to him in those decades. “I was at home when I heard he’d died,” she says. “I was asleep, and my phone was pinging, going crazy with all these messages saying ‘sorry for your loss’. I didn’t even know he was ill. I cried buckets, and I had flashbacks of everything we’d been through, the golden years, if you will.”
Cherry isn’t speaking idly; the song of the same name was written for her by Bowie, and is a snapshot of their time together. “‘In walked luck and you looked in time’,” she intones down the line, “‘never look back, walk tall, act fine’. Well, I guess that’s what we did. And I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
