One Saturday morning early in the summer of 1971, Suzi Ronson was busy at work at the Evelyn Paget hair salon on Beckenham High Street when a couple walked past pushing a pram. The woman was wearing black jeans and a furry jacket, the man was in a flowing gold midi dress. “Everybody rushed out to have a look,” recalls Ronson, who then went by her maiden name Fussey. “Everyone was like nudging, poking each other, asking, ‘Who’s that?’ Then someone whispered, ‘It’s David Bowie.’”
Ronson had vaguely heard of Bowie: the success of his Space Oddity single had made him a local celebrity and the singer’s mother was a client. But she recalls: “He was in an arty clique, not my world.” However Ronson would end up becoming part of Bowie’s world, the only working woman in his touring party – as her new memoir Me and Mr Jones relates.
I used Schwarzkopf Red Hot. God knows why we had it in the salon – no one else in Beckenham would have wanted it
Bowie and his wife Angie lived on the middle floor of a mansion called Haddon Hall, in the south London suburb of Beckenham. Stepping inside it felt like entering another world. “I’d never met people like this before,” says Ronson. “There were gay guys – I had never met anyone overtly gay before – and there was Daniella, who was West Indian with a cockney accent, hair the colour of an egg yolk with big brown eyes. I was only three miles from home but it might as well have been a foreign land.”
And at the centre of it all were the Bowies. Ronson had been invited to Haddon Hall by Angie, whose hair she had cut. “They wanted to change David’s look,” says Ronson, “and Angie knew I was willing to experiment.” Bowie showed Ronson a magazine photograph of a model used by the Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto. The model had short, red spiky hair and the singer asked if she could copy that. So Ronson got to work. “It was the colour that really sold them,” she says. “I used fantasy colours – Schwarzkopf Red Hot – from the salon. God knows why we had them in Beckenham. No one used them.” That day, the Ziggy Stardust hairstyle was born.
Ronson was welcomed into Bowie’s circle, finding it both unsettling and intoxicating. “I didn’t have a particularly happy childhood,” she says. “My family were a little fucked up so I left school at 15 and was always looking for an escape.” Bowie offered that escape and soon Ronson was on the payroll as hairdresser for the band. It’s clear from Me and Mr Jones just how influential Angie was on Bowie’s and Ronson’s lives and careers.