How our golden years turned to ashes: Still reeling from David Bowie's death, his bitter ex-wife ANGIE BOWIE gives her outrageous account of their doomed love 

She was there at the birth of a legend – a dynamic force in David Bowie’s rise to super-stardom. She helped create Ziggy Stardust and gave him a son, Zowie. 

Yet by the time Angie Bowie heard of her former husband’s death, they were just former lovers mired in bitterness and acrimony. 

Here in a painfully frank account of an extraordinary life together, Angie tells how Bowie conquered the world; how sex, drugs and fame destroyed them; how their son is now lost to her – and relives the moment she learned the star she had once loved was gone... 

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David and Angie Bowie, pictured in 1970, shortly after they married after first meeting in 1968

The phone call from David was panic-stricken. He was in Los Angeles and I was in New York. He couldn’t say what was wrong but I had to fly to his side.

So I jumped on a plane, rushed into the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel and headed straight for his room.

I found him there having sex with American soul singer Claudia Lennear. Whatever had been troubling him had obviously passed. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

I closed the door and headed for the Polo Lounge restaurant thinking to myself: ‘You need to get a life Angie, because this is not a life – this is hanging on by your fingertips.’

He had told me before we married ‘I don’t love you’, and we had enjoyed an open relationship from the start: we had a threesome on the night before our wedding.

But I demanded dignity and respect and this was the moment I realised I was losing both. 

David had always had my permission to have sex with people to the left of me and to the right of me – but not in front of me.

The news of his passing was broken to me in the Celebrity Big Brother house on Channel 5. 

The fact that it happened on television was weirdly appropriate since it was a showbusiness marriage conducted in public a lot of the time. 

I was shocked, completely unprepared for his death. I simply hadn’t expected him to die before me.

No one knew he’d been fighting an 18-month battle with cancer and that his latest album Blackstar was his farewell. I thought he was indestructible.

We’d been apart for a long time, so it’s not as if it bent me out of shape – but as I said on screen the stardust has gone.

The couple, pictured with son Duncan 'Zowie' Jones, at a press conference in Amsterdam in 1974

I believed the Big Brother bosses who told me but I was suspicious. That tells you something about the people that you’re working with, that you think this might be a stunt. 

I kept thinking it can’t be true. A relationship like that with a man like that, it defines your life.

That episode in the Beverly Hills Hotel was almost 40 years ago. Those were meant to be our golden years, the era when we enjoyed the global legend we’d built together in Beckenham, South London. I knew then they were coming to an end.

David and I were divorced in 1980 and there has been silence between us ever since. Despite our decade of marriage and a child together I was airbrushed out of his life.

He never demonstrated any affection or gratitude after we parted. He fired anyone who mentioned my name. 

Pictures of us together were destroyed. He would never let it be acknowledged what I had done for him. I was given a kiss off, whacked financially. The vitriol was extraordinary.

Once when I was having an argument with his PA Corinne Schwab, he hurtled across the room and grabbed me by the throat with both hands and started squeezing. 

He was high. It was awful. Corinne dragged him off. Some time after that when David and I met in Berlin to talk about divorce, I found all her stuff in his apartment so I re-arranged it – straight through the bedroom window. I heard it landed on a car below.

When we divorced I only wanted two things: a relationship with our son Zowie and enough money to live on until I had established my own career. I got neither. 

Zowie was my gift to David and I would never have separated them, I’d never have used my child as a weapon in our divorce. 

But it meant I was doubly punished when we split – I lost my work which was David, and my family.

Zowie just did not want to come and see me any more. I was living in New York in an apartment on 8th Street above a diner and he didn’t like it, it wasn’t what he was used to. 

Angie, pictured, was told of her ex-husband's death while appearing on Celebrity Big Brother

The last time I tried to contact him was when he was a pupil at Gordonstoun – David’s choice, not mine – and I tried to call to wish him luck with his A-levels. 

The school said: ‘There is no one of your name that has anything to do with him…’ They would not put me through.

Today he is 45, a grown man who obviously does not want me as a mother. Now David is dead I am not going to get in touch with him. 

Why would I do that to make myself more miserable? Zowie obviously wants things never to be repaired which is sad, but there it is.

I first saw David when he played with his band The Feathers at the Roundhouse in London. 

I was a student doing marketing and economics at Kingston Polytechnic and was on the music scene because of my friendship with Lou Reizner, boss of Mercury Records.

Speaking out: Angie appeared on Ray D'Arcy Show on Saturday evening to reveal more about her time with the late legend

Shocking: Angie has stunned fans of Bowie by revealing candid details about their marriage, including how she only had a child to please him

A few months later I met David for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, The Dumpling, and we went to the Speakeasy club to see rock band King Crimson.

I was wearing a pink velvet trouser suit. David asked me to dance and turned on the charm… but then I could be charming too! 

We slept together in my flat in Paddington that night. He was a stud, proud of it but when the morning came he left abruptly. 

That was David – he used sex the way a cat marks its territory. We became friends – I was his confidante. It was 1968.

One day I got a call from him saying he was sick, near death. I got the train down to Beckenham, he welcomed me at the door and didn’t look sick at all. 

In his room, all hippy sensuous, he played me the demos for what became the David Bowie album, his first. 

I thought: ‘Wow, he’s a genius!’ and when we made love he was much more delicate and sensitive than he’d been before. 

It made us intimate with each other, sharing secrets and stories, and that’s the day our relationship really began.

I was falling hopelessly in love though I could see my main potential to him was as a nurse, cook, housekeeper, creative ally and business adviser. 

1971's Hunky Dory LP, featuring the song Kooks, which David first sang to her and their son

I already knew he was a dirty dog, sleeping with Hermione Farthingale, his bandmate from The Feathers, and his next door neighbour Mary Finnigan and I thought well it’s going to have to be business for me too because it’s not going to work any other way. 

But my heart…he was so, so attractive.

We moved into Haddon Hall, a grand old Victorian mansion in Beckenham. It felt logical, normal.

I made a home, I anchored us as a couple, and I used my sense of theatre to help style him, to amplify the brilliant music he was making. 

The Ziggy Stardust red hair came from looking at back copies of Vogue; the Aladdin Sane make-up, the Space Oddity costumes – we worked on them there together.

I was at my parents’ house in Cyprus shortly before Christmas 1969 when David phoned to ask me to be his wife. I’d just opened a letter from him which read: ‘This is the year we will marry.’

The next time he called, the day before I was due to fly home to him, he played me the song The Prettiest Star which he’d written for me. Impressed? I was 19. Of course I was.

We married on March 19, 1970, at Bromley Register Office. The night before, we went to a friend’s flat for dinner, got tipsy, fell into bed, and romped a trois until we passed out. We woke so late we had to rush to the register office.

What was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander – except I did not flaunt my lovers in the public life we were navigating. 

I remember Mick Jagger – who was sleeping with my friend, the singer Dana Gillespie – came sniffing around me. 

David had taken Bianca, Mick’s then-wife to the South of France. I wasn’t particularly impressed or interested. I had one job and that was David.

We were young and beautiful and this was London, ground zero for the bold. Free love was just what you did. 

Threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, I was never a one-man woman, or a one-woman woman either. For David, offers from men and women were abundant to the point of being overwhelming.

Angie, 66, said the couple were a great team but that fame and drugs put their relationship under pressure

We were a great team. He made music and I kicked down industry doors and sorted his problems out, just the kind of thing I was supposed to be doing when I flew to LA and caught him with the singer.

I’d spent seven years at boarding school in Switzerland so I knew how to cook and sew. 

If I wasn’t looking after him or running up costumes for his stage shows on my sewing machine, I’d be off to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris on a £60 ticket to promote Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

Zowie was planned. I asked David if he wanted to start trying for a child after his father died. They had been so close and David was devastated by his death.

Our beautiful son was born on May 30, 1971, courtesy of the NHS. I was swearing like a sailor because he was so big he broke my pelvis. David was there, thrilled. 

We didn’t know he was going to be a boy but had already chosen the name Zowie, which means life, for a son or a daughter. David was a brilliant father, devoted and involved.

David was a late riser. I’d take him toast and coffee and orange juice in bed when he woke up and run him though his list for the day. 

Sometimes he’d say: ‘No, I’m going to the piano…’ his grand, which was downstairs in Zowie’s bedroom. That’s where he composed.

I remember one fantastic day he called me and said: ‘Listen to this.’

He started to sing ‘Will you stay in our lovers’ story…’ the opening line to his song Kooks.

I went and got Zowie and said: ‘You’ve got to hear this, Dad wrote a song for us,’ and David was playing and grinning and I was dancing with Zowie. That was the side to David the fans never saw.

When he wasn’t working he liked to go to the antique stores in Beckenham. He bought us a Burmese sideboard, a Japanese bed and an exquisitely carved French art nouveau bed. 

David Bowie pictured with his second wife Iman, whom he married in 1992 

Haddon Hall was coming together but it wouldn’t be long before his career took off and we needed to move.

We went to Diana Rigg’s flat but then when we outgrew it with Zowie, we moved to Chelsea and finally to New York.

I was young and inexperienced and I always tried to keep a small piece of myself safe by thinking about our life together partly as a business relationship. 

I knew I was vulnerable and so it proved. But I don’t regret our years together. I don’t wish I’d walked away earlier.

I was a realist. I understood David was hungry to make a mark at his trade, to use his talent and I knew he would behave in a certain way to get what he wanted, using sex to get people to do what he needed.

He used it to endear himself to people so they loved him and worked hard to promote him. I was not prepared to let that ruin a perfectly good working relationship. 

It was the pure selfishness of wanting to succeed. His sexuality was the currency he had available and I had to let him go and get on with it.

In the early days I went on tour with him, creating a home environment for him and the band. I always like to say I’ve never lost a musician yet. 

But as David and the Spiders got bigger, and Zowie started growing up, they put me off the road.

That’s the time David started to get involved in drugs. I think he wanted to forget about all the management problems at the office and the stuff that was being done in his name. 

The stress drove David in the wrong direction. He was supporting a lot of people but could not pay his own musicians what he wanted to pay them, he wasn’t seeing a lot of the money he made – industry executives were enjoying it instead.

Angie said her film director son Duncan 'Zowie' Jones, pictured, does not want to be a part of her life

It ended with some crazy scenes, such as the time he called me from LA saying he was being held captive by a warlock and two witches and Satan was coming. 

He was talking in slurred, hushed tones, hardly making any sense and crazed with fear. Yet again I got on a plane from London to fly to his rescue.

He was deep in cocaine-induced paranoia; I feared he might have some neck-snapping seizure. It was far from the idea of cocaine as a quick showbiz toot.

It was not pleasant and I tried very hard to be patient. I’m a very impatient person, and addictive behaviour just doesn’t make any sense to me. But I did what you do, I carried on.

I had my own brush with a drugs near-death. At a West End film premiere I was offered a snort of something I thought was cocaine but was a very stiff jolt of pure heroin. 

My lights went out, I keeled over and my heart stopped. 

A friend caught me and revived me. Without him I would not have made it – David Bowie’s wife dead at 25 right there in her evening dress, cold as a fish on a plate.

In New York we were busy being a sparkling couple, that was our job. He was courting Iggy Pop and Lou Reed and I was interested in working too. 

It became clear that despite the deal we’d made at the outset – his career first, then mine – he was not going to help me. That was a deal-breaker for me.

Nothing happened immediately. Our marriage lumbered on for another year or two – it suited him. 

I was asked if I would go to Switzerland – where the divorce laws were more in David’s favour – to arrange his taxes. I agreed, and it was there that he asked me to divorce him. It was very cruel.

He came to me and said: ‘You have to divorce me so that we can both be free.’ I said: ‘OK, fine.’

Later we talked about it at a restaurant in Berlin and once it was settled we were so much happier. In the wee small hours I held David up in the street while he vomited all over his shoes. 

I told him: ‘This just proves that not everything that comes out of your mouth is worth recording.’ 

He started to giggle and that night we went to his apartment and made love for the first time in years. 

It lasted three days and had a strange erotic quality. After we divorced I was very relieved. It was fabulous being free, to make my own decisions, to not be on call for him.

I walked away with just £500,000 to be paid in instalments over ten years and I was blackballed by the industry for a long time, because if David got upset about something he would make a face and someone would make sure the ripples were felt throughout. 

I married briefly again and had a daughter, Stacia, with another musician. 

I have been with my current partner, who is in construction, for 23 years. I don’t know what kind of husband David was to his second wife, Iman, but I heard he could be neglectful so maybe it was not all flowers and fun for her either.

The people I know who get divorced are cool about it. David wasn’t. Someone asked me if that was because I’d abandoned him but I never did. 

Did he feel guilt about all that I’d invested and the limited return? I wonder. I don’t know. Now he’s gone I never will.

After David's death, hundreds of his fans took to Brixton in London to pay tribute to the musical legend