That same month, John welcomes Londoner David Bowie back to New York. They’d met a few months earlier, on September 20, 1974, at the twenty-first birthday party Dean Martin threw for his son Ricci in Los Angeles. Other guests had included Ringo, Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Arthur Ashe, and Brian and Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys.

The big draw at the event for John are the stars Dean Martin and Elizabeth Taylor. “He really wanted to go,” May says. “He loved the old-time Hollywood stars.”

Forty-two-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, in between marriages to Richard Burton, has recently met Bowie and taken a strong liking to him. “Miss Taylor had been trying to get me to make a movie with her,” Bowie says, though he isn’t interested. (He later tells Cameron Crowe, in an interview for Rolling Stone, “I mean she was a nice woman and all, even if I didn’t get much of a chance to know her. She did tell me I reminded her of James Dean.”) She makes the introduction between the two musicians at the party.

“So John was sort of ‘Oh, here comes another new one,’” Bowie later says, imitating John’s Liverpool accent. “And I was sort of, ‘It’s John Lennon! I don’t know what to say. Don’t mention the Beatles, you’ll look really stupid.’ And he said, ‘Hello, Dave.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got everything you’ve made—except the Beatles.’

“In the early 1970s,” Bowie admits sheepishly, “that would have been most uncool to actually say you liked the Beatles in any way, shape, or form.”

Despite that awkward first meeting, the two quickly find common ground and become close friends. “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness,” Bowie recalls. “Also, uninvited, John would wax on endlessly about any topic under the sun and was over-endowed with opinions. I immediately felt empathy with that.”

Bowie says John “was probably one of the brightest, quickest witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life. Socialist in its true definition, not in a fabricated political sense, a real humanist.

“And he had a really spiteful sense of humour which of course, being English, I adored.”

Bowie, who on January 8 had celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday (Elvis Presley turned forty that same day), has returned to the Pierre, on Fifth Avenue, where—in two $700-per-week suites—he had built the elaborate sets for his Diamond Dogs Tour, which wrapped on December 1, 1974.