Who is the Jean Genie in David Bowie’s classic song?
The Aladdin Sane sessions formed an album inspired by David Bowie‘s conception of “rock and roll America”, as he described his time on the road for the Ziggy Stardust Tour in 1972 and 1973.
“Here I was on this great tour circuit, not enjoying it very much,” Bowie detailed, quoted in 2016’s The Complete David Bowie. “So inevitably my writing reflected that, this kind of schizophrenia that I was going through.”
In between the first two days of the tour, riding on a tour bus from Cleveland, Ohio, to Memphis, Tennessee, Bowie’s The Spiders from Mars guitarist Mick Ronson was aimlessly playing a riff on his Les Paul similar to a Bo Diddley tune. This would form the basis of ‘The Jean Genie’, the first song born from Aladdin Sane. Once the Ziggy Stardust Tour reached New York City, Bowie would complete the song, with inspiration from Cyrinda Foxe.
Foxe was one of Andy Warhol’s Superstars in New York, appearing in his 1971 play Pork and later, his 1977 film Bad. She was a fixture at Max’s Kansas City before being immersed in Warhol’s so-called “scene”, and with Bowie at her apartment, she would spark one of Bowie’s greatest stories.
As she recounts in her 1996 memoir, Dream On: Livin’ on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith, Bowie asked Foxe, “I want to write you a song. What do you want?”, to which she replied, “Something like the Yardbirds”.
Bowie confirmed this with the explanation, “I wrote it for her amusement in her apartment. Sexy girl.”
It was from Warhol’s world of eccentric artists, models, actors and all-around muses to which Bowie had long been indebted. As detailed in Please Kill Me, it was Foxe, photographer Leee Childers (who would later become the official photographer for the Ziggy Stardust Tour), singer Jayne County, artist (and future publicist for Bowie) Cherry Vanilla and more from the cast of Pork that first influenced Bowie to remove himself from his early folk-hippie persona and lean into punk and glam, when the play had its run in London.
“Of course, we influenced David to change his image,” County said, quoted in Please Kill Me. “After us, David started getting dressed up. I’d gotten the shaved eyebrows thing from Jackie Curtis, and David started shaving his eyebrows, painting his nails, even wearing painted nails out at nightclubs, like we were doing. He changed his whole image and started getting more and more freaky.”
When Bowie and his wife, Angela, ventured to the States for the Ziggy Stardust Tour, with Bowie playing New York’s Carnegie Hall, the couple met Foxe. “I was sort of like a new toy for David on the Ziggy Stardust tour,” she explained in Please Kill Me. “But while we were in San Francisco, David asked me, ‘Are you in love with me?’ I said, ‘No.’ I wasn’t about to say, ‘Yes!’”
Foxe – who had been working as a publicist under Bowie’s manager, Tony DeFries – was flown out to San Francisco to star in the music video for ‘The Jean Genie,’ in which Bowie would star as Ziggy, “a kind of Hollywood street-rat” and Foxe as a “consort of the Marily brand,” as he explained in the 2002 book Moonage Daydream.
Foxe continued, “Besides, Tony DeFries wanted everybody to be this Bowie thing. I didn’t want to cut my hair like that. So I wasn’t impressed with them. I mean, OK, I get to go on a plane and go somewhere, but that’s all I thought it was.” By Foxe’s account, when she told Bowie, “No,” she was left in San Francisco.
There seemed to be no animosity, however, in Foxe’s recollection of her time spent with Bowie. In her memoir, she described him as a “great lover” and noted that she “really cherish[ed her] time” with him.
As for the literal Jean Genie, who “lives on his back,” “loves chimney stacks,” and is “outrageous, he screams, and he bawls,” Iggy Pop is believed to be the primary source of inspiration, in the early days of his and Bowie’s friendship. But, as Bowie clarified – quoted in The Complete David Bowie, the Jean Genie is “an Iggy-type character… it wasn’t actually Iggy.”
The title of the song, otherwise, is “a clumsy pun,” in Bowie’s words, alluding to Jean Genet, the French writer revered by the likes of Patti Smith and Pete Doherty. In this vein, the Jean Genie, as Bowie explained on BBC Radio 2 in 2002, was about “the ‘Iggy-type’ person… the closet intellectual who wouldn’t want the world to know that he reads”.
