CYRINDA FOXE: “The first thing I did when I got to New York was change my name and my look. Gone were the proper Southern shoes and layers, and in came very 1940s platform heels, rolled-up jeans with seamed stockings, and those tiny little velvet tops.”
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CYRINDA FOXE: “Leee Black Childers, Candy Darling, Andy Warhol, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, everyone around me was gay, vibrant, creative, eccentric, intelligent. They would dress me up, parade me around, and use me to attract straight guys. They gave me black lips, because they said in the old black and white movies they used black lipstick. I plucked out my eyebrows and drew in these arches. So, with my raccoon eyes and platinum hair, and wild, glamorous clothing – like electric-colored, skin-tight 50s dresses – I was made.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “Leee Childers and I would go back to his place and watch old movies. It was there that he turned me on to Marlene Dietrich. He’d take me to thrift shops where they had these beautiful, inexpensive clothes from the twenties, thirties, and forties. Life was no longer normal. It was what I had always wanted. You couldn’t just go to Bloomingdale’s and buy a dress, you had to do something different.”
STEVEN TYLER: “Cyrinda tried to be the wise-cracking, gum-chewing, Lolita-type blonde – but she wasn’t born yesterday. Sometimes a lost childhood can erode your innocence. By the time Cyrinda was twelve, she was already twenty-five. She could be bittersweet, wouldn’t let you get away with anything; sharp as a tack and ferociously to the point. So to the point, they called her ‘Syringa.’ She told me that when she was thirteen, she’d walk along the beach in LA with needles stashed in her bobby socks and sell them to speed freaks.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “I was hooked immediately. This was what I wanted. These people were fun. I wanted a bunch of wild kids. It was like everyone had run away from home. We could dress like we wanted, do whatever we wanted. The first person I noticed was Candy Darling. She had on a spaghetti-strap dress… black satin… tall… ‘Woof,’ I said. ‘Gosh, she’s gorgeous.’ I had no idea she was a he.”
DAVID BOWIE: "One most fun companion at that time was Cyrinda Foxe. Cyrinda had hung out with the Warhol crowd back in NY. Well, she had been virtually adopted by them. They had her pegged as their very own Marilyn Monroe. Andy loved her, took her out to fun places, had her dine in fancy restaurants, got her introduced to big stars. She had also had a small part in the infamous New York production of Pork and I think that if events hadn't taken over her life she may have had a good chance of doing a lot more theatre. What I liked about her so much was that although she had been exposed to the most caustic and world-weary set of queens ever unleashed, she retained innocence and had a light but effective sense of humour. She rarely drank or drugged, she didn't fuck around with too many guys. She really seemed to enjoy life just for what it was. She was FUN to be with. I would get her to tell me how she met Marcel Duchamp, what did he wear, what did they talk about, did the old genius hit on her?"
CYRINDA FOXE: “Bowie once said, ‘I want to write you a song. What do you want?’ And I’m like, ‘Gosh, no one has ever asked me that, I don’t know, something like the Yardbirds, I guess.’ So he wrote, ‘Jean Genie,’ with that whole middle that’s just like the Yardbirds. The song is not about me, but about Iggy, although I don’t think David was hanging around with Iggy yet.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “My friends Leee Childers, Wayne County, Tony Zanetta, and Cherry Vanilla all came back from London as employees of Main Man. They came to Max’s in limousines, rented new apartments on gorgeous streets in Chelsea, ordered champagne for everyone, bought themselves color TVs, had their teeth capped, you name it. For a while, it seemed as if everyone in the back room at Max’s was being subsidized by Main Man. ‘You’re spreading goodwill for David Bowie? Fine, I’ll have a magnum of Veuve Cliquot, if you promise to think very highly and often of David.’ It was unbelievable. People who couldn’t pay the rent on their squalid flats a few months before were now spending thousands a week on frivolities, setting up Main Man’s New York office, and sending the bills to Tony DeFries.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “We always had the prime VIP booth at the Whisky because we were Mainman’s representatives on earth. We’d just walk in and the booth would be right there. All the kids, especially the groupies and stuff like that, would be looking hopefully at that booth. Cyrinda Foxe was gorgeous and I looked pretty cool too at the time, so everybody would be flirting with us.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “David Bowie and his wife Angela had a very open marriage. They were sleeping with anybody they felt like sleeping with. I was sort of like a new toy for David on the Ziggy Stardust tour. 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!’ I was still tripping around. No salt on my tail. I didn’t want to get tied down. 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, okay, I get to go on a plane and go somewhere, but that’s all I thought it was. So when David Bowie asked if I was in love with him, and I told him no, he left me there.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “I was living on Ninth Street between First and A, in Penny Arcade’s apartment. I hadn’t known Penny, but she was a famous underground star. She’d gone to Amsterdam, and a mutual friend got me to move in and house sit, which I did, and pay the rent, which I’m afraid I didn’t. Four hundred and fifty dollars a month was out of the question, especially with my fashion budget. I’m afraid I was not a responsible person. I think Penny hates me to this day, because when she was in Amsterdam she heard that she was getting evicted. She flew back to New York, let herself in the apartment, and found me naked and lying on the floor with my wrists cut. This was only one of my dozen or so drama-queen suicide attempts, which was the thing back then. Penny doesn’t take any bullshit, and she was not pleased. She walked over and sort of nudged me, not all that gently, with her foot. I came out of my unsuccessful suicide stupor at that point, sat up, and asked this complete stranger what time it was. When she told me, I said, ‘Oh my God, I have to be at Max’s,’ and I ran to the bathroom, bandaged my wrists, and was out the door. Penny threw me out of her house the next day and wrote a song about the experience.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “We saw the Dolls and they were electrifying in a real funky way. They were extremely colorful. That’s when New York City people wore color. It wasn’t just black and white and gray. We were all so good-looking back then. They became the New York ‘It’ band. It wasn’t Gary Glitter. It wasn’t the English bands. I’d seen Johnny Thunders at Max’s. That was David [Johansen]’s entry into the back room at Max’s. He had been hanging out on the Lower East Side with Charles Ludlam and that theater crowd. He took me to my first plays and that was really fun. I’m sitting in one of the booths talking to Leee and Eric Emerson, and David came in and sat down. Leee had him sit down with us. We were all excited. And David – how we got together is he just kept knocking on my door. Oh hey, he was heterosexual – sort of, I guess. Geraldine Smith and I sat at this table one night and she told a table full of people that we had more sex with gay men than we’d had with anyone else.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “Andy wanted to marry me off to a banker but I was still young, 19 or 20. I’d only just got out of the house so why go back in? I thought David Johansen was the funniest person, he was intelligent, well read. He wasn’t pretty or handsome, he was kooky. As an artist, I thought he was brilliant… Much to the chagrin of the whole uptown Warhol crowd, I started going out with him… ‘Rock Scene’ got ahold of us and our romance took on a life of its own in the pages of that magazine.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “Andy was furious about me and David being together. ‘Forget this guy,’ he said. ‘What are you doing to yourself?’ And Paul Morrissey told me David was some kind of dwarf that was given hormone shots to make him grow. That only made me angry and made me want to hang out with David even more. I don’t know how long David and I would have lasted if people hadn’t made such a deal about dumping him. He was a good man but not my cup of tea. I mean he was a pseudo-intellectual who dropped acid and read encyclopedias. Where’s the scene in that?”
MIA TYLER: “My mom thought David was cute and liked that he was the hot guy in the center of that fashion and status-centric downtown world. They got married less than a year after meeting and lived in a tiny apartment. They were hard-core druggies: heroin, coke, and alcohol. She once told my dad, Steven Tyler, that David would get so fucked up he couldn’t make it to the bathroom and peed in his dresser drawers.”
STEVEN TYLER: “Around this time an unearthly creature came into my life. I first met Cyrinda Foxe when I was cruising the streets of the lower Village with David Johansen. She was gorgeous and glamorous, white hot (with a whisper of Norma Jean) with candy-floss blond hair. She was married to and consumed by David but devoured me with her eyes. I would sit there and watcher her and wonder, ‘What the fuck is going on with these two?’ This insatiable fox named Cyrinda was best friends with Joe Perry’s wife, Elyssa, who knew exactly what was going on between us and invited her on tour with the band. While all this was going down, Cyrinda played lovely Lolita and we played cat and mouse for months on and off tour. She wouldn’t let me near her. You want it? Can’t have it! David was cool, but I couldn’t help sitting there thinking, ‘God, your wife is as fine as wine!’”
BEBE BUELL: “When I was first living with Todd, David Johansen, lead singer in the New York Dolls, and Cyrinda Foxe, who went on to marry Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and star in Andy Warhol’s last film, ‘Bad,’ had nowhere to stay, so we put them up for two or three weeks in the apartment on Thirteenth Street. I came home one night and found that Cyrinda had completely bleached and Ajaxed the bathroom. It looked like a shining saint. I mean, it was so white, and she was lying in a bubble bath, drinking champagne that wasn’t hers, and she had my dogs in with her. I just thanked her. I couldn’t believe it. She said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was filthy. I had to make it all clean.”
BARBARA KANE: “Cyrinda was bright, very magnetic, and had an effervescence about her. She was very much a character of her own creation. She always said what she wanted, and she carried herself with class. I was so sorry to hear that Cyrinda later became a junkie.”
STEVEN TYLER: “Cyrinda’s real name is Katheleen Hetzekian. She was a major starlet on the New York scene and was just back from Japan, where she promoted the Warhol movie she was in. I used to see her when I was buying heroin at David Johansen’s house. He had some real good stuff and he sold it to us. David was an alcoholic. Cyrinda told me he used to piss in the bedroom drawers because he thought he was in the bathroom. I never got that stoned when I OD’d. I shot coke with Cyrinda. We did everything. And she’s not just anybody. Cyrinda was a character from heaven. Gorgeous and glamorous. She took that Marilyn Monroe spin and had it nailed down.”
MIA TYLER: “Through the Dolls, she met Joe Perry and his first wife, Elyssa. My mom dealt them heroin out of David’s apartment. I don’t know if she was the dealer or merely answering the door, but she was in the middle of the transactions. I’ve known lots of people who live that life, but it’s still hard for me to picture my mom, as beautiful as she was then and as much as she enjoyed her champagne and Hermes, living like that. But hey, look at the other New York dolls who preceded her, Gia and Edie.”
STEVEN TYLER: “What a beautiful name, Cyrinda Foxe, and what a fox she was. I was on the chase for four months after we met in the Village in ‘76. I was wounded and beaten from the band, the drugs, and the road, and in a hopeless romantic moment, I borrowed from Humphrey Bogart… ‘Are you guys getting along? Are you two really in love? Do you think you could fall for a guy that doesn’t wear lipstick? If I told you you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” What a grouch I was. She looked at me and blushed. ‘David’s a different kind of guy. Heee’s @#$(*&*!&*($, and not only that, he’s @#$*@#$*&* up…’ But she was a strange bird, that Cyrinda. She was a Warhol girl… had a part in his film ‘Bad.’ She could Marilyn my Monroe one minute, and the next, Cruella my Deville. And then out of that love came the sweetest love of all, Mia. The rumor mill was cranking out bullshit in overdrive. She was on the cover of ‘Life,’ and I loved her to Death. She worked for Warhol; I was an asshole. She was always too dramatic, and I was known as a drugged-out addict. The one thing they couldn’t write – and didn’t even think of – was what we were, and that was In Love.”
MIA TYLER: “My mom was one of those special women who walked into a room and made heads turn. Blond and beautiful, Cyrinda Foxe was her own best creation. This was also her curse. Long after her best years were behind her, she still referred to herself as a sex kitten. She was so entertaining when she got in that playful sort of mood. Her eyes came to life. She still possessed that magic quality, that special it, and she tried to pass bits and pieces of that to me. I can picture her striking a pose in the living room of our apartment, which was decorated with signed Warhol lithographs. ‘Mia, listen to me,’ she said. ‘Sex kittens don’t get fat.’ ‘They don’t?’ ‘No.’ She smiled and made her voice a soft, playful purr. ‘They get fluffy.’”
