Jimmy Page left a party with Lori Maddox on June 3, 1973. He’d arrived with his girlfriend at the time, Pamela Des Barres. Maddox was fourteen.
The Getty Images archive of the Sunset Strip scene has that date exact, because a photographer happened to be working the room that night at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. Weeks earlier, Page had called Maddox’s house. She thought it was a prank call until she met him in person and he told her, “I told you I would be with you.” That was when she realized the call had been real.
Led Zeppelin’s manager, Peter Grant, found her later that same night outside the Rainbow Bar and Grill and told her to come with him. A car took her to the Hyatt House, where the band was staying, and to Page’s room.
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How she ended up on the Sunset Strip
Maddox, who also goes by Lori Mattix and modeled under the name Lori Lightning, was already a familiar face on the Strip by then. She’d grown up in Los Angeles and met her closest friend, Sable Starr, back in junior high. By 1972, when Maddox was thirteen, the two of them were sneaking out at night to a handful of clubs where touring bands stayed: the Rainbow, the Whisky a Go Go, and Bingenheimer’s English Disco. Starr already had a reputation in that world. Maddox was newer, which is reportedly how she picked up the label that’s followed her ever since: baby groupie.
What Jimmy Page did to keep it quiet
What started that night lasted more than two years. During Led Zeppelin’s later tour stops, Page kept Maddox out of sight, posting a security guard outside her hotel room. He flew back to Los Angeles between shows on the band’s private jet to see her, a detail documented in Barney Hoskyns’ Led Zeppelin biography Trampled Under Foot. Maddox has said Page asked her mother for permission to be with her and told them both he was in love with her.
Led Zeppelin’s 1975 song “Sick Again” is widely believed to reference her, a connection Led Zeppelin historian Dave Lewis has written about. Robert Plant, who wrote the lyrics, has said the song was really about the wider pattern of underage girls the band met on tour that year, not about any one person.
Rolling Stone looked into the Page story in a 2019 piece fact-checking Led Zeppelin folklore, and concluded it held up. Maddox was fourteen when she met Page, the magazine reported, and Page went to real lengths to keep the relationship quiet because, even in the 1970s, it could have gotten him arrested. The relationship ended around 1975, after Maddox found Page with Bebe Buell, who was old enough to date him legally. Buell has since given her own account of how it ended, and the two versions differ on some details, though neither disputes how old Maddox was when it started.
The David Bowie story that made her famous
None of this is the story most people know her for.
In 2015, Thrillist published an interview with her titled “I Lost My Virginity to David Bowie,” and it’s the piece that made her recognizable outside classic rock circles. She told the magazine she met Bowie in October 1972, during his first American tour, though nothing happened between them that first night. She wasn’t ready, she said. Five months later, the night before Bowie played the Long Beach Arena, she said his bodyguard collected her and Starr and brought them to his hotel suite, where she lost her virginity to him. She was fourteen at the time, not fifteen, which is the age usually attached to the story.
She’s told that night differently more than once. In the Thrillist version, both she and Starr slept with Bowie. Starr gave her own account years later, recorded in the oral history book Please Kill Me: she said she was the one who slept with Bowie, and that Maddox had already left the room by the time it happened. Maddox gave a third version to Bowie biographer Paul Trynka, saying she and Starr let themselves into his room uninvited and found him tired rather than interested. She has also said she kept seeing Bowie on and off for years afterward, though that part of the story gets repeated even less than the rest.
There’s a gap worth pointing out too. Maddox turns up constantly in photographs from this period: with Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, with Page, with the New York Dolls’ Sylvain Sylvain, at clubs and parties across Los Angeles. No photograph places her with Bowie during the time she says they were involved. That gap doesn’t prove anything by itself, but next to three different versions of the same night, it’s a strange hole in the one part of her story that everyone remembers.
Life after the Strip
Maddox eventually moved away from club life and into fashion, spending years as a buyer at Glam Boutique in West Hollywood. She appeared in the 2003 documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip, and turned up in party photos around Los Angeles as recently as 2019. She married Raymond Irmer in 2021, the same year she appeared in the documentary Look Away, which examined how common relationships like hers were across the music industry of that decade.
How she talks about it now
Maddox has never called herself a victim, and she’s been fairly consistent about that for decades. In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, she pushed back on hearing Page described as a predator, saying he never abused her. In the same conversation, without being asked, she added:
“I don’t think underage girls should sleep with guys. I wouldn’t want this for anybody’s daughter.”
She holds both of those views at once and hasn’t tried to sort them into something tidier. Asked more recently how she sees her own history, she skipped the 1970s entirely and reached for Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, and Gigi Hadid instead. “They are the modern-day versions of teenage groupies,” she said. The real difference now, she added, is how much money the internet lets someone make from it.
