Untitled #3

by Grace Jones

  All the most famous exotic models came from Wilhelmina’s agency, and it was specifically set up for the kinds of girls who were not considered normal. Models like Lauren Hutton, with the gap in her teeth. Having been a supermodel in her day, Wilhelmina really understood how hypercompetitive modeling was, as well as how merciless, and she didn’t have the everyday-girl-next-door agency. She had an eye for unusual new looks, and for different kinds of personalities, the sort that often lead to trouble. The Ford Models agency had the girl-next-door look. I would be their worst nightmare. I did try Ford, and I was rejected with barely a second glance. Wilhelmina herself didn’t accept me straightaway. She kept me working with photographers, and she told me to keep coming back with new pictures. She wanted me to work on my look with the photographers, discover for myself what kind of model I wanted to be.

  Finally, she said yes and took me on. She kept encouraging me to find out what it was I was going to be. In order to find it, I went very, very extreme, almost too far. I shaved my head and my eyebrows, which was a big mistake. She was very upset. At one point I used to have a lot of hair that came down too low at the top of my face, almost like a shadow. In my photographs, I would notice this fine down on my forehead. I decided I would get rid of all the hair, not thinking that I was supposed to ask permission. You were expected to check with your agent before you cut your hair. I obviously didn’t have the catalog look; I wasn’t getting those jobs. I thought it wouldn’t matter if I made my extreme look even more over-the-top; I thought that it would actually help.

  Wilhelmina was outraged at how brutal I now appeared. From the outside, it looked like quite an aggressive statement. What the hell did you do?! We can’t sell that! It was already too much that your nose is too small, your lips too big, and your skin too dark. Now I looked ready to kill someone.

  She made me wear wigs while my head was shaved, to cover up the impertinence, but I hated them and didn’t recognize myself when I looked in a mirror. I wanted my hair short. I didn’t like how I had to straighten it when it was longer—the process was very painful—and the Afro was looking passé. I liked how having it short was a threat to people because it made me look so confrontational. I didn’t want to make people feel comfortable when they were with me, because I was always wanting to test people, provoke them into a reaction. Ever since I had the Afro in Syracuse, before it had become a fad, I liked how the way I wore my hair caused a reaction.

  The biggest reaction came when I cut it to the bone and revealed more of my black skin. It made me look hard, in a soft world. It made me look more like a thing than a person, but that was how I had felt I was treated growing up—as a thing, without feeling, an object, not even human. Having felt that way as a child, it felt normal for to me to shave away my hair and acknowledge that emotionless thingness that had been pressed into me. Without fully understanding it at the time, I savored the response to what I did to myself, by breaking certain laws about how I was meant to behave and look, as a model, a girl, a daughter, an American, a West Indian, a human being.

  My shaved head made me look more abstract, less tied to a specific race or sex or tribe, but was also a way of moving across those things, belonging while at the same time not belonging. I was black, but not black; woman, but not woman; American, but Jamaican; African, but science fiction. It set me outside and beyond in some sort of slipstream, and instinctively, I liked that it was a way of expressing that I was flexible, that I could adapt to different situations, and that I was versatile, capable of changing who I was and what I was doing depending on who I was working with and in what context. It was about not being uniform. It was about change, and changing my mind, and through it I could express how I was always becoming someone else.

  * * *

  Shaving my head led directly to my first orgasm. This is because I am fairly sure the man I had my first orgasm with was Andre, my hairdresser from Cinandre, a huge salon at Fifty-Seventh Street and Madison Avenue. It was such a revelation, almost traumatic, the very first, that most of the details have been wiped away, other than the tidal rush of feelings, but a little bit of detective work, rummaging through my memories, has led to Andre as the prime suspect. His salon was where I was sent to make sure that when my hair started to grow back I didn’t go ahead and shave it off again. He was someone who Wilhelmina thought could soften the hard edges and at least make me look more like a model than a marine.

  These days they say DJs are God. Back then it was hairdressers who were God. Like Vidal Sassoon. All the celebrities would go to hairstylists like Andre. He was more than a hairdresser. He was an artist and a photographer, very experimental. He cut the hair of lots of models and actresses, and he invented the Farrah Fawcett flick. It was decided he would know what to do with me.

  He definitely knew what to do with me.

  Andre relished this instinct that I had to find a different place to be, even when it came to my hair, and he treated my short hair like a canvas. It was very short, but there were ways he could change how it looked, and instinctively this was what I was after, constant change. It would be a key part of my overall performance. My hair could be adjusted, changed, edited, in much the same way that later my whole body would be treated.

  He was the first one to style my short hair. He was a wizard with scissors. He treated my hair as though he was producing a sculpture, with incredible attention to detail. It wasn’t quite the famous flattop that came later, but it was on the way. He let it grow out a little, and then cut what little hair there was into shapes, designs, grooves. He cut a little skier and had ski marks coming down from the back of my head to the front. He shaped my hair above the forehead so that it was very precise. He created partings in my hair by shaving a thin, straight line. He would shave out a groove and then paint it. That was my look, and it became the basis of all my looks, and it is a look you see on so many people to this day, especially rich young black male footballers and athletes. Andre was the first one to paint my naked body, years before Keith Haring would. He would paint white branches all over me.

  He was like a magnet for models. Very charming, a trendsetter, he liked trying new things, and practiced photography on the side. Actresses and models found that combination irresistible. Andre’s was where you went for the most modern cut, whatever you looked like. He had long blond hair, and he acted really cool, very sure of himself. I hung out in the salon. A few of us would stick around after it was shut and we’d play music and smoke and take photographs.

  I suppose it’s not surprising that my first orgasm was with Andre. His fingers on my scalp working their magic helped, and it didn’t take much for that to lead to great sex. I’d never had sex like that before. It was sex from another era, another solar system. It still started with the mouth but it ended up beyond the body. It made me feel like I was falling backward in time. He was very open-minded and creative, and that seemed to spill over into the sex. He bent me out of shape.

  It was so memorable an event, such a life-changing occurrence, that it blasted through time, and it doesn’t come to me instantly when it was . . . ’77. No, ’76. Actually, ’73. It was before I did my first album, before I went to Paris. It could have been ’72 or ’71. Like I say, we weren’t wearing watches, we weren’t keeping time, or recording every moment like you do now. I do know that it was very quickly after I went to New York after Sam Miceli and started to take some test photographs. That means it was more where the 1970s began than where they ended.

  Not only do I not remember the time, the hour, the date, I also don’t remember where. Somewhere in space, in a space. I remember there was a before orgasm, and an after orgasm, but other details remain fuzzy. If you don’t know what an orgasm is like, when it happens, it finally dawns on you, Oh, this is an orgasm! It’s like . . . hold your breath, close your eyes . . . AAAAGHGAAASGGHHFHAAAGHGGHHGHAAAASDFFGGGGAAAAAAAAAGRGRAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. It’s a heart-attack moment. Am I still alive? SHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSH-SHSHSHSHSHS-
HSSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSSHSHSH. If I die now, I die knowing the most amazing feeling of what an orgasm is like. We swallowed each other up inside the body of love. Fireflies scattered through the sky.

  I was with Sam for such a long time, and I loved him, but I had no idea this was what sex could lead to. Maybe he wasn’t patient enough and I took too long to come. With him, it was all very tidy; with Andre, the whole sweaty thing was riddled with surprises and sensationally messy. Maybe there was still a sense that women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex, that the sexual freedom of the ’60s and ’70s was ultimately not about the liberation of women, but a way for men to have more sexual access to a greater number of women. It was not freedom at all, and women who had learned, or been trained over time, to be more orgasmic were still as held back as they had been by inhibitions, fears, traditional female roles.

  Maybe Sam was a selfish lover, and I didn’t know enough to know that. I didn’t even know what to fake, or what that would mean. You don’t know what an orgasm’s like until you have one. With Sam, I thought, Well, this must be it, but I could still feel a sense of frustration—Is that it? I don’t know. Well, where’s the big mind-shaking flesh-melting bang? My imagination and my body told me that this could not be it, that there must surely be something at the center of all this, at the end, that made it more than him going somewhere, and me going nowhere. He was somewhere else, going up, higher and higher, and I was staying put, flatlining.

  With Andre, ironically, it wasn’t selfish. It was unselfish sex, not unselfish love. He wanted me to experience the feeling, even if really it was because it made him feel good. Then he would tell me how I was the only girl in the world he wanted to give mind-blowing orgasms to. Maybe he had a better sense of timing, in all sorts of ways. I think it took a lot of patience, on both our parts, that first time. And a bit of Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra.

  And there were tears, once I had my first orgasm. Tears, because I thought of Sam, and how we had been through so much, and been so close, but this hadn’t happened with him. There was also guilt, of course, bloody, messy guilt. Guilt because I was enjoying the outlandish lusciousness of sex. I still cry when I have a big orgasm. That goes down well with whoever’s taken me there. I burst into tears, and it is from a combination of pleasure and guilt. But I’ve learned to take the pleasure and kick the guilt to one side.

  Maybe I hadn’t had orgasms before because of all that religion growing up. God is going to kill me now that I’ve had an orgasm. That’s why my heart is beating so fast. And inside, there was Beverly, thinking, I shouldn’t have pleasure. Beverly and Grace are pulling against each other at those moments—Beverly is saying, I don’t want to go there, and Grace is saying, I want to go there, I really want to go there, let me fucking go there. It reaches a point of: No, yes, no, yes, no, yes. It’s a cosmic tug-of-war. A cosmos grounded in divine order versus a cosmos characterized by constant change. No, yes, no, yes, no. Beverly thinks I’m going to die. Grace thinks I’m going to feel more alive than I ever have before. It’s a matter of life and death.

  * * *

  I became very close to Andre. We were together for one whole summer, staying many times in his house in the country outside the city. Eventually I found out he had a long-term girlfriend, and had been keeping me a secret, just as she was a secret from me. He had been making sure he kept me away from anyone who might tell me. I found out because she found out about me and came looking for me. She was in a club I liked to go to, Better Days, and she had found out about me and was looking for me with a big knife.

  Better Days was on Forty-Ninth Street with a huge circular bar—they played great music, R & B, Stax, Motown, very early, edgy disco when it was what would now be known as cutting-edge. It was a place for hard-core dance junkies, very much a gay club, guys dancing with each other, working up a sweat to a beat that represented threat, and there would be blacks, Hispanics, swinging couples, serious freaks, amazing-looking girls with prominent Adam’s apples. A lot of supercharged whistle-blowing, and after midnight it would get crazy in there as though everyone was finding themselves by forgetting who they were. It was one of those clubs creating the template for what was about to come, but the sound system was less sophisticated, the light show fairly feeble, and it was pretty grimy, from when New York was rougher, tougher, more boarded up, but more anxiously alive on the edge of its nerves. The kind of place where a rival might come looking for you with a big knife.

  The first Barry White album came out when Andre and I were frequenting Better Days, and we won a dance competition dancing to “Love’s Theme,” where you could hear disco falling into place when there were still traces of gospel, before the beat got too rigid and the strings too syrupy. Back then, when you danced to this sharply syncopated, rampantly suggestive music, there was trucking, there was the hustle, and if you were a couple, you would be apart—it was club dancing—and then you would come together, not like in ballroom dancing, but raunchier. It became “our song,” the soundtrack to our intense romance, the classy strings, the chop-chop wah-wah guitars, the pulsating beat, the schmoozing earth-moving bass. Really, it was the soundtrack to Andre’s lover-man seduction techniques—he was a wonderful dancer, moved so fluidly, it was such a turn-on, and it was meant to be a turn-on.

  He knew how to manipulate circumstances and take advantage of his position and his talent. He’d been around. He looked the part. His tightly clad hips swung like he knew it, and he wanted you to know it too.

  His girlfriend was after me big-time, with a big-deal knife, and a whole lot of vengeance. She was called Clare. That’s all I knew about her. Someone warned me to get the hell out of the club, and I slipped out of a side door. It was heartbreaking finding out that he wasn’t committed to me—I had thought Andre and I were seriously in love. That country house was where he obviously took his other girlfriends, and I realized there must be other girls. He was spinning plates. Spinning models. We even went to Barbados together, and we did a lot of spinning there.

  What was different with Andre was, whether he was faking or not, he had this way of seeming to focus only on you . . . maybe he reminded me of Tom Figenshu, my first crush. We worked well together; it was all very heated, to the point that it was very difficult when I found out about Clare. I hated the idea of breaking up anyone’s family, but it went on for such a long time without there being any sign of anyone else. It clicked very quickly between us, seemed very right. And he had that great feel for music, and moved fabulously to it, which turned me on. An experience like that makes you not trust men, and I was very careful after that. Until I wasn’t.

  Clare stopped eating when she found out about me. She tried to starve herself. It got very complicated, and if I had known there was someone else, I would never have gone with him. Unless I had met her and didn’t like her. I didn’t know her. It was awful, what he did. We were together for a year and a half. We had to stop. There was nowhere for our relationship to go, even if he had showed me this whole new other world.

  I saw Andre a few more times after that, but he was another one of those who simply seemed to fade away, like Tom. Doing their own thing, very gypsylike, and they walk off into a crowd, get gathered up, and are never seen again. They take you so far, and then they leave behind a mystery.

  * * *

  One day, when my hair was cut and sculpted rather than shaved, given style by Andre, my eyebrows back in service, Wilhelmina said to me, out of the blue, “Do you know what? You look like the black Gene Tierney!” Tierney was a contemporary of Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner. She had these prominent cheekbones, an overbite that she didn’t let the executives fix, in the same way she didn’t let them mess with her hair, and she played femmes fatales.

  Her decade really was the ’40s; she was in Laura and Leave Her to Heaven, one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films. Very striking, unusually sexy, definitely very confident and uncompromising but also vulnerable and prone to serious bouts of depression. She once sto
od on a ledge outside her mother’s apartment fourteen floors up in New York, thinking about killing herself. After twenty minutes, she decided not to jump—she couldn’t bear the thought that when she landed she would be mushed up like scrambled egg. That didn’t appeal to her. She said, “If I am going to die, I want to be in one piece.”

  I had no idea who she was at the time. I started to watch her films, and couldn’t see the connection. But Wilhelmina could—she said it was in the bone structure, and she got very excited. It made her think that there might be something in me. She said, “She’s one of the sexiest film stars of all time.” She started to see me in a different way.

  She said, “You should go to Europe. They will understand you in a way they won’t here. Go to Europe, become successful, and then America will be interested in you.” This was her plan: Become big in a place where they get an unusual look, even favor it, and then make the Americans want you. They are intrigued with the new girl causing a stir in Paris. Oh, we want some of that! In many ways, considering New York was seen as being the center of the new and advanced, much about the city’s fashion industry in the early 1970s was deeply conservative. They waited for others to make a move, and then followed. High fashion to this day is intrinsically conservative.

  I could feel that I had to go, somehow find a way. My mom by this time was a lot cooler with everything and the things I was doing. My parents had come to visit and saw I was okay—nothing in the fridge, but that was normal for me. My dad opened the fridge once and the only thing in there was a chicken wing. I said, “You don’t understand. We don’t need to buy food, we are taken out every night and treated.” Every night was a party, and dinner, with photographers and other models. It was a constant stream of nights out. We never needed to buy food; we were out all the time.