by Grace Jones
I am not a great dancer. I don’t put it out like Madonna. I can dance, but it is not normal—I will stand on my hands, tumble, be a little gymnastic, but in terms of stage, and then performance, and video, Kabuki and Miyake helped me refine a dance that was more natural for me.
Before Issey, I wasn’t doing much runway in Paris, which was where the big money was. I was modeling to make as much money as possible, to get me closer to the theater. Paris is like the candy shop of fashion. It’s everywhere. Even the most unclassifiable person is doing something interesting. Everywhere there are people trying things, with integrity, even if they remain obscure and neglected. There’s something about Paris, something in the air, in the earth, that always made it work as a center of fashion, this complicated weave of art, frivolity, entertainment, business, sex, illusion. There’s something in the place itself, and the earth underneath it, something so powerful you can’t mess with it. Hitler left it alone, after all.
Issey took me under his wing. He made me the lead, almost the host, of this radical runway show he organized in 1976 where there were twelve black models wearing his daring new clothes. I would sing and have multiple roles within what was a fashion show remade as a happening. Issey wanted his shows to be more than just fashion, the mundane display of clothes—he wanted theater, scandal, a different kind of event beyond fashion, beyond show business, pure experience, always with an undercurrent of imaginative strength. Even then he was breaking free of the idea of what a model was, and of conventional ideals of beauty.
This show was a fantastic, subversive idea, still ahead of its time. Twelve black models from South America, New York, Africa, Paris, on a monthlong tour of Japan in theaters—fifteen thousand people came to see it. The show was called Issey Miyake and Twelve Black Girls.
Who else would think of using only black girls, even now? This was girl power from Mars. I think he liked how as black models having to fight for attention in a very exclusionary world we were more spirited than the norm. Having foreign girls in Japan created a sense of fantasy—instant, transfixing otherness. Wherever I moved I always seemed to bring otherness with me, because I was always in a new place, an outsider. I never quite belonged wherever I landed, moving from place to place, but always acted as though I did, creating a blur between belonging and not belonging.
Michael Douglas and Jack Nicholson came to see Issey’s show. They were in Japan promoting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Of course they took us out after one of the shows. Jack ordered a couple of limos. Jack, Michael, and all the models—it was very crazy.
A couple of the models were a little too starstruck, throwing themselves at Jack. And he was manipulating the situation. There was that Barry White bass in the background. He would sit there with his arms outstretched and big come-on grin, being Jack even then. Before I knew it, girls started to disappear one by one. I found out the next day from my roommate, an African princess who spoke only French, that he was inviting each girl to meet in the car, and each girl thought she was the only one. And one by one they turned up.
I caught his eye and I could tell what he was up to. I wagged my finger. No, Jack. No way. I am wired to leave when it is heading that way. It did not seem interesting to me. I was not going to go with a bunch of girls losing the plot. I went home. I had a big word with them the next day! Much later on, many years later, I met Jack and quietly found out for myself what he was like. Actually, we mostly talked about hats, and who had the better collection.
To this day, when the celebrities turn up—Bette, Stevie Wonder, Elton John—I have to warn my band, Do not let this freak you out. You get distracted. Even the Queen was not going to distract me. I’d learned to set the example as a girl: Make a good impression, don’t fall apart—there is a proper way to conduct yourself. Maybe it’s a Jamaican thing. No gawking. I thought these models were going to die, they were so overwhelmed. And this was a complicated theatrical show, a musical without dialogue. A lot of cues requiring a lot of concentration. I had never seen anything like it. The way my live shows developed over the years was based on that Japanese trip.
Issey is the only real artist in fashion—smart, sensitive, very humble. Somewhere between a poet and engineer, philosopher and architect, refining centuries of tradition, but always in the future, and somewhere in space, the space he borrowed from the idea of the kimono, and how between the body and the kimono there is only an approximate contact.
He once said that he went into fashion because it was a creative format that is bright and optimistic, and he was there as a seven-year-old cycling to school on the day that the Americans dropped the atom bomb on his hometown, Hiroshima. His mother died three years later from radiation poisoning. She had been severely burned but carried on working as a teacher. He wanted to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, that bring beauty and joy.
He was in Paris at the time of the May 1968 student revolts, which made him question fashion as being something only frivolous and trivial. To Issey, fashion is more than designs, or clothes, or inventions—it is visions, ideas and dreams, turned into wearable, flowing solid objects, shells, algae, stones turned into material. I wear his clothes every day to this day, and even those pieces I’ve worn for years still surprise me. He once said that his clothes are unfinished, and how they get finished is by being worn for years.
They’re clothes you can wear in the street, but they’re theatrical enough to wear onstage. They became part of my look, even if I chose to wear just one of his pieces, just a breastplate. He would do things for me, not to market, just for Grace. He knew I liked hoods, so he would do a collection of hoods.
You cannot copy him. You can try, but people will say, You are copying Issey. He invents fabric that changes color depending on the time of day. He boils fabric, melts it, uses bamboo and ultrasound to treat his cloth. The way his clothes fold, they form a starburst when you open them up. Unbelievable. He was the first person to give me a chance in a runway show. I’d been to see everyone, and no wanted me. As soon as I did an Issey runway show, twenty-seven people who had previously rejected me for runway came backstage and asked that I do runway for them.
Working with him took me into the whole world of the Orient, which made a big difference to my music and performance. He really liked me, and we have stayed very good friends. We took an interest in each other. I said I was going to stop modeling, and he could see that I was serious about that, that I was interested, like him, in going into spaces where no one else was going. Not a singer, not a model, not a dancer, not an actress, not a performance artist: all of that together, and therefore something else. That’s why he set me up as the leader of the show, to help me work out how to be more than only a model.
Working with Issey meant working with the best people, the unique, innovative, edgy women he likes to surround himself with who have something often underestimated in fashion—a great, mischievous sense of humor. Eiko Ishioka, who designed the costumes for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, was the art director of Twelve Black Girls. She worked on Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, because Coppola wanted the costumes to be sets in themselves. She was good at drug-dream vampire brides. I was still working with her on a tour in 2009, and she made what little I wore when I was set before the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee celebration. She once said her clothes were not meant to be comfortable—they were meant to torture the wearer.
That first Issey experience made me focus on what I was and who I was based on the evidence I had—from the past, present, and future, from other people I had been, from other people I would become. He did a whole book, East Meets West, about this way of making something from one piece of cloth. I would make something from one person. And that one person was now, much to her surprise, a singer. A disco singer.
4.
Disco
Before disco, it was soul music that people danced to; it was funk . . . soul music and funk . . . a saucy, languid Latin swing coming up over the horizon
, a place where Miles Davis had taken jazz falling from the sky . . . that’s how it was for me. There were clubs where there was music and dancing to all kinds of music . . . and it all came together, in one room, on one floor, under lights that flashed for life, and became disco. It became Let’s go to the disco, and in the disco there were DJs making music as much as playing it.
Before it was called disco, there were simply dance spaces, party rooms in downtown warehouses and borrowed places over the bridges and through the tunnels out of Manhattan. Lots of places where music you could dance to would be played, creating a demand for a certain sort of venue playing a certain sort of music. The combination of the venue and the music meant that the music that emerged from the meeting of the place and the sound was both the name of the venue and the music—you went to the disco to dance to disco. And you need a DJ to play the records, to choose the range and sequence of the music. The DJ had started to take over the role occupied by the jukebox in the mid-’60s. Disco was the place, it was the music, and it was the DJ and the dancers and then very quickly, it stood for the disco image.
The fact that I made disco music was an accident really. When I made my first records, I didn’t think of them as being disco. I made them in France, and the word discothéque is a French word, but it did not have the same meaning that it was beginning to have in New York. I didn’t characterize them as anything. They were simply songs, with a little bit of soul and rhythm, echoes of singing in church, a sense of something showy whipped up by being in Paris with all the fashion, around the people making it happen.
The first single I released, “I Need a Man,” sounds a little churchy in its original state—it could be gospel, and wherever the best disco goes, it never loses that ecstatic feel, that the music that became disco came from soul and funk and therefore gospel. Most of the words had been written by an anonymous, hardworking session guy called Paul Slade. He was in Paris writing English words for French singers who wanted to sing in English. Stephan had put the call out for some words to this track we had, and we chose Slade’s because he had followed best the brief we had given him. I helped out with the words, but I didn’t know that I was meant to take credit, in order to get paid. I learned that lesson very quickly.
After I recorded “I Need a Man,” Stephan in Paris made contact with a New York couple he had heard of called Sy and Eileen Berlin. They were in the clothing business but were going into music, and they became his backers in America. They had the money, and they had formed a management company with the publicist John Carmen, looking after acts like Double Exposure, who released the first-ever commercial 12-inch single, and the salsoul group First Choice.
I remember they once commissioned an eight-foot-tall replica in gold leaf of King Tut’s head for First Choice to take on tour as a prop. That’s the kind of promoters they were—old-style theater and film show business adapting to the new disco era and permanently on the lookout for new talent. (Eileen was the first to manage a young Tom Cruise in the early 1980s.) At first they didn’t have a solo act, and they were looking for something like me. It all clicked.
John Carmen came with Sy and Eileen and he started doing my publicity, propelling my driven, rampageous behavior out into the world whether I was ready or not, where it would become how people got to know me and make their mind up about what I was like. The number one P.R. man in New York in the ’70s, Carmen was a publicity magician and made me famous in New York, like he did later for the likes of Donald Trump. Sy and Eileen were super independent, operating a small family-run fashion business. They were starting out in the music business, and they were very much not corporate. That’s what I liked about them. They were a little like Euro Planning in Paris—more the underdogs, small, determined to make a splash. They were very enthusiastic about me, but they had a very different vision for me.
Their limited plan was for me to start with disco, which was then fast becoming the trend, and then move to singing in Hilton hotels in long glittery ball gowns before getting to Vegas. To me, them asking me to do this was a little like my mother asking me to marry a preacher. Disco in this plan as the new hot thing was the place to start. Doors could open quicker because the rules weren’t quite in place; something was forming that you could find ways into. Its home was in New York, inside a very few hectic, inbred square miles.
Sy and Eileen worked closely with a lot of disco acts like the Village People and Bobby Orlando and were in touch with record producer Tom Moulton, who worked out of Sigma Sound in Philadelphia. He had developed the 12-inch disco mix format, which involved extending the rhythmical parts of a track to make the song longer, and better to dance to, because there were no vocals. He made the accidental discovery when a song meant for a 7-inch was instead cut onto 12-inch vinyl, leading him to understand how dynamic and physical this made it sound. Longer and louder. Perfect.
He came up with the idea of the disco break from watching how people dance to music in the clubs, and seeing that their favorite parts to dance to were the instrumental sequences and the extended jamming parts of jazz-funk tracks. They hated it when a record changed and the vibe was ruined. In those dancing situations, music had to flow. This was a very new idea, and before disco became the bad, kitsch disco, a very important moment in the development not only of dance music but of pop music in general and, later, even rock.
Then again, perhaps there were these long instrumental sections so that the DJs could have a toilet break. Eight minutes of music, enough time to make it to the toilet and back. What happened in the toilet that was not necessarily about going to the toilet might then have influenced the kind of relentless mixes that the DJs favored.
Tom would spend days editing tapes together, segueing the instrumental passages into one seamless rhythm, for the gay clubs on Fire Island, where he said he saw white people dance to black music for the first time. These white people were gays, responding to the thrust and thrill of the music. That was the key in a way—the bringing together of two outside appetites into one singular sound, radical new power being generated by society’s frustrated outcasts. Then there was the realization that the sound of a record was different for the radio than for the clubs. It all sounds obvious now, but back then it was all brand-new. His thinking helped revolutionize dancing—people would dance for hours on end without a break, working up a sweat.
It was the stark beat, enhanced, and embellished—a little like the way the artist Richard Bernstein exaggerated and emphasized the look of fame and adjusted the color and shape of a face. Richard did the artwork for one of the original “I Need a Man” covers. Sy and Eileen knew Richard, as he had worked on the album cover for their band Black Soul. It was part of the whole thing clicking into place. I had some photos from Paris that Antonio had taken, and these were the ones Richard treated in the way he treated Andy Warhol’s Interview covers. Around that time we also used some photographs that the wonderful, incredibly modest Bill Cunningham took of me making my way around the streets of New York, long before anyone knew who I was. That’s when I was a model working hard to get jobs, as anonymous as anyone. For decades, he pedaled on his bike throughout New York, snapping what people were wearing as they went about their business. He has been fascinated by the clothes that New Yorkers wore since the 1950s. Born in 1929, a few months after Andy Warhol, he was the opposite of Andy, even though he was just as much about and of New York. He didn’t care about celebrity, or fashion, and wasn’t even that bothered about faces. People being people delighted him—the upper class or the avant-garde—and the idea that being yourself in New York was something special. Accidentally or intentionally, he consistently anticipated new clothing trends, so fashion editors loved and trusted him, and he was uniquely embedded in daily New York life, so the New York Times used his photographs as social commentary. I walked around New York a lot, so he took hundreds of photographs of me, just passing him while he was hunting the everyday remarkable. Fifty-Seventh Street was his favorite location, near where I l
ived. He once said that there, on Fifth Avenue, you could wait and eventually see the whole world pass by. I’m as excited to be part of Bill’s New York as I am to be a part of Andy’s.
Richard did all the great star covers for Interview, which chronicled the comings and goings of the heated-up in-crowd that orbited around Warhol’s Factory between Max’s Kansas City in the late ’60s and Studio 54 in the late ’70s. The covers were supersize, the colors saturated. He was Warhol’s favorite local artist and would treat celebrity photographs by airbrushing them and retouching them with pastel and pencil scrawls and shadows. It gave the faces a glamorous big-time dreamtime edge as though they were all inhabiting New York embedded in a Hollywood fantasy. Richard was a link between old Hollywood glamour and the more subversive, nebulous glamour of the new underground art scene.
If you knew Richard and you knew Andy, you were right at the epicenter of a hard-working fairy-tale New York that consisted of people like Viva, Candy Darling, Calvin Klein, Halston, Divine, Roman Polanski, Diane von Furstenberg, Robert Mapplethorpe. If you knew how to get in to where it was all happening, everyone seemed to be in the same place on the same trip. Richard was one of those whose job was to capture the trip, and be a major part of it. To be of the scene, you had to be intimately connected with it.
Andy was taking the already exotic and making it even more so, to make sure that there was no doubt that the subjects were worthy of attention. He was fascinated by fame, as an artist but also as a fan. Andy always wanted the famous to look as perfectly impossibly perfect as they could be, which required Richard to build them up into these glorious panels of color. He would treat the newcomers the same, those that were about to be famous or notorious, giving them this instant, colorized glow of fame, with a subtle hint of something brittle, because the clock was ticking. Fame only lasted so long, according to Andy. I had been treated by Richard for Andy Warhol’s Interview number 24, which showed Andy taking my photograph with me wearing a Santa Claus hat. Richard also designed the cover of my first album, produced by Tom Moulton.