Untitled #3

by Grace Jones

  I eventually got to play at the Garage, carried above the crowd to the stage, cracking my whip, at five thirty in the morning, which for me is really late enough at night to feel most alive. The last time I played there, in 1985, two years before it closed down, Keith Haring painted my naked body with white tribal patterns, and I was covered with space-age red wire tubing spiraling out from two cones covering my breasts. An Egyptian empress as astronaut. Flesh turned into graffiti, skin into a canvas, Africa into space.

  The Compass Point sessions were important for me because I was still experimenting with my voice, and realizing that there was no point in trying to sing in the generic radio key. Chris wanted me to have hits, but knew I was not comfortable singing how other singers sang. He didn’t care that I sounded like a man or an entity; he simply wanted my voice to sound strong.

  After the disco albums, I had decided that I was going to sing in my way, not try and become a conventional pop singer. I had found my voice, and once I started singing along with the heavy bass and machine-gun drum of Sly and Robbie, it was actually an advantage that I had the voice that I did. There was no place for a standard soul or funk voice in that sound. My voice was perfect for it, somewhere between half-speaking and half-singing, between expressing emotion and not expressing anything, between telling a story and remembering a dream.

  It would be better for me to have a voice that suited my appearance, and once Chris had put together these musicians, I found my place. I realized that those Jamaican elements suited my Jamaican voice, but there was also rock, and funk, and something not yet determined. Now that I had lowered my voice I didn’t need anything sweet around me. I could move into other spaces, like I had moved into other spaces via the mind and manipulation of Jean-Paul. I had made a decision not to try to be like the gospel-inspired female singers I admired. There were male singers I loved that perhaps made more sense: James Brown, Bobby Womack, and, of course, Barry White. Hearing Anita Baker sing “I Just Wanna Be Your Girl” in the late ’70s with Chapter 8 was a revelation. She wasn’t afraid to go low and proud, and gutsy too, and it made me think I didn’t have to pretend to be pretty.

  The Compass Point All Stars first all played together on my records, which made those records very unique. I had no idea Chris was putting them together. He could imagine what it could be like, and the more he understood me, the more he realized what kind of band would be good for me. He never asked me what I thought about it; he just went ahead and did it. He read me and my multifarious, international attitude, and he saw I had a rock ’n’ roll side, even though I was never rock. He interpreted my wildness as a rock energy, and that I could bring it as a character into the music. There was the French, Euro, synth part, and the deep, menacing Jamaican drum and bass. That was his vision. Chris, being a prophet, can hear something before it is actually played. He went out of his way to create a sound that suited my personality.

  It also had a little bit of the naughtiness he knew I had—he would go to bed at Nassau, and me and his girlfriend at the time, Natalie, would sneak upstairs, tiptoe into his room and say, “We’ve come to play, Chris, let’s have some fun.” We tried to attack Chris in bed. He was never interested; he would always kick us out. “You girls get out of here. What are you up to? Leave me alone.” But that mischievous, high-spirited side of me went into the music.

  I never saw the All Stars play before I was actually singing with them. I was hearing the group from within, immediately a part of what they were doing. I could sense from inside that it was perfect for me, the groove they hit instantly, the mix of the organic and the electronic. It fit me like a bloody glove. We did all those Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing tracks live in the studio. We fell into a pure, instinctive groove that didn’t need hours and hours of preparation. They set up the groove and worked out the beats, and I got in the chariot—but I was out front, leading the procession, behind when I needed to be, sometimes ahead, sometimes right on the moment.

  * * *

  The work Jean-Paul and I were doing was originally separate from the music. I kept saying to Jean-Paul, This image would make a great cover. Jean-Paul had never done that kind of thing, but I could see clearly his images would make great record sleeves. At first, once we were going out together, there was a sense at Island Records of Oh, he’s the boyfriend. She only wants him to do the artwork because she’s pushing his career. It took a bit of time to persuade Island that Jean-Paul was the way to go. He had done a lot before we worked together, and proved himself in the world he was in, but not to a record company. Their attitude was very much, Well, who are you, and what have you really done?

  They wouldn’t pay him much, because in a music context he was inexperienced. Then Jean-Paul wanted to take control of producing the music, which alienated Chris, who said, “Okay, if you want to produce, then you do it,” and he walked out of the studio. Jean-Paul soon realized he was out of his depth. He did find the “Libertango” track for me later, and over time he did begin to understand my voice and music and figured out how to contribute musically, but it was too early for him to be involved in the music.

  I insisted to Chris that I wanted Jean-Paul to look after the visual side of everything I now did. Having learned from Issey, Eiko, Antonio, Helmut, Andy, Richard, the absolute masters of astounding commercial art, there was no way I was going to go further into the music business without being in control of the artwork. That meant having someone like Jean-Paul. It had to be someone as brilliant as Jean-Paul because of who I had been working with, the ones before who had presented me to the world, Grace as their Grace, which came out of who I was, and then who I would become. Eventually, Jean-Paul won Island’s respect, and Chris loved what he did. He turned them around so much they would hire him for projects that didn’t involve me.

  We did some photographs, and I showed them to Chris. Chris would say, Blow up that image—something Jean-Paul and I had worked on, for the sake of it, with no end in mind—and take it to the studio.

  We blew up this photo that was eventually used for the cover of Warm Leatherette, me as an ominous, hard-eyed samurai filtered through something occult and African, the killer clown interrupting some mysterious ceremony. It was huge and covered the whole wall of the studio. Chris said to the band, Make a record that sounds like that looks. So we started playing with that photograph in front of us. Then we made sure the music suited the photo, what Jean-Paul described as the erotic menace, where he took me as the fighter out of the ring into a new theatrical space, me as the beast out of the wild into a geometrically minimalist setting, me as the shadowless warrior out of the battlefield into a kind of empty, polished museum. Skin like no other skin, Baudelaire’s brown deity: Jean-Paul exaggerated my differences to the point of exorbitance, and the music had to follow.

  In that picture, actually, I am pregnant with Paulo. You could see my tummy sticking out a little, but if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be able to tell. We found a way to cover it up. When I was seven months pregnant, it hardly showed. You couldn’t tell, looking at me, that I was expecting. My breasts got bigger, almost up to my chin, which I loved, as I always felt a little inadequate in that department. I had no morning sickness, none of the classic symptoms of pregnancy. I felt very normal. I swam, I toured. I had a lot of energy.

  The first thing I did when I was pregnant was give up quaaludes. Your body immediately tells you what to do, and I obeyed. Jean-Paul was much more concerned than me about what having a baby would do to my body. I instinctively felt it would be a powerful, positive thing. The baby started to move inside me, and that was very alien.

  Mostly, it was the most natural thing in the world. Now and then I would panic, wondering how it was going to come out of that hole. When I first saw a cock, I wondered how that was going to get into the hole. Now I wondered how a baby could get out of the hole. I thought about it, and then I forgot about it. It had to work. Life itself is a sign that it does.

  I was living on Fifty-Fourth Street
, and Jean-Paul lived on the top floor of a commercial building on Union Square, some forty blocks south. We were together but maintaining our independence. You could look from Jean-Paul’s apartment into Antonio’s window. They could wave at each other. The artists were all downtown. Nothing above Chelsea; maybe Thirtieth Street was as high as the artists went. There was no real gentrification at that point; the farther you slipped downtown, the more basic and sprawling it became, and the artistic communities were not yet being pushed out by money and those looking for interesting creative areas they would then spoil by moving there.

  I would be at my apartment sometimes, and other times I’d spend a few days with Jean-Paul. One weekend, I was staying with him. His Sixteenth Street penthouse apartment opened out onto a terrace—you can see it in the video for “Libertango,” where all of New York becomes the backdrop. All the doors of his flat opened onto the terrace, which was filled with big plants. There was a stairway coming from below leading to the terrace on the outside, which should have been locked. Jean-Paul’s was the only residence on the block, and it was the weekend, so everything underneath was shut.

  It was one of those ordinary mornings—well, probably early afternoon, because it was the weekend. I was walking from the bathroom. This tall black guy suddenly appeared out of nowhere on the terrace, quiet as a panther. He was wearing a beautiful Italian-style suit and had the most perfectly shaped Afro. He didn’t look like a New Yorker. He had a bag slung over his shoulder, very casual. My eyes scanned him very quickly. I said, a little shocked, but there seemed nothing else to say, “Hello, can I help you?” Then I noticed that he was holding a gun. A very small gun, which somehow made it even more threatening.

  Butterflies tore through my stomach. I could see through to the far end of the apartment where Jean-Paul was working hunched over his desk, wearing glasses, cutting up small pictures of me into small pieces and moving them around. He was totally oblivious, concentrating on solving some puzzle about how I might be turned into a new shape. I ran to the bathroom and closed the door. The tall guy followed me and kicked down the bathroom door. He thought I was running and getting a gun, so he was on high alert. There was fear in his eyes. I was on the floor quietly freaking out.

  This was when it became serious and Jean-Paul heard the commotion. He came to see what was going on. He saw the surreal glint of the small gun.

  The guy wanted cash, and Jean-Paul only had deutsche marks. The guy didn’t know what they were, that they were at that time the strongest currency in the world. Jean-Paul was offering him camera equipment. He didn’t want to carry that. He really just wanted cash.

  Jean-Paul’s work was always scattered over the floor. He never hung anything up. There were pictures of me strewn across the floor. The guy recognized me from the photos. I had done a talk show the week before. “Didn’t I see you on The Merv Griffin Show last week?” he asked, a little softer than he was before, intrigued that I might be someone.

  I thought, Oh no, now I really am dead. There’s no one in the building and now he has recognized me: I am dead. I became oddly calm. He tied us both up. Jean-Paul started giggling from nerves, like he was in a movie. There was a small mirror next to the bed to make the room look bigger, nothing kinky, and he was being tied up on the bed and seeing it happen and he laughed. I was thinking, Please don’t do that—here we are, a mixed couple, and you are laughing at him. There’s a black guy in the house with a perfect Afro and a gun, and you are giggling.

  I hissed at him, “Stop it, this is serious,” giving him a really stern expression. I started to use my mother’s technique and tried to charm the guy and get a grip on the situation. “Yeah, I was on Merv Griffin.”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re that girl?”

  I got us to chatting so that it was almost as if we were having a cup of coffee. I said, “You can change that money at any Thomas Cook agency; you don’t need ID.” There were about two thousand deutsche marks, so he was going to get a lot of dollars.

  He could have easily killed us, and no one would have found us until Monday. We started to communicate. He eventually said okay. The elevator door opened into the loft. He untied me but not Jean-Paul. I told him where to go to change the marks. I gave him our keys so he could get out, because you needed to open the lock to make the lift work. I said, “Leave the keys on the fourth floor, and we will give you time to get away.”

  After he had gone, Jean-Paul asked me to untie him. I said, “I can’t, I promised him that I wouldn’t untie you for a certain amount of time,” like he was still watching us somehow. It was like an episode of Kojak, “Die Before They Wake.” After about twenty minutes I untied Jean-Paul, much to his anger and relief. It ended so much better than it looked like it was going to when we were tied up, but it is something that has stayed with me ever since.

  * * *

  We were recording in Nassau at the time, and it was going very quickly. I was due back in the Bahamas for the session, and I went to see my doctor before I got on the plane and he said, “There is no way you can travel.” He said, “You have to go straight to bed.” The holdup had accelerated the pregnancy, and I was close to being due weeks before the baby had fully developed. I had to spend weeks resting to slow down the progress of the pregnancy.

  I moved in with Jean-Paul because his place was nearer to the hospital on Seventeenth Street, Beth Israel. I was taking classes to have a natural birth. Jean-Paul said to me that he didn’t want to see me give birth, because he thought that if he did he wouldn’t be able to have sex with me again. I said, “Don’t come, then!”

  Jean-Paul worked at home, so he was there if I needed anything. He was wonderful, considering he had been freaked out about me having a child. I think he thought my body was going to get out of shape and get fat. I said, “That’s not me. That will not happen. I am a jungle mother.” I believe that was his biggest fear; that I would give up work like his mother did and become a housewife. After she had him she gave up her career. A lot of women do. He was worried I would do that, and become reliant on him.

  I stayed in bed for two weeks on doctor’s orders. I woke up one morning feeling a certain pressure and I thought I was constipated. I sat on the toilet and I started to push. I had no labor pains. I sent Jean-Paul off to get some laxatives. I pushed and pushed. It turned out it was the baby. Another half an hour and I would have given birth in the bathroom at home.

  I was only feeling a pressure, no pain. It didn’t seem to be the baby. Finally Jean-Paul said, “Let’s get a taxi and go to the hospital,” which was just three minutes away. As we arrived I felt a little cramp, but I still told my doctor I am badly constipated. He told me that I am giving birth. I didn’t believe it because I felt no pain. I was screaming for a laxative and then when I thought the baby is coming, I worried that I was going to do a number two at the same time. This was now my biggest fear. My doctor tried to explain to me that this was physically impossible. One hole closes as another gets bigger. Mother nature has elegantly sorted that problem out. I had no clue. It felt like it was all going to pour out.

  Within half an hour Paulo was born. It turned out Jean-Paul had been in the delivery room the whole time. He saw everything. He had on a doctor’s coat, mask, and hat, and I thought he was one of the medical team. I was looking at him the whole time, not knowing it was him. He was there, a very proud father—his curiosity took over and he couldn’t help himself. He saw me give birth and still wanted to have sex with me.

  I think that was when he fell in love with me in a more organic way. Years later, he would use my expression as I gave my final push before our son appeared, my mouth stretched as wide as it could, for the cover of Slave to the Rhythm, one of his most amazing images—he extended the last, big scream, the final push, the birth moment, made my mouth impossibly open, made a still picture appear to be in motion, capturing an extraordinary part of our lives and turning it into art. It was another extreme example of how he told our story, transforming the normal often und
erestimated edges of everyday life into the truly astonishing.

  I still stayed in my apartment. I have too much stuff. And I love stuff. I never seriously thought of having any more children, with Jean-Paul, or anyone after. I knew Paulo wouldn’t hinder the very strong career drive I had, but I never felt an urge to have any more children. My career was like having a lot of babies to look after.

  As Chris recalled:

  We were supposed to start in November 1979, but you gave birth to Paulo, so we started a few weeks later. I didn’t turn up for the first few days because I knew it was going to be difficult as the musicians all settled in. They didn’t know each other, and they didn’t necessarily all get on at first. Different worlds. It worked itself out by the time I had arrived. The personalities got themselves orchestrated. Wally and Sly were of the same complexion, but God, they were very far apart. It’s what made it work in the end—there was a tension between each faction in the group that gave the music both its tightness and its looseness.

  We recorded from scratch, as live as possible. It was very exciting, because I had had the wisdom to get Alex Sadkin as the engineer at the Compass Point Studios. He was beyond compare for his talent, his taste, and his ear. He was the final part of the puzzle. [The record] needed someone fantastically fluent at mixing on the go, to capture the groove as it was happening, mostly played live, to give the process a certain balance and coherence. I would sit in there and sort of nudge it in the right direction. I would support and encourage you singing with a band.

  This became the Grace Jones band. You’d never been exposed to that kind of thing before, but it suited your personality, and that in turn influenced the direction of the music. When you weren’t involved in your music, it could really have been made for anyone. This was music that sounded like you really were—all that international input, the different energies, but at the heart of it, very Jamaican.