Untitled #3

by Grace Jones

  My dad was known as the Shepherd, and there was a Mandela quote that summed up his work in Syracuse and Jamaica; “A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.” Months later, Mandela was elected president of a democratic South Africa.

  They talked for about fifteen minutes. My father was very discreet about what they discussed, but he said that he prayed with Mandela for the future success of South Africa. They had some photos taken together shaking hands that made the Syracuse newspapers. They look like old friends meeting for a catch-up. My dad fell in love with the country. He said something about it reminding him of Jamaica, and a short while after meeting Nelson he met a young local minister whose ambition was to set up a church in Johannesburg, in the way my dad had done in Syracuse. My father loved a big crusade, and always wanted to reach out to as many people has he could.

  He embarked on a new mission, and he helped this young minister to start a church, advising him on how the church could support itself, become self-sufficient, including by opening a bakery to raise funds. They named it after me, because I was the one who had helped make it all happen by bringing my dad to South Africa.

  My dad used to say, “Well, God really does move in mysterious ways. You might be a sinner and a backslider,” he said, not entirely joking, “but none of this would have happened without you getting me a meeting with Nelson Mandela.” I must have had some considerable local influence—the winner of Miss World that we chose that year was actually Miss Jamaica, beating Miss South Africa, who took second place. My dad always said she came second because, when it was my turn to ask her a question, I asked her something so difficult to answer she didn’t know what to say.

  My dad returned to South Africa twice every year with my mom. The man who didn’t want to travel anymore would happily make the eight-thousand-mile journey. They would sometimes bring Syracuse parishioners with them and bring clothing and goods over with them. By 2001, eight years after my father had met Mandela and fallen in love with South Africa, there were twenty churches in the area that he was responsible for founding—he became a diocesan bishop for the South African Forty-Ninth Episcopal District of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. My mom said sometimes it was like he wanted to move there.

  He came on Dali’s television show with me, and of course, once they found out my dad was a bishop, with me being such a notorious character, we helped the ratings. Behind the scenes, my dad had a sense of humor about my reputation. I think he sneaked a peek at me on the television sometimes, when no one was looking. I think he realized I was putting on a show, that it was like a circus.

  When we were on TV together, he was very sensible, and answered questions very calmly. Very cool and in control, not shy at all. He had spent his life in the pulpit, after all. They asked him what they thought of what his daughter did, and he said, “Well, it’s a job like any other. She does it very well. Nothing she does embarrasses me.” A very simple, unflustered answer.

  Years later, as an ardent fan of the tennis-playing Williams sisters, he did the same thing—made me promise that I would arrange for him to meet them, probably once more thinking that as a famous person I existed inside a world where all the famous people intermingled and met each other. I did not know Serena and Venus then, but again I managed to arrange a meeting, and he had them sign a tennis ball each. He was so proud. The tennis balls were placed in his coffin when he was buried.

  I think in his own way my dad was intrigued by what I had achieved, and he enjoyed the stories I would bring back from my travels. He appreciated what I was doing, and could easily separate the apparent scandals from the truth of who I was. I think he understood that Mas P had shaken me to the core, but not obliterated my spirit or, in my own way, my faith.

  In his religion you have to have your own family in order to tell other people what to do, so if you cannot get members of your family picture-perfect, you have to kick them out. He didn’t do that with me, and suffered in silence, having to wait to become a bishop because of my behavior and how it was covered in the press—it set off alarm bells. In the end, he was ordained a bishop the same time as my brother, his son. He had to wait that long, and that was really down to me. He never seemed to resent it, though; he accepted me for who I was, despite it interfering with his lifetime role as a religious man.

  My father died suddenly when he was eighty-three. He had gone into the hospital for some blood tests, and there didn’t seem to be anything dramatically wrong with him. I was always very suspicious about what happened, because he wasn’t sick when he went into the hospital, and he fell ill while he was there. I became convinced that they used an infected needle when they took his blood, and they poisoned him. But there was no way of proving it.

  I was at the hospital when he died. I wasn’t sure whether or not I should be there. Some people said it would not be a good thing, because the experience can be so traumatic. I decided to stay with him as he died, as he took his last breaths, and I am glad that I did. I found it the most beautiful, transcendent moment. It was very peaceful, and the look in his eyes as he approached death was something I had never seen before. It was astonishing.

  As he died, the expression in his eyes was as though he was seeing something so extraordinary it took away any fear and panic he might have been feeling. He opened his eyes wider and wider, as if he wanted to see more of what he was seeing. The light never went out in his face as he died. Life seemed to enter into him. His eyes lit up.

  The nurses went to close his eyes after he had passed on, and I said, “No, please don’t close them, he is seeing something so important and wonderful. Keep them open a while, so that he can still see.” He was seeing something that made sense of everything he had believed in for so long. I was so happy that I was there at that moment. He was not suffering or scared; he seemed to be passing into something glorious.

  After he died, I found out that he always kept a photograph of me inside his wallet. He didn’t think I had let him down, and he never turned his back on me. I thought he was ashamed of me, but he carried a photo of me around with him. However far apart we might have traveled at times, I think he was always praying for me and protecting me. After he died, my mom carried on where he left off. As my brother Noel says in a sermon he often gives in church, “Other people often pray for you more powerfully than you can pray for yourself.”

  16.

  Reason

  According to the Internet—which is in many ways the population of the world having an acid trip—it seems as though I married or was engaged to all of the men I spent more than a few months with. Certainly Jean-Paul, Dolph, Sven-Ole Thorsen, a few others along the way, and the record producer Chris Stanley, my relationship with whom, to cut a long story short, almost led to my death in Jamaica.

  It was another work-and-love, sex-and-image, together-in-art-and-life relationship. He produced my second album for Capitol, Bulletproof Heart. He had a studio in Kingston, Music Mountain, and he released records by Marcia Griffiths, Big Youth, and himself on his own Mountain Sound label. He said he had once worked with Billy Paul.

  At some point, Bulletproof Heart looked like it would be my final album. The critic Robert Christgau, who once wished I had sung “Pretty Vacant” rather than “Send in the Clowns,” called it “incongruous”—one of my favorite reviews ever. He was very perceptive. If I had always liked to be on top, here I was slipping a little underneath something or other. Once, you couldn’t work out if I was man or woman, rock or disco, robot or animal, plant or insect, fuck you or fuck me, shriek or laughter; now I was mixing up alive and dead. It was a disorienting record, because these were disorienting times for me. Chris lived life with such force, and we were swept up together . . . and then into something very dark and traumatic.

  Chris felt we had been together in some other life, where we knew each other inside out, but had to
keep our love secret because together we were dangerous. He was definitely someone who liked to dramatize life, to set things going by building up tension. He was not interested in any kind of peaceful life, which suited me at the time. I like men who make me think, who make me laugh, and in Chris’s case, I like men who bring the best and the worst out of me, who seem to know secret things. He had visions that we had been alive in Egypt together thousands of years ago, and that something was going to happen to us. He had forebodings about his future, and liked to be a recluse. He had a very powerful aura, a very strong presence. He had a very unusual eye color, like a dark, inky red; he was like half Rasta, half something else completely. Charming like the devil. Very talented—I am always attracted to turbulent artistic temperament, like a moth to a flame. I find creativity in anyone who feels passion for something. Because he felt we had known each other in another time, and that our relationship was forbidden, he thought our time together would end badly. Which it did. It was epic. I would need to write another book to tell that story. Or it could be an opera. Definitely a film.

  I once sat next to David Lynch at a party and said, “There is a film I would like to write,” and it was this story—a Jamaican ganja-gothic freak show murder mystery. “Where do I begin?” I said to him when he asked to hear what happened.

  I kept warning Chris that this woman who worked for him at his studio and at his house was dangerous. He had a daughter by his ex-wife, Bernice, and we became friends because their daughter would play with Paulo. Bernice warned me that this girl, let’s call her Maya, had broken them up and that she was very erratic. Chris couldn’t see it. She had a big family in Jamaica, and she became very jealous when Chris and I got together.

  Chris became very ill, suffering a stroke that left him with significant brain damage. I am convinced he was poisoned by this girl. My mom said to me, “Make sure you don’t eat anything she gives you.” Chris got so ill he slipped into a coma, and when he woke up he had short-term memory loss, this problem where he couldn’t remember more than a minute before. He had to keep writing notes to remember where he was and what was happening.

  One night when we were staying in his big mansion in Stony Hill, an affluent suburb in the hills above Kingston, Maya had her cousins move Chris into a room other than the one where we usually slept. I joined him, to look after him. She had her cousin go into our now empty room in the house and plant this cocaine. The police, acting on what they said was an anonymous tip-off, came in during the early hours and arrested me. I am convinced it was part of her campaign to get rid of me and have Chris all to herself. . . . I remember once picking up the phone in the house and she was already on the line, talking to someone. This other person asked her, “Have you got that bitch inside a box yet and moved her off the island?” They were talking about me. I have never felt as chilled.

  The police took me to the local station, and I spent three nights in a cold, concrete jail cell with nothing but a thin, filthy blanket and a filthier toilet. It was a weekend. I thought they were going to get rid of me, kill me in my cell and smuggle my body away. I was left totally isolated. There was a change of shift, and the next policeman on duty let me make a phone call. I managed to get hold of my press agent, John Carmen, in New York. I screamed, “I’ve been arrested, I’ve been set up! If you don’t get it out there where I am, I don’t think I am going to survive this weekend.”

  He blasted over the news to every media outlet he could. You’d have thought I’d died—the news about my arrest was everywhere. Once it hit the press, nothing could be done to me. I had to be treated according to the law; there was too much international attention being paid. John, as always, did a great job, and here was a brilliant, unusual example of the power of publicity—it saved my life, or at least saved me from being jailed for years.

  I spent a year in court on and off after being released on bail, because of all the publicity. No one wanted to try the case. It was postponed seven times. I flew back and forth; there was always a lot of press, describing what I was wearing, reporting with a bias toward it being obviously true that I would have cocaine. It was front-page news in Jamaica. They had actually only found a tiny, tiny amount of cocaine in my handbag, and when I was tested, there was no trace of any drug in my blood or urine. I was looking after Chris, who was in a terrible way. I was not going to get high.

  I had to keep my distance from Maya during the trial. I got my stuff from the house, and I was forced to leave Chris with her in the house. I was not allowed any more contact with him because of the court case. I pleaded innocent. The case took a month to hear, because of more delays, and finally I was found innocent. I walked out of the court and told the press, “That is a big weight lifted off me.” While it was happening, Maya had taken Chris over, and after the case I had to back away and leave him with her. He didn’t know what was going on, and it was horrible to see.

  Chris got worse, and essentially suffered from dementia. She had some horrible plan, and put him under her spell under the guise of being his health caregiver. She weakened him, and he never recovered. He died a few years later, and then she started to battle with his ex-wife and his children for his estate—cars, houses. Chris was rich enough to have the kind of house on the hill that they joke in Jamaica are the kind that are only ever owned by drug dealers. (Some of these ornate mansions in the mountains never get finished because their owners are jailed during construction. They become ruins before they’re even lived in.) The case was still being heard in 2004, after years of appeals and counterappeals. I think the money was what Maya was after all along.

  I was never married to Chris. If I had have been, I would never have allowed this girl anywhere near him. He didn’t see how dangerous she really was until it was too late.

  The truth is, I only ever married one of my boyfriends, Atila Altaunbay, a Muslim from Turkey. I didn’t release any albums in the 1990s, but I did introduce my father to Nelson Mandela, and I did get married. The tabloid view is that I did it absentmindedly, in jest, and then tried to ignore it and pretend it never happened, but I was very serious about it. I thought it would last forever. I always said I would never get married because I don’t believe in divorce. If I’m going to get married, I don’t see the point of getting divorced. On the other hand, I also always say that I want to try everything once.

  I kept it as private as I could because relationships when you are famous become the target of people out there who do not want to see you happy. It is as though everything you do if you are well known is fair game, and you have to fight this energy . . . which takes an awful lot of energy that you should be saving for the relationship. There can be so much negative energy, and so I kept it as private as I could with Atila.

  He didn’t really know about me as a famous person and he was certainly not interested in me as a raging party monster. You get very wary of those who only want to know you because you are famous. He didn’t care about fame. That impressed me a lot, that he was not bothered at all about me being famous. He was interested in the me I held back from the press, from the publicity world that was beginning to make up the hallucination of the Internet. He liked staying in the background.

  Atila was quite young—it turned out he was even younger than I first thought. I met him in Belgium, but his family still lived in Turkey. He was a student, like Dolph, but he also sang at weddings. I only found that out later, that he had a wonderful voice. He was very good-looking, of course. I’m a bee looking for sustenance, craving nectar to lap up, attracted to the most eye-catching petals. We hit it off chemically, instantly, and fell in love very quickly.

  Within a few months of us meeting and hitting it off, I was flying to Brazil for work, and he wanted to come with me. In a way, it became an elopement. In the Muslim family, the males must marry in order of age, and he was the youngest brother, so he wasn’t allowed to get married until his older brothers did. Maybe the idea of upsetting religious rules, of rejecting family expectations, appeale
d to me. It was, after all, me who did the proposing—it was a leap year, and on the plane, I thought, Well, women can propose. I said, “Will you marry me when we get to Brazil?” He said, “Don’t joke with me.” I said, “I’m not!” I was being impulsive, but some of my best decisions have been made that way.

  When we did the paperwork, I found out that he was a few years younger than I thought he was. He was six foot four with a receding hairline. He was very mature and responsible; his family ran pizza restaurants around Belgium; and he didn’t seem boyish at all. Believe me, he looked about thirty-seven.

  It turned out my husband was twenty-four. The family was soon looking to kill me! Because he was not meant to get married, not yet, and I was, shall we say roughly speaking, twice his age, or very close to it. Certainly a lot older. Naturally, when people in the media found out, his age was made even younger, and mine was made even older, so that he became twenty, and I became fifty. My age has always been very elastic, and now his was as well. I think the idea was that they wanted him to be younger than my son, which he wasn’t.

  He couldn’t go back home, because he had disobeyed the family and their religion. He became paranoid that his brothers were hunting him down. I had met his father, but not his mother. She had a voice like me, very deep. We tried to keep the marriage out of the press, but it got leaked from Brazil. It was a very modest, rushed ceremony. We couldn’t find a priest, and someone actually said the priest we used was gay, so our marriage was invalid.

  But my father remarried us at our family home in Syracuse. That’s how seriously I was taking it. We were married twice. My mom and dad loved him; they never thought of our marriage as a whim, or a mistake. I suppose they saw this as a part of real life, not the fantasy life I was living elsewhere. Getting married was probably the most grown-up, down-to-earth, and responsible thing I had done, in their eyes.