Untitled #3

by Grace Jones

  She was blocked, and I really wanted to turn the tables and ask her questions. She was so guarded—the way she sat, the way she held her arms tight across her chest. She was only interested in our backgrounds, in talking about constructs she had invented based on a little research, not the real human beings we were, tangled up inside a relationship that was reaching a crucial moment. Our reputations went in front of us and she could not see beyond them. You could tell by the questions she asked, gathering basic information. She hit a wall, and because she hit a wall, we hit a wall.

  Although she didn’t impress me as a therapist that could make a difference, something tipped the scale, and she set us back. Her negativity had reached Ivor. He felt it. Everything changed. I remember thinking, There is nothing I can do. I wasn’t there for me, I was there for him. And it wasn’t working. She wasn’t helping Ivor, I could see that. These things are good to talk about, but not in this way.

  So I went through it, and it made me realize I’d been right all along not to do this sort of thing. I got out of there. I ran out after the session so quickly my knees buckled. I ran out so blindly into the street outside I could have been squashed like an ant under a bus.

  I left, and Ivor sat where he was. He stayed behind with her. I think he was in shock. She watched as I staggered out, stunned by what had happened, and returned to this blanket blankness. There seemed to be no life in her. We gave her our life; she reacted for a moment, enough to disorient Ivor, and then me, and then withdrew behind her mask.

  Ivor and I would eventually have separated anyway, but I wish it could have happened without her being involved. She was the third party. We looked for help and found Satan. I’m not sure what the end result was meant to be. I think Ivor’s family felt that he was reaching a certain age and that he needed to have children and settle down more conventionally. That was somewhere I couldn’t go. But that wasn’t the main issue. I knew we would have to face that discussion, but it was something we needed to do on our own. She was perhaps meant to help us make a decision, but the whole situation was far too complicated for her.

  * * *

  I have to be particularly choosy about who I enter a relationship with. I always was, but I am even more so now. Because I feel as though I am many ages all at once, it becomes increasingly difficult to set out on a relationship with someone of a certain age who perhaps feels more fixed. I am an energy in search of energy. There aren’t many places you can go where the energy you want hangs out.

  It doesn’t make any difference to my life in the end. People ask if I will be so choosy that I end up alone. Well, we are all alone, ultimately. If I compromise too much in a relationship, then I am hiding so much of who I am that I am still on my own. It is better to truly be on my own than to pretend that I am with someone and go through the motions, but in the end be so compromised I am even more alone. Jerry Hall will sometimes say to me, “Grace honey, you really need to settle down and find yourself a man.” I am okay without a man. I have my brothers, so I am less likely to need to have a man; for Jerry, it was all girls growing up, her mom and sisters. Her dad died when she was young. She thinks I need a man, but what I need is more complex.

  A relationship is always a work in progress. Both sides need to understand that’s what it is. I have made a big effort in my life to enjoy being alone, so that I don’t enter a relationship only because I am afraid of being on my own. I enjoy my own company because there is no guarantee even if you are in a couple that the match will last all your life. And I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have! Look at my mom—her husband has died and she does not want anyone else; she enjoys life on her own. The key is to make friends with yourself. Children make imaginary friends. If I have to do that, I will do that. They will say I’m crazy, but I will be happy. Sometimes it is better to find ways to be happy alone than to have a relationship in which you are miserable for the sake of not being alone.

  Being alone is not a bad thing, unless I make it a bad thing. Being alone doesn’t mean that I am waiting for something to happen, that I think being alone is second best. I am writing a song about it, about how I am alone, but I am not lonely. If you are lonely when you are alone, you’re in bad company. I have plenty of friends I can call, friends I can go and see, who come and see me. So far, I have no need for the imaginary friend. I have no reason to complain. I am an energy, confident that I will find exactly the energy I am looking for. Sometimes being alone is the energy. Sometimes that energy is positive, and sometimes it is negative. It’s the empty space between the stars, and it never scares me. It excites me.

  17.

  Climax

  One of the musical projects I worked on in the years between Bulletproof Heart and Hurricane was the Pavarotti and Friends benefit for Angola in 2002, at which I was a guest. The show was one of Pavarotti’s annual series of concerts in his hometown of Modena, Italy. Other guests included Lou Reed, Andrea Bocelli, Sting, and James Brown.

  I am going to call the boyfriend I was with at the time Casanova. That’s what he was like: very charming, exotic, Italian, a great cook, a wonderful lover. Women fell in love with him very easily. He made everything seem beautiful. He could make everyday life seem so dreamy. He would materialize on a gondola on the canal in Venice, where he lived, and I sometimes did, with a bottle of expensive champagne, wearing a black and red cape. He would have a surprise for me, and I hate surprises, but I trusted him. Before I knew it I would be looking up at fireworks that he had set off above the Venetian skyline. Even when he was in pain from a break up or even a divorce, he was positive.

  He was the sort of treacherous character who if he felt emotionally hurt would cause you hurt, as if he could get rid of the pain by transmitting it to someone else. Dangerous, but alluring. I believe he was the cause of the suicide of a close friend of mine, so I don’t want to name him, but he was around at the time of my performance with Pavarotti and played a part or two in the buildup to the show.

  I had always wanted to sing opera. It would be the ultimate proof that I had finally found my voice and that, after the difficulties I’d had in the early years, I was truly a singer. It was especially uplifting to sing with such a demanding, knowledgeable personality as Pavarotti. He was not going to indulge me if I could not do it.

  I was working on songs with Bruce Woolley at the time, after our experience on “Slave to the Rhythm.” We were attempting to find an aria, because Pavarotti had asked his guests to pick a song to sing as a duet with him. People were saying that I should choose one of my old songs, the way that Lou Reed was doing “Perfect Day,” for instance. Just do “La Vie en Rose,” they said—a song that had become identified with me, but was still someone else’s song.

  I wanted, as usual, to stretch myself completely, and do something from an actual opera. My German singing teacher Madame Monbot always used to say to me, when she wanted to compliment me and give me confidence, “Grace, you have the voice of [Maria] Callas!” I approached the project as a sporting event, something I needed to train myself for, and get myself into absolute peak condition. I hired a singing coach, and Bruce and I brought in a tenor to test out the songs we were thinking of doing.

  We found something from the Camille Saint-Saëns opera Samson and Delilah to be sung by a tenor and a mezzo-soprano: “My Heart Opens Itself to Your Voice,” which Delilah sings to Samson to get him to reveal his the secret of his strength. We thought it could be sung together. We suggest it to Pavarotti. He says no. We are working at two hundred percent strength trying to crack the problem. We send him a couple of other suggestions. He is still not happy.

  We think of a duet between two men, where I could sing one of the men’s parts. Another refusal. I am beginning to despair at all the rejections, and start to think I should not do it. I am in a great amount of distress, and I go to stay with Casanova in Venice, a couple of hours’ drive from Modena. While I am with him, I get more and more stressed about the Pavarotti problem. I cannot sleep at
night, I am pacing around like a tiger. I eventually decide that I am going to say I cannot perform. Enough is enough. I am going to pull out.

  Casanova’s father is a music lover with a deep knowledge of music history. He suggests a sublime aria from Jules Massenet’s Werther, “Pourquoi me réveiller”—why do you wake me up, you breath of spring. As someone who likes to sleep late, I love the title. Also, I am in such a state that I feel that being woken up will remind me of the dilemma I am in. The opera is about how the love that burns with the brightest flame is often the one that is fated to fail—been there, done that—and it has a classic melodramatic plot, about a poet who would rather die than lose the woman he loves. The aria leads to a suicide.

  We send it to Pavarotti. He says yes. It is such a relief.

  And then, more stress, because the duet is now on. The pressure starts to build up. I train like an athlete. I give up all vices. One night, to relieve the tension, I succumb to some strong, sticky Italian liqueur, and I completely panic and have a meltdown, thinking it will mess up my voice. I am scared. I have betrayed myself, broken my vows. I break down in tears in front of my singing coach, who explains that it will have an effect, shaving off a little fraction of my range from both sides of the three octaves I can sing, from both the high and the low end, but that my voice will come back in time for the show.

  Casanova is being very supportive and feels very involved, because his father recommended the song. I wrote a song about him when he was having marriage troubles, because he was the kind of man who would always have a wife and a mistress, and because he had this way of getting very emotional and taking it out on the ones he loved. The song went: Did I come too soon, or did I come too late, because now I am in the middle of your heartbreak, and your heartbreak will become my heartbreak—very deep, below Dietrich, completely gut-wrenching. One day I will record it.

  Pavarotti’s father was dying during the early rehearsals, so the atmosphere was extremely heightened. He died two days before the performance, but he had told Pavarotti on his deathbed to carry on with the show and to on no account cancel it. “I will be with you on the stage,” he told his distraught son. Pavarotti had been suffering from a bad flu and was not very well at all, and mostly sat down for the rehearsals. The melodrama in all the songs we were singing was hanging heavy over the entire production, and there was a real sense of what it takes to perform these very overwrought, technically complex pieces.

  During our rehearsal on the day of the show, I was a nervous wreck. There was nowhere to hide, no room for emotion, which was odd, considering opera is all about the expression of the deepest, wildest emotions. I started to sing my part, and Pavarotti immediately waved for me to stop. He was not looking me in the eye, and he appeared deeply distressed. I instantly thought that after all my preparation I had fucked up. I was hurled back to Philly and the disaster with Gamble and Huff. I have failed. I am not a singer. The master has passed judgment.

  Eventually, after a considerable, tense pause, he sat in his chair, looked up at me, eyes filled with tears, and waved his hanky at me to continue. Later, a local journalist who was seated next to Pavarotti’s sister in the stalls told me what had happened.

  Apparently, when I started to sing, his sister shrieked in alarm, “That is my father’s voice!” My voice had the exact timbre of their father, who had died two days before, promising that he would be there onstage with Pavarotti. That was why he stopped me. He heard his father’s voice too, coming out of my mouth, and was completely unnerved.

  After the rehearsal, I am with Casanova in the dressing room, which is a tent that is open to the stars clustered in an inky black sky. All around us there are trained opera singers all going through their preshow vocal exercises, practicing their scales: Whoo aaah uuuhh eeee ohhhhh. La-la-la ooh ooh ohh. All these whooping, bleating, blowing noises as they warm up, a chorus of abstract tunings and vocal stretching. Casanova and I are very caught up in the moment, the stars shimmering above us, feeling part of an amazing evening, the tension dispersed after a draining rehearsal, cooing at each other how much in love we are, overwhelmed with the romance of the setting.

  Suddenly, he takes hold of my ankles, pushes my legs apart, and starts to passionately lick my pussy. I am wearing a huge billowing skirt, and he easily disappears inside it between my legs. Anyone looking on would not see him, and assume I am on my own. He is giving the tongue action his most sophisticated Casanova attention, and I start joining in with the vocal stretching and tuning going on around me. I scream and whoop, La la la ooh ooh ooh eeee eee eeee, higher than them all, make noises that pierce the sky and reach the stars, clearly considered by those near us to be the most enthusiastic and liberating vocal exercises ever. My orgasm is operatic. Fireflies scatter into the night, each with its own incredible story to tell. Casanova has set me up in the way he knows best for my performance.

  The duet went perfectly, and those who never thought I had it in me stared openmouthed at how I sang. I wore what I considered an operatic hat—fabulously big, designed by Philip Treacy, a flowing white number that made me look like a Dalí flying nun. A little religious undertone. In opera, either you are big, or everything else is. It had to be a big, showstopping hat.

  I have put all my discipline and strength into this single point. All of the searching and anxiety I went through to find a voice explodes and implodes as I sing this intense suicide song with one of the greatest singers of all time. After the show, Pavarotti doesn’t let go of my hand as he moves around his guests. He doesn’t let me go for an hour.

  Casanova has gone. He has left me alone. Perhaps he thinks his work is done. Or he had to go back to his wife.

  The next morning, when I woke up in my hotel in Venice, everyone else had left, everyone I had invited: Paulo, my mother, my friends, all the people I wanted around me on such a night. I was totally alone. I had been on such a high, had reached such a pinnacle, having done something that was down to my singing—not to my image, my partying, or my appearance—and now I felt completely devastated.

  I think everyone left because their way of interpreting what I had done was that it was a triumph, and that I had proved that side of Grace Jones that people assume is all of what I am. The confident, immune, strong, unshakable Grace, who doesn’t need any moral support, who has gone to such a powerful place there are clearly no doubts, and no fears. I am fiercely independent, but I suppose I am scared of being abandoned.

  They thought I didn’t need them around. I obviously believed in myself. I had proved I was a singer in the most taxing of circumstances. It never occurred to them that this was the moment I needed them the most. I had reached the summit. This was everything I had ever wanted and now I had done it. There are moments when you have nothing left to give. I needed them to help me come down from the high I had reached.

  I sat stunned on my own for a while. I looked at the canal outside my window, which had looked exactly like that for hundreds of years, representing the slow, slow passage of time. A small thought entered my mind that I should jump in and disappear into all of this time, and then the thought immediately vanished. I got dressed and went to find out where everyone was.

  18.

  Issue

  I come from the underground. I am never comfortable in the middle of the stream, flowing in the same direction as everyone else. I think people assume that’s where I want to be, famous for being famous, because as part of what I do there is a high level of showing off, but my instinct is always to resist the pull of the obvious. It’s not easy, especially when you have had any sort of success, because then people want you to repeat what it was that made you a success, even if your instinct is to move on, or to want to change, or have other ideas.

  My biggest success came not because I was chasing it but because I was following through on my impulse to change. What was exciting about those early Compass Point sessions was that we were making something that sounded new, that came from the outside. We weren’t chasi
ng fashion. Later, that kind of sound seemed fashionable. At the time we recorded it, it sounded almost uncannily, riskily fresh.

  The industry always wants you to play it obvious. The way a corporate company works can never involve the kind of flexibility and spontaneity that encourages the innovation that leads to the biggest sort of commercial success. Capitol Records was very corporate that way, and that world does not work when it gets involved with creative decisions. The employees are working for the company, not for the artist, and their loyalty is always to the company. Their interests are in satisfying the financial needs of the business, not in allowing the artist to develop and perhaps make the sort of music that ends up making a lot of money. The truly creative artist succeeds and makes a profit in ways that the corporate mentality can never anticipate, because that success is based on completely new ways of doing and seeing things.

  Sure, following trends, singing the obvious, might make you wealthier. But does it make you happier? If your goal is to make a lot of money and it doesn’t matter how you do it, then fine, that is your goal.

  You can listen to the label, and sometimes you can follow their advice, or bear it in mind, but in the end you have to remember what the seed was you planted in the first place. What it was you intended to become as you started out. What was that seed you planted? A rose, an orchid, an apple, a plum, a lemon—what? You have to remember that. You cannot interfere with that process; what it was you wanted to be has to be what you keep being even as others try and make you change.

  You can get sidetracked. A hurricane can wash you away. Trends comes along and people say, Follow that trend. A big act emerges, and the advice comes in: Why don’t you follow them? Even if it was a trend you might have set in motion thirty years ago, and you don’t really want to do it all over again. There’s a lot of that around at the moment. Be like Sasha Fierce. Be like Miley Cyrus. Be like Rihanna. Be like Lady Gaga. Be like Rita Ora and Sia. Be like Madonna. I cannot be like them, except to the extent that they are already being like me.