Untitled #3

by Grace Jones

  One way of collaborating would perhaps be some kind of performance, to be seen by no one, where we talk about fame. I could speak about my experiences, and how they’re really disconnected from who I am and why I do what I do. I have never done anything to be famous. Fame is awful. Fame is the worst part of this. People don’t realize this until it happens, and usually they’re not ready for it at all. When you’re famous, everyone has an opinion about you, mostly wrong and abusive, and if when fame hits you are not absolutely rooted in the very earth, then it can ruin you. You have to be absolutely focused before you become famous to be even a little focused after.

  Everything comes at you when you are famous. Even the most talented and grounded people can get swept away unless they have the right sort of people to turn to for help. I was extremely lucky that I had Chris Blackwell. I say lucky, but there was an element of destiny about it. He got me, and he understood that I was not contriving to seek publicity, or chasing fame. He understood why I made the decisions I made, and what I wanted beyond the fame, which passes through you as you pass through.

  If you can meet someone like that, it helps you make the transition from being someone who behaves in a certain way for a certain amount of people, to becoming someone who behaves the same way you always do, but now in front of lots and lots of people. I sometimes think it would have been good to have had the private conversation I could have with some of these new fame-crushed singers with Michael Jackson. Fame distorted his life, so that because he was good at something, singing and dancing, he then had to deal with this other thing, for which there is no real training.

  I talked with him for a while during one of those moments where we happened to be in the same place. We had a tiny bit of time to talk when we were both in a recording studio at the same time, with not a lot of other people around. There was that unusual quiet where you actually talk about real things that might be on your mind, a quiet you felt he very rarely got. He shyly asked me about breaking away from the family, because that was something he knew I had managed to do. When your world changes so much and yet you are still bringing the family with you into this new state of being, it only adds to the problems.

  Michael asked me how I had managed to break away from all the obligations and expectations. He wanted to know how to go out into the world, whatever the dangers, without that extra complication of the family watching over you, sticking close to you, stopping you grow. It was a big pressure on him. My family was deeply religious, and there were a lot of siblings. There was a certain resemblance to his situation. I was, in my small God-fearing Spanish Town setting, the equivalent of a child star, performing on behalf of my family, who effectively managed me, who never wanted me to grow up.

  “How did you get away?” he asked. My answer was very simple. I said, “I just did it. You just have to do it. Don’t think about it. If you do, you hesitate, and it becomes a problem. Once I was free of their influence, I couldn’t think about how I was the daughter of a preacher, and I had a responsibility to behave how they wanted me to. I was out there crazy.”

  I remember being on The Merv Griffin Show in a full-body flesh suit, and my father, he told me later, was appalled. He thought I was naked. In his eyes, I was. As naked as the devil spitting fire, dripping with sleaze and grinning for the hell of it. This was who I was going to be, and I was going to enjoy myself; I couldn’t think of what my family would think. It wasn’t about them. It was about me.

  I had to follow my own path, or I would always feel held back, and frustrated.

  I told Michael to do it, to walk out on them and let the chips fall where they fall. If you think about it too long—think about it and think about it—then you get torn apart while you are waiting to make a decision. By the time you make your mind up, it can be too late. Michael could never really make those decisions in time, and by the time he did, it would lead to more problems for him to deal with, and that meant he found it even more difficult to make decisions that could help him.

  If Doris and I had that conversation, I would tell her that fame is not inside you, it is outside you. It comes from outside, and you cannot control it. Everybody wants to be somebody, but at the same time, now that everyone is acting like they are someone, there is something more special about being anonymous. Fame doesn’t make you somebody. You are already somebody.

  There are only a few things I enjoy about being famous. Meeting other famous people is one! So you can talk with each other and say, “Isn’t being famous a drag? Don’t you wish you could still do what you do without being famous?” When you walk through that door, through to the other side, where there is fame, you cannot believe how different it is.

  You can get all the pussy and dick you want. Everything becomes available. It goes to your head. But how do you know how to deal with all the people suddenly around you who are only really interested in you as a famous person? How do you work out who likes you because of who you are, not who they think you are?

  You drink too much. You take drugs. You get arrested. You are in a situation where your new position is always being celebrated. Every day is like a wonderland. You start spinning.

  You see your fans look at you—Oh my God, oh my God—and it’s not clear how to handle that. I remember when I was on my first Tonight show with Johnny Carson, and everyone was going, Ooh, you’ve made it now, your life will never be the same again. For me, it was a part of my job, which I liked doing. It didn’t make me into a goddess or anything; it didn’t make me immortal. It was just a good way of telling a lot of people who you were and what you did. You don’t want to make a record and have no one know about it. There was plenty of promotion I didn’t want to do, but there were some things I couldn’t turn down.

  I like chat shows. I like the feeling they have of private conversation. You can make a connection. I always wanted to interview the person interviewing me. Sometimes, doing big shows, it’s like you are connecting with no one. I never really like a huge audience. I find that I have to have fun on my own, by myself, and hope the audience does too. I find it very hard to get fifteen thousand people to enjoy what someone is doing in unison. Arena-sized venues never suited my minimalist approach.

  I am not a big mover. I like to move in slow motion. As slow as possible. I prefer the power of stillness. I prefer the power of the preacher, who is more about getting you to listen, to focus on what you are doing. I don’t go in for distraction. I don’t want anything to distract the audience but me.

  This is what I would say to my pupil: You have become only your fame, and left behind most of who you were. How are you going to deal with that? Will you lose that person forever? Have you become someone else, without really knowing it? Do you always have to stay in character for people to like you? Do you know that you are in character?

  Doris, I would say, fame is all well and good if you want to take it to another level. If you have some greater purpose. Me, I am just a singer, on one sort of stage or another, who likes to have an audience, but not all the time. Listen to my advice; I have some experience.

  In a way, it is me being a teacher, which is what I wanted to be. I still feel I could go into teaching. What is teaching but passing on your knowledge to those who are at the beginning? Some people are born with that gift. With me, the teaching side morphed into the performing side. It’s in there. And these are my pupils—Gaga, Madonna, Annie Lennox, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Miley, Kanye West, FKA twigs, Doris . . . and Russell Harty: I think he would have liked being in that class.

  I wonder if sometimes this really is an inevitable Norma Desmond moment. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got smaller.” I am being replaced, now that the movies are in color and have sound, rather than simply mourning a loss of subversive power and deeper meaning. I am isolating myself, cutting myself off from new influences, as opposed to continuing what I have always done, craving the next, from occasion to occasion, event to event, day to day.

  Am I holding on to the past? I don’t fe
el that I am. I don’t ever feel that I think of time as being past, present, and future, so I don’t feel like I am yearning for better days. I still think of better days as being then, and now, and soon. I am as young as I ever was, because I can move and think, in the real world and the unreal world, exactly like I always have done. If I am from another era, everywhere I look, at the electric sheep all around me, it all seems to indicate that we are still inside that era. There is no new era, only the one I am still part of being stored and restored.

  If I were Norma, that would mean I have already retired. I will never retire. When I retire, I’m dead, and even then, I will be reincarnated. I will remain on the move. Even death won’t stop me. It never has. You can find images of me from centuries ago. Faces that look like mine carved in wood from ancient Egypt, Roman times, the Igbo tribe of southern Nigeria, and sixteenth-century Jamaica, fierce enough to turn people pale, to shrink their hearts. I have been around for a long time, heart pounding, ready to pounce on my prey, blurring borders, speaking my mind, believing that the world is full of visible and invisible forces, crossing the water, tripping, grieving, loving, hunting, conquering, seducing, fighting, dreaming, laughing, and I always will be.

  19.

  Grand

  I hate being vulnerable, but sometimes to feel vulnerable is actually to be strong. To write this book is being vulnerable, and it is the only way it will work—not to close off, but to open up, which takes a lot of strength. People think I am very tough and, sure, I can be very tough, but to be really tough, you need to be vulnerable. Sometimes you need a good cry. In private. Not necessarily about yourself, but about others who you have known and loved, who you still know. It makes you feel, and sometimes when you shut yourself off so much, you stop feeling. I don’t think of time passing, but it does, and I don’t get sentimental about that, but I feel it, and notice it.

  People I know from twenty, thirty years ago look older. They look at me, and I don’t really look older, for whatever reason. They ask, Have you sold your soul to the devil? I think it’s because I don’t believe in time, I don’t believe in age, I don’t believe in getting older. I believe in getting wise. I believe in having more memories.

  I’ll never forget this Twilight Zone episode I watched where all the faces looked like the faces of the women in the Housewives programs: bloated lips, ballooning cheeks, distorted, warped, sliced up, oddly proportioned. People today often look like they are from this episode of the Twilight Zone where the idea of being so facially maimed was a living hell. There are people I knew thirty years ago whom I now don’t recognize because their faces have gone through so many changes. They are attempting to retain their youth, but their efforts don’t make them look younger, only stranger.

  People ask me if I have had work done to my face. I say, “No, I fucking haven’t.” Would I have work done to my face? No, I fucking wouldn’t. Why would I want to look in the mirror and not recognize myself again? Why would I want to see myself in the mirror and wonder, Who is that? That sounds like the definition of madness. Of course, I am also very afraid of needles. And pain.

  Then people say, “Well, one day you will have surgery, when your face finally does start to age.”

  I say, “Well, no I won’t. Absolutely not.”

  I am not sure what people think they are doing. The pressure in certain worlds and professions has become that if you don’t have Botox, filler, a face-lift, you don’t belong. It’s like peer pressure at school trying to keep up, but it’s a global peer pressure among adults. The individual spirit has been devoured. Everyone starts to look the same as well, which makes you think that in thirty or forty years there will only be about thirty or forty separate looks. The world will be full of monocultural clones, all adopting and repeating an apparent, ultimately very stale, ideal.

  There is a mass panic among women, especially, and it seems to lack humor and wit—it’s a form of self-destruction. Those who surgically alter themselves seem indifferent to how grotesque it makes them look. Attacking their own faces is a hostile act of self-hate, not an act of love. They used to say my lips were too big; now they would be saying they are too thin and telling me to pump them up.

  It’s troubling that people put their trust in this kind of mind-set. It is all so permanent and addictive, whereas how I would change myself, and manipulate age and time, was through imagery. I didn’t literally cut into the skin and move around the muscle in my face. I was stretched, fractured, crushed, expanded, liquefied, but always as a performance, as an effect, a consciousness, never as a real human being.

  Versions of me were manufactured, as real as anything, but they emerged out of me, and didn’t scar me. At the center of all these multiple versions of me, there was always a mystery, my mind, where the truth about me really exists, which remains beyond all this interference. My body is a language, but it’s not the only one I speak.

  Perhaps in the future, where life is imagined more than lived, you will be able to separate and decorate yourself in the ways you can in performance, sending an altered and adjusted variety of selves out into the various spaces of the world, while at the center of it, you remain untouched—yourself, pure spirit, staying in your own skin, close to your soul. In one world you age, in another you exist inside a fantasy.

  These Housewives and those fetishizing youth who pursue a reshaping of their faces and bodies are taking too literally the techniques that have been used in the production and retouching of image in entertainment. The face and body can be twisted out of shape, or given the illusion of perfection, on film or video, but there are those who actually do it to themselves, to their flesh and bone. I loved the idea of metamorphosis in my performance, of my persona being infinitely malleable, able to transmit the notion that anything is possible, but I never had the urge to do that to my actual body.

  I would say to those women plumping up their lips and cheeks, Eat more pumpkins. Healthy skin begins from the inside out. The beauty products made from aloe vera—eat them, don’t slap them on yourself. We’ve been eating that in Jamaica since we were kids. Red wine, honey. That keeps you young. Eating the pumpkin. The melon. Don’t put all this shit on your face, eat it.

  Don’t do those quick fixes. It’s like doing heroin. You become addicted to something that in the long run will harm you. Don’t they see it in the mirror, that they look distorted? Or do they keep doing it to themselves to correct the mistakes? It’s like one thing breaks, you fix that; then something else breaks, you need to fix that.

  I would never consider cutting into myself to pretend to stay young. It’s bad enough going to the dentist or the doctor for a shot. If I ever need a shot, I say, “Hit me as hard as you can where the needle goes into my flesh. I do not want to feel the needle go into my skin. I want to feel numb there. Hit me. Harder! Harder! And don’t show me the needle, I don’t want to see it.” They think I am a masochist. Can you image the pain of all those needles in the service of smoothing you out and pretending you are still young and attractive even as death gets closer?

  When I became a grandmother, it still didn’t make me think, Now I must burn away the wrinkles, lift the breasts, pump up the lips. There was no sense of panic. How could there be? Becoming a grandmother was simply another stage I was moving through. Paulo became a father at the same age that I became a mother. His daughter Athena was born in Paris, and I happened to be there on the day she was born doing some promotional work for the Hurricane album, including a photo shoot with Jean-Paul. The day she was born, the album entered the British charts.

  I got to the hospital not long after she was born, and when I first saw her, she had her eyes closed. I had to leave soon, and I was begging her to open her eyes. Before I leave, please open your eyes! A few moments before I had to leave, she opened her eyes—and my God, what a shock. I shouldn’t really say it, but it was like a Rosemary’s Baby moment. She had these deep purple eyes, and this little spray of red hair, and her skin was so white (her mother is half Ita
lian, half Finnish) it was almost transparent. She was like Elizabeth I in wrinkled miniature. Her blue-purple eyes locked right on mine. It was an extraordinary moment.

  I rang Jean-Paul when she was born and said, “If you don’t get down to the hospital immediately I won’t do the photo shoot.” He still had that fear of the newborn, but he came down. It was one great ending to our story, and of course another beginning: to become grandparents and feel how much that stretches reality.

  Paulo had a group with the mother of Athena, Azella, called Trybez, and they supported me when I did the Hurricane tour. I would look after Athena while they were on tour in much the same way I would have Paulo with me when I toured after he was born. I would have her in my dressing room as I was putting on my makeup. It was continuity. You could see Athena respond to the music as it came through the dressing room walls, and notice how she was reacting to something she had been hearing when she was inside her mother’s womb. There was a definite connection with a noise and rhythm she was familiar with.

  I am glad that I had a boy and that Paulo had a girl, which means that, in a way, I can have a girl. I never wanted a girl, because of how I had to compete with all my brothers, and how they can be boxed in and denied freedom. Girls are treated as inferior; it just seems to be the way things are, however much you fight. Now she’s here, I want her to be tough and work out how to do well in a man’s world.

  When she was born, there was some debate about what she should call me—Nana, Bonne Maman, Aunt Grace. “No,” I announced. “I deserve to be called Grandmother, with emphasis on the grand.” I never really had a grandmother, not in any traditional, nurturing sense. Athena made me feel grand. I definitely wanted to be Grandma.