I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  I partied every night in New York, and met Antonio Lopez, who at that point was the finest fashion illustrator in Paris and New York. Everything he did captured the energy, movement, and excitement of the city and its fashion. Actually, Paris was a little depleted when he arrived—he helped transform the scene into something connected to Warhol’s New York, and he had his own entourage, like Andy. He took some of the art fantasies of New York that were then spinning around Warhol over to the fashion fantasies of Paris, where designers like Yves Saint Laurent were beginning their reigns.

  He was described as the Picasso of fashion illustration, giving new life to a then dying art. Very flamboyant, he was from Puerto Rico and moved to New York in 1950, when he was seven. He started out at Women’s Wear Daily in New York in the late ’60s and moved to Paris in 1969. He began collaborating with Karl Lagerfeld, and they ran a kind of salon where models, fashion insiders, and photographers hung out. I suppose he was bringing a lot of American thinking about fashion, art, and style into Paris, things like pop art, which he sampled in his work, the kinetic jumble of kitsch, street, high art, bold shapes, and cartoons.

  I think his moving to Paris was a form of self-exile that I could understand—of getting away from a world that seemed to admire and demand otherness, difference, and specialness, but could somehow only take it pure and unadulterated when it came from somewhere else, as an exotic import. It was like he was chewing up and transforming the imagery that had surrounded him in his childhood, reacting to and exaggerating what he was then ultimately moving away from. His work was all about metamorphoses, and I identified with that. He dreamed up fantasies, and then they influenced reality. There were lots of illustrations he had done in the early ’70s influenced by his interest in the risqué singer and dancer Josephine Baker, one of the first major black superstars, where he drew full-bodied African-American women, contrasting their dark skin against the white clothes they were wearing, which came out of the white paper he was drawing on. He said, “If you ever come to Paris, come to see me.” They loved the Josephine Baker myth of the black goddess, the sex-mad black Venus walking down the Champs Élysées owning the city with her pet cheetah on a leash.

  * * *

  While I was making my mind up about leaving New York, I had my first casting-couch experience . . . another first for me in my family. I was doing all that running around, trying to getting the theater thing off the ground—all the callbacks, almost, almost, almost. You hear about the casting couch thing, but my attitude was always: no way. I am never going to want something so badly that I fall for that.

  I kept thinking, I am almost there, but one more thing needs to happen, a tenth of a percent of some other energy to solve this mystery of always the callbacks, the callbacks, but never the job. There is definitely potential there. They see something in me. But something was blocking me, so I decided to leave New York and try another way. I didn’t know what, but my instinct was to keep moving.

  Before I left I tried one more audition. I thought, I will give this one a go. It was for a film called Gordon’s War, directed by Ossie Davis, starring Paul Winfield, one of the leading black actors of his day. He played Martin Luther King in the film King, and was nominated for an Oscar for Sounder.

  I went to audition for a small part. I had one line. The character, Mary, was a drug runner, a courier, but above suspicion. She was a schoolteacher, dressed nicely, very innocent, with an Afro, because this was a blaxploitation film, and of course she was required to be seen naked now and then. I seemed to have the right experience, between the Afro, the nudity, the heroin, and even the schoolteaching element.

  In the film, a black soldier comes back from Vietnam and finds that his wife back home in tough, grungy Harlem has become a heroin addict and that his neighborhood is rife with prostitution. He gets his buddies together to fight the shadowy Mafia-run drug dealers, pimps, and pushers in their fancy furs who have supplied the drugs, the poison ruining lives. It had a pretty funky soundtrack, lots of cool explosions, split screens, freeze-frames, a bunch of sleazy villains, and plenty of exciting car chases. Not the worst film you’ve ever seen, very much of its time.

  I did my audition, said the line, and the director said, “Okay, you’ve got the part.” I couldn’t believe it. It seemed too easy. The director said, “Yes, really, you’re in, no problem.” The producer then sent for me to come to see him in Los Angeles. He said, “Bring your pictures, I know the director says you have the role, but I have to be the one to approve it.”

  I traveled all the way to his big, beautiful Beverly Hills house. When he opened the door, he was wearing this fancy silk robe, which just about hid a part of him he was clearly very enamored with and couldn’t wait to show me. Oh. And there’s champagne. Uh-oh. And he asks me to sit on the couch next to him. He looks through my photographs. You can read the signs, the way he’s talking and looking. Yes, I know the director says you’ve got the part, but it’s really my decision. So come closer. He pats the cushion next to him. Let’s have a talk. You could almost hear the slinky Barry White wah-wah guitars and his molten growl creep up behind us.

  He’s chatting away like its all innocent and nothing to worry about. The next moment he tries to kiss me. I remember I took my glass of champagne and I slammed the champagne so hard in his face it would have stung. I stormed out. I was so angry. Furious. I weighed about a hundred pounds, I was real skinny, but I would have taken him. I turned around and said to him, “Look, if I’m going to screw you, I am not going to screw you for the part. If I am going to screw you, I do it on my own terms.” I was so insulted. I was thinking, I’m good, I can do this, I don’t need to sleep with the producer. What an awful cliché!

  I was crying as I left; I thought I’d blown it. I spent all night in despair. More rejection. The next day I got flowers and an apology. And I got the part. I was Mary, the tough, single-minded drug courier, and I did my line.

  Later, I was almost the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s full-blown film transformation of the Who’s Tommy. Again, I thought I was perfectly qualified. I knew acid. I knew how to take charge. There were two black chicks who were really rocking at that time, not doing the normal stuff. There was me, and the other one was Tina Turner. She became the Acid Queen, and I didn’t. There was always someone else in the way until I worked out how to make myself the one who was in the way of others.

  I loved Tina. She was the first woman I felt that I could be with. I told her that. She just flat-out turned me on. I could go with you, Tina! She said, “Oh Grace, you are so crazy.” She would say, “But Grace, you don’t really work”—because I would simply walk around the stage, like an explosion that hadn’t gone off. She would put so much effort into the performing, and next to her it was like I was in slow motion. It was very confusing for her—she sweated and gave it her all, and I barely moved a finger. My Acid Queen would still have been scary. My Acid Queen could have taken over the world, whips and all.

  * * *

  I had a friend, Pola, who killed herself in New York, another reason why I had to get out, perhaps in the end the main reason for me leaving and heading to Paris. You see a glimmer of what could happen to you if you don’t adapt and watch out for yourself. It’s a world full of anxious, suffering, excruciatingly self-conscious people who cease to exist if they don’t keep getting paid—money and compliments—to dress up.

  She was also with the Wilhelmina agency, and joined about the same time as me. We were very close. I think after all that time with my brothers, separated from my sisters, I felt like Pola was like a sister; we could be silly together. All my life I have been looking for sisters, as I was always surrounded by boys and separated from my actual sisters. I adopt my best girlfriends and we become as close as sisters.

  We shared a small apartment for a while and she had recently shot two major magazine covers that all came out after she killed herself—Cosmopolitan and Vogue covers. Her face was all over town, days after she had died. Vogue was conc
erned that they were going to put out a cover featuring a dead girl, but they decided to publish the issue. Pola with her big, plump lips staring at the camera, very trusting, very proud, her shoulders sloping somehow sadly. They decided that no one would know that she was actually dead, and she did look so alive. If you did know she was dead, there was a tiny hint that she knew what she was about to do, something broken in the eyes, the lost look of a lost soul.

  Pola’s real name was Paula Klimak. She was from Jackson Heights, Queens, but with a Brazilian background, decades before Gisele Bündchen and Adriana Lima, and as Paula she was a bit of an ugly duckling, gawky, with glasses, very little confidence. She remade herself as Pola, an absolutely beautiful model. But modeling might not have been the best thing for her to have done, because she was very vulnerable and had issues, some whispered, to do with being raped when she was really young. Her wrecked ego never got boosted even as she was feted and photographed. The business increased the emptiness. The cold, treacherous hypocrisy at the center of it all engulfed her.

  Pola was something of an outcast. As models you see each other all the time, you are going to the same go-sees, you are on the same shoots, and you would know right away the gossip. With Pola, no one could believe she was relatively so big—Brazilian big—but getting all the work. She was bigger than the average model, so they had to cut the clothes open to fit her. The models who were starving themselves to get work were outraged that Pola was getting all this work even though they were having to make the clothes bigger. They whispered among themselves sneaky innuendo about what she was doing to get all that work. Psychologically, these jealous models want to kill you. Put poison in your food. Here are some pills—take a lot, OD, why don’t you. What the fuck? It was a very cruel, indifferent world full of desperate techniques of denial. You had to be very strong to survive.

  I was an outcast because of my funny accent, the color of my skin, a strange-looking face according to the New York fashion world, and because in so many ways I didn’t fit in. Black, but strangely full of myself. Oddly entitled seeming, which the African-Americans weren’t. I was expected as a black model to act a little humble, a little grateful. No way.

  Pola and I would hang out together, swapping stories about being the outcast. We were the ones nobody liked. We bonded because of that. But I was not taking the outcast business and all the gossip as seriously as she was. It burned into her. She was very sweet but totally lacked self-esteem. She sought out usually damaging ways to get through the day without feeling more aggrieved and wounded.

  We hung out together all the time. Those were the days of the New York clubs before Studio 54; that energy to come was building up in disparate places ready to be concentrated into 54. New York was heaving with nightclubs packed with people fired up and on the hunt for adventure, and I was a regular at most of them.

  Le Jardin was off Forty-Third Street in the basement and penthouse of the old Hotel Diplomat. Pola and I loved to go there. It was definitely like Studio 54 before Studio 54. The New York Dolls had played in the basement in their early days. The basement was small and underground, and then in the early hours of the morning, if you needed more room to come down or extend the high, you would head up in the elevator, with an elevator operator, to the tenth floor, still part of the club. That was where I would hang out with Antonio Lopez and Pola and make all sorts of plans for the future, and all the magazine covers we would be on, until it was time to go home after dawn.

  It was gay, but there were pretty women there too, because they could breathe a little, and dance without getting hit on—these places were always (probably on purpose) close to the offices of the model agents. David Bowie, Bianca Jagger, Warhol, Truman Capote, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono would be seated on the white leather banquettes surrounded by palms in the corner next to the bar area. Jackie O. and Lou Reed would be yards apart from each other, the wide striving scope of nonstop New York weirdly expressed. What they call the beautiful people, but plenty of wonderfully ugly, unlikely people as well, a toxic mix of those with everything to lose and those with nothing to lose. Movie stars and nobodies mingling as one and the same. It was the nobodies, the real damaged weirdoes, obscure hipsters, gay, blacks, Latinos that made the place, and the city itself, and they were really why the celebrities came, to tap into that erratic, heady energy, and feed off it, using it in how they worked, and played.

  I would see Faye Dunaway there, and we became friends and very close years later. There were these monstrously done-up drag queens crowding around Diana Ross, Bette Midler, and Liza Minnelli, desperate to touch their hems and receive their goddess blessing. Beautiful boys everywhere. Exiled Cubans glowing with sweat, dancing the hustle. Waiters in short shorts wearing roller skates. White statues holding balloons. Fruit and cheese in bowls on the tables. Steve Rubell, later one of the owners of Studio 54, was a doorman, taking notes. Talking about it now, it’s as if I’m making it up, but it all happened. The ’70s, when our hedonism was up in the clouds.

  Le Jardin was one of those clubs where you would discover what a disco was if you didn’t know. These gigantic speakers slamming the steamy go-getting beat of the city into the room. Amazing DJs flinging you from thrill to thrill and groove to groove, giving life a whole new set of thrilling patterns. Barry White pummeling your senses. Hamilton Bohannon. Betty Wright. Herbie Mann. The Reflections. You could be anything you wanted to be there as long as you were there, and if you were there, then you were cool enough to be there. These places got their reputations because there were fewer people on the inside than there were on the outside. So people wanted to get inside. Great marketing.

  A couple of the cattier models said that it was my fault that Pola had killed herself, because I introduced her to her new boyfriend at Le Jardin. He was my friend, and I put them together, but I would still see him at Le Jardin, and they thought we were seeing each other. We weren’t, we were only friends. There were all those rumors circulating. I would get very angry with all these models spreading the rumors, but I knew what I knew, and I would never have betrayed Pola.

  We were trying to protect her because she was liking the pills a bit too much. We all liked to get high, on mescaline, stuff like that, but she was a little bit more hooked. She was using drugs as therapy, as a barrier, as a way of beating back the demons. For me, it was more experimental, a part of my need to try everything, at least once, just in case it worked for me, and became part of the growing me. My free-spirited approach to drugs was part of a deeper search for truth, not just a way out of my problems.

  Pola would get so high and helpless we had to carry her home. She started to worry us. Some of the rumors suggested that there were those getting her stoned so that they could have sex with her. Because she was bigger than other models, she was one of the first models I ever knew who would eat something and then sit on the toilet and purge it out. She was getting very anxious about her size. No one at the agency helped her deal with it.

  We all stuck together in those days, helping each other. We would be like each other’s therapists, because we never went to see anyone officially. We knew we needed to protect Pola. She was only nineteen, very fragile, you would feel instantly that she needed looking after. We made sure Pola had no access to pills—quaaludes in particular were her thing, and there was one pretty strong, massive purple pill Pola and I used to take.

  It had a terrible effect on her—I remember she took this pill at a shoot, and she would leap and jump around, full of beans, and then suddenly fall down in a heap, out cold. It was funny for a bit; then it wasn’t funny at all. The pill never used to hit me as hard. Actually, I liked the effect—they were very popular pills, exactly what you wanted when you went on a go-see and needed to look on the ball even if you were a little off the ball. Drugs and sex have this trenchant power where they can open up the mind to what there is beyond the mundane and at the same time drag you into the darkness of the world and your own frantic, fractured mind. On the way up, you get t
o see all the possibilities in the world; coming down, all the possibilities in the world are wrenched away, and you’re slammed onto the damp concrete floor of emptiness. I had to help a lot of the girls through some dreadful depressions and panic attacks, especially when they were either too high or had hit the pavement hard. I’d had my own experiences and was able many times to talk a girl out of some horrible place.

  Pola planned her death. I’m sure. There were all these rumors—that she had drunk a bottle of champagne and drowned in the bath, that she walked off a roof of a tall building high on heroin and angel dust, that she accidentally overdosed while trying to numb some pain or another. I found out later what happened.

  She would often talk about her father, how he had divorced her mother and then refused to see Pola because she looked too much like her mom. I think that had a lot to do with her getting so recklessly high. A classic case of abandonment bursting into something existentially rotten in the fraudulent world of fashion that superficially appeared to offer solace.

  We all sensed that sooner or later she would take too much. She became very unhappy about her relationship with her father. I think this was why she despised men, which sometimes she seemed to, more than that she was raped as a kid. This was all mixed up with some bad relationships—there was one photographer who locked her in a closet and wouldn’t let her out—before I introduced her to this guy at Le Jardin, who was so nice, uncreepy, and lovely looking, and very good for her.

  One night she told me she was staying with her mom. She told someone else she was staying with me, her mother that she was staying with her boyfriend. She had an apartment by then on her own on Seventy-Second Street, a high-rise building, and somehow she got hold of those purple pills that we kept from her. We wondered how she had gotten them, but when you want to get pills, you find a way of getting pills.