I'll Never Write My Memoirs

Home > Other > I'll Never Write My Memoirs > Page 13
I'll Never Write My Memoirs Page 13

by Grace Jones


  There was also a Hollywood producer lurking around wanting to take her to Hollywood, and he said, as these kinds of guys always do, to put her in films. He might have given her the pills. She took them all. On her own. She didn’t show up for work the next day. People were calling me, asking if I knew where she was. I said, “She is with her mom.” Her mom said, “She’s with her boyfriend.” The boyfriend said, “She’s with Grace.” She had gotten us all thinking she was with someone, but she was on her own. She was found at the window, because, we think, she was calling for help. She had changed her mind after taking the pills. It was too late.

  I ran away after that. I was struggling anyway, really. Not as acutely as Pola, but with my own cavorting demons. She was my closest friend, and it was very upsetting, but her death didn’t put me off being a model. I had tougher skin, stronger methods of defense, a sense there was a world outside modeling that I was heading for. My motive for carrying on was still to get into theater and cinema. Modeling was still going to be the way I would keep myself, but I would never let it become everything. Something else needed to happen, and I was never afraid to try something new. I liked the sound of a city where Josephine Baker, well known for being naked but for a few well-placed feathers, was a heroine.

  3.

  Paris

  I would find a home in Paris, and most of my formative years were spent there. Outside of Jamaica, it is the place I have lived the longest.

  First I had to find my way there. No one would pay for me to relocate, so I did it myself. I did a job for GQ—most of the jobs I got in New York were for men’s magazines. The head guy at GQ was crazy about me, so I did a little fashion spread for them. That was all the money I had—to pay for my ticket and my composite of photographs, because on go-sees, you had to bring the composite to leave with the photographers.

  And your composite had to stand out from all the others they were getting. Mine was supermodern, to reflect who I was and how I looked. My look was very much born in my own imagination. I had made it up out of my own fashion sense, taken from my mom’s style, from understanding the angles in my face, doing my own makeup, and understanding what suited me.

  I learned to do my own makeup by asking questions every time a makeup artist did my face. I made sure I never walked away from having my makeup done without learning a little bit more about how to do it myself. This was more interesting to me than turning up and tuning out while my face and hair were fiddled with. I wanted to learn everything I could. I wanted to learn so much so that, if necessary, I could do it all myself, right down to the lighting. It was all about becoming self-reliant—learning how to do hair, makeup, nails, absorbing all the information possible. I felt it was important to know how to do your own thing as a model, so that you weren’t merely considered a mindless clothes hanger.

  Once I had made my mind up about Paris, nothing was going to stop me. I saved up enough for a budget Freddie Laker ticket to Europe. That was my quite shaky, unformed plan—buy the cheapest flight I could find and leave New York. I had been advised to go to Paris, but had no financial help. Normally, Wilhelmina would send girls to Europe on an exchange with an agency like Elite Model Management, which at the time was run by Johnny Casablancas, who’d founded the agency in Paris in 1972, and they would pay the models’ travel expenses. I later discovered that Johnny didn’t really want me, so I didn’t get any financial help. I was left to fend for myself. I figured if I made it over there, I would make it work, and persuade whomever I had to persuade that I was worth taking on.

  I had my book of pictures and an army outfit I had bought cheap at the army and navy store that I still wear now. (I love it—with the chunky pockets on the cargo pants, and the little Italian-green tank on the breast pocket.) I had my army hat, and my mom and I made this long, hoodless cream-colored cape made of a lightweight wool. Before I left for Paris—either to prepare, or say goodbye to America—I tripped on acid for about two weeks. The great sweep of the acid years was still carrying on for me.

  My brother Chris had come to stay with me in New York to DJ at the Hippopotamus club somewhere around Sixtieth Street and Lexington Avenue, another 54 before 54. It was one of the great early discos when disco was not yet known as disco. There was just smartly sequenced nonstop music that you danced to, and it was as likely to be Jefferson Airplane as James Brown, the Rolling Stones as Donald Byrd. Harold and the Blue Notes and the Ohio Players used to hang out there.

  Chris and I were sharing this rough little flat downtown in Chelsea. He would prepare his DJ set for the night and I remember having taken this acid, feeling like I was flying around this soundproofed room, like a witch ready to put a spell on anyone who annoyed me. That was my way of preparing to cross another sea and become a castaway all over again. The flight took five minutes and five thousand years, and I landed miles away from where I needed to be without much thought about what to do next.

  Still tripping after the flight, I decided I was going to hitchhike from Luxembourg, and I took one of my big photographs and wrote on the back in big black letters: Paris. I had no idea how far away it was, or even that it was in another country. I stood on this big highway—it was a beautiful day. I felt I looked pretty hot in my cape and hat, certainly worth someone stopping for to find out what the story was, but all these sports cars whizzed past me without stopping, totally ignoring me. None of them stopped. I thought, Everyone in Europe is so rude!

  Eventually, a sports car skidded to a halt. It backed up to me, and the driver said, in English, by the way, “You’re on the wrong side of the road. Paris is the other way! I think it’s safer for you to catch a train,” and he took me to the train station. He helped me get a ticket and onto the train, heading for Paris. I’m not sure if he was being kind or just wanted to get rid of me. I didn’t speak a word of French, not one word. Everything got trippier and trippier. The words people spoke—because they were just sounds to me, meaning nothing—took on a life of their own, but pulled me close and closer to Paris. I was determined to get where I was going, and determined to enjoy every second of the experience.

  On the train, I met some backpacking hippies, my kind of people, and we talked. I was still spaced out, feeling totally at one with the universe—thanks to the combination of acid and the Freddie Laker budget flight—and totally fearless. I believed that I loved everyone, and that everyone was going to love me. I knew whenever I needed help, it would come to me and get me to my final destination. I had absolutely no doubt, even though I didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t understand the language. On the train, I sat on the floor, the hippies played their guitars, and we all sang songs. They were probably singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I was singing “Voodoo Chile.” At the station in Paris, the confusion really kicked in. And I really needed to go to the toilet.

  The toilets were the most disgusting place I’d ever seen. They were unbelievable and quite shocking. In the public toilets there was nowhere to sit, and you had to squat over this hole. When a woman peed it bounced up like raindrops going in the wrong direction. I had a thing for public toilets that went way back, and I never wanted to use them. I would hold it, hold it, hold it all day at school, until my mom would see me coming and think, Hold the door, because here comes Bev, and she wants to use the bathroom. The books I was carrying would fly everywhere and I’d dive into the bathroom. I don’t know why I had these issues; I think my mom must have told me about the Jamaican outhouses and the cockroaches, where they were going to crawl. I always had this very dark vision of catching something from somebody else, so I was extremely paranoid. It’s a paranoia that has followed me through my life.

  It was absolutely awful to use a public toilet in Paris. I never got used to that. The most fashionable people in the world, telling the rest of the world how to dress, and then these black, grungy holes in the ground you had to balance over the top of without getting yourself soaked. You had to have very strong legs. If you were in high heels, you didn’t wan
t to take them off, but you didn’t want them to get splashed. In Jamaica it was better to go in the bush, because at least there was earth to absorb the piss. In France, it was concrete, it was cold, slimy tile, and there was no way to aim properly. It all seemed so primitive. This was how I arrived in Europe—a tall, very skinny black girl with a cracked American accent, hardly any hair, in army surplus gear, a white woollen cream cape, and a military hat, still feeling the disorientating effects of an LSD trip, astonished at the disgusting state of the toilets at the train station.

  Then I had to use the phone. I had decided to call Antonio, because he was my only contact. His apartment was on rue du Rhin and that led to the boulevard Saint-Germain, where the model hotel was—a tiny little place, it’s still there. If you look out of the window opposite, there is the very famous art deco café, Café de Flore, which the tourist brochures called the most famous café in the world. It was well known as the headquarters of the existentialists, where Sartre sat writing The Roads to Freedom. James Baldwin used the warmth of the café to work on his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. That’s where my little room, not much bigger than a wardrobe, was—in the model hotel practically attached to Café de Flore.

  It was impossible to use the phone in France. A nightmare. I don’t know if they have the same phones now, but back then I avoided them like the plague. Before you’d put any money in, you’d have to read the instructions . . . in French. I realized I was screwed. I thought, I am going to shoot this phone. I am going to smash it into smithereens. It seemed to stand between me and my future.

  The money goes in and then you have to push a button; the person answers and then you have to push again to hear them. You have to perform about five operations simultaneously. Put it this way, it was not straightforward. I didn’t want to seem stupid, so I kept trying and trying, and the person would answer; I’d get the hello and start talking, then the call would be cut off. It was so frustrating. Finally, I asked for help.

  It took a while. People had other things to do, and I didn’t speak French—the French don’t like it if you don’t speak their language. I learned that very quickly. Eventually, I got some help and figured the phone out. I spoke to Antonio and felt really good about that. The next day we met up, he was three minutes from the model hotel, walking fast, and I was speeding with a need to get things done. We started taking Polaroids straightaway. He was the most ingenious, free-flowing illustrator, and he was very successful in Paris, which was a special place and a great place for special people to work.

  I had broken through so many barriers without even knowing it just by being in the right place at the right time—the right clubs at the right time—and through sheer force of will. Whenever things seemed to be not going my way I always had the courage to break away and try something new.

  Antonio loved the new girls constantly coming into town because of the fashion and the vague promises made to them, giving him something else to look at, sketch, dream about. There was an endless supply of the very best, the most determined and excited to be there. I didn’t really think I was simply the next girl in line; he had a way of making you seem like the one, his favorite, and in a way, at the moment he was with you, drawing you, he meant it. You were satisfying his need for fresh, anomalous female presence, and he was satisfying your need to feel wanted and understood and even—through the way he drew you and paid attention to you—love.

  Every time Antonio drew me it gave me a clue about how to do my makeup and work on different looks, different ways of shading and shadowing. He had been working with Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld since the very early 1970s, and it was an unbelievable way for me to land in Paris. Antonio very quickly sent me on some appointments. He really believed in me, which made me even angrier with Johnny Casablancas later on.

  Johnny Casablancas was known everywhere in the fashion world and was extremely influential, and he had a very innovative approach to marketing models and promoting glamour, which helped turn many of his girls into very wealthy household names. His way of selling his models as more than mere models was a big influence on the emergence of the supermodel. He used to say he could take a girl selling vegetables in Utah and have her on the cover of Vogue six months later. His whole approach was nothing like the almost puritanical, more protective approach of Ford and Wilhelmina, who definitely had standards; he had a more playboy, rock ’n’ roll approach to his relationship with his girls. Wilhelmina would complain that with Johnny, models started to pick and choose what they would do, instead of doing what their agency told them to do.

  There was more romance and scandal with Johnny, definitely a mix of the business with the pleasure. The business wasn’t only about modeling, either. Unofficially, there was the sense that if you were interested in being a model, you were interested in other, shadier ways of getting on in the world. And when you were a top model, the modeling agencies were always putting you with rich, hungry, horny men. Like a show pony. Until you outgrew your usefulness.

  Modeling agencies are where wealthy men look for their female possessions. And a lot of the models took that seriously as a part of their career path. You would go to certain clubs, and certain men would be there, and the ultimate intention was that the girls were there for these wealthy men, because if they were good-looking enough to be models, they were good-looking enough to be taken into that wealthy world—working girls given a legal covering.

  Whenever I was fighting a record company or agent over a deal, I would always use that as my default negotiating position. I don’t need to do this, I would say. I could marry into millions in minutes. I never would have done that, though. I never ask for anything in a relationship, because I have this sugar daddy I have created for myself: me. I am my own sugar daddy. I have a very strong male side, which I developed to protect my female side. If I want a diamond necklace, I can go and buy myself a diamond necklace.

  My acting coach/quasi therapist Warren Robertson would tell me to put that sugar daddy I invented to one side and let men buy me things and look after me. But I knew I could look after myself. I was always turning things down because I always felt there were strings attached. I would think, Now I owe you something. And I didn’t want to feel beholden to anyone. But Warren would tell me, “Sometimes you have to let the man in your life do something for you—not to make you feel better, but to make him feel better.”

  So . . . it is all about them . . .

  At first, Casablancas didn’t send me out on any appointments. Other girls were being sent out every day. I got pissed off pretty quickly. I was in this toy town hotel, alone, still psyched from the bewitching acid trip, leery about the bleak toilet holes, and I was in a hurry.

  After three days of no appointments I decided to confront Casablancas. (I was so impatient; I had a real attitude, or, as I like to think, I could see right through him as just another chancer.) Three is my lucky number—I still like it; it’s a good number for me. So after three days, I stormed into his office and said, “What’s going on here? I know something is wrong, so tell me what it is. Spit it out. Let’s get it over with. Don’t waste my time.” The acid was lingering and increasing my fierce energy.

  Generally, I am the last person to play the race card, because I never think race has anything to do with me—I grew up in a world where our family was at the pinnacle of everything, in religion and politics, so discrimination didn’t mean anything to me. Being black didn’t hold me back in Jamaica, and I rarely thought of it in America. I hadn’t grown up with the idea of racism, with the color of a person’s skin being politicized. I wanted to get out there and show myself to people, never thinking they had any preconceived notions before they actually saw me.

  But there were all these go-sees I should have been doing, and here is this guy, sitting on his ass—actually, he’s sitting on my ass. I was ready to get out there, and he wasn’t doing anything. Then he came out with it, and I swear I’ll never forget it—and he had to pay a lot for it later.
He said to me, “Well, to be honest, selling a black model in Paris is like trying to sell them an old car nobody wants to buy.”

  Those were his exact words to me.

  They hit me like a hammer. I had never before been confronted so straightforwardly about the color of my skin. Until that moment, I’d never in any way felt inferior because I was black. I’d also never used it as any kind of excuse for not making it, or for losing jobs. For example, I knew that catalog modeling was no good for me because of the lighting—I was so black I would come out looking like a shadow next to the studio’s white wall. This is why they usually cast lighter-skinned black girls. I viewed all this as technical, rather than being about prejudice. I never even entertained the idea, so I couldn’t bear that he was using it on my behalf.

  It seemed like a weakness. I remember a black friend who was so angry about the race thing that she would never go with a white guy. I did, because race had never been a factor in my life. I never made a decision based on color, but on energy, on mysterious potential. But there was a sense that black people making it in the business were suspicious that I had white boyfriends. They seemed to think that as a black woman beginning to have success, I should only have black boyfriends, as if to set some kind of example. This really, really angered me—I had grown up with the expectation of setting an example to others, and there was no bloody way I was going to allow that idea to ever get in my way again, and interfere with my freedom.

  I had rejection from both sides, really, because I was black—too black for the white world, not black enough for the black world. Once, a friend confronted me about it—actually, she was the editor of Essence at the time, and she explained to me that the reason she didn’t put me on the cover of the magazine was that I was always with white guys. When Essence did eventually put me on the cover of the magazine, it was basically because they had to—by then, I was too much Grace Jones, too much “the f-word”—too famous. Oh my God, now we have to put her on the cover; she’s achieved something that has gone beyond whether she is with a white guy or not!

 

‹ Prev