I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  * * *

  When Johnny said that he couldn’t sell me because of my blackness, it motivated me like very little had before . . . and I am very, very motivated. I leaned over his desk like I was on the prow of a ship powering through hundreds of dry gleaming snakes, and I said, “I’m going to make you EAT THOSE WORDS!” And as I left the room, I shrieked loud enough to rattle the Eiffel Tower: “AND I HOPE YOU DIE OF CIRRHOSIS OF THE LIVER!!!”

  It was known among the models that he was a heavy drinker—we heard the gossip. Actually, he did die of liver cancer, at age seventy, in 2013—hailed, once all the controversy and exploitation were stripped away, as a model visionary. Well, he was no visionary when it came to me.

  As part of our tetchy little conversation, he mentioned Beverly Johnson. She was the biggest black model at the time, with the most magazine covers for a black girl; she was the first black woman to appear on the cover of Vogue, in 1974. Johnny said to me: “Not even Beverly Johnson works here—what makes you think you can?” I remember the whole conversation like it was yesterday. The two of us were at war, tossing grenades at each other across his desk.

  Beverly was more wholesome than I was, more yielding and carefully ladylike. Beverly didn’t shave her hair and eyebrows; she would style and blow-dry her own hair into friendly domesticated sleekness before she went to jobs in case the stylists didn’t know how to work with her texture. She would take her own foundation, because the foundation makeup artists had was mostly for white girls.

  In America, a lot of the jobs I wasn’t getting, Beverly was getting. We would all run into each other at go-sees. Beverly was one of the reasons I left the States. I knew that as long as she was in place, she would get everything—one black model was all they needed—and I would pick up the crumbs. The crumbs were not enough to feed me. I was starving on those crumbs. She was the token black model. They didn’t need two tokens—I have never heard of two tokens! And when Johnny told me that even Beverly, with her more natural, less radical look, could not work in Paris, I thought, Well, I am not Beverly, and even she can’t get work. What chance do I have?

  Casablancas made it very difficult for me. He tried hard to shut me down—he really had it in for me. I had pissed him off. I don’t think he liked being told he was going to die of liver disease. I could have been a bit more diplomatic, but that wasn’t in my armory at the time. I didn’t become diplomatic until years later.

  I am diplomatic now. I could run for presidency now. I know how to play the game. But it’s tricky for me to be diplomatic—it does not come easy. I find it manipulative and insincere. You have to manipulate your own self to get the results you need without actually expressing how you really feel.

  It wasn’t as though modeling was really what I wanted in life. To be honest, modeling felt so surface to me, so throwaway. It has nothing to do with your soul. It is totally artificial. You jump up, wave, twist your body, throw a pose—this shape, that shape, a little pull on the mouth, a look in the eye, done. If you’re lucky, and the photographer agrees. You are in the hands of the photographer. You have to give yourself away. Casablancas wasn’t even letting me give myself away.

  I was so angry, which is why I cursed him. The idea of joining his agency had brought me to Paris; why hadn’t he mentioned the fact that I was no use to him before? It became clear that he never had been that keen on me, and that Wilhelmina was probably encouraging me to try Paris because she wasn’t really sure what to do with me.

  I was at Wilhelmina’s in New York before I left for Paris, and I was coming out of the elevator one day, angry about something; probably having been told there was still no work for me, or Beverly had gotten the job. And there were a couple of guys standing there who said they were starting a new agency in Paris, and if I ever came to town, they would love to have me.

  The agency was called Euro Planning, later known as Prestige, and the two guys I’d bumped into were called Stefan and Rogi. I should have gone to them straightaway. They seemed interested in me without fussing about my lips, nose, and attitude. I didn’t care that they were new to the scene. I like new. New means they are going to work hard to build something—and that they’re not already so big that they can afford to waste people’s time.

  So after walking out on Johnny and putting the curse on him, I went the next day to Euro Planning. I wasn’t scared. Me? Scared? Never! That word does not exist in my vocabulary. I knew that Johnny Casablancas had made the biggest mistake of his life. I had overwhelming confidence in myself and my future. I was going to make him regret it. YOU WILL EAT THOSE WORDS AND YOU WILL DIE! I knew that given half a chance I could succeed. Casablancas’s world wasn’t big enough for him to completely stop me; in his world I would never have ended up where I did.

  Their first three girls at Euro Planning were me, Jerry Hall, and Jessica Lange. Nobody knew who Jerry and Jessica were at the time, but they soon would. A couple of other girls joined very quickly as well: one from South Africa, known as Este, and an easy-going mixed-race girl from America, more girl-next-door, which didn’t work in Paris as much as it did in the U.S.

  I had joined Euro Planning just before Jerry Hall arrived. Within a week of my arrival, she had been discovered (at seventeen) sunbathing on a beach in Saint-Tropez by the model scout Claude Haddad, who in 1988 was exposed by 60 Minutes as a nasty sexual predator. He was one of those dangerous, slippery charmers exploiting the model world, half pimp, half booker, with a flaky, magnetic personality, always prowling for new girls that he could control, and sometimes that control spilled over into blatant abuse. He was one of those characters who worked around models because they would then be swimming in a sea of women. And women were their prey, and their pleasure, what they needed to live and thrive, and the girls needed these characters to work and earn. A perpetual paradise for him, very dangerous and sleazy for the women.

  Typical that he should spot Jerry and persuade her to try modeling. I was there in the office the day she was brought in to the agency, and it’s true what they say—taller than tall, with long, wavy, golden hair stretching all the way to the Sahara, big eyes, flawless skin, legs that went on for weeks, a huge, irresistible smile, wearing these flowing, hippified ’30s-style clothes. Then there was the big, creamy hillbilly accent that topped everything off. A head full of hair, and a mouth full of Dallas. We took to each other immediately, probably as a form of protection against the predators circling. Together, we created a force field around us.

  We were the beginning of the Euro Planning agency at 3, rue de Courcelles, and the fact they first of all took Jerry, me, and Jessica shows they meant business. They certainly didn’t have the same feelings as Johnny about my blackness. They saw it simply as what made me what I was, how I thought, and behaved, which made me potentially a great model, with enough distinct energy to interest the more adventurous Paris photographers.

  Casablancas was powerful in his own limited way, and he continued to try to block me. The first week, I got a callback for a big spread at Depeche Mode magazine. At that time, it was considered a real breakthrough if you got a big spread in Depeche Mode with a top photographer. It turned out Johnny Casablancas owned the studio where they were going to be shooting. He made sure I wasn’t going to work in any of his studios, but even that didn’t get in my way. There were a couple of photographers not in his world who were fixated on me. And they had names like Helmut Newton. Casablancas had no control over Helmut Newton. No one did. Born in Berlin, he’d moved to Paris in 1961 after time in London and Australia, and by the early 1970s he had become one of the most outrageous photographers in fashion, specializing in hyper-glossed, meticulously coordinated erotic imagery that treated the world as a theater and the woman as an inanimate, spectacular object. Paris, he said, taught him fashion. He already knew sex.

  He liked his women to be full of alienness, which I loved, and after many years working for French Vogue he was unashamedly after “the sexy.” His work got to be branded as “porno chic
.” You could tell looking at his photographs that he had worked in the 1950s as a society photographer in Singapore and loved the atmosphere of bordellos.

  Every time Helmut booked me from my composite it was because of the expression on my face, which he absolutely loved—he saw me as the fearless, high-heeled dominatrix with a man’s ass, someone who accentuated and manipulated traditional sexual stereotypes. He would request me, and the agency would get so excited—Helmut Newton! It’s God calling! I’d be so nervous going to see him. I didn’t plan to stay in modeling, but I wanted to be the best I could be while I was in it. I wanted to get the best out of it; I wanted to work with the best. Like Helmut.

  There were a few gods, not many, but he was one definitely one of the gods. I would go see him, and he would come out, see me as though for the first time, and say, “Shit, every time I forget that you don’t have big tits!” He would be so angry. It was like he was hoping I would have some work done, pump them up with something. No way. He became one of my best friends. He was so damned funny and we would work together a lot. Working with someone as brilliant as Helmut teaches you so much—seeing how he lights something, the visual stories he tells, how he was not interested in mirroring reality but transforming it. His way of working was so powerful and evocative I would never forget.

  I loved Helmut’s photos—they taught me how to stand, walk, be, even how to look in the mirror and perfect my character. You are always looking in the mirror as a model, either as you get ready for work, being made up, having your hair done, or when you are at home, checking on how you look because how you look is how you earn a living. You need to know how to do that without it undermining your confidence, do it so that you are always learning about what makes you look good in a photograph. Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . . friend and enemy.

  It became very hard to think outside the fashion world once I was embedded in it and wanted to be the best. Paris plunged me into the depth of fashion. To the deepest level, and to the highest level. Paris was where the depth was in a superficial world. They were into fashion more than anyone else in the world. They took it seriously, with a tyrannical zeal, but there was also a certain freedom to it, and a luxuriant decadence. It was never boring, always changing. In America, it became very homogenized and commercialized. In Paris, the lighting was darker, starker, a lot stronger—you could tell what the person was sexually thinking from the photographs.

  Paris was where the new originated. Helmut, for example, would not have published a lot of his work in the States unless it bounced over from Paris, where he was allowed to do what he wanted. His photos for French Vogue were taboo in the American edition. In America, his work would be edited, softened, tidied. It was all about the clothes in New York, not the meaning of the photograph. In Paris, the designers and stylists didn’t care how the clothes looked. They didn’t care about a little wrinkle as long as the photo was stunning. It was more about the art—the image was all-important. Paris was unbelievably exciting and suited me so much more. The freedom the photographers had was incredible.

  Another photographer who took a liking to me was a friend and collaborator of Helmut Newton, Hans Feurer. He had shot the 1974 Pirelli calendar, naked girls wrapped in polyethylene, and in 1983 would shoot the Kenzo campaign featuring Iman swathed in a rich crimson net. He loved shooting details of a model’s face and body, focusing abstractly on body parts. His work was very graphic, and he approached his photographs like a painter. This was before retouching and filters, and Hans was fantastic at using natural light, radical composition, and dramatic backdrops to layer a photograph.

  When Kenzo Takada, the label’s founder, told him he could do what he wanted on that 1983 shoot, he said, “Well, what if I do a close-up of an eye?” Kenzo said, “That’s okay.” Hans thrived on being given complete artistic freedom, and that was in the air a lot more in the ’60s and ’70s. You wanted the photographer because of what they had done in their work, so it was stupid to then tell them what to do.

  He had a background in sculpture and illustration, and used fashion not as a place to sell pretty things but as a place to experiment with fantasy and otherness, focusing on how wearing certain clothes could transform a person into someone else. His photographs always seemed to be part of some greater mystery he was trying to solve, even when they were in the pages of fashion magazines or advertising a beauty product. He understood that fashion is fantasy and must always include fantasy.

  Hans said he never liked women who were clearly in the service of men. We hit it off, and because he was a complicated, demanding person, with very discriminating artistic reasons for wanting to be a photographer, I naturally developed a crush on him. I could learn a lot from him. I think that is another reason I developed crushes on those I worked with closely. I was craving knowledge and, in a way, sucking out their knowledge and experience like a kind of vampire. Imagination was the strong blood I was thirsting for.

  We had a very intense relationship, and he liked it when I was very much the dominatrix. I think I was a little too male for us to have actually had a relationship, but we got very close. Strong women fascinated and challenged him, but he wasn’t sure how to take the next step. There is a lot about me that is masculine—I am very feminine, but I am also extremely masculine. I’ve got these two things going on and it is confusing for some men. My way of not backing down offends certain men. I will argue my point. I push the wrong buttons. Hans was interested in the strength of a woman, and sometimes that would mean shooting them in a very feminine way and other times in a very male setting.

  He fell in love with my mouth. My first Vogue cover, which was actually for Vogue Hommes, was a Hans close-up of my mouth, very raw and revealing, with my teeth encased in gold. One of the photos from that session has me rolling my tongue over the gold teeth. I was getting better at knowing what to do with my mouth. He photographed my first Elle spread, me in khaki and a beret looking like a stylized version of myself as I’d looked when I first traveled to Paris. He liked to put me in men’s clothing, a few years before anyone else did. For one shoot that ended up as the original cover for my first record, I Need a Man, he had me wearing a suit and blowing smoke rings for hours on end while he looked for the perfect way of framing my face.

  Fashion and style was hurtling through a multitude of changes in the ’60s and ’70s, catching up with art and pop and pop art, especially in London and Paris. And Hans made sure he was in the middle of what was happening; even now his photos look totally contemporary. You would never know they were taken forty years ago. Photographers like Hans were making up many of the rules for how to naturally, experimentally, and playfully photograph models in real and surreal settings that are still followed today. He is still photographing, always curious about the same elements of a body and face, still in love with mystery.

  Paris was filled with these kinds of artists and innovators. It was a place where I could thrive—to such an extent that once the f-word thing had really kicked in and I was Grace Jones, someone wanted a hit: Casablancas tried to get me back on his side. He was a little underhanded about it. I ended up in his house, brought there by some people who didn’t tell me the party they were taking me to was at his place. He was bobbing for apples (literally) when we got there—it all looked very stupid and contrived.

  I thought, He is bringing me here to humiliate me, and I walked out. Years later, when he was big in television, his people tried to book me for one of his shows, and they were very persistent. They insisted that I agree. I knew he was still trying to exercise his power and prove that he could get me despite what had happened. I’d spread the gossip about what he had said to me, and how I had flung it back in his face. I made sure everyone knew. It was classic model behavior: Do you know what Johnny Casablancas said to me?!

  He was still trying to manipulate me and pretend to the world we were friends, that I had forgiven him, or even that I had made it up, and had a tantrum for no reason. In the end, I agreed to appear
on his show, but it was basic cold business. He would have to pay. A lot. I would manipulate him, still, because what he said to me was unforgivable.

  In Paris, once I’d shrugged off the Casablancas incident, I felt like I had arrived where I belonged. I was what the French needed, and I needed them. Things started to happen. It was as if they needed someone who was so like me it could only be me. The reaction was so positive. There would be a dozen guys lining up in the same room at the same time wanting to impress me. Wilhelmina was right: They really went mad for me. I don’t think it was so much my looks; I think they loved how crazy I was. Let’s hire her! She seems like fun! They wanted to get to know me because I was like an alien who had landed from outer space. People would stop and stare at me on the street as though I were already famous. People in the fashion business wanted to be around me and did whatever they had to do to make that happen—Casablancas hadn’t anticipated that. Let’s shoot Grace for the cover of the magazine. She will make our life interesting!

  I learned French in three months flat. I decided to speak it for a month straight, to be with only French people, and to only have one person around to interpret for me. I had studied to be a Spanish teacher, so I had the Latin already. I wanted to learn French so I could understand what people were saying about me—it gave me an edge. I could tell when someone said something obnoxious and insulting. I knew when they were telling me off, and it enabled me to get inside the French mentality. French can sound romantic even when they are saying “fuck you” and “up yours.” They can say the worst thing on the planet about you and it can sound like they are proposing.

  I learned the language to deal with their very rude, stubborn ways, and to help some of the other girls. I’m not necessarily saying all French people are rude, it just felt that way to me, and I don’t really mean that as a criticism. It’s a part of how much they like to take control of things. The rudeness mostly didn’t bother me. I knew a bit about rudeness myself. It was okay as long as I knew they were being rude to me, so I could be rude back.