by Grace Jones
I used to get so frustrated in those early days when I never got butter with my bread at restaurants. Not in France—apparently, French bread is so good it is an insult to slap butter on it. I would throw the baguette at the waiter. No butter, no bread. I got really angry. I started to take my own butter with me. I also used to carry eggs with me to throw at the taxi drivers when they wouldn’t stop. They used to ask you where you were going before they agreed to take you. Even in the rain. Even when I was with someone who was eight months pregnant.
I said, “Let’s get in the taxi without telling him where we are going.” We got in, and he said he was not going in that direction. “So what?” I said. “We are in the taxi, she is pregnant, and it is raining.” No, you get out. No, we stay. He came around and literally dragged us out of the cab. After that I always carried six eggs with me and I would slam them against the taxi if it didn’t pick me up, and then scream, “Now you have to go to the car wash!” So I was carrying butter for the restaurant and eggs for the taxis. I was armed and ready.
* * *
My very first French cover was for 20 Ans, a teenage magazine like Seventeen in America. I am so black on the cover because there was no sun where we shot. We went to Deauville, a low key, seaside resort in Normandy, on the northwest coast, with this huge wooden promenade. The beach is so wide you can barely see the sea. Yves Saint Laurent had a home there. The overcast gray skies and diffuse coastal light around there fascinated the Impressionists, but it didn’t really suit me. On the cover, I look like a shadow. I am barely there.
When the magazine called to see me, I didn’t feel so good about what I was wearing. Something bothered me. My clothes were scratching me. So I took off all my clothes in the office. I sat there naked waiting to be called in.
They took one look at me and said: Let’s hire her! We want Grace! She’s too much. They had never seen anything like it before. If I’d thought about it, I would have thought such behavior would lose me the job—it was a spontaneous thing, but it ended up working for me. Maybe the New York acid was still in my system. I’d been there only a month. Three days with Johnny. Fuck off, Johnny. No time to waste. Rent to pay by the end of the month. Let’s go! Anyone in my way was going to be knocked out of the way. This was the energy I had picked up as I moved around along the American East Coast. A little bit of momentum in Syracuse, more force grabbed in Philly, and then all of that multiplied in the helter-skelter of New York. I felt I had wasted the whole year there, so I was feeling very impatient.
I never wondered whether it was a brave thing for 20 Ans to put a black woman on the cover. I thought they figured with all that cheek and energy I must be going places. To this day when I do my Paris concerts they all turn up—they all shriek, “Do you remember that rainy weekend in Deauville and the magazine cover where you couldn’t be seen?”
Within three months I got a record deal, and had started recording. I say three months. Everything seemed to be about three months. Though my three months is not necessarily what others might think of as three months. It was simply that everything was happening very quickly. Finally, the speed things were happening around me suited the speed of my mind. I got so much done after that year that went nowhere in New York, which seemed like forever. The world caught up with how fast I wanted it to be.
Jerry, Jessica, and I would basically use our minuscule rooms in the hotel to sleep, and for little else, and we would be out every night—clubs, music, fashion, life. Paris seemed to stay out at night even later than New York. We’d drag ourselves back to the room in daylight after a night out and get ready for the next night out. We were out of our minds on fashion, on Paris, and on having a good time. The ’60s, which were all about having a good time and dressing like you knew it, were rushing into the ’70s. I developed incredible, long-lasting bonds with the girls I worked with, not least because I also lived with them and we explored new, strange territory together. I have remained friends with Jerry and Jessica to this day, and we help each other and inspire each other. Other models along the way as well. We’re always there if one of us needs a place to stay, some help with another ridiculous load of man trouble, or just to share the latest news. We’ve all been through something particular and—mostly—come out the other side. Modeling—dealing with it, not the thing itself—helped us to take on the world. We’re sisters in life—Efva Attling, another singer and model who’s become a famous jewelry designer based in Stockholm and the Danish designer Antonie Lauritzen were also part of the group. A crazy group. Good crazy. Young, lustful girls moving around Europe, with Paris at the center, making a living, becoming stronger, discovering new ways to hang out and look after ourselves.
I totally immersed myself in French culture. I would walk around Paris smiling a lot. Stories streamed through every street. It was obvious why it was a city of so many people’s dreams. It was cheap, five francs to the dollar. Grimier than it is now. Truer, really, with the fashion dream there to light up the night, burn into the day, and create the legend.
I baptized myself in Parisian blood. Felt glamorous history in the air, got to know the vivid legends: Josephine Baker becoming such a decadent, amoral diva, dancing the Charleston at the Folies Bergère in the 1920s, wearing a banana tutu designed by Jean Cocteau; the cabaret, the glorious excess of the nightlife; the honking, sizzling Paris jazz; the boys dressed as girls; the dazzling dancing girls loving to show themselves off and be treated as artists, not tarts. The great French singers Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco, Édith Piaf, and Serge Gainsbourg were all melancholy and melodramatic romantics, but also geniuses at representing erotic sensuousness through music. I couldn’t resist that combination. The songs weren’t only about love, either; there were drunks, and hookers, and despair that needed correcting, or relishing. The singers sounded filthy and wise, and I loved the way they built a world of their own out of melody, drama, and sex. We were looking for encounters without hoping for anything more, without longing for emotional entanglement. We wanted adventure.
All dinners in Paris, I noted, would end with intense discussions about sex. What else was there? A good dinner, fabulous wine, and then talk about sex, and the world is a better place.
Jerry was very open about sex. In Texas, for some reason, the women are very different from those in the reserved American North. Texan women love talking about having sex in the barn—head outside, body inside, so that the rain would be falling on their face while down below they were being ravished in the dry, head soaked wet, the bottom half getting it on in the hay.
I studied the naked couture at the Crazy Horse, the temple of striptease, where stripping collided with the avant-garde. I knew the music arranger there, and while I was hanging out, things got a little casting couch with one of the managers. I always hated that, the idea that to get on you would have to sleep with the boss. It made me feel so powerless. And I wanted the power over the men.
Jerry and I would compete for boys. We had this kind of competition going. Our personalities fitted together, but we were also opposites. We liked the same things, and we especially liked the same boys, so we fought sometimes to be first to get there. She would get very jealous. She would ask about a boy we would both be chasing, her eyes flashing, where were you last night—did you get him?! Yes, I did, I would admit. Goddammit, I wanted him, she’d drawl, genuinely a little put out. It was sibling rivalry. I had never been allowed to play with my real sisters, but now here was someone I could play with. In her book she said we were roommates, but it was a lot more than that. We were close, sisters in love, each wanting the other to succeed, but when it came down to it, if the choice was between me and her, naturally I would choose me, and she would choose her. Jerry and I had a lot of fun together, but we were also rivals.
We would go and buy cheap clothes at a place called the Rag Queen. Honey, let’s go shopping, Jerry would say. The Rag Queen was not very far from when we lived. It was owned by a German girl, and she used to hunt far and wide for pieces
that suited us, but they were never more than we could afford at the time, which wasn’t much. She would go on the hunt for clothing that we asked her to look out for—I liked hoodies from the ’30s and ’40s, to keep my neck warm with the short hair. I didn’t want to wear a wig. The short hair was my look, and Paris loved it. I looked natural and unnatural at the same time. They didn’t slap a wig on me like they did in America. We used to go on our go-sees in these made-up outfits, and the designers would get their ideas from how we dressed. Lots of designers told us they liked us coming in so they could see what we were wearing and be inspired by it. It made us less passive, a part of the creativity. It was one of the ways fashion finds on the street started to infect the haute couture.
Jerry was tall and fresh-faced, and had all this long blond hair, and I was dark, severe, wore my warm military clothes, and had very little hair. Quite a sight. Chocolate and vanilla. Fairest and feistiest. We did go-sees together, and after a while we didn’t want to take the underground. We started to hitchhike for limousines when they were off duty between drop-offs.
Jerry wanted to have fun in an almost ferocious way. We would dress up, and we would look good, glowing with sheer get-up-and-go, in our element as exotics in the capital of exotica. Sometimes we would wear glitter, and African bones around our necks, nothing else, no top, a shred of a skirt. Our boldness knew no bounds, because Paris made us seem like we were always on show.
We’d go out and guys would try and get between us and we would throw them from one end of the room to the other. We weren’t interested in anything long-term. Nothing longer than a few hours. Once it becomes a relationship it becomes about control, and back then, we were mostly interested in our careers. We were not looking for boyfriends or for one-night stands, and if we were, we wanted it to be on our terms. We would pick a guy up, not have him pick us up.
We used to go to this great club called Club Sept on rue Sainte-Anne, a really hard-core gay area, run by an ex-stylist and makeup artist called Fabrice Emaer. He was known as the Prince of the Night, and he was very mysterious. You would see him do his thing only at night. There was no sense of a family. He had such elegance and charm, and he attracted a certain sort of personality to his venues.
Fabrice was blond, ageless, could have been thirty, forty, it was difficult to say. Very tall—a lot of the Frenchmen are usually, shall we say, smaller. He wore discreet, elegant suits. He loved taking care of people. He was constantly in motion, and he would float from person to person, making sure everyone was having a good time on their own terms. He had a way of making you feel amazing without getting into your business. This was the nightlife, and he was in charge. That is a real talent. It’s hard work, and he did it so smoothly. He always had the right people working for him, and they stayed with him.
Way before Studio 54, Fabrice would mix people with all sorts of backgrounds like an artist. Club Sept had a restaurant on the ground floor where you could chat or play cards after dinner, and a small dance floor in the basement where those who were eating didn’t want to go until later. Sophia Loren, Roman Polanski, Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and all the top models would have a table—you never had to pay for anything because you would draw in a certain clientele—and then there would be the up-and-coming designers like Claude Montana. (I met Jeanyves Lascombe, my first boyfriend in Paris, while he was working at Club Sept; he was the classic French dreamboat I had been lusting for. We weren’t looking for boyfriends, but if one came along who fit the bill, we didn’t say no. That didn’t mean you stopped seeing other men. I’d have a boyfriend, but I’d have ten others as well.) There was also a vibrant gay clientele, with glamorous straight girls and gays grinding into each other to disco and funk, but this was not a clandestine gay club.
Gays were starting to go to places that weren’t only for gays. This was very new; they were coming into the light. They were coming into the world. There was a more furtive gay club next door, and glamorous girls used to go to gay clubs because we didn’t want to be picked up. We wanted to go out and have a good time, not get into a relationship.
Jessica, Jerry, and I would go out, and when we dressed up, we looked like nothing else. Look at us, but don’t you dare look at us. A lot of itches need scratching. We had brazen appetites and desires, enough to crack a man’s gaze and bruise his soul.When we went out, if we went to a straight club, every man in the room would approach us. Sometimes they would drink to pluck up the courage, and that would often make them really obnoxious. To get rid of them sometimes we would have to get physical and throw them across the room—sometimes they were so drunk you’d merely flick them with a sharpened fingernail and they would fall over.
At Club Sept there was no sense of a sudden ending to the night, when they would blast on the lights and shout at you to leave, Time to go, and you would stand there in the sudden light with your makeup running after dancing all night and your clothes torn from rolling around on the floor. That never, ever happened there, and that suited me. I like to be the last to arrive and the last to leave, and I never want to feel I am being kicked out even if it is seven in the morning. I would leave Club Sept at seven—the clue was in the name—and take the night’s vibe into whatever I was doing next.
It was incredibly glamorous, exposing the magic you can achieve with some mirrors, lights, and of course, the music of the moment. This was a disco in heaven, disco as the music of big cities, of the night, of sex. Guy Cuevas was the DJ mixing the classic newly forming disco; hard, insistent rhythms from around the world: scheming funk, hardworking soul-jazz, plastic soul, high-living show tunes, bits of noise and sound, anything that took his fancy in making up a show from records.
The DJ was a kind of sculptor of atmosphere and mood, setting up through sound the charm of possible encounters. The mix of people was part of the magic—in this small space with these strong, sexy sounds pounding into your head, heart, and groin, there were the famous, the lusty, the intellectuals, the chic, the beautiful, the half-crazed, the loners, gay, straight, in-between, over the top, under the radar, the undecided, whores, models, and Casanovas, the marginal within the marginal, all sorts of heroes of the night, everyone becoming a bit of everything else, bodies coming and going in the shadows. A weird sort of community, sharing excitement, enthusiasm, and one another.
What took place in these clubs was a kind of choreographed danger, cruising as a form of socializing, contradictory pleasures gathered together in a single place. Energy in the margins that would eventually pour into the mainstream. A whole range of sensations designed to make people happy for one night. These clubs were at their peak a representation of the receptiveness to new ideas that were around at the time; a vivid, breathing, and often sweaty symbol of transition.
It was as though, in this small place, you could somehow change location on a whim, because of the variety and newness of the music, the varied people, the flashing lights, the sense of what was about to happen because of what had happened the night before, and the night before that. This was very much a time when you could sense the role music and culture were playing in the evolution of homosexuality. It became a fashionable aesthetic; no longer were gays having to keep quiet, trapped in their own places, because now they had more and more places to go, where they were the pioneers, the ones in control, explicitly setting the trends. I belonged in these places, places where you went to perform, to watch others perform—I picked up a lot of the signals that would go into my music in these places.
Out of my mind, but somehow fully focused, I’d sing along in the clubs to my favorite songs, performing karaoke before karaoke existed. You might even see me climb onto tables in the café downstairs from my room, and sing a little. Loudly. That would become my thing: dancing on tables, which I used as a stage, bringing my go-go experience into play, cracking imaginary whips. If I didn’t dance on a table, everyone with me would be disappointed. That’s still true to this day. It’s what seals a night out with me as a good one.
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sp; When I was in my hotel hutch getting ready to go out, I would always sing at the top of my voice through the open window and the lace curtains into an inner courtyard that was outside my room. My voice would echo off the courtyard walls and maybe sound a little better than it really was. Este from Euro Planning, who lived in the next room, could hear me showing off, and she had a boyfriend who was scouting talent for a small record company. His name was Stephan Tabakov. He was lean and tall, with these big, popping eyes; he had done a bit of modeling and had a look that was quite striking. He was, naturally, very charming, and was clearly used to hustling, wanting to make something happen. I had a knack for finding these guys who were desperate to do something in the music business. That was not my intention at the time, but I had all this energy, and if that came with a personality, and even a hint of being able to sing in tune, these guys were interested.
Este told her boyfriend, “Oh, Grace knows how to sing!” I was beating her up in a state of alarm when she told him in front of me. “What did you tell him that for?” I asked, thinking I could be heading for a disaster on the scale of Gamble and Huff.
Stephan asked me to do a demo of “Dirty Ol’ Man” by the Three Degrees, which I sang a lot, imagining I was in the group. I knew exactly about the men they were singing about. You can’t keep your hands to yourself . . . you can look but please don’t touch . . . all you want is another victory . . . you’re a dirty ol’ man.
I sang it in a studio called Acousti in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in front of Stephan and the engineers, and they said, “Mmm, it sounds okay, but we want you to take some singing lessons.” It was a polite way of saying I was singing out of tune. That was an improvement on the Gamble and Huff rejection, but it didn’t appeal to me. I felt free for good of any kind of school. My piano teacher in Jamaica used to crack my knuckles with her wooden ruler when I got things wrong, and she was one of my aunts. The worst pain, worse than the whip.