I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  Whenever I play the piano now I beat it, smash it with my elbows, bang, bang, bang, beat it until my fingernails break. It’s amazing how that stuff from your past sticks in your system. That was how I played. I was never going to be gentle, however brutally they rapped my knuckles.

  I didn’t want to do the singing class, but I reluctantly agreed. Out of curiosity, again. At least the door had stayed open a crack and had not slammed in my face. Let’s see what this is going to be like. If I don’t like it, I’ll quit.

  Very quickly I started skipping the classes because I didn’t like the teacher. She was too stiff and spent too much time teaching me how to breathe. She was the wrong teacher for me, too set in her ways, and they weren’t my ways. I found it boring—she didn’t excite me, and I do need to be excited. It was all technical and very dry.

  Stephan said to Este, “Well, Grace is not serious, so we are going to forget about it.” As soon as she told me what he had said, that he was disappointed, some sense got knocked into me. I thought, I’m being stupid, and too stubborn. I remembered how silly I felt when I messed up the Gamble and Huff chance. This thing with Stephan could take me somewhere else, not necessarily where I thought I wanted to go, but it might help me on the way there. Overnight, I talked some sense into myself and started to take it seriously.

  I thought about what music I wanted to make. I thought about whom I wanted to work with. I started to pull a team together, to really take control. I took off like a high-speed train. I thought, There are three doors—singing, acting, modeling. What’s behind the singing door?

  I took control of the sound of the music. I didn’t like French pop music, which was becoming very Eurovision and generic, compared to the disco that was coming through at the time, which felt electric and electrifying. It was both the soundtrack to going out and about going out, what happened as you danced, the people you were with, lovers and strangers, and also what happened after going out. What happened once you had found what you were looking for—another person, or another night on your own, various tensions building. Musically, I knew what I didn’t want to do, and it was definitely not the French thing. French music sounded great before the 1960s, but it didn’t sound right after rock ’n’ roll, and soul. It had trouble keeping up. Apart from anything else, the French language didn’t fit so easily with the new riffs and rhythms.

  I was picking up all the nighttime action happening around me like some sort of antenna, and I wanted to feed it through my emotions and transmit it in some way that seemed to make sense to me, and fit right in among that music I was hearing in Club Sept, and what I had been hearing in New York before I left—disco as the beat of man-love, basically, and a sense that dance music was a disguised form of militancy. I wanted my music to have the charged after-hours vigor that homemade French music suddenly didn’t have.

  I knew I didn’t have a natural voice, but I was going to work out how to make it work, stretch it into a new place. If I could have sung like my mother, I would have, but I couldn’t. If I could have sung like Aretha Franklin, I would have, but I couldn’t. If I could have sung like Chaka Khan, I would have, but I couldn’t. That whole period was me finding a voice that I was happy with. And that took a long time—early on, I sang sharp, and I realized producers want singers to sing in a similar key, so that when they mix for the radio, it fits the very narrow, familiar range of what radio wants. It wasn’t my key, but I would try and sing there to please them.

  This reminded me of catalog work—only now it was not about being forced to use the same lighting as everyone else, but the same key. I had to force myself to conform, and I was always sharp. There was nothing to fix the voice in those days like there is now, nothing to correct you.

  I hear my early records now like “La Vie en Rose,” and think, Jesus Christ, I am so off-key! I went along with what the producers wanted because I didn’t know any better, and I stretched and I stretched, reaching for the note with such desperation. I had so much conviction: I was determined to hit that note but never hit it. Someone said, “You are the only black singer we have heard who is off-key, and not flat, but sharp.” I wanted to hit that note, and if I wasn’t getting there, I certainly believed that I was. That’s what you hear on those early records—complete, delusional self-belief.

  I thought, If I’m going to do this, I’m going to be the best . . . still thinking that I had to be an example. Perfect. The thing was, I didn’t want to be a singer, not when I was younger. I didn’t like what singers wore. I thought I’d have to wear what they wore if I was a singer. I thought those were the rules. I didn’t want to follow that formula, be part of that group. I was totally antisocial in that sense. I didn’t want to be a part of the club that everyone else was joining. I always ran away from that.

  I felt comfortable going in the other direction. I think it goes back to Jamaica again—I had four brothers and two sisters but, as a form of protection, ended up being a loner. I enjoyed other people’s company, but I enjoyed my own company the most. Slowly, I learned to trust others, especially when they could teach me things. I was always attracted to those who were the very best at what they did.

  I loved Antonio Lopez’s work. I didn’t know how important and respected he was when I first met him. The friendship was based on him as he was before I knew about his achievements. I didn’t search him out thinking I could take advantage of him. He came to me and invited me in. But he was surrounded by a lot of people who did try and take advantage, so he liked that I liked him for who he was, not what he could do for me.

  I became what was known as an Antonio girl. There was a group of us—Jerry, Jessica, Tina Lutz (whom Antonio introduced to the man who became her husband, Michael Chow), Paloma Picasso, Pat Cleveland, Marisa Berenson. He had this eye. All the girls he approached did something special. His girls were not necessarily the pretty girls, or the obviously beautiful girls; they were the girls with balls, with something on their mind. He liked them a little fucked up, which suited me. He liked the freaks and made them freakier. Jerry wanted to fix her nose. She hated the bump in her nose—he said, “Don’t you dare!” Jerry and Antonio got very close, and her jealousy kicked in when it came to some Antonio images of me in my portfolio. She ripped them out, and I was very angry that she did this because being endorsed by Antonio was very valuable in Paris. It helped pay the rent, and that was very important.

  We all had ambition, I guess, to be more than models. We wanted to be fabulous in a different way. Once I decided to go into music, for instance, I was obsessed. I wouldn’t leave my voice alone until I got it where I wanted. I couldn’t bear the thought that it would never sound like I felt inside. Without a special voice I would be very ordinary, and that was never good enough for me in whatever I did. I needed a voice, to speak my mind.

  Later, still on the quest to find my voice, I would work with a singing teacher back in New York, a German lady in the 1980s, and she was so much better for me—the total opposite of the uptight Parisian professor, who I’m sure was good for opera, but not for me. When I told her that in Paris the teacher spent the whole time trying to teach me how to breathe, she said, “Ridiculous, you know how to breathe as soon as you are born. Why do you need to be taught how to breathe? This is what I want you to do—I want you to jump on the furniture, leap around the room, and let the note fly!” She was amazing. She treated being a vocal coach like being a therapist and also like a kind of performance. I needed to feel I was being taught by a performer. She taught me so well I could be a vocal coach now.

  She used to say, “Let the emotions out, listen to what you are singing, the melodies, believe in that.” I turned down so many songs because I didn’t believe in what I was singing. I was the first to be sent “Boogie Wonderland” and I turned it down because I didn’t believe in it. Can you imagine me singing “Boogie Wonderland”? Preposterous. That song needs a twinkling Tinker Bell to sing it, and I’m much more of a witch with a smear of blood on my cheek.

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nbsp; I said no even though I knew it was going to be a huge hit. Other things are more important to me than simply having a hit, because then you have to live with it—it becomes who you are. People think you are mad if you don’t accept something that will make money, because they think it is going to be a hit, and that is all that matters. It doesn’t work like that for me. There are a lot of hit songs out there I wouldn’t want to have associated with me because they have no soul, no power.

  People think I am being too intellectual, but it’s not that. It’s fine to sing something that isn’t intellectual, that is bubbly, and I can do that, but I still need to feel something. I have to like hearing myself. I have to believe that the song can be one I would want to sing forever and not be embarrassed.

  I remember working on a song for the soundtrack to the movie 91/2 Weeks starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. The producer who was doing the soundtrack, Narada Michael Walden, had recently worked with Aretha Franklin. I could never sing like her, but eventually I realized that she couldn’t sing like me. It eventually sank in.

  A singer is not really meant to listen to herself. By listening, you lose concentration—you cannot perform and listen to yourself. My voice teacher could tell when I was listening to myself. There was too much tension. It’s like acting—you are either trying to act, or you really are acting. When you are trying to act, you can see it. When you are acting, it is invisible.

  Narada was trying to get me to sing a pretty camp, frivolous song, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” in a key I can’t sing in. I would love to be able to say I am a vocal chameleon, but I’m not. With certain songs, I have to go through a jungle with a machete in the dark fighting off tigers to get to where it fits with my voice, otherwise I wouldn’t believe it. And if I don’t believe it, no one else will.

  Narada was pushing me to sing it like Aretha and mentioned her, which pissed me off. I said, “This is a waste of time. I can’t sing it like that. I’m not Aretha,” and walked out. The prima donna, you know, so they say, spoiled and temperamental—but I never like the pressure of someone making me feel inferior without helping me solve the problem.

  Wound up, I left for a break, to calm down a little. The Rolling Stones happened to be recording in the same building. Keith Richards was in their studio on his own. I sat next to him at the piano where he was doodling. I said, “I am so upset.” He said, “Have a puff on this.” Naturally, he had something to puff on, one of his kind of joints, built for his tolerance. I took a puff. It was too strong. Within seconds, I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. I had to be carried out of the studio and taken home in a car. Walden must have assumed I had stormed off. I don’t know what Keith thought.

  Years later, the same thing happened in reverse. I had been invited with a friend up to his house in Jamaica perched in splendid rock-star isolation on the spectacular tree-covered cliffs overlooking the sweeping sandy bay in Ocho Rios near where my Jamaican home is. I can see the house hanging from the cliff, flag flying above the roof, from my living room. Using telescopes, we could wave to each other. We arrived more or less on time for dinner with Keith and his wife Patti Hansen, an old friend of mine from the Wilhelmina days. It was Patti who had invited me more than Keith. She was very important in his life—she saved him really. We were shown into the dining room and asked to sit down. There was no sign of Keith and Patti. An hour later, there was still no sign of them. I was getting impatient and I marched off to look for them.

  I found their bedroom, and Patti was fast asleep sprawled on the bed, and Keith was slumped on a chair knocked out cold with a joint still clinging to his lips, slowly smoldering. The people working for him didn’t dare touch it, so it was just burning away. I didn’t care about respecting him in that state. I took it out of his mouth and tried to wake him up, but he was too far gone. Eventually he came too, as incoherent as you could imagine, like there were spider webs and sundry creepy crawlies in front of his eyes, and, to his evident alarm, at the center of them, spinning a glitter ball on her head, some phantom of the disco tugging at his mouth. He realized it was me and looked very confused as to why I was there in his home, possibly trying to pull out his teeth. He started shouting at me, “Grace Jones! You should not be here! Get out of here!” It turned out he didn’t mean that I shouldn’t be in his house, but that I should not still be around as a musician. “You had your day! Your time was up a long time ago!” Patti tried to calm him down. “Keith, Grace is our guest! She’s an old friend!” He kept mumbling, about how I should not be here, I was Studio 54, I was from a dead, plastic world. To him, I was disco, and nothing else. I knew better. After all, I had turned down “Boogie Wonderland.” Eventually, he passed out again, into another segment of this nightmare. The next time we met, he’d forgotten all about the incident, or just accepted that I was still around, that I wasn’t disco, that grotesque aberration. I was more like him, a wanderer, a nomad, at home here and there, with, when it suits, a purpose.

  Eventually I heard the song Walden did for the Mickey Rourke film; he had gotten a Canadian singer called Luba to sing like me singing like Aretha Franklin. It was awful. The trouble is, once you go through something like this, it stays with you and is there every time you make a decision. It haunts me, but not as much as the song would have if I had done it.

  My German teacher in New York taught me to let my emotions take over, but that meant singing something that meant something to me, that made me emotional and involved, however dark or perverse the subject. Singing is a form of manipulation of the emotions. It’s something you even do with your speaking voice—you manipulate a situation, to get what you want. I got that. I understood that. That helped me sing like Grace Jones, which was what I wanted all along.

  * * *

  While I was in Paris, making it a home, another genius, Issey Miyake, turned my life around in the way I like. He was then at the beginning of his extraordinary career. I first met him at an audition in a bare room somewhere in the middle of the endless city. It was very everyday. You turn up. You wait with other girls. You go into the room where everyone is. You try on the clothes and walk, hoping you are doing it the way they like.

  They all sit around a table, and watch without giving anything away. It’s very humiliating. That’s why I would never want to be a judge on one of those talent shows. They ask me all the time. Simon Cowell always wants me. I’m offered so much money to do these kinds of shows, but no amount of money is enough to compensate for what appearing on them would do to my soul. They’re awful, there’s no learning experience, it’s demeaning and dispiriting. Sure, it’s a part of life, and you have to go through it, but to set it up as something that people laugh at is so damned cruel.

  Issey was lovely, though, and he was very fond of African and Indian models, girls not likely to be used by other designers, even the most radical. He wanted the models he used to have a dangerous and ambiguous kind of allure.

  He made such a contribution to how I perform, that withdrawn, minimal, underplayed performance. He showed me how to discipline the body in order to heighten the excitement, which was something that set me apart from the standard way that pop singers moved to make their point. He made me realize that to make my presence felt I could stand still, and radiate intense inner life without having to dance around like all the others. I was the countdown to an explosion that was always about to happen.

  I found the stillness more powerful. I met Issey when I was thinking about ending my modeling life and become a singer full-time. I had recorded my first single, “I Need a Man.” All that energy and discovery, all that strutting American disco fed through the swashbuckling French glamour, and all the lovers I had, my being tangled up with the lingering male genes, it was all there in “I Need a Man,” which became an unofficial gay national anthem. He said, “Why don’t you sing that song while you model my new wedding dress?” The Paris fashion-show reveal of the wedding dress was always meant to be the showstopping highlight, so it was a real honor to be c
hosen. It was really my first official public singing engagement. I became known for a while as the singing model.

  Through him I learned about theater, Kabuki, and this was a massive influence on how I would present myself as a performer. I had been moving toward it without even knowing it. The powerful, extreme makeup that I favored, the flamboyant costumes and exaggerated gestures . . . Kabuki is an investigation, really, into eccentricity while maintaining something completely pure.

  Kabuki’s meaning is to act eccentrically, or erratically, and Kabuki gave me clues about how to achieve the spectacular without appearing obvious. I got to it after being in America, and then Paris, and that was the right order—a crash course in pop culture and hippie adventure on the East Coast, a year getting up to speed amid the make-it-here frenzy of New York, a discovery of provocative French passions, and then spinning all this through this dazzling Japanese combination of formality and subversion. It taught me a way of being larger than life without losing control, the way they used their cross-eyed glare and stuck out their tongues to drive away evil meshed with a lot of what I felt about Jamaica and the way I was brought up. I liked the idea that you could repel badness through a look, a held moment. There’s an element of the African trickster too, introducing disorder and confusion but paving the way for a new, more dynamic order.

  The Japanese influence concentrated the more conventional ideas about performance and entertainment into something very precise and intense. It was a clash of two or three very different forms of energy to produce a new kind of energy that very much reflected and represented my own travels. I think I connected with Kabuki because it was about the enormous amount of compressed energy it takes for the Japanese to deviate from the norm in a place where comfort and formality is highly valued. I had come from a very conformist past, and Kabuki helped me articulate my own form of deviation from the norm, the breaking away from the rigid without it being predictable and shrieky. I could shriek, and in some senses I still did, but I also learned the impact of stillness.