I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  Andy was taking the already exotic and making it even more so, to make sure that there was no doubt that the subjects were worthy of attention. He was fascinated by fame, as an artist but also as a fan. Andy always wanted the famous to look as perfectly impossibly perfect as they could be, which required Richard to build them up into these glorious panels of color. He would treat the newcomers the same, those that were about to be famous or notorious, giving them this instant, colorized glow of fame, with a subtle hint of something brittle, because the clock was ticking. Fame only lasted so long, according to Andy. I had been treated by Richard for Andy Warhol’s Interview number 24, which showed Andy taking my photograph with me wearing a Santa Claus hat. Richard also designed the cover of my first album, produced by Tom Moulton.

  It was all part of the same sense of making entertainment for a world craving pleasure and escape larger, bolder, and brasher, and more energetically enchanting. The unsettling growing chaos of the threatening, corrupt, and paranoid world out there, all the political scandals and indefinite wars and crises, needed to be kept at bay. Presidents and governments were cracking up; people needed to look after themselves, and create their own new rules and customs.

  Richard remixed images of the famous to make the stars more obviously famous looking, from a wonderful fantasy that must never end, and Tom was remixing dance music to make it more obviously about the fantasy of dance, to ensure the rhythm never had to stop. Songs that were three minutes long would now go on longer, and longer, so that the spell would not be broken. The bits that were part of making the song longer started to become more sophisticated, and started to become the best part.

  Tom Moulton was given my early tracks that were recorded in Paris, “I Need a Man” with an instrumental mix on the B-side, and then “Sorry” and “That’s the Trouble,” that we put out as a double A-side, because I didn’t want one of them to be a mere B-side. A B-side was seen as a throwaway. I said, “Why am I going to record something you chuck away? It will be a double A, like the battery. High energy.” I could never understand some of these stupid rules.

  I wrote “Trouble” with a French-Greek writer, Pierre Papadiamandis, who created great, effervescent French-style melodies. He’d written something for a Johnny Hallyday album. That was my first collaboration in music. He couldn’t speak English, so he had no idea what I was singing about, and he went by sound rather than sense when we recorded me. My accent was alien anyway, an alien English, and this embellished the alien. I was singing English like I was making it up as a language as I went along. The record went out in New York on a small label attached to Berlin/Carmen management, Beam Junction, which had released Black Soul.

  Even then I had made up my mind that I was not going to do the music unless I had some control over it, enough to keep my interest. There was enough going on around me that I was not yet in control of, certainly in terms of writing songs, and choosing material, at least that part I was in control of. You have to start somewhere.

  Tom mixed those first three songs to sound more New York and pulsating than they had been in France, and that was definitely toward the coalescing sound of disco, which is a little mathematical, very organized in its own way, to achieve control in the clubs, to create the right mood and movement—and in the end, it still comes out of the church.

  Disco in its purest sense means that you will come out of a place having gone into euphoria, feeling that you have rejoiced. That’s the sense the disc jockey in the clubs was helping crowds achieve, and Tom took it into the recording studio. Mixing the music to completely control your emotions, bringing you up, taking you down, slowing you down, speeding you up, making you soft, making you hard. A great groundbreaking 1970s 12-inch mix was the sound of an erection—of one shape becoming another. It was obvious that such an idea would come from the gay clubs. Tom was really one of the first, if not the first, to take that new idea of manipulating rhythm and pace of the club onto a record that in turn would be played in the clubs.

  He had already started work on giving “La Vie en Rose” a disco boost, but he hadn’t done it specifically for me. He made a backing track without knowing who was going to sing it, and I was there at the right time, with the right image. He was very sure of himself and his instincts at the time, and because he was clearly the master of this new form he’d helped define, I went along with it all. He was the expert and someone to learn from. I would push myself as hard as I could in order to give him what he wanted. You can hear my determination on the track—the determination that was lifting me into singing, if not necessarily as a singer.

  The disco producers were very much the kind of producers who created the track without the singer, and added them at the end. Tom mixed the first three tracks in New York while I was in Paris, and the next thing I hear is that I have a dance hit. I hadn’t even heard what he had done. I didn’t meet Tom until I went over to New York after the song was a club hit. Sy and Eileen had called me over to do some promotion, singing the three songs I had in the underground clubs.

  I had a little crush on Tom, because he was very good-looking, a former model. He was also another demanding, complicated man. As usual I had no idea he was gay. It must have been the man in me, tangled up inside, that always fell for gays, and also for something I didn’t have that I wanted to know about. I was living in Paris, so I didn’t know much about him.

  I would go out to Sigma in Philly to record with him. I think Tom was always a little irritated when I would act a little, as he saw it, precious. Singing there meant overcoming quite a lot of nerves, first of all about whether I could sing and secondly about how it sounded. Tom was very like Gamble and Huff in the studio. No nonsense, the vocals merely a part of the overall effect, and he would expect the vocals to come as easily as the playing of a rhythm. The drummer or the drums didn’t need to rest a while before they performed, or need a special drink, so he didn’t understand why I did.

  I needed to be pampered a little before I sang, even if by myself. Tom thought that was very self-indulgent, but then he underestimated what it takes to deliver a certain kind of performance in the recording studio, one that was done inside pretty much an empty room but that would come across as a great moment and last for a long time. He was one of those producers who like to tinker, and the human element, the actual soul, was not something he wanted to waste too much time on. I think the thing he respected the most about me was my absolute determination to succeed. He thought of me not as a singer but rather as a personality bringing presence to the record. Part of the packaging. Years later, in interviews about that time, Tom would say how annoyed he was that I came across as confused. He said that I was always asking him to come into the vocal booth to help me with the singing. He thought it was silly and pathetic. What he never realized was that this was because I thought he was so hot. It was the only way I could think of to get him to stand close to me. I wasn’t so ditzy, apart from the fact I didn’t appreciate that there was no way he would ever be interested in me. I wasn’t quite man enough for him.

  When I heard Tom’s mixes I thought my voice sounded really fast. He had sped me up to fit his slick, swinging version of the track. Also, when I did the vocals originally I had a fever, and I was still very shy singing in a studio in front of people. I did the vocals under a table, hidden from sight. Maybe I should have danced on the table. When I heard it, I could tell I had a cold. He treated my voice a little, but not enough to disguise that. It sounded very different from what we had done in Paris. Guy Cuevas, the DJ at Club Sept in Paris, would play it because we became good friends, but I always felt he was not really sure about it.

  I was certain that I wasn’t going to do any more music in Paris. There was something inauthentic when the French tried to do American or English pop. London was the nearest place where I felt the music scene would work for me, but I didn’t go at the time. I think I was put off by the IRA bombings there, which made me think London was a war zone, and by a feeling that somehow
London would be too gloomy for me.

  Going back to New York once the record was a club hit meant I was going to a place that suited my desire to take my music more seriously, rather than as something on the side. I told the head of Euro Planning to give all my bookings to my friend Toukie Smith. She was the sister of the first major black fashion designer, Willi Smith. Toukie had always wanted to be a model, but her body was the wrong shape for her to get much work in America. Toukie had the big tits that Helmut Newton complained I didn’t have.

  She had come out to Japan to be part of Issey’s Twelve Black Girls show. Issey loved her look, and while we were part of the show we became very close. I said she should come back to Paris with me, and because I was now concentrating on the music, I thought she could have my work in Paris. When I traveled to New York for a few weeks I said she could move into the apartment I shared with my boyfriend at the time, Jeanyves. I trusted them both, and at the time she was going out with an illustrator and artist called Jean-Paul Goude. He had become the art director at Esquire magazine at the end of the 1960s, and was still there in the mid-’70s.

  He was in the Factory orbit, and worked with Richard Bernstein, knew Andy Warhol, and also the writer Glenn O’Brien, who had edited Interview between 1971 and 1974 before leaving under a cloud of bad feeling. He had hired Richard in 1972. Later Glenn would host a New York public access TV show called TV Party, decades ahead of its time, and edit Madonna’s Sex book.

  I had a fling with Glenn not long after the orgasm eruption with my hair stylist Andre. This was where the Factory world could get a little soap opera, and often inbred. He was very shy, nicely intense, and dry. I liked shy people. I liked talking with him; it was more a mental relationship with Glenn than with Andre. I like both sides. The physical orgasm, the mental orgasm. Glenn and I shared mental orgasms. He had a great, very sophisticated and stimulating mind. He could keep your interest, and you would learn something after you talked with him. I like a mind that takes you into unexpected places. He was very much the opposite of Andre, which is probably why I went there after that macho disaster. No more lover-man, something a little more insightful and intellectually uplifting. At least for a while. I guess these were always the two sorts of men I was attracted to—the man of action, or the man of philosophy. If possible, the man who was both. The action body meets the mind in action.

  What Andre did to my hair, Glenn did to my sense of being able to see things in a different light. His friend Jean-Paul had seen me perform “La Vie en Rose” for the Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—he saw me before I saw him, put it that way. He saw me in my new natural habitat. Richard had taken him because he had designed my show, dressing me up as a multicolored luminescent chandelier in a tribute to the artist Erté.

  Jean-Paul became more than intrigued with me and how I looked and what I might be like in bed. He would probe Glenn about what kind of men I liked, and what turned me on; he was creating a fantasy about me even before we met. He saw me sing “I Need a Man” in front of a gay audience at a club with a bare torso and a prom dress. There was nothing pretty about it, nothing obvious, it was dramatically exhibitionistic, and there was a tangle of signals in terms of who was what and who was entertaining who. He was instantly captivated. I don’t think he fancied my looks. He fancied my spirit.

  I was not his physical type at all, really. Bountiful Toukie was, and he liked to make sculptures of her, making her even more voluptuous and proud, but I was too skinny and boisterous. He wasn’t my type, either—intellectually he was, but I liked pretty boys. The models. Jeanyves in Paris was like a throwback to the Three Musketeers, suave and dashing. I’m not sure how it worked, but while Toukie was in Paris, she and Jean-Paul started to split up.

  She didn’t tell me. I thought we were really good friends, although I did a lot of the talking, and she did a lot of the listening. So she never told me what was going on. She knew all my secrets, but she told me nothing. She would just go mmm-hmm as I chatted. But they broke up. Jean-Paul said I indirectly contributed to the breakup by helping her model in Paris and letting her stay in my apartment.

  * * *

  Clubs were everywhere in New York, out of sight but there for those who knew where they were, and the first time I sang in public it was Halloween, perfect for me, in New York at the Gallery on West Twenty-Second Street. Twenty-two-year-old Nicky Siano had opened the Gallery in 1972, having consciously designed it as a glowing, throbbing dance palace, and his inventive disc jockeying made it one of the great clubs. His approach to DJing was that of a collagist, cutting up tracks, layering sound effects, suddenly switching the flow, catching you out, lifting you up, weaving a hundred tracks into one so you couldn’t hear the join; he was the essence of the idea of the DJ as an improvising composer and dedicated showman. He would say, “When the crowd gets off, I get off,” and he wanted to make them scream.

  John Carmen had been nagging him to put me on at the Gallery. Nicky said later that when he finally met me at Sy and Eileen’s, after I made sure I made quite an entrance wearing an extravagant headdress, legs and arms akimbo, he was entranced because I was so exotic. He invited me to perform at his club.

  The Gallery had a very small stage—really just a part of the floor—as was usual in those early underground clubs, and the audience was crammed into a tiny room. It reminded me of a couple of the drag and strip clubs I used to go to in Paris with Antonio, where it was so full it seemed like there were bodies on bodies, some of them so close they were penetrating each other, lubricated by their own sweat. The stage was so small you couldn’t have a band, so you would use playback, like I had seen at the drag clubs in Paris. I also thought that unless you could get a band to play the music as great as on the record, there was no point. The music was beginning to be made electronically—machines were increasingly being used, especially to generate rhythms—so it seemed wrong to have a band and try to reproduce it. These drag shows proved to me that you would not miss the band as long as you put together a show.  The show was important for this sort of music, not musicians playing live. There was no room anyway.

  I was criticized, because people thought I was miming. This was a real no-no. I would go out of my way to make sure the audience knew I was singing live—I would talk in the middle of a song, I would ad lib, I would throw in something different, to make it obvious I was live, and the rest, the playback, it didn’t matter as long as I was for real. It was inexpensive, too, not to have the band.

  I had my three songs. That was the extent of my repertoire. They would play the extended Tom Moulton instrumental mixes as an introduction to make the show longer, and to build up tension. I wore my Darth Vader Miyake; that was my uniform, mystery in layers, so you could take a layer off, and then another layer, eventually stripping down to a skintight bodysuit. I came with my fashion feel and the whole Issey sensibility, the theater I had learned from Japan, the stillness and bareness, and went for it like a bat out of hell. I was aggressive about the minimalism.

  I had learned that stillness was a better way for me to appear. I wasn’t so great a dancer that I was going to wow people with movement. I never try to do what I know I am not the best at. I couldn’t dance but I knew how to walk and how to freeze. I had done a whole season of Parisian catwalk and Twelve Black Girls in Japan. I also used anything around the stage as the stage, so I wasn’t hemmed in. I would crawl all over the place, hiss at people, bark in their faces, and pretend to slap people sitting near me. No one had seen anything like that. Rumors shot around the city—You have to see this girl, it’s outrageous, disco that cuts into you, show business that threatens you. She’s as mad as hungry tigers.

  An actress, Tara Tyson, who later became branded a Manhattan socialite after she married the Greek shipping magnate and technology pioneer M. Michael Kulukundis, came along to one of the shows to see what the fuss was about. That was the start of a lifelong friendship. She had small parts in TV shows like Charlie’s A
ngels and Starsky & Hutch, and had appeared in off-Broadway productions with titles like “Foreplay” and “Porno Stars at Home.” Andy photographed her, and she was also a favorite of the beauty-loving superstar photographer Francesco Scavullo, who was responsible for the classic Cosmopolitan cover look. Usually, this was the glamorized very white all-American look, but there was a photograph of the black model Naomi Sims on the cover in 1973. It didn’t break any new ground, but it was an interesting moment that suggested another possible world.

  After Tara married, she gave up acting because her husband did not like her working—the thing I always said I would never do. I once found her at a party locked into her bathroom giving an exclusive one-woman performance for the likes of Al Pacino and Christopher Walken. They were entranced. She had a lot to give, even though her husband didn’t want her to. She was a dynamo. She once got in a fight with legendary restaurant hostess Elaine Kaufman at her literary clubhouse, Elaine’s. Elaine scratched Tara’s face, punched Tara’s date, the costume designer Jacques Bellini, in the face, and then kicked them out, claiming Tara had bumped into her with a cigarette and set her dress on fire. “Not my face,” Tara shrieked as Elaine scratched her. “I thought she was a transvestite,” Elaine said in her defense. Tara was my kind of girl, from my kind of New York, and she loved the way I tore up the stage.

  I would have dry-ice fog rolling around the stage, at about waist height, to appear out of and sink into like an animal on the prowl. Because there was no real stage, I had a chair as a prop. Very French cabaret. Leg up! That’s all you need. When the stage is tiny, or nonexistent, ask for a chair, and stick your leg up. Voilà—theater. One spotlight on your face. That’s all you need to generate mystery.

  Nicky then went out after me dressed, somewhere between accurately and madly, as Diana Ross, as if the whole thing was about having a tongue in your cheek. That made me think! It was like in Paris—you can learn a lot about performing in a small, dark space by watching drag queens stretch credibility. I was working on my routine, building up the parts. A little bit of Kabuki stillness, a warrior slash of drag debauchery, a dash of black humor, shoulders out of a gothic fantasy, a load of tease. And repeat. Perfect.