I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  5.

  Andy

  Richard Bernstein used to take me to the Factory building on Union Square because he would do the Interview covers every month. This was when it had just moved from the Decker building at Union Square West to its third location at 860 Broadway at the north end of the Square.The Factory was the center of Andy Warhol’s empire, a few blocks from the Empire State Building, which he thought was a star and filmed as though it was. New York was the center of the artistic universe, and the Factory was at the center of the center, and at the center of that was Andy Warhol, who had New York and art at his center. As soon as you walked into the building you could tell that something extraordinary was going on.

  The Factory was his Hollywood, his TV channel, his publishing house, from where he created stars, instantly labeling them superstars; made his movies; and measured out time, fame, scandal, disaster, repetition, talk, his form of a high society. He helped promote artists who would never have been heard of if he hadn’t given them a platform. From his lair, ultimately more famous than just about anyone alive, he would lure people in from that high society for chats, portraits, and interviews.

  Andy had encouraged Richard to stop painting his multicolored pop-art pills and to start painting people. Richard was given the task of creating the covers for Interview, which people naturally thought were by Andy. They were portraits of the rich and famous, done in a way that looked to the casual viewer like they might be Warhol, but they were all Richard’s own work. Like Andy, because of Andy, he moved from face to face, and I became one of those faces.

  Richard was very insecure and always concerned the Interview team wouldn’t like his covers. There were people—colleagues, assistants, hangers-on, court jesters, groupies, nutcases, foreign receptionists who intentionally couldn’t understand what you were saying—that you had to go through to get to Andy. But Andy would ask to see you; you wouldn’t ask to see Andy. So Richard would have to show his covers to someone who would then show them to Andy, and the response would come back: Shave that, trim that, cut that, add more color, bend that, alter that nose—Andy was like a plastic surgeon in a way, adjusting appearance, but only in a fantasy—or, now and then, Leave it as it is. There was a pecking order, though. Peck, peck, peck, power would pass back and forth, back and forth through various levels of ego, tension, and hysteria. The covers also had to cross the desk of editor Bob Colacello. Richard always felt that it was Bob who amplified Andy’s indecisions. Andy was sort of in the distance, where he liked to be . . . watching, but hard to see and hear.

  Oh, Grace, Richard would say, I have to take a cover in today, I am nervous about it. There was this one bitch who will tell me to make changes. He didn’t have the sharp tongue of many of those who occupied the Factory, and there were plenty trying to take advantage of him. I would go along with him to give him confidence. His high-ceilinged studio was on the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel, a short walk around the corner from Andy’s studio. I would go to the Factory a lot.

  I can’t remember if I met Andy at the Factory or in a club on one of those nights you can’t help but forget, even if during the evening you were given a joint laced with angel dust by Divine, who sat between Truman Capote and Woody Allen. Something like meeting Andy Warhol for the first time is one of those moments in your life that are so unique, you can’t remember the details. One minute you don’t know him, and then you do. He’d been Catholic Andrew Warhola, like I had been Pentecostal Beverly Jones, and there was definitely a religious intensity in the way he operated that I could recognize.

  Once we met, he would invite me all the time to the Factory. It wasn’t the easiest place to get into, so it helped to be asked by Andy himself. You had to have the right qualities, and I must have passed the test. That’s the kind of test I like. You don’t even know what the questions are, but all your answers are correct.

  He would call me and say, “I am interviewing so-and-so for the magazine at the Factory—why don’t you come by?” I met André Leon Talley there; that’s where he was working, answering the phones—with a very hearty bonjour—and starting to write the Small Talk column for Interview.

  He was brought up very strictly by his grandmother in North Carolina, and the pride she took in her appearance rubbed off on him. He moved to Manhattan in 1974, and then burst into life. Together when we were out, sharing mad moments amid the swishy fashion commotion in the club scene, we would explode, urging each other on. He felt like an outcast at the time; he was looking to work out who he was and where he belonged. Very smart about design and the history of personal style, he developed a grand, insightful sense of luxuriousness. I insisted when Vogue wanted an interview with me that he do it. It was the first print interview he did for Vogue, and then he worked there for thirty years, starting as news editor and ending up an editor-at-large.

  Andy always had these sorts of people in close proximity, working on their own lives and on their own ways of recording and announcing them. A lot of people were competing for attention, jealous of each other, fighting for space, and somehow he commanded their attention. Some of them were afraid of him, though, and hung around because they felt they had to. If they left him, they would be in a kind of exile.

  He surrounded himself with action, and it all made it seem as though he was more active than he actually was. Andy didn’t like to go to the clubs, really. It was a social obligation, part of his schedule, meticulously worked out by his entourage, but he liked to keep his distance. When he did go to a club, he barely moved. He would melt into the background, pretty static, observing all the me’s making out and making themselves up. I was one of the few people he would dance with on a dance floor. “Oh,” he’d say, “nobody gets me on the dance floor but you, Grace,” as we danced to Michael Jackson. He loved Michael. They made a nice couple. I was also one of the few who could get Michael Jackson on a club dance floor dancing for the sake of it. I would have been best man for both of them if they had married, which in some universe was their destiny.

  I met Michael a few times, whenever we happened to find ourselves in the same club, or studio, the same artificial zone, as entertainment associates sharing some of the same highs and lows. He was somewhere between being a total stranger to everyone and a friend to everyone. He was a really nice, hopeful young man who started to become too dangerously aware of himself, and how life changes, and how big and awful and complicated the world could be. He lacked Andy’s wary ultimately quite tough ability to keep everything at a distance. Andy was better at camouflaging himself.

  Andy preferred to watch while everyone else cavorted. He would usually be against a wall, the Warhol wallflower. After he got shot in 1968 at the original “Silver” Factory on East Forty-Seventh Street, a few days before the assassination of Robert Kennedy, when he went out, he liked to stay in one place with his back to the wall. You wouldn’t know if he was in a club or at a party unless you were called for. He had someone scouting for him. You would tell the scout some news, and if Andy was interested, he would ask for you to come and tell him yourself. He would be in the dark somewhere, hiding, almost merging into the wall. Ever since he had been shot, he had changed his style to protect himself. He wasn’t being a diva; it was a necessity. He could still go out and get information, but he had to do it more discreetly, so that he could never be circled by people and trapped. He had a fear of being in a crowd, though he would never admit it.

  When we were together, we would chat about nothing much. Where have you been, what have you done, who did you meet, what was it like? He was so curious. He wanted the gossip, however trivial-seeming. He wanted to hear confessions, however lurid. He had his tape recorder inside his pocket, whirring constantly, which not many people knew at the time. He’d show me. He’d have it hidden close to his heart. It was a part of him. Whispering to itself. Stirring up the gossip he thrived on. He called it his wife. When he went out, his pockets would be filled with tapes and batteries, and he would be frustrated when some
one didn’t want him to have the tape running at a dinner party or in a meeting. It didn’t matter to me that he was taping all the conversations he was having. That was his business. I’d tell him the same things whether the tape recorder was on or not. Maybe I exaggerated a little knowing the tape was on, performed more—but then, everything I did was like a performance, so I was his ideal subject.

  He’d watch life pass as quickly as the tape. He said that when people told him their problems, once he started taping, it was no longer a problem—it was an interesting tape. It was a kind of show. We were all part of an extended conversation Andy was having with the rest of the world. As long as the batteries lasted.

  I didn’t think he was a vicious person, so I never thought that he would use what I said against me. He didn’t judge. There were a lot of preachy, bossy people about at the time, but he was perhaps the least judgmental person I had ever come across. Perhaps he didn’t want to upset anyone in case they came after him again with a gun. There was simply a flow of chat that passed through him. It was his way of getting a feel of what was happening around him. The tapes were exploited after Andy died by those who had an agenda, who didn’t use the material as Andy would have. I didn’t have an agenda. I wasn’t in the club or at the Factory to get something out of him. I didn’t suck up like a lot of the others. I spoke to him like he was my brother.

  He liked to encourage others to do things that he never wanted to do, but that he wanted to experience through you. Like when I appeared in the Bond movie A View to a Kill. Andy loved that. It was as though he could then experience what it was like to be a Bond villain without actually having to do it. He put me on the cover of Interview—he never had before, but once I was in the Bond film, he put me on the cover. In his eyes, the movie role officially made me star Grace, more than the music.

  He definitely saw the future. When he took a photograph of himself with a Polaroid camera, he was taking a picture of the future, when it seemed like everyone started taking their own photograph. Everyone wanting to be on a stage, on a screen, in a photograph, on the cover of a gossip magazine, communicating their thoughts, everyone thinking about themselves—the wide embrace of everyday chatter. Andy knew what was coming. He shaped what was coming.

  The photographer Christopher Makos, who had apprenticed with Man Ray, had given Andy his first camera and taught him how to use it. Chris had taken some fabulous photos of Andy in women’s wigs and full makeup referencing Marcel Duchamp’s female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. Makos chronicled the choppy, supercharged New York mid-’70s period when disco and punk, uptown and downtown, art and fame, sex and money all blurred together. If you were photographed by him, as I first was in 1974, fresh faced, short haired, and a shade cocky around and through the eyes, at the 860 Broadway Factory, wearing a Le Jardin T-shirt, it meant you were put into a world where there were also Andy, Patti Smith, Anthony Perkins, Tennessee Williams, Richard Hell, Elizabeth Taylor, Quentin Crisp, John Paul Getty III, and Alice Cooper. A special community. You were someone, marked out for attention, in this exciting new somewhere between New York City and the future.

  Andy’s Factory and the ambitious people who gravitated there and worked for and with him was where the craziness of the ’60s was transformed into something the whole world would start to experience. He saw that this whole celebrity thing was where everything was happening. He was a voyeur, and he saw which direction the energy was heading. He saw the art in everything, in what was happening around him.

  Andy was obsessed with celebrity, and because he was a watcher, it sort of echoed out from him. So he became an example of a celebrity, without really acting like one, and he anticipated that the curiosity he had about it, and how that impacted his own status, would infect the whole world. No one really got to know him, though. He was the blank canvas everything got projected onto. He himself was very, very private—I only went to his home once, filled with art but none of his own. I never saw him get high. He preferred to watch other people get high. The ultimate high.

  Andy would often ask me to go places with him—events, clubs. If I did a show, he would be there. We would have dinners together, and Richard would join us. We went to a restaurant called Holbrook’s on Seventy-Fifth Street and Third Avenue, which was filled with celebrities—John and Yoko, Tom Wolfe, Princess Grace of Monaco, Robert Redford, all the Kennedy kids—all the time, because even in a fantasy, you have to eat. It was there one night that Andy suddenly said, “Stand up against that wall.” They’d shut down the restaurant. He put me next to a long table, took out his Polaroid camera, and the next thing I knew, he had done four silk-screened portraits of me. He said, “I want to give you one”—mostly, you had to buy from him.

  The most famous thing that happened with me and Andy was when I was his date at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wedding to Maria Shriver. They got married in April 1986 in Hyannis, Massachusetts. Theirs was a big storybook wedding, modest but moneyed, with almost the entire Kennedy clan there, and thousands of photographers. It might have been relatively low-key, but it was all perfectly set up for a very greedy media. We had to fly on this little private jet to get there, and the weather was terrible. Andy was saying, like a delicate version of Alice’s White Rabbit, “We can’t be late, Grace, we can’t be late,” because of course I had the reputation even then of being late. “Can’t be late, Grace, it’s a wedding.” I was on time, but only because I hadn’t put on my makeup or gotten properly dressed.

  I got ready in the bathroom at the airport when we landed. All the time, he was taking photos, taking Polaroids. He was like a kid, Andy, so enthusiastic about every single thing. I wonder sometimes if that had something to do with him being shot. Once you have had five bullets pumped into your chest, it changes everything. You become more conscious of life, of the smallest detail; you become more astounded by how people behave, and by what happens when they become so famous they change. In a way, fame is a kind of death of the person you were before. If you are really famous—Marilyn Monroe famous, Liz Taylor famous—you are never the person you once were again. He started to see through to the temporary, fragile heart of things very quickly and forensically.

  He would be taking photographs all the time, the tape recorder whirring in his pocket, helping him remember. He’d ask me about my sex life. He would send spies out as well. I remember when I started going out with Dolph Lundgren. The grapevine hummed very quickly. Andy got the news before anyone else.

  Andy would ring up wanting to know how big Dolph’s dick was. It was that kind of world. Everyone was curious. He wanted to get more information about my new boyfriend, so he set up a photo session with Helmut Newton.

  Dolph and I ended up naked in our session together, me riding him skin on skin like he was some mythical, muscular Swedish beast. It was our baptism as a couple. Apparently getting us naked was the intention all along, cooked up between Andy and Helmut. When I arrived at the session, late, naturally, Dolph was already down to his underpants. Grace has a new boyfriend. Let’s see how he’s hanging. Andy wanted to know that I was in good . . . hands. He wanted to make sure I was going to enjoy myself. It was his way of showing he cared.

  Because of the weather, and the traffic, we were late for Arnie’s wedding. I swear it wasn’t my fault. It was an Irish wedding, and I wore a very tight, full-length, fishtail, forest-green Azzedine Alaïa dress; Kenzo Takada had made me a bright green fur hat; I had a high-collared green coat; I even had green contact lenses. I was doing the Irish celebration thing to the hilt.

  I had put all that on at the little airport—I was in the bathroom getting dressed, and one of the young Kennedy sons saw me and decided he wanted to wear one of the green contact lenses. He couldn’t get it in, so I wore them both. Andy and I got into this jeep that had come to get us, no limo, and we arrived at the church, a charming little white wooden building, and everyone is cheering and screaming outside, and we enter the church. Late.

  At the exact moment that Arnold and Maria are o
n their knees finishing off their special, intimate ceremony, we arrive. The doors noisily creak open and they turn around to see what the commotion is, and it is, guess who, Grace and Andy. Late. They didn’t say anything, but you could see from the looks on their faces that they were not at all impressed. Green, grinning, furry me and Andy being the usual pale deadpan Andy in his uniform, always the same, wherever he was, whatever he was doing—black turtleneck, leather jacket, jeans, silver wig, and glasses, little black rucksack over his shoulder—very slight and insignificant looking amid all this top-hatted celebrity wedding fuss. I don’t know the reason for the wig. I never asked. Maybe it was like my hoods. To keep the neck warm.

  He was shy, even after all those years dealing with the rich and famous, running his studio, organizing his art, monitoring the center of attention. He would push me when I got shy—because I can be shy too. And all the Kennedys from age fourteen up wanted to dance with me at the party afterward. And I was saying, “No, Andy, I can’t—my dress is too tight.” I wouldn’t take off my coat, and he was the one telling me to go and dance: “Go on, go on, dance with the Kennedys!” I was going, “Darling, no, my ass is sticking out.” He would say, “Don’t be silly, get on the dance floor.” He didn’t want to dance with me; he wanted me to dance with them. I got scared, but Andy made me.

  He pushed me to do a few things I didn’t want to do. He would say, “Oh you are making a big deal out of nothing. Do it. I want to watch! I want to see what happens.” Living through others. So I had a couple more drinks and danced with the Kennedys—including Ted—and Andy got to see what it was like. He had fun and remembered everything. It would be great if Andy was still around to bounce ideas off of and get his knowing response to the instant, self-generating world he helped spawn.