I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  I had a friend, Patrice Calmettes, who managed at Le Palace after Fabrice died. Patrice and I are very close, and he was close friends with Marlene Dietrich. When I was with him one night he put me on the phone. I said, “Hello,” in my usual deep voice. And she said, “Well, you sound just like me.” It was close to the end of her life, and she had become a recluse—she didn’t leave her apartment or speak to many people. Patrice was one of those she still spoke to. Our conversation was very brief: “We have the same voice,” she purred. She wished me all the best.

  I remember meeting Lauren Bacall at a party for Giorgio Armani. She was also taken with my deep voice, because she had one as well. She said, “We have the deep throats!” It was like being in this community of deep voices. Lauren loved my lips. She started kissing me. It was like we were in a little club of deep, manly speakers.

  It was interesting, though, that a lot of the time it was others who wanted me to be the new this, the new that. Others said I was the new Dietrich, the new Josephine Baker, even the black Monroe after an Italian Vogue shoot for which they made me up like Marilyn. A lot of the acts I was compared to were white, and it struck me as being a way for critics to take the me out of me. The me I had worked so hard to be.

  There was also a job I did that forced me to explore my male side in pictures. After a few months in Paris, I was hired for a shoot for La Perla in Côte d’Ivoire. I had turned down an important shoot with Yves Saint Laurent because although it had incredible prestige, it didn’t pay much, and the La Perla shoot paid well and I had bills and rent to pay. Also, it was a chance to go to Africa, and I had never done that before.

  I got held up at the airport after the flight because, they said, my papers weren’t in order. They wouldn’t let me into the country after a long flight from Paris. I was frustrated and scared, as the rest of the party were allowed in with no trouble, and suddenly, in the middle of the night, I was on my own, surrounded by threatening security guards. I think they were after a bribe, but I had no money on me. They decided to deport me.

  I was very tired and had taken a Valium for the flight. Three guards lifted me up like a sack of potatoes and threw me onto the plane, ready for the flight back to Paris. I pretended that I was ill and kept my eyes shut and let a little foam form at the side of my mouth. They were speaking in French and didn’t think I could understand them. They were talking about how Americans thought they were comedians, taking the piss out of them.

  The pilot refused to take off with me on board, because he thought I was seriously ill. This was good news for me, because I wanted to get into the country. They carried me off the plane and put me in a cold, dirty cell—not much of an improvement on my circumstances. I was still playing ill, and started to cry. One guard definitely seemed in the mood to try something, and I was worried that I was going to be raped. Basically, I fought this by making it seem as though if they messed with me, they would catch a disease. Foaming at the mouth and being incoherent because of the Valium put a barrier around me. Do you want to catch what I’ve got? He didn’t. Eventually I was allowed into the country, although they took my passport, which made getting out of the country another adventure.

  Because I was late, and the male models got sunburned in the boiling hot sun, I ended up having to play the male part in the shoot, and my openness in agreeing to this kind of thing, when a lot of the models wouldn’t, became part of my thinking. I was comfortable playing the man. Because of the trouble I’d had getting into the country, in all the photos I was in a bad mood, pouting hard, staring at the camera with a lot of aggression. I look at those early pictures, often taken in beautiful parts of the world by fantastic photographers, and it makes me laugh that it often looks like I was in a really foul mood. It made for a good photo, but also told the story of what was happening—the trouble I was in, the hangover I had, or the annoyance with some of the people I was on the shoot with.

  Jean-Paul loved the man/woman idea, because he wanted to mix and split everything up in the pictures, so that they were tough but soft, manly but female, ancient but modern, mystical, everyday photos but hyperreal and painterly. It was all part of the puzzle that became the androgynous thing—it became the obvious direction for me to go in. The images also were made up of a series of lies, and here was the classic deceit—the woman dressed up as a man, or the man as a woman, or which was it? Masked and unmasked. I remember once when I was shopping at Bloomingdale’s in New York and I was trying some clothes on in a changing room. A woman saw me and complained that there was a man in the dressing room. I swiveled around, naked to the waist, and casually announced: “Can a man be pregnant?” Paulo was on the way at the time.

  A One Man Show was my first world tour. I’d been seen in crowded discos, with the kind of cheap, improvised theatrics suited to the club scene, but never on such a grand level. It was everything I had always been, but made new. I would make the whole theater my space. I borrowed ideas from church—this formalized interpretation of desire, and yearning, and charisma. I was preaching pleasure as a certain sort of threat, getting the audience to get down on their knees, bringing them onto the stage, blessing them in my own way.

  A One Man Show was the distillation of this process where I was as much a performance artist as a pop singer or actress. Or at least, I was interested in presenting myself as a singer in a way that broke away from what had quickly become a very narrow set of traditions. Most pop performance didn’t take into account pop art, or Warhol’s films, or a European catwalk, or Japanese theater. There seemed to be many different ways of doing a concert where you would be influenced not by a rock ’n’ roll show or a soul revue but by minimalist art, expressionism, and avant-garde film.

  It was Jean-Paul inventing a new context for me to inhabit, as though Marlene Dietrich, Bertolt Brecht, and Piet Mondrian were as important an influence on pop as Elvis, as though music could be connected to art and theater. It was like the invention of a new genre, related to the musical, to opera, to circus, to cinema, to documentary, to the art gallery. To magic as well, because Jean-Paul was like an illusionist, creating magic tricks that somehow philosophically dislocated reality, and my image, and even my soul.

  It was also about stripping back prejudice. It was about rejecting normal, often quite sentimental and conventionally crowd-pleasing ways of projecting myself as a black singer and a female entertainer, because those ways had turned into clichés, which kept me pent up in a cage. I wanted to jolt the adult world that is traditionally led by bland white men, to shatter certain kinds of smugness through performance and theater.

  I never really thought of myself as black, so it wasn’t as though I consciously decided that I would behave in a way that black people didn’t usually behave. In America they tried to force me to be, in their eyes, a traditional black person, to limit myself to the limitations imposed from outside on a black American, but I didn’t want to go there. It seemed that would make me act like a victim, like the inferior person they wanted me to be by dismissing me as black—ruled by the language of the prejudiced—and I wanted to be ruled by my own language, my own way of putting and seeing things.

  The unmoored power that people recognize in the One Man Show is possibly because I was simply being me, not thinking about the color of my skin, or my sex—I was outside race and gender: I considered myself an energy that had not been classified. Jean-Paul amplified my own exaggeration and perversion of how the female path to survival has often been through seduction.

  I never wanted to limit myself to being A Black Woman, because that immediately puts a person on their back foot—beginning from a kind of negative space in order to prove the positive—and I never wanted to think of who I was as anything less than positive. If there was any woman in there, she was abstracted, hidden behind a mass of disorienting contradictions. I didn’t want to act black, or white, or green.

  This was immediately shocking. I was behaving in a way that was certainly not perceived to be African, or Jamaic
an, not least because the show was clearly interested in things Africans and Caribbean people apparently had no interest in because it wasn’t part of their history—things like minimalism, cubism, musical theater, absurdism, Happenings. (This attitude completely underestimates and misunderstands the African and Caribbean openness to experimentation and renewal that is essential to how they deal with radically challenging circumstances.) And I was dressed as a man, or an animal, or an alien. I didn’t invite the audience into a familiar set of spaces, so there was no safety there.

  There was also a robotic quality to my performance, a mix of the human, the android, and the humanoid, and that was also disorienting to those expecting to see a black woman essentially act either like a passive black woman playing along with the rules, or a strong, defiant black woman blasting through the rules with what were still essentially compliant black “soul” elements.

  I was being entirely natural, given that the whole thing was deliberately heightened. I was never coached in how I moved, or regarding my facial expressions. I picked all that up from various places. From Issey and Japan, from my acting coach, Warren Robertson, who made me realize I was being my abuser, Mas P. This was why I was being so scary; this was what I was channeling.

  Theatrically, I was not thinking, This is a way of finding a different way to be black, lesbian, male, female, animal. I didn’t want my body language to betray my origins. I wanted to use my body to express how I had liberated myself from my background, ignored obstacles, and created something original, based on my own desires, fears, and appetites. I was using my body as a language. A language that comes from a dark continent. And dark is dangerous.

  We never discussed its being about blackness, or femininity, or masculinity, about the breaking of certain taboos and traditions. The power of a black female entertainer being so confrontational in a world where that meant you didn’t challenge or provoke was not something we set out to do, and maybe that’s why it was seen as so challenging and provocative. We were not limited by thinking there were barriers to break down. We didn’t even consider the barriers. As far as we were concerned, we were so far on the other side of any barriers that we never even thought of them. We were after a kind of freedom to experiment with performance, and we could do that more by not limiting ourselves to any categories. I was a human being, and more than anything we were seeing how far you could stretch being human before it became something else altogether.

  Jean-Paul, perversely, as the creator/master of a show about freedom, might have considered some of these themes and processed them through me. The black woman as a weapon—the black woman who felt she could exist anywhere, who could change what it is to be black at will, who didn’t want to be fixed so that she couldn’t move through and into different worlds. Maybe he was scared of me, and this was his way of explaining it to himself. Perhaps he was exoticizing me, and these were his fantasies about me taken to the limits. Perhaps he wanted to reconfigure my celebrity status in a way that turned him on. He wanted to invent a brand-new sort of diva—Marlene Dietrich, the other side of Kraftwerk; Eartha Kitt, the other side of David Bowie and Klaus Nomi. We didn’t talk about it, but I know there were certain things he liked me to do, poses to adopt and expressions to use, as though moving through a dream about which he was making a documentary.

  I was playing a character—a number of characters, masculine and feminine—but not feminine with big tits and a big butt, feminine in the brain, through mental discipline and flamboyance. And human, as an energy, a force, a creative act that did what creative acts are meant to do: to break outside of categorizing us sexually and racially, which causes problems.

  The show came out of the minimalism, the cubism, and of creating a great effect without much money. It was also show business bent out of shape. It helped that I was fearless. I was prepared to take on whatever challenge Jean-Paul set for me, or I set for myself. A gorilla wearing lipstick? Absolutely. Bring it on. I loved it all—I loved his perfectionism and the madness that sometimes startled me that I could then turn into my own madness and startle him back with.

  You don’t necessarily realize that you are onto something as you are doing it. It blossoms as you do it, and it turns into something that happens to be unique. At first, when we performed it live, people didn’t clap. They didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. And then jaws dropped. There was a slight state of shock. I could feel it coming off them, but of course I couldn’t react, as I was acting as if in a play. I was in another reality. It wasn’t Grace Jones onstage: it was Grace Jones playing Grace Jones, with the help of other people playing Grace Jones. I couldn’t come out of character.

  My immediate reaction as I was doing the show was that it was a complete flop, except no one left the theater. They stayed. They watched. They wanted to work it out.

  We used a catwalk, to refer back to the modeling part of me, that I would walk down into the audience. One night a fan handcuffed himself to my leg so that I couldn’t move. The audience rose up as one to demand that this person who had done it set me free so that I could finish the show. The bodyguards threatened to break his fingers if he didn’t let me go. I was shaken, and no one was sure I was going to continue after he let me go, and the whole theater stood up to urge me on. Then I realized it was working. They were quiet because they were seeing something new, not because they didn’t like it, but because they were concentrating on what on earth was going to happen next. It was a show that created a series of incidents, and you wanted to see how it ended.

  Once you’re onstage, if they are not applauding . . . well, as long as they are not leaving, it is not a complete disaster. I concentrated on doing my part, making sure my voice was strong, that I hit my marks. It was a very new kind of show, even down to the fact the lights were shone on the audience. That was new in pop, that challenging of the audience, that bringing them into the show by making them a part of it. Big lights would come out at them, searching their faces, putting them on show. A huge fan blew confetti all over them. They weren’t used to that, to being abused. They were forced to keep their wits about them.

  They weren’t sure how to react, not because they didn’t like it but because it had never been done before. The idea was that there was a story, or a series of stories, that was new. The idea that I was playing different characters, all based on me, or connected to me, but not really me, was also new. There was a lot to take in.

  I was not being passive in the slightest, in the way most singers are. I whacked the cymbals. I dominated the audience. It was what I was always like, but much more so. I used to drag people onstage and pretend to sodomize them and pretend to whip them. It was total confrontation. I would beat the audience up. Bang them over the head.

  Orson Welles once told me on a talk show, The Dinah Shore Show, that I raped the audience. I had just performed a song, and to be honest, in the confines of the TV studio, I was not particularly extreme. For me, fairly reserved. There was still enough of the drama for him to see something. He said, “Certain people seduce an audience, flatter an audience, beseech an audience. Grace, you rape an audience—your show is a sexual assault.” He meant it in a good way. . . .

  * * *

  I had bought a house in the Bahamas as part of my deal with Island, and I went there to write. I lived there with Paulo, and my family would come. After a while, Dolph came to visit for a holiday. Jean-Paul was working on me, but he knew I was with Dolph. We did try after Dolph left the Bahamas. Jean-Paul said he had changed his mind. He came over and we talked it through.

  I think he realized he loved me when it was too late. He loved me as an object during our relationship, and he explained that to me. Later, he realized he loved me as me, but by then I was too aware of being loved as an idealized object, and I didn’t want to be loved like that. I don’t think I was selfish to say, “I am on tour, working hard; please come and help.” He might have understood if he had been a professional dancer and experienced what it was like, but
he hadn’t.

  One day, in the Bahamas, trying to fix everything, Jean-Paul suddenly said, “Well, let’s get married.” I was driving, leaving our apartment, and I panicked so much I slammed the car into reverse. I put my foot on the gas and went backward fast and almost crashed into a wall.

  He thought that was what I wanted, but what I wanted was to get back together, not to get married. “No,” I said, “you don’t get it. That’s not what I want. Marriage is not going to solve anything.”

  I knew he wasn’t going to change. The relationship wasn’t working because he was more intense than ever in trying to make it work. Which wasn’t natural. And I could not adapt to the pressure of being perfect. I had grown up with that and did not want to repeat it, even with Jean-Paul. I didn’t want to lose him as a friend. I didn’t want to lose him as an inspiration, as what made us work—I couldn’t lose that. I panicked. I could see the future. I knew Jean-Paul. That was it.

  I didn’t want to change him. I couldn’t change myself. I knew deep down in my heart that if I had gone back with Jean-Paul, he would never have forgiven me for going with Dolph. For the rest of our lives he would always bring it up. I would have to pay for it for the rest of my life if we stayed together. I always made sure Dolph was never around when Jean-Paul came to visit Paulo.

  Jean-Paul still brings it up—that I cheated on him. But I was always trying to tell him it was going to happen. He was always a little jealous—of John Carmen, of Chris Blackwell, of others who were part of presenting me to the world. He wanted to keep me to himself. Jean-Paul would be jealous of my press agent, even though he was gay. John could be sleazy, but he was very good at his job. Chris would say, “Your PR guy is the best.”

  He would get me in the press all the time without it becoming too much. John was naughty—he’d say, “When you get out of the limo, scratch the car, jump on it, make noise.” Basic stuff, but it did the job. Pictures of me went in the papers. We would always be a bit high. Living the dream of the nightlife and the music, laughing and having a ball. Jean-Paul didn’t like to go out. He was a workaholic. I was the mistress; the work was his wife. By the time he realized that was the problem, it was too late. He would see me frolicking with John, laughing pictures of me on the town making the newspapers, and he thought there was something going on.