by Grace Jones
Roger Moore said to me, “Please stop looking at me like that, with such venom.” It made him really uncomfortable. I was a killer. I was willing to kill. In my real life, I would only do that for my son. More for blood than for a lover. Generally I would hurt myself before killing anyone. Roger Moore was such a softie, although he did have incredibly hard legs and the stiffest hair, and he was so relaxed about the whole thing—some would say too relaxed—that he didn’t like me glaring at him off set like I really was a henchwoman and he really was the spy I was determined to kill.
I was on such a strict schedule, and it could become quite taxing. I had to be in the car by four forty-five in the morning. When I was doing James Bond in Britain, I met Danny Huston, the son of legendary film director John Huston. He was directing the “making of” film for the Santa Claus movie where Dudley Moore played Patch, one of Santa’s elves. It was his first professional job, and he was editing at Pinewood near the set where we were filming. He was only about twenty-three. We had a very secret affair. I was very good at secrets. It was good to have some privacy. It was nice to get up to something that no one knew anything about. Danny and I didn’t really get involved at first; we just started hanging out. I would go to his editing room and have a little joint. It was a little bit of wild time outside the discipline of making the film.
They didn’t know who was going to be my lover and boss, the film’s main villain—at first it was going to be David Bowie. He declined, because he said he didn’t want to be in a film where for most of it his character would be played by a stand-in doing the stunts. He also wanted to see the script, and for a long time they weren’t ready. They then asked Mick Jagger, because they definitely wanted this to be a rock ’n’ roll MTV Bond. He didn’t want to do it either, and they were struggling with getting a male rock star for the villain.
The role was eventually taken by Christopher Walken, styled in the film to be very Thin White Duke Bowie—lean, mean, blond, and suavely narcissistic. Chris was very cool and friendly on set, but it took a little bit of time to get close to him. I had a crush on Chris in real life, but for the sake of the role I wanted to keep my distance. I was totally committed to him as my boss, but I decided to play it that when we had a love scene it would feel intense to me, that I would really feel the moment. Plus, I was really very shy in this world.
At our first meeting the director, John Glen, had said, “You are the actors. You do the acting, and anything you do wrong, I will fix it in the editing room.” He was very much an action director and not really interested in the mechanics of acting. The actors were left to it.
I interpreted his speech about the editing room as meaning: If you are no good, you will be cut. Most of you will disappear onto the cutting-room floor. I remember being incredibly scared. Fuck, what do I do now? I didn’t like the thought that I would be left to my own devices.
I said to my teacher, Warren Robertson, that the director was not going to help me much as an actor. I was on my own, and I didn’t think I was experienced enough to deal with that, especially as part of what was such a brand, and such an industrial process. I wanted to be super-professional without taking it too seriously. I just wanted to get on set and push a button and be in character. I had wanted Warren to teach me this, to help me work out how to do it.
Warren told me to go to Chris for help. He had taught Chris. And Chris was very helpful. We would slowly get to know each other. In the script, we had a sex scene together, and that becomes an important part of the dynamic. You know the sex scene is coming. Everyone on the set knows the sex scene is coming. The tension builds up. I didn’t want Dolph there. He is very Scandinavian about sex—he wasn’t the jealous type. He was very open, and that openness bound us together, and was never the direct cause of any problems we might have had. But I didn’t want him there while I filmed the love scene with Chris. There was another reason, really. Dolph was beginning to try acting, fairly informally at first, and there was a little friction because it seemed he might be hanging on to my coattails. I felt, for the sake of my Bond character and her single-mindedness, that I needed to be on my own. I was feeling nervous about the scene. It would have been too distracting having Dolph around, as if this was about him as much as me.
The sex scene with Chris involved nothing more than some passionate kissing, but it ended up so intense that it was edited out when the film was shown on certain South American airlines. Chris and I managed to generate some genuine sexual tension—his wife said to me, “If I didn’t know you were in love with Dolph, I would have been jealous.”
I was the first Bond girl to help create her own costume. Usually it was Cubby Broccoli’s wife, Barbara, who was in control of the clothing, but I thought that a part of why they asked me was because of my own style. I knew what I wanted, how I was going to look as a Bond girl. I was way ahead of the game. I looked at Disney colors, because I figured being a Bond girl was like being in a cartoon. I picked out every piece of fabric. I took in tips I had learned from Issey and Kenzo, and had direct input from one of my other favorite designers who became a friend, Azzedine Alaïa, but Bowie and Jagger were right in thinking that you have trouble operating with any kind of soul, or intimate energy, inside such an industrial production. You are a small cog, as huge pieces of machinery are dropped in around you. Your main job is to try to make sure you are not crushed by all this falling machinery.
The Bond team was amazing. There were bits I was afraid of, but I did the best I could to make sure I looked in control. I watched all the previous movies. I developed the character so that you would know her even if she was miles away, hidden in the shadows. I took in all my experience of being me, wearing certain clothes, pulling certain faces. It’s a Bond film, but the way I looked at it, I wanted it to be the best cartoon I had ever seen. Take it extremely seriously up to a point, and then stop. Take the film for what it was, and try to have a great time. I also wanted to make sure that people didn’t look at me in the film and say, “Well, that’s just Grace Jones.” I wanted people to think of me as May Day.
I got on great with Roger Moore. He was very funny and easygoing. He helped me a lot, because I wanted so much to be good. I was a worrier. I worried that I didn’t know what I was doing. When I got stuck he would humor me.
I remember I had to walk in on Roger as Bond in a scene, and I was meant to look surprised to see him alive. It is very difficult to be surprised to see someone who shouldn’t be there when you know he is going to be there. We had done three takes already, and I wasn’t experienced enough to work out how to look surprised when I knew exactly what was about to happen. I know he’s there! I read it in the script, and we have rehearsed it and done some takes. He’s there in bed; how can I be surprised? That kind of pretending I found a little troubling. I couldn’t look surprised! Eventually Roger stuck something stupid on his head, and I was really surprised to see it, so I looked surprised, and that was the take they used.
It seemed appropriate that I appear in a James Bond film, because of the connection between Bond; his maker, Ian Fleming; Jamaica; and Chris Blackwell. Chris’s mother, Blanche, was for many years the mistress of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond books. He visited Jamaica during the war, attending a naval conference exploring the potential presence of Nazi U-boats in the Caribbean Sea, and he fell in love with the island’s peace and silence and what he described as its “cut-offness” from the world. He was determined to come back after the war, and in 1946, he built a holiday home in Jamaica on the north coast near the quiet banana port of Oracabessa. The twisting, tree-lined roads hugging the coast alongside the sea would have reminded him of English country lanes, but with the addition from paradise of the glittering, sometimes choppy, purposeful sea, the soft white sand, and the neon-blue sky. He found fifteen acres of land, an old donkey racecourse on a secret coral beach protected by a reef. He called the modest, minimal bungalow he built Goldeneye. It was where he wrote all fourteen of the Bond books—without Jama
ica, a universe away from the low-sky postwar grayness of London, there would be no Bond. He loved birds, and one of his favorite books was a reference book, Birds of the West Indies, by James Bond.
Chris worked as a location scout on the first Bond film, Dr. No, when some scenes were shot in Jamaica, including the classic scene where Ursula Andress’s Honey Rider, wearing a belted white bikini, walks out of the sea—a private beach called Laughing Water—suggestively carrying her conch shell. May Day was a descendent of Honey Rider. We all belonged to the same family.
Chris bought the Goldeneye estate in 1976 after trying to get Bob Marley to buy it, and turned it into a resort that protected and showcased the Fleming history. Fleming’s writing desk, where he would write the Bond books, is still there. Elizabeth Taylor, Charlie Chaplin, and Sophia Loren used to holiday with Ian Fleming; now it is Jay Z, Johnny Depp, and Bono who come to stay, and in between there was Mick and Bianca.
Ian Fleming loved to snorkel, and one day he was snorkeling in the water of his private beach at the foot of the cliff where his house was built. He swam out to a small rock that poked out of the warm blue sea like something human frozen in time, and spotted an octopus just under the water’s surface. This became the setting for a short story he wrote, “Octopussy.”
I have visited Goldeneye many times, and spent some time there working on this book, because of the way the place clears the head and revives the soul. I have taken my mom and dad there, who agree with Chris that the place has a magical atmosphere. Many who visit plant a tree there, labeled with their name, helped by Ian Fleming’s original gardener, Ramsey Dacosta. I have planted a tree there, alongside those planted by the Clintons, Princess Margaret, Bono, and Pierce Brosnan, and I love to see how quickly and confidently it has grown over the years. One or two others nearby have not fared as well.
Noël Coward was one of the first visitors to Goldeneye after it was built. Coward was once described as fourteen men in one; I often feel I am fourteen in one as well. He adored the location, although not so much the modest house Fleming had built—with no hot water or glass windows. He first built a home called Blue Harbour, five miles along the coast from Goldeneye, but that became such a social whirlpool he felt the need for a quieter, less accessible place. He had a simpler house built farther up the hill, in the local, spartan tradition, on the site of an old pirate lookout that was originally called, unsurprisingly, Look Out. You can see the Blue Mountains in the distance across Port Maria Bay, one of the longest beaches on the island, where Europeans first came ashore. His new house was kept apart from the rest of the island by rugged narrow lanes tightly winding upward under sparkling canopies of trees and bushes, each leaf laid sleekly in place, a true, divine hideaway.
Noël Coward renamed his island home Firefly, because of the lightning bugs that covered the ground. This was my nickname when I was a child. One of Chris Blackwell’s companies now maintains Firefly as a museum. The place is still as hard to find as it once was, close to what it was like when stars, royalty, and politicians would visit. Chris talks of having tea with Noël Coward once—another of his early mentors—with Burt Bacharach and Marlene Dietrich. It all seems to be part of what I called the Giant Octopus, where huge tentacles stretch out around the world—and my life—generating a tangle of coincidences, associations, and connections that spring up and multiply as fast as anything growing on Jamaica.
11.
Delay
I remember this one time when Keith and Andy were waiting for me because Keith was going to paint my body, and Andy was going to watch and take photographs. I was late. They waited two hours. They waited patiently, because they expected it to happen. When I did arrive, on the back of a motorcycle, Keith was fine, because, he said, as soon as the task at hand was under way, I was totally committed. I was in the moment.
It was as though that’s why I was late—because where I was before, I was totally committed to that task, and wouldn’t leave until it was completed. Whatever it was, something important or something trivial, I concentrated on it to such an extent that the next thing I was meant to do was forgotten. Even something as special as having my body painted by Keith Haring, while Andy Warhol recorded it all.
Was I always late, for everything, all my life? As a child, no. I always had to be on time. There was definitely a punishment for lateness hanging on the wall. Slowly, as I left my childhood, I would be later and later for things. I didn’t think of it as being rude or lazy. I am always busy doing something, even if that is simply getting ready, or getting ready to get ready. Sometimes I am a bit late for the first thing I do in a day, and then a bit later for the next appointment, and then the lateness will multiply. By the end of the day, I am very late. Then I will stay up late, which means I begin the next day later than I should. Even if I think I am early, I am a little late.
Sometimes I might be in one time zone but feeling I am in another. I will be in London or Paris on New York/Jamaican time. Locally—when I am at my home in London—it is three in the afternoon. In my head it is ten in the morning. It takes me some doing to catch up with European time when I am feeling more New York, or more Jamaican. In London, I’ll reach peak wakefulness at four in the morning, because in Jamaica it is eleven at night. A lot of the time I am on L.A. time, which is eight hours behind London. As dawn rises, I am having what in Los Angeles are end of the evening conversations with my brother Noel, my mother when she’s staying out there, or Marjorie Grant, my business manager. I’m in three or four time zones at the same time.
The lateness also became more apparent, and notorious, once I started to perform. Half of the time I was late arriving onstage. I was asked to be late. That’s a big secret about my lateness. It has to do with money. A lot of the time when people are waiting for me to appear, I am waiting myself backstage. The clubs want to make money on the booze, and because people leave as soon as I finish, they make me wait so they can sell more booze. They pay me the door money, so they need the money from the bar. That was in my contract. They wouldn’t let me go onstage even if I wanted to. In that case, I might as well turn up late, rather than hang around. And then people started to expect me to be late. It became a Grace Jones thing. There would be disappointment if everything ran smoothly.
I admit, sometimes it will be my fault, the lateness, but never in vital circumstances. I might be a week late sometimes, say, for a chat show appearance in Australia. But I turn up and give everything I have, and, secretly, I think the late Grace is preferred in those circumstances to the Grace that politely turns up on time. It is not as though being late has ruined a whole performance. When I need to be on time, because something relies on total punctuality, I am on time.
It became part of my reputation. Part of my image. I should not spoil the mystery concerning my lateness. And I do help the mystery along. If people expect me to be late, I arrive late. How boring, she has not arrived. She’s two hours late. What on earth is she doing? The audience would boo and jeer—Burn the witch! Burn the witch!—and then I would go out there and say, “Okay, bring it on!” Or I would sing one line of a song, and they would forget how long they had waited. It was worth the wait—that was the point. Keep the audience waiting, and then make sure it was worth the wait.
You can’t be late when you are filming. You couldn’t be late for the Concorde. (Well, actually you could be—I once arrived just as the plane was about to take off, and they stopped the flight and came and got me.) You can’t be late for the theater. You can’t be late for a court appearance. You can’t be late for live television. You can’t be late for Pavarotti. You can’t be late for the Queen of England. There are some things you can be late for, and I’m very good at being late. But there are some things you cannot be late for, and then I can be amazing at turning up on time.
When I am filming, I am never late. There were many productions I was involved in where they worried about me being late, because there were always rumors about how long people were waiting for me at
photo sessions and live shows. It became part of the legend. But for films, I had to be there at four in the morning, and I could not possibly be late, because it would cost so much money. On the Bond film, Barbara Broccoli was put in charge of coming to get me because I was known to be late. But I was never late. It’s a different animal, filming. It is not the night, it is not about anticipation, and it is not about the kind of glamour that lateness can accentuate.
I remember when I was recording “Slave to the Rhythm” with Trevor Horn. Trevor produced records in the tradition of the disco producer. He didn’t expect a collaboration, but in his case, if you inspired him, he would give everything, whatever the time and cost, to produce a very special piece of music.
He spent most of the time with his team in the studio building the track like the extreme perfectionist he is. I was very happy to let him make the blueprint to his exact design—order the material, build the foundations, start to construct the rooms. It took time, but when he had a vision, there was no one better to trust.
I had never worked with anyone like Trevor. He allowed me to experiment with my voice in a way no one had before. He let me be free to try things out in every part of the song. To attack, to be sweet, to be operatic, and then he pieced all these fragments together. The voice led to the tone and texture of the track, and the arrangement and dynamic of the music were devoted to how I had sung each word and phrase. The music was built up around my vocals.
I felt that Trevor totally understood the scope of my voice, the theatrical extremes. He totally got it.
He reminded me of my German singing teacher in New York, allowing me to try whatever came to mind. I don’t have to sound like Aretha, or whoever the producers had finished working with, or whatever song was the last big hit. He wasn’t thinking about whether a song would sound good on the radio, or in Madison Square Garden. He wanted to get the best possible performance out of me within the limits of me being me. That was his template. He had a way of motivating me without putting pressure on me. Working with him reminded me of when I used to sing before it became a responsibility, when it was like a hobby, but he also made me realize that my singing is my responsibility, and I like it like that.