by Grace Jones
In Vamp they wanted to give me words, and I said, “No, I am too powerful to speak!” Too many words and you can get tangled up, trying to coordinate the words and the expressions. When I saw The Artist, I thought, Well, I wasn’t that far off the mark. For me, a silent movie and the atmosphere it creates are the pure essence of cinema, and if I had been alive during their heyday I would have been in my element.
Maybe Tom Holbrook took Dolph away from our house because I was getting a little Katrina-ish in real life. It’s hard to tell in Hollywood. If New York is a tragic, comic, stupendous, absorbing, sexy, enchanting opera with huge sets, Hollywood is a bright, corny advertising jingle that doesn’t even rhyme. In New York, you know when you are going mad, and you can enjoy it, or deal with it, or make art out of it. In Los Angeles, you cannot tell that you are going mad, because everyone around you is consumed by their own madness, hoping to make a movie about it.
I was so angry that Dolph was not coming home after being away for a week that my sister-friends Sarah, Tara, and I descended on the Sunset Marquis like we were Charlie’s Angels on a dangerous mission. I actually had a gun. It seemed very natural that I would go and fetch Dolph holding a gun. I did so out of desperation—we had been together for years and had made this move to L.A., a place I absolutely loathed, against my better judgment, and then he comes back from being away and Tom blocks me from even seeing him. What is going on?
We three girls got ourselves worked up and then decided, Let’s go and get him! Sarah asked me where I’d gotten the gun. I said, “Well, it came with the house.” In L.A., everything came with the house, including a gun. We turned up at the hotel, not to shoot anyone, but to make sure he came with us. We banged on the door of his room. Bang, bang, bang! I’ve got a gun! Elsewhere, Los Angeles carried on being Los Angeles, expecting such behavior, a similar scenario being played out elsewhere across the synthetic city; it’s what they base their myths on—violence and despair and money. I’m screaming, “Let him out, you bastard!” It was as though Tom was holding him hostage and we had come to rescue him, hair flying, legs flailing, breasts heaving, guns flashing, music pumping. This was the kind of hysteria that took place in Los Angeles.
In one of the many lives I never got to live, another Grace (one who never came true) shot Dolph there and then. Or rather, the bloodsucking Katrina wired for sex shot the titanic Drago bound for glory, one savage beast pulled down by another, in a city teeming with savage beasts tearing each other’s hearts out for the sake of a part, a hit, a job, a high, a fuck, an award. And that was the end of the ballad of Grace and Dolph. Dolph lived to see another action movie, and another, until the end of time, and I got to move the hell out of Hollywood.
* * *
Jessica Lange went to Hollywood for similar reasons as Dolph after she modeled and then became an actress. I once bumped into her on the street in New York. I was pregnant with Paulo at the time and was going to the Carnegie Deli for a sandwich. It was raining, and I hate umbrellas. I wear a hooded coat by Issey Miyake, so I don’t have to carry an umbrella. And there she was, passing me on the street. We hadn’t seen each other for years, not since Paris. We were standing in the rain talking about what we were going to do with our lives. I said, “Come up to my apartment on Fifty-Seventh and Seventh.”
We were so cozy in my warm and dry little flat. She was telling me all about her film career after she had made King Kong. She had signed a big Hollywood contract, and I could see that the heartbreak had already started. No matter what you sign, they never pay attention to it. That’s why I don’t sign anything anymore. What’s the point? You sign something, and they still do what they want to do. You have big hopes, and that inevitably means big disappointments. She said, “I was supposed to get this role, but someone else got it. Nothing is going like they said.” You could see the frustration and despair written on her face—on the verge of becoming destructive. That kind of deal with Hollywood as the devil can be totally dangerous.
I remember saying to her, as if I were exorcising a demon, “GET OUT OF THAT PLACE!” It was like a monster movie: The bogeyman is going to get you unless you run! Don’t even collect your stuff, get the hell out of there! I said to her, “If they want you, they know where you are. If they really want you, they will go to the ends of the earth to get you.”
Jessica listened to me! Shortly after that, she did a movie with Bob Fosse, All That Jazz. And she never moved back to L.A.
Hollywood always maintains the illusion that in order to get a job there, you have to live there. That’s the most ridiculous thing ever—when you have jet planes, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump from New York. It’s not the other side of the world. My attitude was: If you want me, you know where I am. I don’t have to live among you. As free as L.A. is supposed to make you feel, that is where I feel the most in prison.
That’s why I hate it there—I’ll go for a couple of weeks if I have to now, but it is a very destructive and dangerous place. It was easy to see how horribly phony the place was after a couple of visits. It was like a little birdie told me: Here’s a message. A strong message. This place is not for you. This place is going to be the death of you. It’s a place that is cursed and that perhaps goes all the way to the early fallout of the big bang that created everything. It is dead earth, dry earth, a desert never meant to be built on. It is such a destructive place, and if you have to go there, go only for a short while, and make sure you protect yourself. Otherwise, they will suck you dry.
Some people only see the sunshine. But that disguises the disaster. They call it the City of Angels? Jesus Christ—it’s the opposite, it’s a demon city. That place can convince you to wreck your integrity just like that. It’s built on making people sell their souls for the smallest chance of a part. Perhaps I felt it through meeting Jessica on Fifty-Seventh Street, how trapped she was, how much pain she was going through. Get out now! Are you waiting for them to beat you up and bury you?
I had another girlfriend, Sarah Douglas, with whom I’d worked on Conan the Destroyer. She was the Bad Queen, and then she was in Superman with Terence Stamp. And then she went to Hollywood. I told her to get out of Hollywood as well. She didn’t leave. Years later, she said to me, “I wish I had listened to you.” She was made to feel that she had to stay in L.A. in order to get work . . . even though she wasn’t living there when she was cast in Superman II. The whole casting system makes it all seem so urgent. They act like it is all such a hurry: If you are not around, you blow your chance. It’s best to keep a kind of mystery. Maintain a kind of deception.
The whole Hollywood world loves the organized chaos of the process. Especially the casting process. They will write a role for you and then make you jump through hoops to get it, almost make you beg—even though they have already decided it’s for you.
I landed a part in an Eddie Murphy film, Boomerang. Jean-Paul and I had hired him early in his career as the support on the American shows for A One Man Show. We needed someone who wouldn’t get in the way of the show itself or the set—a stand-up comedian was perfect. And Eddie Murphy was the perfect comedian to hire. Years later he started to make movies that were essentially one-man shows, and he invited me to do the film as a thank-you for hiring him early in his career.
In Boomerang Eddie plays a debonair stud, naturally, and I, naturally, was hired to play someone raucously silly from the fashion world with a silly name—Strange, pronounced Strawn-j. My role involved taking my knickers off in public, rubbing them in people’s faces, chasing the pants off Eddie, and saying the word pussy a lot with an accent that is from nowhere on Earth. Styled like an Egyptian sex doll, I was launching a new fragrance, which I was thinking about calling Love Puss or Pig Puke or Steel Vagina. . . . I have no idea why they thought of me for the role.
They were apparently amassing information about me when they were writing the role, because they wanted the character to reflect who I was. They were asking people who had worked with me to tell them funny stories about m
e, so they could use them in the writing. Stories about my behavior to build up a cameo from real life, even though what they ended up with is as far removed from real life as you can imagine. They did the same with Eartha Kitt, and she ends up playing a nymphomaniac.
They asked the director of Vamp for stories about what I was like. How I behaved when I did certain things, what I did when I had to turn into a vampire, how extroverted I would be on set. There was one incident on A View to a Kill when I was recording some dialogue for the film in a vocal booth, and my clothes were rustling. So I took them off. I did my lines nude.
That became a kind of legend that was passed on to Boomerang. They built that into the film: I go through a metal detector wearing a metal dress, which sets off the alarm, so I take the dress off and walk through the machine naked. You find yourself acting out chewed-up versions of your life as you pass through something that has absolutely nothing to do with you. And a Hollywood movie doesn’t really belong to anyone; it is not really the result of a great, single vision. It is a peculiar misshapen collaboration between hundreds of people who only know what they need to know in order to make their contribution. No one is really in charge, just the momentum that is generated by the fact it is being made, and costs millions and millions of dollars. That movies end up looking in any way coherent is either a fluke, or because they have been so fastidiously designed. The standard kind of Hollywood movies are as empty and unreal, as strange and unnecessary, as the town itself.
You realize that you are easily replaceable as well, even if you are the only person on the planet who seems qualified to play the horny, eerie, vampiric, stripping, singing, alien, semi-naked, bloodthirsty character with funny hair. They will find someone else, and you find that you can replace someone else too easily as well. I later found out that Bianca Jagger was the first choice to play Katrina in Vamp, and during the preproduction of Boomerang I bumped into Iman at a fitting at Alaïa’s. She had been promised the role of Strange and had no idea that I had been given it. That was embarrassing, as we are really good friends.
In music, only I sing like I do; only I can make Grace Jones records. I star as myself in a setting and story I can control, and there can be no substitute, at least not one with my name, face, attitude, voice, and songs.
I really thought that acting was where I wanted to go. After making the kinds of films I ended up making I realized that this was not actually what I wanted. I had to have the experience to realize that it is not really for me. In the kinds of films I was hired for, I was moved around like a pawn; I was effectively a cartoon character. That is okay in theory, but not when I think of all the effort I put into it.
I always play a character clearly based on the public version of me. I wanted people to see through me to Strange, and it always pleases me when people see me in the streets and mention Strange, or May Day from View to a Kill, more than Grace Jones. These characters so obviously looked and sounded like me, and I was chosen more because of my scary, wayward pop image than for my ability to become someone else, so it is great that people see the characters, and not me. There were elements of the characters that I managed to make stronger than me, and that was very satisfying. To some people I did more than merely play myself, and even though I never got a chance to play a character who was not essentially me in a cartoon setting, I took the characters outside myself.
In the end, there are only so many times I can play the demented diva based on the zanier parts of my reputation. Maybe if I had accepted being the Snake Lady in Blade Runner I would now be acting in things a little more serious, in Game of Thrones, or the X-Men series, cartoons, still with semi-naked girls and far-fetched monsters, but with something realer and deeper added.
I saw that the film business was a motherfucking beast, and one that would have killed me if I had kept going. If I had taken more control, had attempted to become a more serious part of a project, not simply a loopy, sex-mad caricature, even directed, I would not have lasted. If I had gone into film full-time and become more creatively involved, I would have killed myself by now. It is next to impossible to get in a situation where all the people involved in the project are moving in the same direction at the same time with the same purpose. Even making a record with a few people, it is hard to get that, but more likely.
Making a movie is about climbing the highest mountain, flying through the sky, landing on your feet, swimming across oceans, surviving avalanches, walking in space—it all keeps coming. I have total respect for whoever can come through all of that without losing their mind, or being treated as though they have.
13.
She
Nile Rodgers had wanted to work with me for a long time, and I had obviously wanted to work with him, since the disco days with Sy and Eileen and the Studio 54 fiasco. The opportunity finally came years after the Studio 54 doorman had told him to fuck off, and when it did, he was more or less the number one producer in the world.
My contract with Island Records had run out. I had promised to re-sign, but Capitol was chasing me like crazy. They had courted me for a year, sending me baskets of fruit and cheese. It was one of those million-dollars-an-album-for-five-albums deals. Very tempting. In the end I felt really bad that I didn’t stay with Island, but Capitol was offering so much money. I was in tears at the thought of leaving Island, but Chris Blackwell said there was just no way he was able to top their offer. I was unsure. Chris and I talked about it at length. I felt like I was breaking my word.
I had a feeling I was going to regret it. I said to Chris, “This might not be the best move.”
He said, “Oh, go on and take the money. We can’t compete.”
It was a heartbreaking moment for both of us. I was in tears. I took the money, but I should have resisted the temptation. It was emotional turmoil, and I learned my lesson: Don’t always go for the money.
None of the people who were keen on me, though, was the head of the company. To some extent the head of the company would always change, and eventually the person in charge didn’t really like me. The people who were chasing me to sign with Capitol were reactivating the great Blue Note jazz label, which made the move seem human, and about music . . . but they were replaced. I ended up dealing with a whole different set of people who never wanted me in the first place and didn’t really like what I did. They decided I was a disco queen whose crown had slipped, if not totally fallen off. Fashions moved quickly in the 1980s, and within a few years you could go from being totally today to just someone else half-forgotten from yesterday. Keeping up was hard, and the fact that the record industry itself was going through all sorts of changes and panic didn’t help. I was stuck with them and they were stuck with me, and after the creative, family closeness of Island, the corporate nature of Capitol was quite a shock.
In the end, the heads of companies like Capitol in the ’80s and ’90s had more in common with Sy and Eileen than with Chris Blackwell in terms of where they wanted to position me—as a cabaret-style cash cow, not as an artist-creature-object reacting to and creating atmosphere. Their idea of my wildness and creative ambition was that it was nothing but a pose, not something rooted in my entire being. At Island, I had been allowed to fuse the visual and the musical, and I took it for granted that would happen at Capitol. It was very different, though, much more brutal, and very basic.
Chris said, “Let’s end this with one last record for Island,” and that became Slave to the Rhythm. That was like the transfer fee: It was a Capitol release, but Island got a percentage. Manhattan Island was a label formed only for the release of Slave to the Rhythm, a one-off joint venture between Capitol’s Manhattan and Island Records. It was an in-between moment between one label and the other.
Trevor Horn had spent so much time and money producing the one track that he and Chris suggested making a whole album from the one song, a sort of musical documentary in record form of my life. The budget for the record would make more sense for an album than for a single, although even t
hen it was gigantic. It was certainly one of the most expensive singles ever produced, if not the most expensive single. I nearly fainted when I saw the final bill, which ultimately was what I was paying, even though I never sanctioned that amount. It would take until the end of time to have paid it back even if it was a number one single all over the world; it was a relative success but not a complete smash hit. But once Trevor was in the zone, there was no stopping him. It was as though he was directing a movie, and he was Steven Spielberg, with a limitless budget.
Also, even though we were no longer together, Jean-Paul was working in close collaboration with Trevor on the artwork for the record, so the perfectionism of Trevor was further complicated by the perfectionism of Jean-Paul. The result was art, art fascinated with the whole legend that pop music, entertainment, and fashion had become by then, dedicated to rearranging and enhancing it, opening up new directions, but Capitol was more interested in an efficient piece of dance product, practically packaged, that would do the job.
Chris and I sat in a room with the executives at Capitol to play the album for them—they were anxious because they had thought it was a single and now it was an album. They were bickering away, worried about what to call it, and I was kicking Chris under the table. It wasn’t a single, it wasn’t an album. Trevor had delivered this selection of tracks that derived from the original song, not a collection of remixes, but the same song variously extended and rewritten so that it became a number of songs. It was ingenious, but not an instant commercial hit—playfully controversial like a Madonna album, or slickly frenetic like a Janet Jackson record—that Capitol had been expecting.
Chris came into the office, put it on, told them it would take about thirty-three minutes, and then walked out of the room. He knew it would be okay. He loved what Trevor had done, and thought it was the perfect, elegant way to say goodbye to Island and hello to Capitol. He saw it was a way of taking in the disco me and the Compass Point me, and then introducing the next me, extending the brand, deepening the myth. He said to me, “Don’t worry, they’re all going to want a piece of this. It’s one song, but it’s a hell of a show. No one will care when they hear it—it’s not the same thing repeated over and over again.”