I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  I was female, and they decided that I was rock ’n’ roll insane. Had I been a man, they would have considered I was merely retaining control, or professionally fretting about the details. Once they start treating you as though you are losing your grip, it becomes kind of true—in reacting to accusations that you are paranoid and incapable of acting responsibly, you end up seeming to confirm that you are paranoid and reckless. When you try and explain to people who have decided you have lost the plot that you haven’t lost the plot, and try to demonstrate your emotional balance, often by shouting about how absurd they are being, they think you are being hysterical. If you try and calmly deal with their fears, they think you are not being yourself, and that you are on the verge of collapse. They wore me down. They sabotaged me.

  You can tell why there are so few female film directors. It’s the same with any job that society has decided can only be done by a man: They find ways to undermine and undervalue a woman doing that job. And the fact that you end up saying “they” makes you sound paranoid. But there is no doubt that a particular job is usually for the boys: If a woman tries to do it, she is treated as though she is doing something wrong, even perverse.

  What are the chances of a female president being elected? The men-only corporate reaction is: What about the tampons?Will she bleed everywhere? What if she gets pregnant? What if she is going through menopause? What if she’s been through menopause and is therefore old and used up? It’s the same old caveman shit, a power thing. It’s why I want to fuck every man in the ass at least once. Every guy needs to be penetrated at least once. Do it yourself if you want. But that’s the vision—a woman lies there and the man goes in, takes control, whoosh. It’s all about power. The woman is always in the vulnerable position, and the man takes control. Come on. Everybody can be penetrated—mentally, too.

  Slowly, slowly, it changes. Too slowly.

  Signing to Capitol was like signing a contract where they give you something on the first page, and on the final page they take it all away. They wooed me with treats and pleasantries, and then they wanted to dress me in a little leather bikini and have me submit to being fucked in the ass.

  The other album I made for Capitol, Bulletproof Heart, was also tricky to make, because my personal life was becoming a psychodrama, and the record didn’t recapture the creative and commercial momentum I had in the first part of the 1980s. The Capitol years were, to put it mildly, not as exciting or inspiring as the Island years, or the Trevor Horn collaboration. The music business—which I had now settled into after making the decision that it would allow me to be more me than the film world, where you could not be in control of your appearance, art, psyche—was letting me down. I felt that everyone was expecting me to be much bigger commercially than I was, because of Madonna’s driven ’80s success with what the label bosses simplistically thought I did—that exhibitionistic disco-pop with videos unashamedly borrowing from art history and underground pop culture. That was not really what I was about. Even if it was, I had been there, done that. I am very stubborn, and I was always looking for the new, even if it makes life difficult for me. The new, or nothing.

  I would rather do nothing than do something that doesn’t satisfy me. If I am not enjoying what I am doing, I will beg to be fired. If I think, This is not making me feel motivated, if I am disappointed in a project because it has not gone in the right direction, I will stop. I stood there in a sixty-foot-wide skirt, painted by Keith Haring, who understood me, who knew that I belonged at all points in time, not only in Studio 54 or an MTV video, and the Capitol executives walked underneath my skirt, and I floated off into the sky.

  14.

  Crash

  There is a picture from the ’80s taken of me, Andy, Antonio Lopez, Keith Haring, Richard Bernstein, and the producer of Vamp. Yoko is in there as well. Looking at it now, it’s almost like The Last Supper. It’s spooky, because as you look from the edges, all the men started to die. One by one. All still young, and this one’s dead, this one’s dead, this one. Lovely Richard didn’t die in the 1980s, but his death in 2002 at sixty-two was still years too early.

  Because of Yoko you can’t help but think of John Lennon, who died at the very beginning of the decade. I would look at the picture and think, It’s creeping in toward me. There was a lot of death going on. You feel guilty for being alive. You don’t want to be around without them.

  People started to die very quickly, too. You heard they were ill, and then they were dead. It would hit strong, and it was horribly crafty, whatever it was. You seemed fine until you weren’t. It was that kind of thing. You’d see some lesions and think, Uh-oh, that’s a bad thing. Keith and I were dancing at the Garage a few weeks before he died. When Antonio passed away in 1987, no one knew what the cause was, or they wouldn’t say. It was still something that would be hidden. They said it was pneumonia. I thought, You don’t die from that. He was forty-four.

  Antonio was one of the first people I was close to who died from what they called complications from AIDS. There was a viral cause for the cancer he died from, Kaposi’s sarcoma, but that link wasn’t discovered until 1994. The 1980s were the dark ages, even though AIDS was first recognized in 1981, and several thousand men in New York and San Francisco were estimated to have been infected by HIV by 1978.

  Then it all came like a hurricane. It was before the drugs, before they learned how to control it. It wasn’t only AIDS. Death was swooping down in all sorts of ways. Andy died in surgery in 1987; Alex Sadkin from Compass Point died in a car crash the same year at thirty-eight; and in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat died from a heroin overdose at just twenty-seven. I wrote a song with Barry Reynolds called “Well Well Well,” really about Alex Sadkin, but it could have been for any of my friends who died. I’m on a tightrope / I think I’m falling / I can’t tell right from wrong / And I feel I’m alone again.

  There was this world where friends and friends close enough to be family were disappearing around you, leaving you feeling very vulnerable. AIDS was a dreadful, chaotic amplification of the deathless facts of mortality that we evaded while we partied in the ’70s. After the years of hard partying and sweating because of pleasure, it was becoming more and more a case of sticking around. Hanging on as people very close to you suddenly dropped out of sight.

  Keith worked until the end. He couldn’t stop. He had so much to say. He should still be saying it. It’s a world he helped to create. He should still be watching it, reacting to it, drawing it, brightening it.

  He was doing exhibitions all over the place up until two weeks before he died. He wasn’t even in bed for those two weeks. We all knew. It wasn’t talked about much. We didn’t have the words. I didn’t have the words.

  The attitude among many of those who were diagnosed was, Well, I am going to work as much as I can. There was also a feeling that they would find a cure, that a cure was right around the corner. If I can just hang in there, a pill will arrive, a cure will be found. Someone will sort it out. No one saw it coming, but once it was everywhere, a visible, terrible problem, it was surely going to be dealt with. Keith was only thirty-one when he died.

  At first there was a lot of paranoia, when people thought it was like a cold, that you could catch it by touch, or by being in the same room. People thought it was something you could breathe in and catch. A sneeze would give it you. The sweat of someone else. A kiss, the swapping of saliva. It was like we all needed to wear protective clothing.

  Any little scratch, feeling under the weather—vague symptoms, rashes, infections, marks on the skin, it was surely coming to get you. It was not a good time. You think you are next. Everyone in your circle, your crowd, might be next, the ones you had been hanging around since the days when you would have quick, glancing encounters with people as you passed through a city, a club, a party, a scene. The world seemed to accuse a certain section of people as though they had brought it on themselves through their careless, deviant behavior. Those were dangerous days, but we didn’t know it
at the time. We thought we were unstoppable.

  Tina Chow was one of the first women to be infected. She was diagnosed in 1989, having contracted it in the mid-’80s after an affair with Kim d’Estainville. He was quite a notorious bisexual playboy, and she knew at the time she was being a little naughty. Naughtiness was not meant to lead to such devastation.

  She was such a contemporary of mine, our lives almost running parallel—except she moved from America to Japan in the mid-’60s, but that move set her life in the kind of motion mine had, close to the same orbit, close to what turned out to be the same edge. She was photographed by Helmut, drawn by Antonio, painted by Andy—on the other end of the phone with Andy, him living through you, asking what you were up to today—muse of Miyake, feminine and masculine, androgynous haircut, the dressed object, the uncluttered look, blending cultural nuances from very different places, the imposed standards of perfection from her husband, the constant struggle to define herself.

  Even dying in 1992 meant the tabloid headlines shrieked that she had died of “the gay plague.” Tina’s death made it seem closer than ever. You couldn’t help but think of the people you had slept with or, even more so, of the people who had slept with the people you had slept with. It had been so easy to sleep around. In the places I was, everyone was so sexual. In Paris, it was food and sex. Wine, food, and sex. You can’t leave out the wine. Sex was a vital part of individual freedom. It was meant to lead to more life, not death.

  It was a catastrophic return to the days before syphilis, before antibiotics. I had always been so intrigued by sex because it was such a blank space and such a no-no growing up. For me, discovering it, savoring it, understanding it, were a part of escaping an emotional prison. The church made it seem like you would be punished in the most appalling manner imaginable if you indulged. I had made my mind up that they couldn’t be more wrong. Now, it started to seem as though maybe they had a point. Sex without love, without the protection of God, led to horror.

  Tina’s was one of the strangest of those deaths. It was very shocking, and it still throws me even now. I’d never thought of her having an affair, and getting into a position where she would be vulnerable. It was only one night, I think, and it made me realize how easily transmission can happen. A chance meeting, a spur-of-the-moment decision, and everything changed.

  Even by the time Tina died, no one really knew how you got it. People were guessing, and even when it became clearer what was involved you didn’t immediately trust the information. I thought, Well, if Tina can catch it, and sleeping around is definitely something she did not do, then anyone can catch it. It can’t be difficult to get. She was very private and very careful.

  An actor and model named Angelo Colon was my double in films, and he passed away because of AIDS at twenty-eight. He would sleep over at my place and sometimes sleep in my bed, when I wasn’t there. I thought, Well, that puts me at risk. There was a time when I believed, It’s bound to happen. My double died. Me next. It seemed a definite sign from above, or below. The random bullets were flying all around, and some of them were grazing my skin. I was never as careful as Tina.

  I remember saying to my mom, “I think I have it, I think it have caught it. I think I am next.”

  She was so positive. She kept telling me, “You are okay.”

  I got tested because my mom pushed me. I could feel it breathe down my neck. Angelo had bleeding gums, and I used to say to him, “Go and take care of your teeth.” He was so gorgeous and perfect looking, with flawless skin, very careful about his appearance, but he had little things happening to him beyond his control that I now realize were serious signs.

  We were in Ibiza once in the late ’80s—an inevitable next stop on my trail, just as the sunshine Balearic beat was being dreamed up. I was—casually, which was becoming increasingly lethal—seeing someone on the island, a roguish, very appealing Australian, Tony Pike, who had opened the Pikes Hotel in the late ’70s. One of his first guests was Stevie Wonder, who loved the place. Tony was very Hugh Hefner, and the hotel was notorious for hedonistic excess and attracting celebrities. They filmed Wham’s “Tropicana” video there, with a brief cameo for Tony, and Freddie Mercury’s monster-size forty-seventh birthday party was held in the hotel. Freddie knew by then that he had contracted AIDS, but very few at the party knew. The party was Studio 54/New Year’s Eve in Paradise–level; the end of an era, and therefore the beginning of another.

  Tony likes to tell stories about me that I am sure are quite true, or not true at all. The kind of stories that you wouldn’t remember too well if they actually happened. So you will never know for sure what’s real or not. I can make a few educated guesses.

  Tony made up a whole lot of stuff. He went off the deep end. He was totally obsessed. He fantasized quite a bit, made up his own version of Grace Jones, and then talked about her as though she existed. I became his project, except he didn’t turn me into a work of art; he turned me into a movie, or perhaps a soap opera with a hint of porn.

  Men would often fantasize about me, create this very out-there creature. I am out there anyway, and I am quite happy to play their out-there version of me, to go to their extremes, but when I get home, it’s over. Out there, I am onstage. At home, I am offstage. Some men couldn’t understand the difference, and that caused problems. They wanted the onstage Grace Jones at all times and didn’t understand how at home, behind closed doors, I am less prone to excess.

  That happens a lot with me in relationships; it is not so much my personality, but everything going on around me, and how people perceive me, that creates tension. There is always a point in any relationship I have where it becomes a case of that other Grace, the Grace that has been created around me through my reputation and image—she is the one that the other person begins to respond to.

  I have tried to simplify this as I’ve grown older, but maybe it has gotten more complicated for men. I think that when a man comes into my life, he believes he is going to get the public Grace, and not who I really am, which is much more of a house cat. I stopped going to parties (unless I am working) a long time ago. It takes a lot to get me to a party because it is so much work. After all the parties I went to, and gave, there’s nothing that can really surprise me. I tend to wait until most people have gone before I turn up.

  Men often have a preconceived idea of me thanks to the press. But the press me is never the real me. I work hard at never showing the press the real me. I jump on tables—that’s my trademark—I scream and shout, I play the diva according to their expectations, but this is not who I am at home. I jump on tables on talk shows, I release energy and wildness during a show, but essentially I am having fun with the idea of the performance, with me as a performance. I turn myself into a kind of party, but after you’ve been to a party, you don’t come home and have the same party.

  If I go out, I go out to do something different. When I go home, I like to watch tennis on the TV. I like the pace of it all, the characters and the inventiveness, the construction of a kind of argument. I have gotten to know many of the players. This is my private passion, and it’s not what a boyfriend expects, one who is expecting party Grace all the time. I used to watch with my dad. It was something we used to love doing together. He particularly loved watching the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, either apart or together.

  Now, I will watch with one of my close sister-friends, Suzette Newman, who has worked with Chris Blackwell as long as I have known him, and before that. We get so inside the matches that nothing else matters. Sometimes we go to live matches, and we often make our presence felt at Wimbledon. On the day of the Wimbledon final in 2012, between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, I was in the audience, but I was also due to perform in front of forty thousand at the outdoor Wireless Festival at Hyde Park across London. I had neglected to tell my management where I was in the afternoon, having decided I could fit both things in. I knew that I would be told it was impossible, but I knew I could make it work.

 
The final was still being played long after I was due at Hyde Park. In the end, I got changed and made up in the car on the way to Hyde Park, and eventually told my manager I was on my way—after much freaking out—arriving just in time to walk onstage and do my set. I considered this perfect timing, but Brendan Coyle, my manager, still feels the cold sweat to this day. It’s a Grace Jones performance. The band is all ready. The audience is all ready. Everything is ready. The curtain is about to go up. The intro is about to be played—the actor Ian McShane intoning the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Grace Jones,” as Trevor Horn got him to do during the “Slave” recording session. (How Ian got paid for supplying his voice cannot be revealed for legal reasons, alas.) But no Grace Jones. I had to see Rafael win before I did the show. I did, and still made the show, lipstick perfectly applied in a moving vehicle. I’ve got that down to an art, speeding through a city and getting ready for a show in the backseat of a car.

  I am known for being a huge Rafael Nadal fan. Even Andy Murray knows I am in Rafael Nadal’s camp. When Suzette and I were in the players’ lounge during the Wimbledon 2014 tournament, we happened to bump into Andy, and Suzette asked if we could have a photograph of us together. “Oh,” he drily remarked, remembering the last time I had met him, when I’d admitted my true preference. “I thought you were a Rafael fan.” He genuinely did not look that impressed. He was the defending champion that year and lost the very next day. Suzette was convinced we had jinxed him, and that he thought we had purposefully put him off his game by asking for a photo. Suzette and I totally live through the matches together, whether we’re watching them on television or at the venue, and from the outside our passion must look fearsome, but not in the expected Grace Jones way.