by Grace Jones
Another obsession that alienates some new boyfriends is making jigsaw puzzles. I will sometimes stay up all night doing them, usually when I need to clear my head and get some inspiration about something I am working on. In a brand-new relationship where the man is looking for the screaming idol to hit the heights, this is often not tolerated. I love the big 1,000- to 3,000-piece puzzles that Ravensburger makes, and by the end of a project I will have a finished one. I always pick up a couple at Galeries Lafayette when I am in Paris, and in Piazza San Marco in Venice, or at Times Square in New York.
I think of Kane’s wife in Citizen Kane, Susan Alexander, alone in his big mansion, clothed in diamonds and chiffon, surrounded by majestic statues, completing puzzle after puzzle, her actions representing the passage of time, fractured personalities, and unsolved mysteries. The couple’s voices echo in the vast emptiness of the hall. “It makes a whole lot more sense than collecting statues.” Why do you do it? “I do it because I like it.”
I like to cook, especially those meals and marinades that I feel have been handed down from my ancestors like bone structure and deep memories. In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I might dramatize things a bit, but only because I take things seriously, or sometimes not seriously enough.
I need a man who is not blinded by the temporary-performance Grace, the working Grace, the Grace that works at play. That Grace, the one people want to hang out with, the ones who want to photograph me, go wild with me—it is all very temporary, and it’s a Grace that will not exist once I become a nobody in the eyes of everybody.
Tony talks of cocaine binges and intoxicated lust. Well, he might be on to something there. He remembers parties I threw in the dark on the waterfront in New York that smelled of semen and marijuana. Orgies I hosted. If a party I was at turned into an orgy, well, I always let people do what they want to do. I can’t think of any warehouses where there were the kind of orgies he describes, but there would be parties I hosted where I would wake up and there would be bodies everywhere, in the bath, spread around, some who I hadn’t even invited, gate-crashers. They weren’t called orgies in the ’60s. They were called “love-ins.” Hell, I’m a hippie—like Jesus, who probably enjoyed a good love-in himself.
When I reluctantly lived for a year in L.A. with Dolph, when he was seriously pursuing an acting career, I got the nickname “the Errol Flynn of the ’80s” because of my parties. It was the only way I could cope with the evil of Hollywood while I was living there. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t go anywhere, because I wouldn’t drive, not into this paved-over emptiness. I would be sent home by the police if I walked anywhere. I had the worst claustrophobia, and at the same time, I didn’t want to go out into this creepy artificial paradise. I thought I was going mad, trying to scratch out some sort of personal space where I felt myself.
Getting high was how I got through, and giving special weekend parties that I would design to perfection. I would give the very best party. I would have the best coke, and let it breathe like a fine wine, pile it up and put it under a gold dome on a silver platter, with a gold spoon. I really did prefer to get the coke for others, to look after them. Then I would have the Quaalude room, the marijuana room, the Marianne Cocoa Puff room, with music in each room to match the high or the low. I would make sure everyone was well catered to, whatever their interests and tastes. No one would go wanting.
If there were ever an orgy—or love-in—in my vicinity, I wouldn’t be hosting it. I would be at the center. I’d be the queen bee, darling. I wouldn’t want everyone else having all the fun. And if it was in a period where I was with no one in particular, well, there would be plenty of men around who had been wanting me, waiting for me, and who were waiting to jump in. I would move around, never stay too long with one person, be very friendly with them all. None of this seemed to be taking any sort of life-threatening risk.
Venice was a great place for these kinds of parties. The ornate masks, the billowing water lapping against the walls, the sexual dreaminess. But I would always be at the center. Never anything as dreary as the host. I didn’t want to run things. I wanted to perform.
At my parties, I would let people do what they wanted as long as they didn’t die. That was the number one rule. People could have all the fun they wanted, but no one should die. No overdoses, no drinking too much, no collapsing, no falling out of the window, no drowning in the bathtub. No accidents. Don’t spoil the party. If you wanted to kill yourself you had to leave the house and walk across the highway.
Tony says that I asked him to pick up the ugliest girls he could find so that I could watch them have sex. An ugly girl? Absolutely not! He is making that up. That is his fantasy, or his crooked memory. I experimented with a certain openness with Dolph, and he had a very open, Scandinavian approach to sex, but that was a very private thing, and not what Tony is talking about. I admit I occasionally like window dressing, if you know what I’m saying. I don’t know what he means by ugly, but I was very particular about my choices. I wouldn’t even want someone who had a funny voice. If their voice was odd, I would want them to keep their mouth shut, so that it didn’t spoil the fantasy.
Tony says that he became my road manager and would have sex with me minutes before I went onstage because I needed the power that he was there to provide because of his colossal organ and his eternal erection. He did have an enormous penis, and I was happy to take care of it. I am not saying we didn’t have sex. A few times. We weren’t together for very long—and he was not my road manager. We never spent a lot of time together; I would hook up with him when I was in Ibiza, but no more than that.
He was a cool guy. I like those kinds of ebullient, charming characters, and I meet a lot of them when I travel. They help pass the time easily. Tony was another man with a full-time girlfriend I knew nothing about who tried to kill me when she found out about us. I had no idea. He started to have a huge portrait of me more or less naked painted to hang above his bed, and she was not pleased with this idea. I can understand that. She came after me with a knife. I was often the target of a spurned girlfriend with a lethal weapon.
I don’t remember being at the Freddie Mercury party, like he has said I was. I was only in Ibiza when I was working. I genuinely don’t think I was there. I don’t think I would have forgotten that. I don’t get that carried away. I think Tony made up the guest list after the event, an ideal guest list that didn’t take into account who was actually there. You would think that Grace Jones should have been at such a party, so the legend becomes that I was. Perhaps it was my double, one of my clones, my shadows, the one with the epic coke problem, not me at all.
It’s a pity. He lost the plot. It became clear that he was only using me to promote his hotel. And since then he has been using me to promote his own legend. I have nothing against that, but I have my own story to protect, and I want the details to be right, or, if they are wrong, to be wrong in a way that works for me!
He can fantasize all he wants—I never like to burst those bubbles. But he went too far when he said we were getting married. We made the papers on the island, around the world. It was news to me, but he always knew how to sell himself, and his hotel, and the island. He helped make Ibiza the clubbing capital it became. He became a mascot of it, and even though the world was slowing down, if not growing up, because of AIDS, it still wanted to party. Actually, it wanted to party even more.
I guess we would have been the royal family of rave if we had gotten married—ruling the island where people went to get stoned out of their minds, get off with each other, and see the best new DJs. But the whole point of that world was transience. It happens, it happened. If you stick around after you have your moments, it gets sad. There’s a time to arrive, and a time to move on.
This is an example of another Grace Jones that gets released into the world, and then people think that is as much me as the real me. You find that your identity is being assembled by others, by the gossip and repetition of the Inte
rnet. I absorb it, I can deal with it, but sometimes the made-up Grace is so inaccurate, and she is beyond my control. There are numerous fantasy Grace Jones out there, especially now that there is the Internet, and some of them are closer to being me than others. One day we might all meet. Maybe some of us are meeting in this book. Maybe one of them didn’t make it through the drug-fueled sex orgies Tony talks about. In one universe, in that Last Supper photo, I am one of those who died.
I must have come very close. The thousands of women whom Tony slept with—so he says, but there must have been a few. There must have been many men that Angelo slept with. He had appetites. We talked about it. We swapped stories.
One night after another crazy party at the hotel with too much drink, I saw Tony coming out of Angelo’s room holding a bottle of champagne. I don’t know what was going on, but in my mind I thought, Oh, me and Angelo are sharing the same man. Angelo was a pretty boy with an incredible body who could get you even if you were straight. He’d been alone with Tony, who was curious enough to be curious enough about Angelo. Interesting. This meant we would surely catch the same diseases.
You can tell when someone is coming out of somebody’s room having done something naughty. Maybe, maybe not, but after that, when Angelo passed away, I put the worst-case scenario together, and imagined that I would be next. Naughtiness had become toxic, especially in a paranoid mind. You would get tested, but at that time, they said there was still a chance over the next year or two that it could emerge. The science of it was all very rough.
It was like surviving a plane crash when everyone else died. Why did I survive? My double dies, Tina Chow dies—it was getting closer and closer. My mom helped me through that period. It was such a cloud, and it was over New York, and Paris, and the whole world. She encouraged me to stop beating myself up. I made sure I stayed busy. At some point you figure, What are you going to do anyway? You have to keep going. The “enjoy life” spirit of the ’70s had become “enjoy life while you can.”
I was in the hospital with Angelo when he was very ill, shrinking in front of my eyes, and the closer you were to it in the flesh, so to speak, the more you began to understand about the reality. Some people would run away from visiting those dying in the hospital, but for many, seeing their friends ill cleared up of some of the preconceptions and prejudices that were circulating at the time. It cleared away the mud and misreading surrounding the epidemic. It made it more real, and somehow, even as it was awful, less vague and horrible. It was something that could be dealt with, and what was important was to face up to it, not turn away from it and keep it amorphous. Keeping it a puzzle was helping no one.
I still feel there was a conspiracy. If you hang out long enough with Timothy Leary you realize how the government is always asking for new lethal poisons to be invented. For security reasons, for defense reasons, to control populations, they would synthesize a substance that was not meant to exist in nature.
Spies need to be killed, terrorists executed. Usually the government has the antidote. This might have been something that they started to develop, and then it got away from them before they were able to discover an antidote. The way AIDS appeared out of nowhere, it makes you wonder. They blamed it on fucking monkeys. Oh, yeah, of course. Makes perfect sense. I think someone high up took a look at what was happening in the New York sex rooms in the mid-’70s, in the secret Studio 54 chambers, the straights that swung, the colors that mixed, and the gays exploring everything, and thought, We need to sort this out. They spiked the punch.
I remember when I did my shows during the ’90s, I started to change some lyrics to acknowledge those who had gone. I imagined all my friends who had died were watching me and I was keeping some sort of flame going. For me to shed the depression and guilt I felt, that I had survived the parties, it was as though when I was onstage it was my job to keep them alive. I would do a riff about seeing them in the light; I would stare into the spotlight on me to the point of blindness, which is why I often wore sunglasses onstage, and talk about them being in the light, still alive. I would completely believe that my friends who had died were all around me, and that we were still together. Doing so helped me balance a little better on the tightrope.
15.
The Shepherd
My dad was faced with many problems because I was his daughter. He felt that his role as a pastor and a committed Christian was undermined by my volatile reputation, and it was difficult for him to acknowledge me as his child, at least in a public setting. A number of the church hierarchy were uncomfortable with me, and it stopped him from becoming a bishop until late in life.
Appearances counted for a great deal, and as far as he could he would avoid any publicity that associated him with me. He built his parish assiduously, sold real estate for two decades, and worked hard for years in Syracuse, working closely with the local General Motors factory to find work for members of his community. He was a member of the board of directors for the Americanization League, assisting immigrants from the Caribbean. He was living a very generous, caring life, and I was essentially indulging myself in various fantasies, and selling an image of myself based around sex, drugs, and stark raving craziness.
My world was very removed from his, and although he never made me feel awkward about how I lived my life, and never told me directly that I was an obstacle to his progress, we never talked about what I did in any great detail. He would stay very much in the background, while my mother would sing on my records, and be fine if she was mentioned in interviews. She took a more active interest in what I was doing.
In the end, it was a visit to South Africa in 1993 that changed things. I went there to be a judge for the Miss World competition in the gambling resort of Sun City, eighty miles north of Johannesburg. South Africa had been barred from the competition for twenty years because of apartheid, and had only been readmitted the year before. The cultural boycott that had stopped outside artists and celebrities from visiting South Africa had been lifted, and the country was determined to show off to the rest of the world that there had been significant change. The ceremony was broadcast around the globe. The girl representing South Africa in the competition was black, the first time that had happened.
The organizers said I could bring whomever I wanted with me; they would pay for first-class tickets. My mom wanted to go so badly, and she wanted her husband to come with her. My mom loved being on the move, my dad less so, especially by then. My mom was the greatest housewife. So much of what she did got taken for granted. She was obedient, self-sacrificing, to the point of being invisible. Even if she wasn’t cooking and cleaning—if someone from the church, one of the sisters, was doing it—she was the one responsible for making sure there was always dinner on the table and clean clothes for my dad according to his schedule.
She could never go away on her own terms. If he didn’t want to travel anywhere, then she didn’t go. Finally, I pushed her, and she started to travel on her own. These days, she’s always traveling from Syracuse to Jamaica to Los Angeles and round again. She loves moving about, but back then she rarely went far on her own. I said, “Go, he will be there when you get back. Someone from the church will stay in the basement and look after Dad. Don’t worry about him!”
It took decades for that to happen, but ultimately she would travel while he stayed in Syracuse. Eventually he said to me, “I will come to South Africa if you introduce me to Nelson Mandela.” This was perhaps how powerful he thought I must be in the world. I had become famous, apparently; surely I knew everyone, including the man who by then was one of the most famous people in the world. Perhaps he thought it was such a ridiculous request I would never be able to make it happen, but I swore to him I would even though I didn’t have a clue how to do it. I had never met Nelson Mandela, did not know him, and had no idea how to get to him. I could have introduced my dad to Giorgio Armani, to Gianni Versace, to Mick Jagger, all of whom had become my friends, but these names meant nothing to my dad.
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p; I promised him, though, because I really wanted him to come with my mom, and a promise is a promise. At the time, Mandela was campaigning to be president in the first multiracial elections to be held in South Africa, in April 1994, a few months after the Miss World show. He was on the road campaigning for what would be a highly historical moment, and that made arranging a meeting between him and my dad seem even more impossible.
When the Miss World jury got together, I had Dali Tambo on my right and Twiggy on my left. The other judges included Jackie Chan, Lou Gossett Jr., and Vanessa Williams. It was like being at a really bizarre wedding. Dali was a celebrity, a television personality who happened to be the son of Oliver Tambo, one of the founders, with Mandela, of the African National Congress Youth League. Dali called Nelson “Uncle,” he was that close. When I mentioned my dad’s dream of meeting Mandela, he said, with great confidence, “I’ll arrange it.” He had a TV show, so I said I would go on his show. He never said, “I’ll arrange the meeting if you appear on my show.” He said, “Leave it to me,” but because Nelson was traveling around the country and we were in Johannesburg, it still didn’t seem likely.
I mentioned to my dad that there was a small chance that he might get to meet his idol. My mom and I went on a safari, but my dad sensibly refused to leave Johannesburg. He said, “I’m not leaving, just in case he comes to the city.” My dad stayed in the hotel, and then the message came through that although Mandela was tired, he would take time to see one person. He wasn’t told who it was or why he was there, simply that a Reverend Robert Jones, who had founded an apostolic church in Syracuse, New York, very much wanted to see him.
My father proudly went into the meeting with Nelson Mandela, and I’m not sure how it came up, but Mandela said to my father, “Well, and where is your daughter?” It came back to me from his advisers that he would have been happy to see me as well, but if it had been between me or my dad, I would have made sure it was my dad who met Mandela. He had set his heart on meeting him.