You and Ms Jones don’t have a thing going on. But you can read her book. By Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
Grace Jones (Simon & Schuster)
****
Grace Jones was two hours late for her own book launch in New York, and when she finally arrived she refused to do the scheduled interview. Instead she hoicked up her top and flashed her estimable tits at the audience. Vintage Grace Jones.
Jones devotes an entire chapter to her legendary lateness in this book, titled after a line in her 1981 song Art Groupie, and ghost-written by rock journalist Paul Morley. Her tardiness, she says, has become part of her persona. “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 it.”
She showed up late, with Andy Warhol, to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wedding, the odd pair bursting through the doors of the church just as Arnie and his bride Maria Shriver were saying their vows. Warhol looms large in her story; her years with him and his entourage were defining. This was the era of Studio 54, the outré New York discotheque, of which Jones was the queen.
She describes a typical night: “Lathered in foam and coke, tongued and flailed by drag queens, total strangers and horny hedonists, entertaining the creeps, freaks, strays, and lionised, living the un-American dream.” As kitsch as disco seems now, she reminds us how revolutionary it was for LGBT consciousness.
This is no superficial, air-brushed celebrity memoir. Morley captures a wry voice in his subject as she bares all. There’s the time she klapped a British talkshow host on live television when she thought he wasn’t paying her enough attention. There’s the time she was too busy burning her boyfriend Dolph Lundgren’s clothes to go back into the studio to finish a song and kept the crew waiting for three days. There’s drink (vodka, tequila), drugs (she prefers ecstasy and took it for the first time with Timothy Leary), and sex. A lot of sex. Like the time she was waiting to go on stage to sing with Pavarotti, and her lover, well, let’s just say got under skirt and sent her out there on a high.
“I was the ultimate specialist in pursuing my insatiable appetites and shameless lusts,” she writes. “I was the wildest party animal ever. I pushed myself to the limit and started from there.”
But there is way, way more to Jones than the excess. You don’t last as long, nor be as distinctive — she is one of the few artists who can truly be described as “iconic” — without discipline, ambition, intelligence.
Her early life in Jamaica is fascinating. She was raised by her grandmother and step grandfather “Mas P” in a rigid, punishing Pentecostal home. Each of the six children had their own leather strap with which to be whipped, a near daily occurrence, and Grace — or Beverly as she was known in the family — would have her bottom lip pulled up over her face if she spoke back. Jones writes that her trademark fierce look comes from channelling Mas P’s furious gaze.
When she was 14, her parents sent for her to live with them in Syracuse in the US. She took up drama, then modelling and never looked back.
As well as being an intimate portrait of an inimitable life, this is a valuable record of pop culture history, of the process of making art. The avatar of avant-garde must be utterly maddening to be around, but she is her own woman. “I can’t be bought,” she says.
Follow Michele Magwood on Twitter @michelemagwood
Book details
- I’ll Never Write my Memoirs by Grace Jones
EAN: 9781471135224
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