By her Grace
Jones has been a star for 40 years, and there’s still no one quite like her
Grace Jones is one of those people who has been famous for so long, it’s easy to forget what she actually does. In the 1970s, she was a supermodelturned-disco-singer. She posed for Helmut Newton, walked the runways of Paris, hung out with Andy Warhol at Studio 54. She was both stern and provocative, the glamorous embodiment of the hedonism of the decade.
In the ’80s, she became an action-movie star.
She has released both a memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (Gallery, 2015), and a new documentary, Bloodlight and Bami, which recently opened in New York and Los Angeles.
Jones is smaller than her glamazon reputation would suggest, but still a formidable presence. She’s interested and friendly, with an easy laugh and a halting Jamaican accent. She looks serene and watchful, like the galaxy’s most beautiful praying mantis, her face a collection of right angles. She terrifies the waitress.
Celebrities tend to appear more pedestrian in real life, but Jones seems even more like an alien cyborg who reluctantly came to Earth. It’s impossible to imagine her doing normal-person things, such as driving a car or eating a taco.
There’s a shield of mystery and myth that protects her. She tries to keep it that way.
“I tell a lot of untruths. My age is one. I always tell everyone only the FBI knows my age. … I’m already 5,000.”
By more reliable estimates, she will turn 70 on May 19.
To make Bloodlight and Bami, Jones spent a decade submitting to the ministrations of director Sophie Fiennes, whom she adores. Fiennes had previously made a documentary about Jones’s brother Noel — who, like their father, is a preacher. Her cameras followed Jones to Jamaica, her birthplace, and where she reminisced with family members about her fireand-brimstone childhood.
“I grew up with fear,” she says now. “Letting go of fear was the best thing that ever happened to me. Fear of God, fear of hell, fear of fire.”
Jones, who would move with her parents to a town near Syracuse, N.Y., when she was a teenager, wasn’t allowed to listen to records. She fled to Manhattan, and eventually to Paris. She became a model and a nightclub fixture, an androgynous, warrior-like figure of great fascination and novelty. Music seemed like a logical next step.
When she made her first official recordings in the mid-’70s, Jones, raised on church music, had no cultural reference points to navigate. She released a series of albums that sold well enough, growled her way through a series of hits such as Slave to the Rhythm, and began to grow more confident.
It was around this time that Jones began a relationship with French photographer Jean-Paul Goude. She was his muse and he was her great love. The art they made was iconic, and occasionally problematic and their relationship was fittingly turbulent.
The documentary’s most wrenching scene is a discussion between the two: “You’re the only man that made me buckle at my knees,” she tells an impassive Goude.
Once, Jones had a knee infection while on the road. Goude, appalled, flew home immediately. “That’s his way of dealing with imperfection,” Jones says. “He never wanted me to be imperfect in any way.”
Their relationship fell apart when Jones became pregnant with their son, Paulo, now 38. She was a transgressive star at the height of her fame during much of Paulo’s childhood, but she tried hard to give him a normal upbringing. There were rules: She was careful not to use negative words like “no” or “don’t” around him, and insisted that he bring any unfamiliar drugs home for her to test. Just to make sure.
“You have borders that you don’t cross,” Jones says. “You don’t expose children to certain things. I mean, hello. I didn’t have sex in front of him.”
After acting in a string of forgettable films, Jones co-starred in the 1984 Schwarzenegger movie Conan the Destroyer, and in the Bond film A View to a Kill the following year. She was officially famous, and now with a famous boyfriend to match: Dolph Lundgren, Swedish and hapless, who was her equal in pure physical splendour. Lundgren was a part of Jones’s security detail and landed a small part in A View to a Kill before going on to become an action star. One day, late in their disintegrating relationship, Jones pulled a gun on him in an aborted kidnapping attempt.
Her work has served as a road map for artists such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga, though Jones cares little for either.
Bloodlight and Bami makes an argument for Jones’s role as an artist, not just a provocateur.
“It’s a learning process,” Jones says. “If you keep fear, you’re never free.”