I’ll Never Write my Memoirs

SOMETIMES a person can be so famous and iconic it hardly matters that we would be hardpressed to enumerate or describe many of their actual superlative accomplishments. Grace Jones, as she is the first to say, is “famous for being famous, because as part of what I do there is a high level of showing off ”. But surely there is more to the woman, who expects kerbside-to-airside VIP treatment and stretch limos on permanent call, than the fact that 30-odd years ago she beat up British chatshow host Russell Harty, punishing him on live TV for his “boorish condescension”?

Maybe it suffices that Jones, who is like a creature imagined by Gauguin – halfhuman and half-jaguar or panther – was one of the most beautiful women of the late 20th century, “a black Dietrich… even the black Monroe”.

Or perhaps it will do that she remains the world’s trickiest customer – for who else dares say about themselves, as Jones does in this electrifying book, that she is believed to be “demanding, crazy, offensive, indulgent, chaotic, depraved. I can be a pain, but most of all, I can be a pleasure”?

Fasten your seatbelts – this is going to be a bumpy book.

Jones is vague about her age, but evidence suggests (“World War II had finished”) that she grew up in the 1950s in Jamaica — an island with “a slithering hint of the supernatural”.

We have superb descriptions of the “shamrock-green hills that seem to hover under misty clouds”, the silhouettes of trees hanging over walls like “hulking dinosaurs”, the giant moths, trembling fireflies, screaming mongooses and bats.

What an ideal habitat for Jones, who even as a youngster stood out as exotic and alien, with “charcoal skin… You could only make out my eyes and teeth, sparkling in the dark”.

Her background is not dirt poor: her father’s family were politicians and administrators who ran the National Library of Jamaica in Kingston. They also served in the world wars as soldiers in the British West Indies Regiment.

The Joneses were a religious family, their Pentecostal faith being “mystical and obsessive”, says Jones, a mix of Christianity and traditional ancestral cults.

It was “emotional and exuberant”, but with strict ideas about sin and free expression, construed as disobedience.

Jones was often cruelly walloped by her step-grandfather, a hated figure, “a kind of gothic monster” who meted out serious abuse. She would go to school, knowing all day that upon her return home, “you were going to get a whipping”.

Paradoxically, the step-grandfather formed Jones’s later style. She can see how, in her act, she has adopted the man’s mannerisms: “the fixed stare, the dominant stance”, the pouting and the aggression that were to make her fortune.

Jones’s parents left her behind in the Caribbean when they moved to the US to found a branch of the All Saints Apostolic Church.

She followed them eventually in 1961, and quickly discovered Southern Comfort (“I liked what it did to my mind”) and sex (“I still cry when I have a big orgasm… from a combination of pleasure and guilt”). She loved fancy clothes, becoming “addicted very quickly to dressing to impress… Flash sequins and shimmering gowns”, and paid for this by working as a telephonist, where she whizzed about the office on roller skates. Grace went to Philadelphia with an Italian boyfriend, where “I lived as a nudist”. The police often arrested her under the mistaken assumption that she was a prostitute.

This was the 1960s, so Grace experimented with drugs – Quaaludes and Valium – and walked into walls.

“Acid intensifies what is real to such an extent it doesn’t seem real,” she says knowledgeably. Under the influence, Jones examined flowers and the petals emitted sparks.

She did a stint as a Playboy Bunny, “a classier step up from dancing in go-go clubs”, and began putting together a portfolio of photographs of herself adorned with “tribal white marks on my face”.

Because of her high cheekbones, Jones’s modelling career took off – $60 an hour at least, millions later on.

“I shaved my head and my eyebrows, perfecting the warrior appearance. I was black, but not black; woman, but not woman; American, but Jamaican; African, but science fiction.”

Looking like a fabulous sculpture, Jones had a premonition she’d be taken seriously in Europe.

Her ambitions and drive were heightened when a New York fashion industry insider came out with an astonishing piece of racist so-called advice.

“Selling a black model in Paris,” Jones was told by this bigwig, “is like trying to sell them an old car nobody wants to buy.”

To which Jones responded: “I hope you die of cirrhosis of the liver,” which she thinks he did. That or liver cancer, anyway.

But her instincts were correct: the Paris fashion crowd adored her – Helmut Newton created Jones’s high-heeled dominatrix persona.

He taught her how to stand and strut. No wonder Russell Harty was given the willies.

Jones appeared on his chatshow in 1981 (“I knew nothing about his camp reputation”), and after a few cursory remarks he turned his back on her, preferring to talk to Patrick Lichfield, the royal photographer, instead.

When Jones attempted to get his attention, Harty scolded her, making the fatal mistake of treating her like a naughty girl.

“Harty was rude,” says Jones. “I wasn’t going to put up with it. I kept lunging at Harty, hitting and hitting him.”

You can watch it on YouTube. It was indeed “one of those career-defining moments”, especially for poor Harty.

When he died, it was the main thing obituarists dwelt on.

Part of the problem was that it was Jones’s first visit to London and she hated the place, finding it full of “old, crumbling buildings filled with broken windows, ghostly cranes, dirty water and piles and piles of bird droppings”.

She was happier back in New York where, fashion having caught up with her, she became a performance artiste and centrepiece at “throbbing dance palaces” like Studio 54.

Wearing skin-tight bodysuits, Grace was “an animal on the prowl” in a sea of dry ice.

Jones recorded albums, appeared at events, clubs and corporate gigs often with Andy Warhol, who turned her into a screen print. She was not by any means a conventional pop singer, nor was she easy to cast as an actress.

Grace says that she’d have liked to have been in Game Of Thrones or X-Men, but she’s too original: “I stand out too much.”

She was a Bond girl, however, in A View To A Kill, where she scared the living daylights out of Roger Moore.

“Please stop looking at me like that, with such venom,” he pleaded.