GRACE JONES TELLS ALL
Grace’s book reveals her wild times ‘Riding him like a mythical, muscular Swedish beast’
DISCO GODDESS Grace Jones’ memoir, ironically titled “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs,” isn't always coherent, but on one thing she’s perfectly clear.
She couldn't be stopped if there was a man or a drug to be had.
“I was the ultimate specialist in pursuing my insatiable appetites and shameless lusts,” writes the long, tall diva.
“I was the wildest party animal ever. I pushed myself to the limit and started from there.” It’s true that in the book, Jones throws shade on today’s divas — Beyoncé, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga — for jacking her style. But coming from a 67-year-old stunning icon of outrageousness, it’s almost a compliment.
And one can see why Jones feels she pretty much invented being “bare skinned and sybaritic.” Read her description of a typical night at Studio 54.
“Lathered in foam and coke, tongued and flailed by drag queens, total strangers and horny hedonists, entertaining the creeps, freaks, strays, and lionized, living the un-American dream.”
At 5-foot-10½, Jones would stride into view with shoulders squared, limbs greased and smoky eyes, her style aggressively androgynous.
She recalls how photographer Helmut Newton wanted her to grow a pair — breasts, that is — and snarled at her flat chest, but still booked her again and again for his eroticized fashion shoots.
That was during her time in Paris when she tore through the modeling world with a vengeance. A particular vengeance, in fact, against Johnny Casablancas, the slick playboy who later started a major modeling agency in NYC.
When she arrived in 1970, he’d refused to send her on go-sees, telling her, “selling a black model in Paris is like trying to sell them an old car no one wants to buy.”
“You will eat those words and you will die!” she shrieked at him. “I hate you!”
When a magazine called asking her to come in, Jones decided she didn’t much care for the outfit she was wearing, so she took it off in the waiting room. She got hired. “France needed me,” she crows. Not only did she work with Newton and other hot photogs, she walked the runway for Yves Saint Laurent, Claude Montana and Kenzo Takada. Her roommates were Jerry Hall (below l.) and Jessica Lange (below r.).“Jerry was tall and fresh-faced, and had all this long blond hair, and I was dark, severe, wore my warm military clothes, and had very little hair,” she writes.
"Quite a sight. Chocolate and vanilla."
Sometimes Jessica, Jerry and Grace would go out together and “when we dressed up we looked like nothing else.
“We had brazen appetites and desires.”
Though they spent a lot of time hanging at Club Sept., a hardcore gay club that Tout Paris frequented, she and Jerry would compete “for boys.”
“Jerry wanted to have fun in an almost ferocious way.”
It was a heady time for Jones, who’d left New York after losing jobs to Beverly Johnson. It seemed there wasn’t room for two black models in Manhattan. But in Paris, Issey Mikaye famously organized a 12 Black Girls fashion show. Michael Douglas and Jack Nicholson came to the spectacle.
Afterward, Nicholson invited the models, one by one, to visit with him in his car.
Jones just wagged her finger no at him and moved on.
She says Mikaye helped her define her stage presence by introducing her to kabuki. Later, Tina Turner would scold her, “Grace, you don’t really work,” because Jones would just stride about onstage, sometimes striking poses or falling into a handstand.
“I’m not a great dancer. I don’t put it out there like Madonna.”
In France, she started recording, ultimately putting out three disco-era albums, Portfolio, Fame and Muse. “I Need a Man” became her first club hit, while her rework of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” became the end-ofnight standard she’s most identified with.
It was time for Jones to come and get the party started.
Studio 54 appealed to her sense of outrage, she writes. Raised under the name Beverly by her grandmother in a harsh Pentecostal community in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Jones was determined to let her inner hedonist rule the day.
She describes the rubber room with “walls that could be easily wiped down after all the powdery activity that went on” and the room above that “a place of secrets and secretions, the incrowd and inhalations, sucking and snorting.”
There have been many descriptions of Studio 54, but no one has ever put it quite like that.
Jones is oddly reticent about events at 54, though.
One gets the sense she doesn’t quite remember much beyond the coke and the Quaaludes. She recalls she would begin the evening in expensive if scanty outfits but come home in tatters from all the “activity.”
She perfected the art of popping out of a cake, “something I
am fond of to this day.”
For her 1977 New Year’s Eve performance, Normal Kamali designed a shiny gold unitard with a flowing skirt, a total glitter and feathers look. When she wore the costume back in Paris, she was attacked onstage, Mace sprayed in her face, with the crowd still demanding to hear “La Vie en Rose.”
Shivering, sticky and near-naked, Jones still rose to sing as Yves Saint Laurent wrapped his cummerbund around her bare breasts.
That’s just the kind of life that Jones led.
She took to hanging out with Andy Warhol, and two had a good time, arriving so late to Arnold Schwarzenegger's wedding to Maria Shriver, that they opened the creaky church door as the couple kneeled before the altar. The bride and the groom both whipped their heads about to glare.
Warhol was particularly afire when she started dating Dolph Lundgren, the hypermasculine Swede who went onto to become a Schwarzenegger-style action hero. At the time, Lundgren was best known as Jones’ blond, beefy bodyguard, then arm candy.
Warhol (right) set up a photo shoot for the two with Newton, hoping for some action.
“Dolph and I ended up naked in our session together, me riding him skin on skin like he was some mythical, muscular Swedish beast.” Andy was pleased.
Keith Haring used her body as a canvass when she readied herself for personal appearances. She would be photographed by her then-lover, Jean-Paul Goude, who choreographed her stage shows and directed her music videos.
When she became pregnant with their son, Paolo, Jones quit two things. Quaaludes and Goude, though the two remain friends. He recently shot Kim Kardashian’s bare buttocks cover, “Break the Internet,” for Paper magazine.
Jones continued to have spectacular moments, once famously slapping at a British talk show host, Russell Harty, when he turned his back on her. In the clip, you see her glaring at him, and then the camera, with such smoldering beauty.
She really was spectacular. Her friend Kate Moss still tells her she’s the only performer around who deserves to be called a diva. But she admits to feeling a little like Norma Desmond these days.
So she scolds the superstars of today, name checking all of the above as well as Rita Ora, Jessie Ware and Madonna, for stealing from her.
Jones claims she turned down the opportunity to work with “the biggest thing on the planet,” a woman she calls Doris, because it would only add to the superstar’s brand and not her own.
“I’d rather be a memory of something fantastic,” she writes, “than join in with the party as it is now, filled with people copying something that happened before they were born.”