I would find a home in Paris, and most of my formative years were spent there. Outside of Jamaica, it is the place I have lived the longest.
First I had to find my way there. No one would pay for me to relocate, so I did it myself. I did a job for GQ—most of the jobs I got in New York were for men’s magazines. The head guy at GQ was crazy about me, so I did a little fashion spread for them. That was all the money I had—to pay for my ticket and my composite of photographs, because on go-sees, you had to bring the composite to leave with the photographers.
And your composite had to stand out from all the others they were getting. Mine was supermodern, to reflect who I was and how I looked. My look was very much born in my own imagination. I had made it up out of my own fashion sense, taken from my mom’s style, from understanding the angles in my face, doing my own makeup, and understanding what suited me.
I learned to do my own makeup by asking questions every time a makeup artist did my face. I made sure I never walked away from having my makeup done without learning a little bit more about how to do it myself. This was more interesting to me than turning up and tuning out while my face and hair were fiddled with. I wanted to learn everything I could. I wanted to learn so much so that, if necessary, I could do it all myself, right down to the lighting. It was all about becoming self-reliant—learning how to do hair, makeup, nails, absorbing all the information possible. I felt it was important to know how to do your own thing as a model, so that you weren’t merely considered a mindless clothes hanger.
Once I had made my mind up about Paris, nothing was going to stop me. I saved up enough for a budget Freddie Laker ticket to Europe. That was my quite shaky, unformed plan—buy the cheapest flight I could find and leave New York. I had been advised to go to Paris, but had no financial help. Normally, Wilhelmina would send girls to Europe on an exchange with an agency like Elite Model Management, which at the time was run by Johnny Casablancas, who’d founded the agency in Paris in 1972, and they would pay the models’ travel expenses. I later discovered that Johnny didn’t really want me, so I didn’t get any financial help. I was left to fend for myself. I figured if I made it over there, I would make it work, and persuade whomever I had to persuade that I was worth taking on.
I had my book of pictures and an army outfit I had bought cheap at the army and navy store that I still wear now. (I love it—with the chunky pockets on the cargo pants, and the little Italian-green tank on the breast pocket.) I had my army hat, and my mom and I made this long, hoodless cream-colored cape made of a lightweight wool. Before I left for Paris—either to prepare, or say goodbye to America—I tripped on acid for about two weeks. The great sweep of the acid years was still carrying on for me.
My brother Chris had come to stay with me in New York to DJ at the Hippopotamus club somewhere around Sixtieth Street and Lexington Avenue, another 54 before 54. It was one of the great early discos when disco was not yet known as disco. There was just smartly sequenced nonstop music that you danced to, and it was as likely to be Jefferson Airplane as James Brown, the Rolling Stones as Donald Byrd. Harold and the Blue Notes and the Ohio Players used to hang out there.
Chris and I were sharing this rough little flat downtown in Chelsea. He would prepare his DJ set for the night and I remember having taken this acid, feeling like I was flying around this soundproofed room, like a witch ready to put a spell on anyone who annoyed me. That was my way of preparing to cross another sea and become a castaway all over again. The flight took five minutes and five thousand years, and I landed miles away from where I needed to be without much thought about what to do next.
Still tripping after the flight, I decided I was going to hitchhike from Luxembourg, and I took one of my big photographs and wrote on the back in big black letters: Paris. I had no idea how far away it was, or even that it was in another country. I stood on this big highway—it was a beautiful day. I felt I looked pretty hot in my cape and hat, certainly worth someone stopping for to find out what the story was, but all these sports cars whizzed past me without stopping, totally ignoring me. None of them stopped. I thought, Everyone in Europe is so rude!
Eventually, a sports car skidded to a halt. It backed up to me, and the driver said, in English, by the way, “You’re on the wrong side of the road. Paris is the other way! I think it’s safer for you to catch a train,” and he took me to the train station. He helped me get a ticket and onto the train, heading for Paris. I’m not sure if he was being kind or just wanted to get rid of me. I didn’t speak a word of French, not one word. Everything got trippier and trippier. The words people spoke—because they were just sounds to me, meaning nothing—took on a life of their own, but pulled me close and closer to Paris. I was determined to get where I was going, and determined to enjoy every second of the experience.
On the train, I met some backpacking hippies, my kind of people, and we talked. I was still spaced out, feeling totally at one with the universe—thanks to the combination of acid and the Freddie Laker budget flight—and totally fearless. I believed that I loved everyone, and that everyone was going to love me. I knew whenever I needed help, it would come to me and get me to my final destination. I had absolutely no doubt, even though I didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t understand the language. On the train, I sat on the floor, the hippies played their guitars, and we all sang songs. They were probably singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I was singing “Voodoo Chile.” At the station in Paris, the confusion really kicked in. And I really needed to go to the toilet.
The toilets were the most disgusting place I’d ever seen. They were unbelievable and quite shocking. In the public toilets there was nowhere to sit, and you had to squat over this hole. When a woman peed it bounced up like raindrops going in the wrong direction. I had a thing for public toilets that went way back, and I never wanted to use them. I would hold it, hold it, hold it all day at school, until my mom would see me coming and think, Hold the door, because here comes Bev, and she wants to use the bathroom. The books I was carrying would fly everywhere and I’d dive into the bathroom. I don’t know why I had these issues; I think my mom must have told me about the Jamaican outhouses and the cockroaches, where they were going to crawl. I always had this very dark vision of catching something from somebody else, so I was extremely paranoid. It’s a paranoia that has followed me through my life.
It was absolutely awful to use a public toilet in Paris. I never got used to that. The most fashionable people in the world, telling the rest of the world how to dress, and then these black, grungy holes in the ground you had to balance over the top of without getting yourself soaked. You had to have very strong legs. If you were in high heels, you didn’t want to take them off, but you didn’t want them to get splashed. In Jamaica it was better to go in the bush, because at least there was earth to absorb the piss. In France, it was concrete, it was cold, slimy tile, and there was no way to aim properly. It all seemed so primitive. This was how I arrived in Europe—a tall, very skinny black girl with a cracked American accent, hardly any hair, in army surplus gear, a white woollen cream cape, and a military hat, still feeling the disorientating effects of an LSD trip, astonished at the disgusting state of the toilets at the train station.
Then I had to use the phone. I had decided to call Antonio, because he was my only contact. His apartment was on rue du Rhin and that led to the boulevard Saint-Germain, where the model hotel was—a tiny little place, it’s still there. If you look out of the window opposite, there is the very famous art deco café, Café de Flore, which the tourist brochures called the most famous café in the world. It was well known as the headquarters of the existentialists, where Sartre sat writing The Roads to Freedom. James Baldwin used the warmth of the café to work on his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. That’s where my little room, not much bigger than a wardrobe, was—in the model hotel practically attached to Café de Flore.
It was impossible to use the phone in France. A nightmare. I don’t know if they have the same phones now, but back then I avoided them like the plague. Before you’d put any money in, you’d have to read the instructions . . . in French. I realized I was screwed. I thought, I am going to shoot this phone. I am going to smash it into smithereens. It seemed to stand between me and my future.
The money goes in and then you have to push a button; the person answers and then you have to push again to hear them. You have to perform about five operations simultaneously. Put it this way, it was not straightforward. I didn’t want to seem stupid, so I kept trying and trying, and the person would answer; I’d get the hello and start talking, then the call would be cut off. It was so frustrating. Finally, I asked for help.
It took a while. People had other things to do, and I didn’t speak French—the French don’t like it if you don’t speak their language. I learned that very quickly. Eventually, I got some help and figured the phone out. I spoke to Antonio and felt really good about that. The next day we met up, he was three minutes from the model hotel, walking fast, and I was speeding with a need to get things done. We started taking Polaroids straightaway. He was the most ingenious, free-flowing illustrator, and he was very successful in Paris, which was a special place and a great place for special people to work.
I had broken through so many barriers without even knowing it just by being in the right place at the right time—the right clubs at the right time—and through sheer force of will. Whenever things seemed to be not going my way I always had the courage to break away and try something new.
Antonio loved the new girls constantly coming into town because of the fashion and the vague promises made to them, giving him something else to look at, sketch, dream about. There was an endless supply of the very best, the most determined and excited to be there. I didn’t really think I was simply the next girl in line; he had a way of making you seem like the one, his favorite, and in a way, at the moment he was with you, drawing you, he meant it. You were satisfying his need for fresh, anomalous female presence, and he was satisfying your need to feel wanted and understood and even—through the way he drew you and paid attention to you—love.
Every time Antonio drew me it gave me a clue about how to do my makeup and work on different looks, different ways of shading and shadowing. He had been working with Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld since the very early 1970s, and it was an unbelievable way for me to land in Paris. Antonio very quickly sent me on some appointments. He really believed in me, which made me even angrier with Johnny Casablancas later on.
Johnny Casablancas was known everywhere in the fashion world and was extremely influential, and he had a very innovative approach to marketing models and promoting glamour, which helped turn many of his girls into very wealthy household names. His way of selling his models as more than mere models was a big influence on the emergence of the supermodel. He used to say he could take a girl selling vegetables in Utah and have her on the cover of Vogue six months later. His whole approach was nothing like the almost puritanical, more protective approach of Ford and Wilhelmina, who definitely had standards; he had a more playboy, rock ’n’ roll approach to his relationship with his girls. Wilhelmina would complain that with Johnny, models started to pick and choose what they would do, instead of doing what their agency told them to do.
There was more romance and scandal with Johnny, definitely a mix of the business with the pleasure. The business wasn’t only about modeling, either. Unofficially, there was the sense that if you were interested in being a model, you were interested in other, shadier ways of getting on in the world. And when you were a top model, the modeling agencies were always putting you with rich, hungry, horny men. Like a show pony. Until you outgrew your usefulness.
Modeling agencies are where wealthy men look for their female possessions. And a lot of the models took that seriously as a part of their career path. You would go to certain clubs, and certain men would be there, and the ultimate intention was that the girls were there for these wealthy men, because if they were good-looking enough to be models, they were good-looking enough to be taken into that wealthy world—working girls given a legal covering.
Whenever I was fighting a record company or agent over a deal, I would always use that as my default negotiating position. I don’t need to do this, I would say. I could marry into millions in minutes. I never would have done that, though. I never ask for anything in a relationship, because I have this sugar daddy I have created for myself: me. I am my own sugar daddy. I have a very strong male side, which I developed to protect my female side. If I want a diamond necklace, I can go and buy myself a diamond necklace.
My acting coach/quasi therapist Warren Robertson would tell me to put that sugar daddy I invented to one side and let men buy me things and look after me. But I knew I could look after myself. I was always turning things down because I always felt there were strings attached. I would think, Now I owe you something. And I didn’t want to feel beholden to anyone. But Warren would tell me, “Sometimes you have to let the man in your life do something for you—not to make you feel better, but to make him feel better.”
So . . . it is all about them . . .
At first, Casablancas didn’t send me out on any appointments. Other girls were being sent out every day. I got pissed off pretty quickly. I was in this toy town hotel, alone, still psyched from the bewitching acid trip, leery about the bleak toilet holes, and I was in a hurry.
After three days of no appointments I decided to confront Casablancas. (I was so impatient; I had a real attitude, or, as I like to think, I could see right through him as just another chancer.) Three is my lucky number—I still like it; it’s a good number for me. So after three days, I stormed into his office and said, “What’s going on here? I know something is wrong, so tell me what it is. Spit it out. Let’s get it over with. Don’t waste my time.” The acid was lingering and increasing my fierce energy.
Generally, I am the last person to play the race card, because I never think race has anything to do with me—I grew up in a world where our family was at the pinnacle of everything, in religion and politics, so discrimination didn’t mean anything to me. Being black didn’t hold me back in Jamaica, and I rarely thought of it in America. I hadn’t grown up with the idea of racism, with the color of a person’s skin being politicized. I wanted to get out there and show myself to people, never thinking they had any preconceived notions before they actually saw me.
But there were all these go-sees I should have been doing, and here is this guy, sitting on his ass—actually, he’s sitting on my ass. I was ready to get out there, and he wasn’t doing anything. Then he came out with it, and I swear I’ll never forget it—and he had to pay a lot for it later. He said to me, “Well, to be honest, selling a black model in Paris is like trying to sell them an old car nobody wants to buy.”
Those were his exact words to me.
They hit me like a hammer. I had never before been confronted so straightforwardly about the color of my skin. Until that moment, I’d never in any way felt inferior because I was black. I’d also never used it as any kind of excuse for not making it, or for losing jobs. For example, I knew that catalog modeling was no good for me because of the lighting—I was so black I would come out looking like a shadow next to the studio’s white wall. This is why they usually cast lighter-skinned black girls. I viewed all this as technical, rather than being about prejudice. I never even entertained the idea, so I couldn’t bear that he was using it on my behalf.
It seemed like a weakness. I remember a black friend who was so angry about the race thing that she would never go with a white guy. I did, because race had never been a factor in my life. I never made a decision based on color, but on energy, on mysterious potential. But there was a sense that black people making it in the business were suspicious that I had white boyfriends. They seemed to think that as a black woman beginning to have success, I should only have black boyfriends, as if to set some kind of example. This really, really angered me—I had grown up with the expectation of setting an example to others, and there was no bloody way I was going to allow that idea to ever get in my way again, and interfere with my freedom.
I had rejection from both sides, really, because I was black—too black for the white world, not black enough for the black world. Once, a friend confronted me about it—actually, she was the editor of Essence at the time, and she explained to me that the reason she didn’t put me on the cover of the magazine was that I was always with white guys. When Essence did eventually put me on the cover of the magazine, it was basically because they had to—by then, I was too much Grace Jones, too much “the f-word”—too famous. Oh my God, now we have to put her on the cover; she’s achieved something that has gone beyond whether she is with a white guy or not!
When Johnny said that he couldn’t sell me because of my blackness, it motivated me like very little had before . . . and I am very, very motivated. I leaned over his desk like I was on the prow of a ship powering through hundreds of dry gleaming snakes, and I said, “I’m going to make you EAT THOSE WORDS!” And as I left the room, I shrieked loud enough to rattle the Eiffel Tower: “AND I HOPE YOU DIE OF CIRRHOSIS OF THE LIVER!!!”
It was known among the models that he was a heavy drinker—we heard the gossip. Actually, he did die of liver cancer, at age seventy, in 2013—hailed, once all the controversy and exploitation were stripped away, as a model visionary. Well, he was no visionary when it came to me.
As part of our tetchy little conversation, he mentioned Beverly Johnson. She was the biggest black model at the time, with the most magazine covers for a black girl; she was the first black woman to appear on the cover of Vogue, in 1974. Johnny said to me: “Not even Beverly Johnson works here—what makes you think you can?” I remember the whole conversation like it was yesterday. The two of us were at war, tossing grenades at each other across his desk.
Beverly was more wholesome than I was, more yielding and carefully ladylike. Beverly didn’t shave her hair and eyebrows; she would style and blow-dry her own hair into friendly domesticated sleekness before she went to jobs in case the stylists didn’t know how to work with her texture. She would take her own foundation, because the foundation makeup artists had was mostly for white girls.
In America, a lot of the jobs I wasn’t getting, Beverly was getting. We would all run into each other at go-sees. Beverly was one of the reasons I left the States. I knew that as long as she was in place, she would get everything—one black model was all they needed—and I would pick up the crumbs. The crumbs were not enough to feed me. I was starving on those crumbs. She was the token black model. They didn’t need two tokens—I have never heard of two tokens! And when Johnny told me that even Beverly, with her more natural, less radical look, could not work in Paris, I thought, Well, I am not Beverly, and even she can’t get work. What chance do I have?
Casablancas made it very difficult for me. He tried hard to shut me down—he really had it in for me. I had pissed him off. I don’t think he liked being told he was going to die of liver disease. I could have been a bit more diplomatic, but that wasn’t in my armory at the time. I didn’t become diplomatic until years later.
I am diplomatic now. I could run for presidency now. I know how to play the game. But it’s tricky for me to be diplomatic—it does not come easy. I find it manipulative and insincere. You have to manipulate your own self to get the results you need without actually expressing how you really feel.
It wasn’t as though modeling was really what I wanted in life. To be honest, modeling felt so surface to me, so throwaway. It has nothing to do with your soul. It is totally artificial. You jump up, wave, twist your body, throw a pose—this shape, that shape, a little pull on the mouth, a look in the eye, done. If you’re lucky, and the photographer agrees. You are in the hands of the photographer. You have to give yourself away. Casablancas wasn’t even letting me give myself away.
I was so angry, which is why I cursed him. The idea of joining his agency had brought me to Paris; why hadn’t he mentioned the fact that I was no use to him before? It became clear that he never had been that keen on me, and that Wilhelmina was probably encouraging me to try Paris because she wasn’t really sure what to do with me.
I was at Wilhelmina’s in New York before I left for Paris, and I was coming out of the elevator one day, angry about something; probably having been told there was still no work for me, or Beverly had gotten the job. And there were a couple of guys standing there who said they were starting a new agency in Paris, and if I ever came to town, they would love to have me.
The agency was called Euro Planning, later known as Prestige, and the two guys I’d bumped into were called Stefan and Rogi. I should have gone to them straightaway. They seemed interested in me without fussing about my lips, nose, and attitude. I didn’t care that they were new to the scene. I like new. New means they are going to work hard to build something—and that they’re not already so big that they can afford to waste people’s time.
So after walking out on Johnny and putting the curse on him, I went the next day to Euro Planning. I wasn’t scared. Me? Scared? Never! That word does not exist in my vocabulary. I knew that Johnny Casablancas had made the biggest mistake of his life. I had overwhelming confidence in myself and my future. I was going to make him regret it. YOU WILL EAT THOSE WORDS AND YOU WILL DIE! I knew that given half a chance I could succeed. Casablancas’s world wasn’t big enough for him to completely stop me; in his world I would never have ended up where I did.
Their first three girls at Euro Planning were me, Jerry Hall, and Jessica Lange. Nobody knew who Jerry and Jessica were at the time, but they soon would. A couple of other girls joined very quickly as well: one from South Africa, known as Este, and an easy-going mixed-race girl from America, more girl-next-door, which didn’t work in Paris as much as it did in the U.S.
I had joined Euro Planning just before Jerry Hall arrived. Within a week of my arrival, she had been discovered (at seventeen) sunbathing on a beach in Saint-Tropez by the model scout Claude Haddad, who in 1988 was exposed by 60 Minutes as a nasty sexual predator. He was one of those dangerous, slippery charmers exploiting the model world, half pimp, half booker, with a flaky, magnetic personality, always prowling for new girls that he could control, and sometimes that control spilled over into blatant abuse. He was one of those characters who worked around models because they would then be swimming in a sea of women. And women were their prey, and their pleasure, what they needed to live and thrive, and the girls needed these characters to work and earn. A perpetual paradise for him, very dangerous and sleazy for the women.
Typical that he should spot Jerry and persuade her to try modeling. I was there in the office the day she was brought in to the agency, and it’s true what they say—taller than tall, with long, wavy, golden hair stretching all the way to the Sahara, big eyes, flawless skin, legs that went on for weeks, a huge, irresistible smile, wearing these flowing, hippified ’30s-style clothes. Then there was the big, creamy hillbilly accent that topped everything off. A head full of hair, and a mouth full of Dallas. We took to each other immediately, probably as a form of protection against the predators circling. Together, we created a force field around us.
We were the beginning of the Euro Planning agency at 3, rue de Courcelles, and the fact they first of all took Jerry, me, and Jessica shows they meant business. They certainly didn’t have the same feelings as Johnny about my blackness. They saw it simply as what made me what I was, how I thought, and behaved, which made me potentially a great model, with enough distinct energy to interest the more adventurous Paris photographers.
Casablancas was powerful in his own limited way, and he continued to try to block me. The first week, I got a callback for a big spread at Depeche Mode magazine. At that time, it was considered a real breakthrough if you got a big spread in Depeche Mode with a top photographer. It turned out Johnny Casablancas owned the studio where they were going to be shooting. He made sure I wasn’t going to work in any of his studios, but even that didn’t get in my way. There were a couple of photographers not in his world who were fixated on me. And they had names like Helmut Newton. Casablancas had no control over Helmut Newton. No one did. Born in Berlin, he’d moved to Paris in 1961 after time in London and Australia, and by the early 1970s he had become one of the most outrageous photographers in fashion, specializing in hyper-glossed, meticulously coordinated erotic imagery that treated the world as a theater and the woman as an inanimate, spectacular object. Paris, he said, taught him fashion. He already knew sex.
He liked his women to be full of alienness, which I loved, and after many years working for French Vogue he was unashamedly after “the sexy.” His work got to be branded as “porno chic.” You could tell looking at his photographs that he had worked in the 1950s as a society photographer in Singapore and loved the atmosphere of bordellos.
Every time Helmut booked me from my composite it was because of the expression on my face, which he absolutely loved—he saw me as the fearless, high-heeled dominatrix with a man’s ass, someone who accentuated and manipulated traditional sexual stereotypes. He would request me, and the agency would get so excited—Helmut Newton! It’s God calling! I’d be so nervous going to see him. I didn’t plan to stay in modeling, but I wanted to be the best I could be while I was in it. I wanted to get the best out of it; I wanted to work with the best. Like Helmut.
There were a few gods, not many, but he was one definitely one of the gods. I would go see him, and he would come out, see me as though for the first time, and say, “Shit, every time I forget that you don’t have big tits!” He would be so angry. It was like he was hoping I would have some work done, pump them up with something. No way. He became one of my best friends. He was so damned funny and we would work together a lot. Working with someone as brilliant as Helmut teaches you so much—seeing how he lights something, the visual stories he tells, how he was not interested in mirroring reality but transforming it. His way of working was so powerful and evocative I would never forget.
I loved Helmut’s photos—they taught me how to stand, walk, be, even how to look in the mirror and perfect my character. You are always looking in the mirror as a model, either as you get ready for work, being made up, having your hair done, or when you are at home, checking on how you look because how you look is how you earn a living. You need to know how to do that without it undermining your confidence, do it so that you are always learning about what makes you look good in a photograph. Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . . friend and enemy.
It became very hard to think outside the fashion world once I was embedded in it and wanted to be the best. Paris plunged me into the depth of fashion. To the deepest level, and to the highest level. Paris was where the depth was in a superficial world. They were into fashion more than anyone else in the world. They took it seriously, with a tyrannical zeal, but there was also a certain freedom to it, and a luxuriant decadence. It was never boring, always changing. In America, it became very homogenized and commercialized. In Paris, the lighting was darker, starker, a lot stronger—you could tell what the person was sexually thinking from the photographs.
Paris was where the new originated. Helmut, for example, would not have published a lot of his work in the States unless it bounced over from Paris, where he was allowed to do what he wanted. His photos for French Vogue were taboo in the American edition. In America, his work would be edited, softened, tidied. It was all about the clothes in New York, not the meaning of the photograph. In Paris, the designers and stylists didn’t care how the clothes looked. They didn’t care about a little wrinkle as long as the photo was stunning. It was more about the art—the image was all-important. Paris was unbelievably exciting and suited me so much more. The freedom the photographers had was incredible.
Another photographer who took a liking to me was a friend and collaborator of Helmut Newton, Hans Feurer. He had shot the 1974 Pirelli calendar, naked girls wrapped in polyethylene, and in 1983 would shoot the Kenzo campaign featuring Iman swathed in a rich crimson net. He loved shooting details of a model’s face and body, focusing abstractly on body parts. His work was very graphic, and he approached his photographs like a painter. This was before retouching and filters, and Hans was fantastic at using natural light, radical composition, and dramatic backdrops to layer a photograph.
When Kenzo Takada, the label’s founder, told him he could do what he wanted on that 1983 shoot, he said, “Well, what if I do a close-up of an eye?” Kenzo said, “That’s okay.” Hans thrived on being given complete artistic freedom, and that was in the air a lot more in the ’60s and ’70s. You wanted the photographer because of what they had done in their work, so it was stupid to then tell them what to do.
He had a background in sculpture and illustration, and used fashion not as a place to sell pretty things but as a place to experiment with fantasy and otherness, focusing on how wearing certain clothes could transform a person into someone else. His photographs always seemed to be part of some greater mystery he was trying to solve, even when they were in the pages of fashion magazines or advertising a beauty product. He understood that fashion is fantasy and must always include fantasy.
Hans said he never liked women who were clearly in the service of men. We hit it off, and because he was a complicated, demanding person, with very discriminating artistic reasons for wanting to be a photographer, I naturally developed a crush on him. I could learn a lot from him. I think that is another reason I developed crushes on those I worked with closely. I was craving knowledge and, in a way, sucking out their knowledge and experience like a kind of vampire. Imagination was the strong blood I was thirsting for.
We had a very intense relationship, and he liked it when I was very much the dominatrix. I think I was a little too male for us to have actually had a relationship, but we got very close. Strong women fascinated and challenged him, but he wasn’t sure how to take the next step. There is a lot about me that is masculine—I am very feminine, but I am also extremely masculine. I’ve got these two things going on and it is confusing for some men. My way of not backing down offends certain men. I will argue my point. I push the wrong buttons. Hans was interested in the strength of a woman, and sometimes that would mean shooting them in a very feminine way and other times in a very male setting.
He fell in love with my mouth. My first Vogue cover, which was actually for Vogue Hommes, was a Hans close-up of my mouth, very raw and revealing, with my teeth encased in gold. One of the photos from that session has me rolling my tongue over the gold teeth. I was getting better at knowing what to do with my mouth. He photographed my first Elle spread, me in khaki and a beret looking like a stylized version of myself as I’d looked when I first traveled to Paris. He liked to put me in men’s clothing, a few years before anyone else did. For one shoot that ended up as the original cover for my first record, I Need a Man, he had me wearing a suit and blowing smoke rings for hours on end while he looked for the perfect way of framing my face.
Fashion and style was hurtling through a multitude of changes in the ’60s and ’70s, catching up with art and pop and pop art, especially in London and Paris. And Hans made sure he was in the middle of what was happening; even now his photos look totally contemporary. You would never know they were taken forty years ago. Photographers like Hans were making up many of the rules for how to naturally, experimentally, and playfully photograph models in real and surreal settings that are still followed today. He is still photographing, always curious about the same elements of a body and face, still in love with mystery.
Paris was filled with these kinds of artists and innovators. It was a place where I could thrive—to such an extent that once the f-word thing had really kicked in and I was Grace Jones, someone wanted a hit: Casablancas tried to get me back on his side. He was a little underhanded about it. I ended up in his house, brought there by some people who didn’t tell me the party they were taking me to was at his place. He was bobbing for apples (literally) when we got there—it all looked very stupid and contrived.
I thought, He is bringing me here to humiliate me, and I walked out. Years later, when he was big in television, his people tried to book me for one of his shows, and they were very persistent. They insisted that I agree. I knew he was still trying to exercise his power and prove that he could get me despite what had happened. I’d spread the gossip about what he had said to me, and how I had flung it back in his face. I made sure everyone knew. It was classic model behavior: Do you know what Johnny Casablancas said to me?!
He was still trying to manipulate me and pretend to the world we were friends, that I had forgiven him, or even that I had made it up, and had a tantrum for no reason. In the end, I agreed to appear on his show, but it was basic cold business. He would have to pay. A lot. I would manipulate him, still, because what he said to me was unforgivable.
In Paris, once I’d shrugged off the Casablancas incident, I felt like I had arrived where I belonged. I was what the French needed, and I needed them. Things started to happen. It was as if they needed someone who was so like me it could only be me. The reaction was so positive. There would be a dozen guys lining up in the same room at the same time wanting to impress me. Wilhelmina was right: They really went mad for me. I don’t think it was so much my looks; I think they loved how crazy I was. Let’s hire her! She seems like fun! They wanted to get to know me because I was like an alien who had landed from outer space. People would stop and stare at me on the street as though I were already famous. People in the fashion business wanted to be around me and did whatever they had to do to make that happen—Casablancas hadn’t anticipated that. Let’s shoot Grace for the cover of the magazine. She will make our life interesting!
I learned French in three months flat. I decided to speak it for a month straight, to be with only French people, and to only have one person around to interpret for me. I had studied to be a Spanish teacher, so I had the Latin already. I wanted to learn French so I could understand what people were saying about me—it gave me an edge. I could tell when someone said something obnoxious and insulting. I knew when they were telling me off, and it enabled me to get inside the French mentality. French can sound romantic even when they are saying “fuck you” and “up yours.” They can say the worst thing on the planet about you and it can sound like they are proposing.
I learned the language to deal with their very rude, stubborn ways, and to help some of the other girls. I’m not necessarily saying all French people are rude, it just felt that way to me, and I don’t really mean that as a criticism. It’s a part of how much they like to take control of things. The rudeness mostly didn’t bother me. I knew a bit about rudeness myself. It was okay as long as I knew they were being rude to me, so I could be rude back.
I used to get so frustrated in those early days when I never got butter with my bread at restaurants. Not in France—apparently, French bread is so good it is an insult to slap butter on it. I would throw the baguette at the waiter. No butter, no bread. I got really angry. I started to take my own butter with me. I also used to carry eggs with me to throw at the taxi drivers when they wouldn’t stop. They used to ask you where you were going before they agreed to take you. Even in the rain. Even when I was with someone who was eight months pregnant.
I said, “Let’s get in the taxi without telling him where we are going.” We got in, and he said he was not going in that direction. “So what?” I said. “We are in the taxi, she is pregnant, and it is raining.” No, you get out. No, we stay. He came around and literally dragged us out of the cab. After that I always carried six eggs with me and I would slam them against the taxi if it didn’t pick me up, and then scream, “Now you have to go to the car wash!” So I was carrying butter for the restaurant and eggs for the taxis. I was armed and ready.
My very first French cover was for 20 Ans, a teenage magazine like Seventeen in America. I am so black on the cover because there was no sun where we shot. We went to Deauville, a low key, seaside resort in Normandy, on the northwest coast, with this huge wooden promenade. The beach is so wide you can barely see the sea. Yves Saint Laurent had a home there. The overcast gray skies and diffuse coastal light around there fascinated the Impressionists, but it didn’t really suit me. On the cover, I look like a shadow. I am barely there.
When the magazine called to see me, I didn’t feel so good about what I was wearing. Something bothered me. My clothes were scratching me. So I took off all my clothes in the office. I sat there naked waiting to be called in.
They took one look at me and said: Let’s hire her! We want Grace! She’s too much. They had never seen anything like it before. If I’d thought about it, I would have thought such behavior would lose me the job—it was a spontaneous thing, but it ended up working for me. Maybe the New York acid was still in my system. I’d been there only a month. Three days with Johnny. Fuck off, Johnny. No time to waste. Rent to pay by the end of the month. Let’s go! Anyone in my way was going to be knocked out of the way. This was the energy I had picked up as I moved around along the American East Coast. A little bit of momentum in Syracuse, more force grabbed in Philly, and then all of that multiplied in the helter-skelter of New York. I felt I had wasted the whole year there, so I was feeling very impatient.
I never wondered whether it was a brave thing for 20 Ans to put a black woman on the cover. I thought they figured with all that cheek and energy I must be going places. To this day when I do my Paris concerts they all turn up—they all shriek, “Do you remember that rainy weekend in Deauville and the magazine cover where you couldn’t be seen?”
Within three months I got a record deal, and had started recording. I say three months. Everything seemed to be about three months. Though my three months is not necessarily what others might think of as three months. It was simply that everything was happening very quickly. Finally, the speed things were happening around me suited the speed of my mind. I got so much done after that year that went nowhere in New York, which seemed like forever. The world caught up with how fast I wanted it to be.
Jerry, Jessica, and I would basically use our minuscule rooms in the hotel to sleep, and for little else, and we would be out every night—clubs, music, fashion, life. Paris seemed to stay out at night even later than New York. We’d drag ourselves back to the room in daylight after a night out and get ready for the next night out. We were out of our minds on fashion, on Paris, and on having a good time. The ’60s, which were all about having a good time and dressing like you knew it, were rushing into the ’70s. I developed incredible, long-lasting bonds with the girls I worked with, not least because I also lived with them and we explored new, strange territory together. I have remained friends with Jerry and Jessica to this day, and we help each other and inspire each other. Other models along the way as well. We’re always there if one of us needs a place to stay, some help with another ridiculous load of man trouble, or just to share the latest news. We’ve all been through something particular and—mostly—come out the other side. Modeling—dealing with it, not the thing itself—helped us to take on the world. We’re sisters in life—Efva Attling, another singer and model who’s become a famous jewelry designer based in Stockholm and the Danish designer Antonie Lauritzen were also part of the group. A crazy group. Good crazy. Young, lustful girls moving around Europe, with Paris at the center, making a living, becoming stronger, discovering new ways to hang out and look after ourselves.
I totally immersed myself in French culture. I would walk around Paris smiling a lot. Stories streamed through every street. It was obvious why it was a city of so many people’s dreams. It was cheap, five francs to the dollar. Grimier than it is now. Truer, really, with the fashion dream there to light up the night, burn into the day, and create the legend.
I baptized myself in Parisian blood. Felt glamorous history in the air, got to know the vivid legends: Josephine Baker becoming such a decadent, amoral diva, dancing the Charleston at the Folies Bergère in the 1920s, wearing a banana tutu designed by Jean Cocteau; the cabaret, the glorious excess of the nightlife; the honking, sizzling Paris jazz; the boys dressed as girls; the dazzling dancing girls loving to show themselves off and be treated as artists, not tarts. The great French singers Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco, Édith Piaf, and Serge Gainsbourg were all melancholy and melodramatic romantics, but also geniuses at representing erotic sensuousness through music. I couldn’t resist that combination. The songs weren’t only about love, either; there were drunks, and hookers, and despair that needed correcting, or relishing. The singers sounded filthy and wise, and I loved the way they built a world of their own out of melody, drama, and sex. We were looking for encounters without hoping for anything more, without longing for emotional entanglement. We wanted adventure.
All dinners in Paris, I noted, would end with intense discussions about sex. What else was there? A good dinner, fabulous wine, and then talk about sex, and the world is a better place.
Jerry was very open about sex. In Texas, for some reason, the women are very different from those in the reserved American North. Texan women love talking about having sex in the barn—head outside, body inside, so that the rain would be falling on their face while down below they were being ravished in the dry, head soaked wet, the bottom half getting it on in the hay.
I studied the naked couture at the Crazy Horse, the temple of striptease, where stripping collided with the avant-garde. I knew the music arranger there, and while I was hanging out, things got a little casting couch with one of the managers. I always hated that, the idea that to get on you would have to sleep with the boss. It made me feel so powerless. And I wanted the power over the men.
Jerry and I would compete for boys. We had this kind of competition going. Our personalities fitted together, but we were also opposites. We liked the same things, and we especially liked the same boys, so we fought sometimes to be first to get there. She would get very jealous. She would ask about a boy we would both be chasing, her eyes flashing, where were you last night—did you get him?! Yes, I did, I would admit. Goddammit, I wanted him, she’d drawl, genuinely a little put out. It was sibling rivalry. I had never been allowed to play with my real sisters, but now here was someone I could play with. In her book she said we were roommates, but it was a lot more than that. We were close, sisters in love, each wanting the other to succeed, but when it came down to it, if the choice was between me and her, naturally I would choose me, and she would choose her. Jerry and I had a lot of fun together, but we were also rivals.
We would go and buy cheap clothes at a place called the Rag Queen. Honey, let’s go shopping, Jerry would say. The Rag Queen was not very far from when we lived. It was owned by a German girl, and she used to hunt far and wide for pieces that suited us, but they were never more than we could afford at the time, which wasn’t much. She would go on the hunt for clothing that we asked her to look out for—I liked hoodies from the ’30s and ’40s, to keep my neck warm with the short hair. I didn’t want to wear a wig. The short hair was my look, and Paris loved it. I looked natural and unnatural at the same time. They didn’t slap a wig on me like they did in America. We used to go on our go-sees in these made-up outfits, and the designers would get their ideas from how we dressed. Lots of designers told us they liked us coming in so they could see what we were wearing and be inspired by it. It made us less passive, a part of the creativity. It was one of the ways fashion finds on the street started to infect the haute couture.
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. Quite a sight. Chocolate and vanilla. Fairest and feistiest. We did go-sees together, and after a while we didn’t want to take the underground. We started to hitchhike for limousines when they were off duty between drop-offs.
Jerry wanted to have fun in an almost ferocious way. We would dress up, and we would look good, glowing with sheer get-up-and-go, in our element as exotics in the capital of exotica. Sometimes we would wear glitter, and African bones around our necks, nothing else, no top, a shred of a skirt. Our boldness knew no bounds, because Paris made us seem like we were always on show.
We’d go out and guys would try and get between us and we would throw them from one end of the room to the other. We weren’t interested in anything long-term. Nothing longer than a few hours. Once it becomes a relationship it becomes about control, and back then, we were mostly interested in our careers. We were not looking for boyfriends or for one-night stands, and if we were, we wanted it to be on our terms. We would pick a guy up, not have him pick us up.
We used to go to this great club called Club Sept on rue Sainte-Anne, a really hard-core gay area, run by an ex-stylist and makeup artist called Fabrice Emaer. He was known as the Prince of the Night, and he was very mysterious. You would see him do his thing only at night. There was no sense of a family. He had such elegance and charm, and he attracted a certain sort of personality to his venues.
Fabrice was blond, ageless, could have been thirty, forty, it was difficult to say. Very tall—a lot of the Frenchmen are usually, shall we say, smaller. He wore discreet, elegant suits. He loved taking care of people. He was constantly in motion, and he would float from person to person, making sure everyone was having a good time on their own terms. He had a way of making you feel amazing without getting into your business. This was the nightlife, and he was in charge. That is a real talent. It’s hard work, and he did it so smoothly. He always had the right people working for him, and they stayed with him.
Way before Studio 54, Fabrice would mix people with all sorts of backgrounds like an artist. Club Sept had a restaurant on the ground floor where you could chat or play cards after dinner, and a small dance floor in the basement where those who were eating didn’t want to go until later. Sophia Loren, Roman Polanski, Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and all the top models would have a table—you never had to pay for anything because you would draw in a certain clientele—and then there would be the up-and-coming designers like Claude Montana. (I met Jeanyves Lascombe, my first boyfriend in Paris, while he was working at Club Sept; he was the classic French dreamboat I had been lusting for. We weren’t looking for boyfriends, but if one came along who fit the bill, we didn’t say no. That didn’t mean you stopped seeing other men. I’d have a boyfriend, but I’d have ten others as well.) There was also a vibrant gay clientele, with glamorous straight girls and gays grinding into each other to disco and funk, but this was not a clandestine gay club.
Gays were starting to go to places that weren’t only for gays. This was very new; they were coming into the light. They were coming into the world. There was a more furtive gay club next door, and glamorous girls used to go to gay clubs because we didn’t want to be picked up. We wanted to go out and have a good time, not get into a relationship.
Jessica, Jerry, and I would go out, and when we dressed up, we looked like nothing else. Look at us, but don’t you dare look at us. A lot of itches need scratching. We had brazen appetites and desires, enough to crack a man’s gaze and bruise his soul.When we went out, if we went to a straight club, every man in the room would approach us. Sometimes they would drink to pluck up the courage, and that would often make them really obnoxious. To get rid of them sometimes we would have to get physical and throw them across the room—sometimes they were so drunk you’d merely flick them with a sharpened fingernail and they would fall over.
At Club Sept there was no sense of a sudden ending to the night, when they would blast on the lights and shout at you to leave, Time to go, and you would stand there in the sudden light with your makeup running after dancing all night and your clothes torn from rolling around on the floor. That never, ever happened there, and that suited me. I like to be the last to arrive and the last to leave, and I never want to feel I am being kicked out even if it is seven in the morning. I would leave Club Sept at seven—the clue was in the name—and take the night’s vibe into whatever I was doing next.
It was incredibly glamorous, exposing the magic you can achieve with some mirrors, lights, and of course, the music of the moment. This was a disco in heaven, disco as the music of big cities, of the night, of sex. Guy Cuevas was the DJ mixing the classic newly forming disco; hard, insistent rhythms from around the world: scheming funk, hardworking soul-jazz, plastic soul, high-living show tunes, bits of noise and sound, anything that took his fancy in making up a show from records.
The DJ was a kind of sculptor of atmosphere and mood, setting up through sound the charm of possible encounters. The mix of people was part of the magic—in this small space with these strong, sexy sounds pounding into your head, heart, and groin, there were the famous, the lusty, the intellectuals, the chic, the beautiful, the half-crazed, the loners, gay, straight, in-between, over the top, under the radar, the undecided, whores, models, and Casanovas, the marginal within the marginal, all sorts of heroes of the night, everyone becoming a bit of everything else, bodies coming and going in the shadows. A weird sort of community, sharing excitement, enthusiasm, and one another.
What took place in these clubs was a kind of choreographed danger, cruising as a form of socializing, contradictory pleasures gathered together in a single place. Energy in the margins that would eventually pour into the mainstream. A whole range of sensations designed to make people happy for one night. These clubs were at their peak a representation of the receptiveness to new ideas that were around at the time; a vivid, breathing, and often sweaty symbol of transition.
It was as though, in this small place, you could somehow change location on a whim, because of the variety and newness of the music, the varied people, the flashing lights, the sense of what was about to happen because of what had happened the night before, and the night before that. This was very much a time when you could sense the role music and culture were playing in the evolution of homosexuality. It became a fashionable aesthetic; no longer were gays having to keep quiet, trapped in their own places, because now they had more and more places to go, where they were the pioneers, the ones in control, explicitly setting the trends. I belonged in these places, places where you went to perform, to watch others perform—I picked up a lot of the signals that would go into my music in these places.
Out of my mind, but somehow fully focused, I’d sing along in the clubs to my favorite songs, performing karaoke before karaoke existed. You might even see me climb onto tables in the café downstairs from my room, and sing a little. Loudly. That would become my thing: dancing on tables, which I used as a stage, bringing my go-go experience into play, cracking imaginary whips. If I didn’t dance on a table, everyone with me would be disappointed. That’s still true to this day. It’s what seals a night out with me as a good one.
When I was in my hotel hutch getting ready to go out, I would always sing at the top of my voice through the open window and the lace curtains into an inner courtyard that was outside my room. My voice would echo off the courtyard walls and maybe sound a little better than it really was. Este from Euro Planning, who lived in the next room, could hear me showing off, and she had a boyfriend who was scouting talent for a small record company. His name was Stephan Tabakov. He was lean and tall, with these big, popping eyes; he had done a bit of modeling and had a look that was quite striking. He was, naturally, very charming, and was clearly used to hustling, wanting to make something happen. I had a knack for finding these guys who were desperate to do something in the music business. That was not my intention at the time, but I had all this energy, and if that came with a personality, and even a hint of being able to sing in tune, these guys were interested.
Este told her boyfriend, “Oh, Grace knows how to sing!” I was beating her up in a state of alarm when she told him in front of me. “What did you tell him that for?” I asked, thinking I could be heading for a disaster on the scale of Gamble and Huff.
Stephan asked me to do a demo of “Dirty Ol’ Man” by the Three Degrees, which I sang a lot, imagining I was in the group. I knew exactly about the men they were singing about. You can’t keep your hands to yourself . . . you can look but please don’t touch . . . all you want is another victory . . . you’re a dirty ol’ man.
I sang it in a studio called Acousti in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in front of Stephan and the engineers, and they said, “Mmm, it sounds okay, but we want you to take some singing lessons.” It was a polite way of saying I was singing out of tune. That was an improvement on the Gamble and Huff rejection, but it didn’t appeal to me. I felt free for good of any kind of school. My piano teacher in Jamaica used to crack my knuckles with her wooden ruler when I got things wrong, and she was one of my aunts. The worst pain, worse than the whip.
Whenever I play the piano now I beat it, smash it with my elbows, bang, bang, bang, beat it until my fingernails break. It’s amazing how that stuff from your past sticks in your system. That was how I played. I was never going to be gentle, however brutally they rapped my knuckles.
I didn’t want to do the singing class, but I reluctantly agreed. Out of curiosity, again. At least the door had stayed open a crack and had not slammed in my face. Let’s see what this is going to be like. If I don’t like it, I’ll quit.
Very quickly I started skipping the classes because I didn’t like the teacher. She was too stiff and spent too much time teaching me how to breathe. She was the wrong teacher for me, too set in her ways, and they weren’t my ways. I found it boring—she didn’t excite me, and I do need to be excited. It was all technical and very dry.
Stephan said to Este, “Well, Grace is not serious, so we are going to forget about it.” As soon as she told me what he had said, that he was disappointed, some sense got knocked into me. I thought, I’m being stupid, and too stubborn. I remembered how silly I felt when I messed up the Gamble and Huff chance. This thing with Stephan could take me somewhere else, not necessarily where I thought I wanted to go, but it might help me on the way there. Overnight, I talked some sense into myself and started to take it seriously.
I thought about what music I wanted to make. I thought about whom I wanted to work with. I started to pull a team together, to really take control. I took off like a high-speed train. I thought, There are three doors—singing, acting, modeling. What’s behind the singing door?
I took control of the sound of the music. I didn’t like French pop music, which was becoming very Eurovision and generic, compared to the disco that was coming through at the time, which felt electric and electrifying. It was both the soundtrack to going out and about going out, what happened as you danced, the people you were with, lovers and strangers, and also what happened after going out. What happened once you had found what you were looking for—another person, or another night on your own, various tensions building. Musically, I knew what I didn’t want to do, and it was definitely not the French thing. French music sounded great before the 1960s, but it didn’t sound right after rock ’n’ roll, and soul. It had trouble keeping up. Apart from anything else, the French language didn’t fit so easily with the new riffs and rhythms.
I was picking up all the nighttime action happening around me like some sort of antenna, and I wanted to feed it through my emotions and transmit it in some way that seemed to make sense to me, and fit right in among that music I was hearing in Club Sept, and what I had been hearing in New York before I left—disco as the beat of man-love, basically, and a sense that dance music was a disguised form of militancy. I wanted my music to have the charged after-hours vigor that homemade French music suddenly didn’t have.
I knew I didn’t have a natural voice, but I was going to work out how to make it work, stretch it into a new place. If I could have sung like my mother, I would have, but I couldn’t. If I could have sung like Aretha Franklin, I would have, but I couldn’t. If I could have sung like Chaka Khan, I would have, but I couldn’t. That whole period was me finding a voice that I was happy with. And that took a long time—early on, I sang sharp, and I realized producers want singers to sing in a similar key, so that when they mix for the radio, it fits the very narrow, familiar range of what radio wants. It wasn’t my key, but I would try and sing there to please them.
This reminded me of catalog work—only now it was not about being forced to use the same lighting as everyone else, but the same key. I had to force myself to conform, and I was always sharp. There was nothing to fix the voice in those days like there is now, nothing to correct you.
I hear my early records now like “La Vie en Rose,” and think, Jesus Christ, I am so off-key! I went along with what the producers wanted because I didn’t know any better, and I stretched and I stretched, reaching for the note with such desperation. I had so much conviction: I was determined to hit that note but never hit it. Someone said, “You are the only black singer we have heard who is off-key, and not flat, but sharp.” I wanted to hit that note, and if I wasn’t getting there, I certainly believed that I was. That’s what you hear on those early records—complete, delusional self-belief.
I thought, If I’m going to do this, I’m going to be the best . . . still thinking that I had to be an example. Perfect. The thing was, I didn’t want to be a singer, not when I was younger. I didn’t like what singers wore. I thought I’d have to wear what they wore if I was a singer. I thought those were the rules. I didn’t want to follow that formula, be part of that group. I was totally antisocial in that sense. I didn’t want to be a part of the club that everyone else was joining. I always ran away from that.
I felt comfortable going in the other direction. I think it goes back to Jamaica again—I had four brothers and two sisters but, as a form of protection, ended up being a loner. I enjoyed other people’s company, but I enjoyed my own company the most. Slowly, I learned to trust others, especially when they could teach me things. I was always attracted to those who were the very best at what they did.
I loved Antonio Lopez’s work. I didn’t know how important and respected he was when I first met him. The friendship was based on him as he was before I knew about his achievements. I didn’t search him out thinking I could take advantage of him. He came to me and invited me in. But he was surrounded by a lot of people who did try and take advantage, so he liked that I liked him for who he was, not what he could do for me.
I became what was known as an Antonio girl. There was a group of us—Jerry, Jessica, Tina Lutz (whom Antonio introduced to the man who became her husband, Michael Chow), Paloma Picasso, Pat Cleveland, Marisa Berenson. He had this eye. All the girls he approached did something special. His girls were not necessarily the pretty girls, or the obviously beautiful girls; they were the girls with balls, with something on their mind. He liked them a little fucked up, which suited me. He liked the freaks and made them freakier. Jerry wanted to fix her nose. She hated the bump in her nose—he said, “Don’t you dare!” Jerry and Antonio got very close, and her jealousy kicked in when it came to some Antonio images of me in my portfolio. She ripped them out, and I was very angry that she did this because being endorsed by Antonio was very valuable in Paris. It helped pay the rent, and that was very important.
We all had ambition, I guess, to be more than models. We wanted to be fabulous in a different way. Once I decided to go into music, for instance, I was obsessed. I wouldn’t leave my voice alone until I got it where I wanted. I couldn’t bear the thought that it would never sound like I felt inside. Without a special voice I would be very ordinary, and that was never good enough for me in whatever I did. I needed a voice, to speak my mind.
Later, still on the quest to find my voice, I would work with a singing teacher back in New York, a German lady in the 1980s, and she was so much better for me—the total opposite of the uptight Parisian professor, who I’m sure was good for opera, but not for me. When I told her that in Paris the teacher spent the whole time trying to teach me how to breathe, she said, “Ridiculous, you know how to breathe as soon as you are born. Why do you need to be taught how to breathe? This is what I want you to do—I want you to jump on the furniture, leap around the room, and let the note fly!” She was amazing. She treated being a vocal coach like being a therapist and also like a kind of performance. I needed to feel I was being taught by a performer. She taught me so well I could be a vocal coach now.
She used to say, “Let the emotions out, listen to what you are singing, the melodies, believe in that.” I turned down so many songs because I didn’t believe in what I was singing. I was the first to be sent “Boogie Wonderland” and I turned it down because I didn’t believe in it. Can you imagine me singing “Boogie Wonderland”? Preposterous. That song needs a twinkling Tinker Bell to sing it, and I’m much more of a witch with a smear of blood on my cheek.
I said no even though I knew it was going to be a huge hit. Other things are more important to me than simply having a hit, because then you have to live with it—it becomes who you are. People think you are mad if you don’t accept something that will make money, because they think it is going to be a hit, and that is all that matters. It doesn’t work like that for me. There are a lot of hit songs out there I wouldn’t want to have associated with me because they have no soul, no power.
People think I am being too intellectual, but it’s not that. It’s fine to sing something that isn’t intellectual, that is bubbly, and I can do that, but I still need to feel something. I have to like hearing myself. I have to believe that the song can be one I would want to sing forever and not be embarrassed.
I remember working on a song for the soundtrack to the movie 91/2 Weeks starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. The producer who was doing the soundtrack, Narada Michael Walden, had recently worked with Aretha Franklin. I could never sing like her, but eventually I realized that she couldn’t sing like me. It eventually sank in.
A singer is not really meant to listen to herself. By listening, you lose concentration—you cannot perform and listen to yourself. My voice teacher could tell when I was listening to myself. There was too much tension. It’s like acting—you are either trying to act, or you really are acting. When you are trying to act, you can see it. When you are acting, it is invisible.
Narada was trying to get me to sing a pretty camp, frivolous song, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” in a key I can’t sing in. I would love to be able to say I am a vocal chameleon, but I’m not. With certain songs, I have to go through a jungle with a machete in the dark fighting off tigers to get to where it fits with my voice, otherwise I wouldn’t believe it. And if I don’t believe it, no one else will.
Narada was pushing me to sing it like Aretha and mentioned her, which pissed me off. I said, “This is a waste of time. I can’t sing it like that. I’m not Aretha,” and walked out. The prima donna, you know, so they say, spoiled and temperamental—but I never like the pressure of someone making me feel inferior without helping me solve the problem.
Wound up, I left for a break, to calm down a little. The Rolling Stones happened to be recording in the same building. Keith Richards was in their studio on his own. I sat next to him at the piano where he was doodling. I said, “I am so upset.” He said, “Have a puff on this.” Naturally, he had something to puff on, one of his kind of joints, built for his tolerance. I took a puff. It was too strong. Within seconds, I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. I had to be carried out of the studio and taken home in a car. Walden must have assumed I had stormed off. I don’t know what Keith thought.
Years later, the same thing happened in reverse. I had been invited with a friend up to his house in Jamaica perched in splendid rock-star isolation on the spectacular tree-covered cliffs overlooking the sweeping sandy bay in Ocho Rios near where my Jamaican home is. I can see the house hanging from the cliff, flag flying above the roof, from my living room. Using telescopes, we could wave to each other. We arrived more or less on time for dinner with Keith and his wife Patti Hansen, an old friend of mine from the Wilhelmina days. It was Patti who had invited me more than Keith. She was very important in his life—she saved him really. We were shown into the dining room and asked to sit down. There was no sign of Keith and Patti. An hour later, there was still no sign of them. I was getting impatient and I marched off to look for them.
I found their bedroom, and Patti was fast asleep sprawled on the bed, and Keith was slumped on a chair knocked out cold with a joint still clinging to his lips, slowly smoldering. The people working for him didn’t dare touch it, so it was just burning away. I didn’t care about respecting him in that state. I took it out of his mouth and tried to wake him up, but he was too far gone. Eventually he came too, as incoherent as you could imagine, like there were spider webs and sundry creepy crawlies in front of his eyes, and, to his evident alarm, at the center of them, spinning a glitter ball on her head, some phantom of the disco tugging at his mouth. He realized it was me and looked very confused as to why I was there in his home, possibly trying to pull out his teeth. He started shouting at me, “Grace Jones! You should not be here! Get out of here!” It turned out he didn’t mean that I shouldn’t be in his house, but that I should not still be around as a musician. “You had your day! Your time was up a long time ago!” Patti tried to calm him down. “Keith, Grace is our guest! She’s an old friend!” He kept mumbling, about how I should not be here, I was Studio 54, I was from a dead, plastic world. To him, I was disco, and nothing else. I knew better. After all, I had turned down “Boogie Wonderland.” Eventually, he passed out again, into another segment of this nightmare. The next time we met, he’d forgotten all about the incident, or just accepted that I was still around, that I wasn’t disco, that grotesque aberration. I was more like him, a wanderer, a nomad, at home here and there, with, when it suits, a purpose.
Eventually I heard the song Walden did for the Mickey Rourke film; he had gotten a Canadian singer called Luba to sing like me singing like Aretha Franklin. It was awful. The trouble is, once you go through something like this, it stays with you and is there every time you make a decision. It haunts me, but not as much as the song would have if I had done it.
My German teacher in New York taught me to let my emotions take over, but that meant singing something that meant something to me, that made me emotional and involved, however dark or perverse the subject. Singing is a form of manipulation of the emotions. It’s something you even do with your speaking voice—you manipulate a situation, to get what you want. I got that. I understood that. That helped me sing like Grace Jones, which was what I wanted all along.
While I was in Paris, making it a home, another genius, Issey Miyake, turned my life around in the way I like. He was then at the beginning of his extraordinary career. I first met him at an audition in a bare room somewhere in the middle of the endless city. It was very everyday. You turn up. You wait with other girls. You go into the room where everyone is. You try on the clothes and walk, hoping you are doing it the way they like.
They all sit around a table, and watch without giving anything away. It’s very humiliating. That’s why I would never want to be a judge on one of those talent shows. They ask me all the time. Simon Cowell always wants me. I’m offered so much money to do these kinds of shows, but no amount of money is enough to compensate for what appearing on them would do to my soul. They’re awful, there’s no learning experience, it’s demeaning and dispiriting. Sure, it’s a part of life, and you have to go through it, but to set it up as something that people laugh at is so damned cruel.
Issey was lovely, though, and he was very fond of African and Indian models, girls not likely to be used by other designers, even the most radical. He wanted the models he used to have a dangerous and ambiguous kind of allure.
He made such a contribution to how I perform, that withdrawn, minimal, underplayed performance. He showed me how to discipline the body in order to heighten the excitement, which was something that set me apart from the standard way that pop singers moved to make their point. He made me realize that to make my presence felt I could stand still, and radiate intense inner life without having to dance around like all the others. I was the countdown to an explosion that was always about to happen.
I found the stillness more powerful. I met Issey when I was thinking about ending my modeling life and become a singer full-time. I had recorded my first single, “I Need a Man.” All that energy and discovery, all that strutting American disco fed through the swashbuckling French glamour, and all the lovers I had, my being tangled up with the lingering male genes, it was all there in “I Need a Man,” which became an unofficial gay national anthem. He said, “Why don’t you sing that song while you model my new wedding dress?” The Paris fashion-show reveal of the wedding dress was always meant to be the showstopping highlight, so it was a real honor to be chosen. It was really my first official public singing engagement. I became known for a while as the singing model.
Through him I learned about theater, Kabuki, and this was a massive influence on how I would present myself as a performer. I had been moving toward it without even knowing it. The powerful, extreme makeup that I favored, the flamboyant costumes and exaggerated gestures . . . Kabuki is an investigation, really, into eccentricity while maintaining something completely pure.
Kabuki’s meaning is to act eccentrically, or erratically, and Kabuki gave me clues about how to achieve the spectacular without appearing obvious. I got to it after being in America, and then Paris, and that was the right order—a crash course in pop culture and hippie adventure on the East Coast, a year getting up to speed amid the make-it-here frenzy of New York, a discovery of provocative French passions, and then spinning all this through this dazzling Japanese combination of formality and subversion. It taught me a way of being larger than life without losing control, the way they used their cross-eyed glare and stuck out their tongues to drive away evil meshed with a lot of what I felt about Jamaica and the way I was brought up. I liked the idea that you could repel badness through a look, a held moment. There’s an element of the African trickster too, introducing disorder and confusion but paving the way for a new, more dynamic order.
The Japanese influence concentrated the more conventional ideas about performance and entertainment into something very precise and intense. It was a clash of two or three very different forms of energy to produce a new kind of energy that very much reflected and represented my own travels. I think I connected with Kabuki because it was about the enormous amount of compressed energy it takes for the Japanese to deviate from the norm in a place where comfort and formality is highly valued. I had come from a very conformist past, and Kabuki helped me articulate my own form of deviation from the norm, the breaking away from the rigid without it being predictable and shrieky. I could shriek, and in some senses I still did, but I also learned the impact of stillness.
I am not a great dancer. I don’t put it out like Madonna. I can dance, but it is not normal—I will stand on my hands, tumble, be a little gymnastic, but in terms of stage, and then performance, and video, Kabuki and Miyake helped me refine a dance that was more natural for me.
Before Issey, I wasn’t doing much runway in Paris, which was where the big money was. I was modeling to make as much money as possible, to get me closer to the theater. Paris is like the candy shop of fashion. It’s everywhere. Even the most unclassifiable person is doing something interesting. Everywhere there are people trying things, with integrity, even if they remain obscure and neglected. There’s something about Paris, something in the air, in the earth, that always made it work as a center of fashion, this complicated weave of art, frivolity, entertainment, business, sex, illusion. There’s something in the place itself, and the earth underneath it, something so powerful you can’t mess with it. Hitler left it alone, after all.
Issey took me under his wing. He made me the lead, almost the host, of this radical runway show he organized in 1976 where there were twelve black models wearing his daring new clothes. I would sing and have multiple roles within what was a fashion show remade as a happening. Issey wanted his shows to be more than just fashion, the mundane display of clothes—he wanted theater, scandal, a different kind of event beyond fashion, beyond show business, pure experience, always with an undercurrent of imaginative strength. Even then he was breaking free of the idea of what a model was, and of conventional ideals of beauty.
This show was a fantastic, subversive idea, still ahead of its time. Twelve black models from South America, New York, Africa, Paris, on a monthlong tour of Japan in theaters—fifteen thousand people came to see it. The show was called Issey Miyake and Twelve Black Girls.
Who else would think of using only black girls, even now? This was girl power from Mars. I think he liked how as black models having to fight for attention in a very exclusionary world we were more spirited than the norm. Having foreign girls in Japan created a sense of fantasy—instant, transfixing otherness. Wherever I moved I always seemed to bring otherness with me, because I was always in a new place, an outsider. I never quite belonged wherever I landed, moving from place to place, but always acted as though I did, creating a blur between belonging and not belonging.
Michael Douglas and Jack Nicholson came to see Issey’s show. They were in Japan promoting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Of course they took us out after one of the shows. Jack ordered a couple of limos. Jack, Michael, and all the models—it was very crazy.
A couple of the models were a little too starstruck, throwing themselves at Jack. And he was manipulating the situation. There was that Barry White bass in the background. He would sit there with his arms outstretched and big come-on grin, being Jack even then. Before I knew it, girls started to disappear one by one. I found out the next day from my roommate, an African princess who spoke only French, that he was inviting each girl to meet in the car, and each girl thought she was the only one. And one by one they turned up.
I caught his eye and I could tell what he was up to. I wagged my finger. No, Jack. No way. I am wired to leave when it is heading that way. It did not seem interesting to me. I was not going to go with a bunch of girls losing the plot. I went home. I had a big word with them the next day! Much later on, many years later, I met Jack and quietly found out for myself what he was like. Actually, we mostly talked about hats, and who had the better collection.
To this day, when the celebrities turn up—Bette, Stevie Wonder, Elton John—I have to warn my band, Do not let this freak you out. You get distracted. Even the Queen was not going to distract me. I’d learned to set the example as a girl: Make a good impression, don’t fall apart—there is a proper way to conduct yourself. Maybe it’s a Jamaican thing. No gawking. I thought these models were going to die, they were so overwhelmed. And this was a complicated theatrical show, a musical without dialogue. A lot of cues requiring a lot of concentration. I had never seen anything like it. The way my live shows developed over the years was based on that Japanese trip.
Issey is the only real artist in fashion—smart, sensitive, very humble. Somewhere between a poet and engineer, philosopher and architect, refining centuries of tradition, but always in the future, and somewhere in space, the space he borrowed from the idea of the kimono, and how between the body and the kimono there is only an approximate contact.
He once said that he went into fashion because it was a creative format that is bright and optimistic, and he was there as a seven-year-old cycling to school on the day that the Americans dropped the atom bomb on his hometown, Hiroshima. His mother died three years later from radiation poisoning. She had been severely burned but carried on working as a teacher. He wanted to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, that bring beauty and joy.
He was in Paris at the time of the May 1968 student revolts, which made him question fashion as being something only frivolous and trivial. To Issey, fashion is more than designs, or clothes, or inventions—it is visions, ideas and dreams, turned into wearable, flowing solid objects, shells, algae, stones turned into material. I wear his clothes every day to this day, and even those pieces I’ve worn for years still surprise me. He once said that his clothes are unfinished, and how they get finished is by being worn for years.
They’re clothes you can wear in the street, but they’re theatrical enough to wear onstage. They became part of my look, even if I chose to wear just one of his pieces, just a breastplate. He would do things for me, not to market, just for Grace. He knew I liked hoods, so he would do a collection of hoods.
You cannot copy him. You can try, but people will say, You are copying Issey. He invents fabric that changes color depending on the time of day. He boils fabric, melts it, uses bamboo and ultrasound to treat his cloth. The way his clothes fold, they form a starburst when you open them up. Unbelievable. He was the first person to give me a chance in a runway show. I’d been to see everyone, and no wanted me. As soon as I did an Issey runway show, twenty-seven people who had previously rejected me for runway came backstage and asked that I do runway for them.
Working with him took me into the whole world of the Orient, which made a big difference to my music and performance. He really liked me, and we have stayed very good friends. We took an interest in each other. I said I was going to stop modeling, and he could see that I was serious about that, that I was interested, like him, in going into spaces where no one else was going. Not a singer, not a model, not a dancer, not an actress, not a performance artist: all of that together, and therefore something else. That’s why he set me up as the leader of the show, to help me work out how to be more than only a model.
Working with Issey meant working with the best people, the unique, innovative, edgy women he likes to surround himself with who have something often underestimated in fashion—a great, mischievous sense of humor. Eiko Ishioka, who designed the costumes for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, was the art director of Twelve Black Girls. She worked on Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, because Coppola wanted the costumes to be sets in themselves. She was good at drug-dream vampire brides. I was still working with her on a tour in 2009, and she made what little I wore when I was set before the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee celebration. She once said her clothes were not meant to be comfortable—they were meant to torture the wearer.
That first Issey experience made me focus on what I was and who I was based on the evidence I had—from the past, present, and future, from other people I had been, from other people I would become. He did a whole book, East Meets West, about this way of making something from one piece of cloth. I would make something from one person. And that one person was now, much to her surprise, a singer. A disco singer.