9.

One Man

I had been on tour while Jean-Paul stayed in New York, working. After it was over, I tried to take him with me on vacation. He couldn’t understand why I needed a vacation, because as he saw it, when I had been touring, I had been in this exciting place, and then this exciting place. He thought being on the road was a holiday. He’d say, “That’s not work.” He didn’t get it.

To show him what it was really like, I took him on tour with me—I was on my own, without a band, still using playback. It was all my responsibility, the performance, and I wanted him to see how much work it was, even if I was traveling to exotic places. The show was full of set pieces we had designed together. It was not only me standing there singing the songs to the backing music. It was like a minimal musical starring me, and I carried the whole show. He had a nervous breakdown on the third day on a rooftop in Saint-Tropez. I said, “Now do you see how much hard work it is? Now do you understand? This is no holiday.” He couldn’t take the pace, and he wasn’t even performing. He had to go back to New York.

Another time he came with me for some American shows and I got a knee infection during a show in Florida, from crawling onstage. I would throw my body about during a performance. Someone had dog shit on their shoes, and some of it was left on the stage. It got into a cut on my knee, which became infected and extremely inflamed. They had to put my leg in a cast—I almost lost the knee.

I was on a lot of painkillers, but I still went out and performed. The pain was so bad for me that Jean-Paul decided to go back home—he couldn’t bear to see me suffer. He couldn’t just stay with me and help me. I was pregnant at the time as well—before Paulo—and because of the knee, I had to abort. They said that because of the antibiotics I was taking the baby would be born without limbs. Jean-Paul had trouble dealing with these practical problems. I became very disillusioned, concerned that he preferred the illusion he had created, not the actual me.

That scared me. It made me feel very insecure. It made me think that if I wasn’t this perfect human being, it would not satisfy him. I couldn’t count on him to be there for me when I really needed him, because if I needed him, he saw that as weakness. The Grace Jones he had designed with me was not weak. She would not need a holiday, or get sick with fever. He didn’t want to see that I could be vulnerable.

I wanted to get pregnant again, having lost the first one. There was no doubt in my mind that Jean-Paul was going to be the father of my child. There might have been doubt in his mind, but he didn’t use condoms, so I figured he wanted a child with me. I’m not sure he really thought about it. We carried on, and we had Paulo. When I told him I was pregnant, there didn’t seem to be any joy in his response, not like the first time. I think he thought it was going to interfere with everything going on between us. That was his fear; I didn’t think it would.

The pressure to be perfect for him started to get to me. He said I had a problem with authority, that I don’t like to be told what to do. He wanted to be the authority in our relationship, and I wouldn’t lie down. I was never mute, like the image he invented based on me that said nothing. I had plenty to say. I was not a bed warmer. He was used to bed warmers—your basic housewife types. Go to the spa, keep yourself busy, do your nails, come home, fuck, go to sleep. I was too manly. I always kept my own apartment. I felt that was necessary. God bless the child that’s got his own. I could say, “This is my house, you get out.”

I could always feel when a fight was coming. I was never diplomatic—I would put my foot in it and we would end up in a big fight. I would say, “Okay, I’m going home.” But if he really wanted to let it out, then I would have to wait and have it out. My mouth was cutting. I would never mince words, always saying exactly what was on my mind. Jean-Paul and I would get pretty personal. Now and then our fights would get quite physical. There would be blows. He whacked me once, took me by surprise, retaliating for something I had said or done. Then I would write a song about it and he would turn it into an image.

I laughed when he said, “In this picture I am going to have you shoot yourself.” It made perfect sense as a metaphor. He was angry with me in an argument and it turned into an image where he had me hold a gun to my head. As an idea, fabulous; as a way of getting things out of your system, great; but you don’t want that to leak into real life.

Whatever was going on in my private life I would channel into my performances. Jean-Paul knew that; sometimes he would upset me so much I would be in tears before a show. I began to wonder if he was doing it on purpose. It’s like that movie All About Eve, when someone says to Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, once she has gone through something torrid: “After this, you will give the performance of your life.” I had a couple of moments like that with Jean-Paul, because he was provoking me. Why else do what he did before I went onstage? Either that or he was nervous for me. Sy and Eileen used to be so nervous for me. It was as if they were going onstage. They would be shaking, and they would touch me before I went onstage. I would say, “No, don’t do that,” because it would change my state of mind and make me feel something I hadn’t been aware of. I tended never to be nervous before I went onstage; if I was, it would go the other way and I would have yawning fits. Early on, I would clear the dressing room and meditate. I would isolate myself from whatever chaos was going on around me.

My vocal coach told me there is no such thing as nervous. You are excited, not nervous! I liked that—nervous is negative, excited is positive. It’s a different way of looking at the same thing.


Jean-Paul was using me. And I was using him. I thought what he did to me as an object was beautiful. He loved my lines, my shape, my color, and he loved manipulating those things to reproduce me and remake me. The universe to him is visual. It is a fantasy he wants to control.

I was so in love, and I realized that he didn’t love me as I loved him. The way he loved me was not how I wanted. He showed his love through the work, but he couldn’t do it any other way. At that time, I didn’t understand that.

I would tell him about being a nudist. I realized that I preferred to cover my head, not my pussy, and that would become an image. He would put my head on my brother Chris’s body, knowing the tangled nature of our relationship, the mix of me and him, her and me. He transformed the story of my life into a series of visions and fantasies. Talk would lead to him thinking, I will do you like this. There was a lot of talking, and then the idea. It was collaborative, never him only doing me. I was not a model. I was a partner in design.

An idea is worth so much. It’s beyond money. Jean-Paul has a store of ideas that could last a thousand years. He’d talk about the war, when he was growing up, seeing the Nazis walk into his village when he was a kid, monsters in stylish uniforms, evil dressed up to the nines.

I had a thing about uniforms at school. I had to make sure that every pleat on my skirt was still in place after a day at school, even after all that moving around and sitting down. My beret had to be absolutely just so after a whole day of it being crushed into my pocket. I never want to have to go through that kind of thing again, wearing a uniform to be so obviously obedient to a repressive force. The uniform represented how there was no escape from having to be perfect.

This combination of his memory and mine led to me goose-stepping in a video. We would talk about real stuff—horror, cruelty, fear, pain—and it would become an image, a way of dealing with the horrible, truly a kind of fairy tale in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, where nastiness is cast aside through storytelling and imagination.

That would become my role: to suggest to him an image that he would turn into a visual moment, part of a story that contained darkness but was heading toward a happy ending, or that contained beauty and was heading toward disaster. I would say his work was based on the experiments I performed on myself. The images were reflections of my past, my memories turned into visual expressions. I loved how artistic he could be in a commercial world, how funny, perceptive, strange, surprising. He was the best at being an artist in a commercial world. Those kinds of people come along once in a lifetime.

A lot of his work is very sexual, and I loved that he was so kinky. But when we started to have trouble in our relationship, it led to me putting my foot in it. One of the reasons I kept my own place for a long time when we were together, apart from the need to maintain my independence, was because he had these statues of Toukie in his house—it was his work, but it was other women, their bodies. I was jealous and silly because of that. I did not want to see his creation of another woman right in front of me all the time.

It made me think of what Helmut Newton had said—I didn’t have big tits. Toukie did! I knew I had something else. But now and then I would think, in my insecurity, Maybe I need to bring him a girl like the sculpture. Maybe that’s what he wants. So I did: I brought home a girl shaped like Toukie, so that we could all go to bed. I was so pleased with myself. I thought, Have I got a surprise for you! Boy, did I blow that.

He went through the motions with the two of us to be kind of hip, but the next day he was not a happy bunny. He said, “Don’t you ever do anything like that again! What on earth were you thinking?” That shows you how my mind works. That was my attempt to enter his fantasy world, by bringing in my fantasy world. He was kinky in the pictures, but he didn’t want it in our life.

I remember I had a beautiful girlfriend called Nina, and we would pretend to make love in the other room to see if we could take him away from his work. Help me out, Nina, I can’t get him away from his desk. We’d make these sex noises. I didn’t think about his deadlines, or about how long it took him to complete a piece; I was being selfish. I want attention! Now!

Jean-Paul thought it was simply me being crazy. He loved it at first, when he was looking at me from the outside, causing mayhem on small club stages, attacking a gay audience with pure relish. The reality was less amusing to him.

It was always me he was working on. It wasn’t like he was paying attention to another woman, but I became jealous of me. That, in the end, is what broke us up. He was paying attention to me. He was looking at nothing but me. He was inserting his imagination right inside me, and he has a very big imagination, believe me. But that meant he was ignoring me. He was a perfectionist, and he was always obsessed with making his work flawless. In a relationship, this can be difficult. He was always turning me into an ideal being, the perfect specimen, and meanwhile, I was living in the real world.

This was the battle—him creating the perfect Grace through the manipulation of image versus the flesh-and-blood Grace in the real world. I was so scared of appearing less than perfect that I would pose even on the toilet. The toilet door didn’t have a lock, and I would be like a statue on a throne in case he came in while I was there. I so wanted to please him, but had I known better I would have just kicked him around a bit. If I had to do it all over again, I would say, “This is silly, stop making me feel silly.” I was looking up to him too much. We were putting each other on these pedestals, whereas where we needed to be was more down-to-earth. We needed to be realistic with each other.

Jean-Paul became well known after working with me, but from the outside, he was as much relegated behind the image of me he designed as he was promoted to a new level of success. He would be called Mr. Jones when we checked into hotels, and he did not like that. If you have an ego—and he does, and I liked that—it’s difficult to be seen as a supporting act. It wasn’t my fault, though, and I hoped he could forget it.

He was in my shadow, as much as he had emerged from the shadows of the underground,where he had been before. This did bruise his ego, and in the realm where he was inventing himself as much as he was me, this disconcerted him. His best creation was an obstacle in front of what he ultimately wanted to be his greatest creation—himself.

He would be working, working, working on me, but I needed the physical comfort. He thought my work was enough to keep me company, in the way his was. But I was not with him when I worked on the road in the way he was with me as he worked on my appearance in the studio, at his desk. Perhaps if he had been using computers it would have been different. He could have moved around with me; but then, you had to work at your desk, in your studio. Jean-Paul was wrapped up in me, carving me up, remaking me, putting me together, paying very close attention to me on paper, but ignoring me for real.

As Janis Joplin said, when you sing you are being adored by thousands of people, but you go home alone. The kinds of people who want to come back to your room with you are not the kind of people you want to have in your room. I could have had groupies, two dozen in line, next, next, next, but that’s not what I wanted. There were hundreds of people after me, guys and girls, but if people are chasing me, I back off.

I like a quiet, slow build, rather than being accosted. People could come back with me, to the hotel, to my room, but at the end of the day, I go to bed alone, and everyone has to leave. I like to be quiet, and sometimes that can attract people even more. You want to be alone, and this intrigues people. They want to conquer you.

He was alone with his work, and I was surrounded by a ton of people, most of them wanting something from me. I was dealing with madness on the road, and in the end all you want to do is get high, because of the anonymous crush of people around you, and yet the loneliness.

Being onstage is a high, but I never wanted to get high to get onstage. I could never do that. I would see singers get high before they went out, and I would go, “How on earth do you do that?!” I was almost jealous in a way. My voice could not take me being out of control. Probably a good thing, because I might have OD’d by now if I needed to be high to get out and perform. I have to be completely straight.

When I sing I have to be aware from second to second—of the breathing, the note that has just gone, the note that is coming. I need it all in my head, plus I am thinking of the lighting and of everything that is happening around me. Getting high wrecks my concentration. That’s where I am very disciplined.

I tried a joint once in a show during “My Jamaican Guy,” but it totally dried my voice out, and I got very paranoid. I thought I would use it as a prop—the song is all about the spliff—and I lost control of my whole body, of my whole senses. I lost the flow. You get so high from singing beyond anything you could take. Holding notes, breathing very quickly, you get high after doing that for an hour and a half. It’s like sex, if you do it right.


I met Dolph Lundgren while I was on tour. Jean-Paul was at home—with me, but not with me. Dolph was Hans Lundgren then. Jean-Paul and I were looking for a place in New York to move in together. Paulo was two, it was 1981, and I met Dolph on tour in Australia. This is a time and date I can be relatively precise about.

I was saying to Jean-Paul, “I really need you with me,” not for needy reasons but because I loved him, and missed him when I was away. He was editing A One Man Show, our masterpiece, a live show he was turning into a film, so he was probably feeling that I was in the room with him. But I felt very distant from him. He said, “I cannot come; you have to control yourself—I am working on the film.”

I said, “Get over here!” I remember saying, “I don’t cheat, but I am giving you a first warning: if you don’t come, I might start thinking of cheating. Three warnings, and you’re out.” I couldn’t control my hormones; they were all over the place.

I find it very difficult to masturbate, so I couldn’t get it out of my system that way. Any other woman might have dealt with it all by masturbating, but I thought the whole thing was absurd. I imagined myself doing it, and it was so ridiculous—I project myself doing it, and I just want to laugh at myself. If I was a guy, it’d be easier. A guy masturbating is very sexy. A woman masturbating is preposterous. That is my Oscar Wilde statement about the whole rigmarole.

I couldn’t relieve the tension and loneliness that way. I knew if I ever did cheat on him, it would be all over. We were so connected, in every way, that there could be no frivolous escape through a trivial one-night stand. I started to get high when I could to such an extent it was dangerous because I was hurting so much.

It’s easy to get high when you are on the road. Everyone is throwing shit at you. They throw it on the stage. I didn’t smoke because it spoiled my vocal cords. It was the coke period, and coke doesn’t really agree with me. I never really got it.

It makes you want to talk, but I can do that anyway. It makes you chatty, but I didn’t get the high. Pills were more my thing—the quaalude, Mandrax, Valium—they make you relax. I far preferred downers, and was always wishing that instead of giving me bad cocaine, the last thing I wanted, people would give me quaaludes. Just half a quaalude was perfect for me. They were so sexy, as long as you could stay awake more than fifteen minutes after you took one. They were like downers with an edge. Whatever it was the scientists did with the ingredients in that pill so that the psychotic people they were designed for would love everyone, when you took it for fun there was a very unique sensation.

In the end, all drugs, legal or illegal, are bad for you if you take them in the wrong way, or you take too many, or they simply don’t agree with your personality or basic DNA. I believe in drug use, not drug abuse. Coke was never my drug, although there are some who might be surprised by that. By being so closely associated with Studio 54, the assumption is that I was a complete cocaine fiend. There are rumors that my rider can include a demand for $30,000 worth of cocaine. This is from that part of Google that is pure fantasy, the part of Google that is itself high on something. If I had taken as much as cocaine as it is rumored, I wouldn’t have a nose. If I was such a coke monster, I wouldn’t have a life.

Actually, I preferred to put a rock up my ass rather than snort it. Sometimes it might get blown up there, one way or another. Then you get a very wonderful sexual feeling in your lower half. Stick a tiny little rock up your butt and it feels fantastic. The coke must be clean, of course. Very clean—that’s the word, more than “pure.” Or you put it in a bit of lotion and rub it on your skin. Tried that with a couple of girlfriends in Paris—nice. And the Cocoa Puffs. That way of taking it, rather than putting it up my nose.

The coke created this babble. Ideas, ideas, ideas, fabulous, fabulous, fabulous, and the next day none of it makes sense. You feel on top of the world, but a world made of powder.

Coke you had to keep taking to keep the buzz. The pill buzz lasted.

Coke was a constant thing that you had to keep topping up. It can take over your day. I figured out later it was because the coke was always cut, diluted. Eventually, I would want to know everything that I was putting in my body. I became a scientist, a doctor of medicine. I wanted to know what was okay, what might kill me. I could break down the ingredients of everything I was taking. I wanted to make sure that if I took coke, most of what was in there was coke. By taste, by smell, by look.

Sometimes in clubs, at parties, they would put down coke on a big table, loads of lines, and most of what was in there was heroin. That could have killed me without me knowing what I had taken. I quickly learned to come really prepared. To know what I was doing. I didn’t want an accident, which would be so stupid. I would sample every pill I was given before I swallowed it, even aspirin, and I could tell on my tongue if something was up, if there was some strange ingredient that did not belong. I became such an expert.

I had my very first ecstasy pill in the company of Timothy Leary, which is a bit like flying to the moon with Neil Armstrong, and I learned the taste of what was good, and what was bad. I developed my taste buds to tell when something was wrong. On very good ecstasy, I was okay. I would only take half a tablet, because my body is not good on excess. I know my body. I like to be in control of being out of control. Extreme, but in moderation. Crazy out there, but within reason. Take nothing in your body without being completely fussy. Be very aware. Make rare visits to certain drugs, so that it is a treat rather than a necessity—so many people, once they start taking drugs, binge on them, and that ruins the point for me. I don’t want drugs to wreck me, I want them to give me power, and strength, maybe warp me for a while, but not permanently.

I’m not an excessive person, except on tequila, perhaps. I don’t take acid anymore because it can make me lose control, and that is not a feeling I like to have now. It was right at the time when I took it under controlled circumstances, and it opened my mind, but it got about as open as it could. Now people take stuff without knowing what they are taking and what the consequences are. It was all very chic at the beginning, when it was open, and then shit turns to shit, and it becomes secretive, and the whole thing changes. Instead of having a line like a cup of coffee, very normal and everyday, it becomes dark and dirty, and then dangerous and life-threatening. When it becomes something to hide, you binge on it as quick as you can while you can.

I was getting in a spin. I said, “Jean-Paul, I need you, I’m losing it, please come.” He didn’t want to come; he was only interested in the film. The film me, not the real me. I could see it coming, that something was about to happen.

I was playing this huge theater in Sydney. Australia really liked me; I had a massive gay following there. I had a big dressing room filled with goodies, loads of food and drink, and it was my birthday. Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver were in town filming The Year of Living Dangerously, and we were going to be taken out to meet them. Dolph—Hans then—was at the University of Sydney studying chemical engineering. He was from a long line of chemical engineers. He had been hired for two weeks to do security at the theater, to make some pocket money. He was standing in front of my dressing room door, keeping people away. My friend Mary Vinson, who would later marry Chris Blackwell, was there with me, keeping me company.

I invited Hans in. We changed his name much later, when he started acting. I was in the mood to start flirting. I said, “Oh, you look like you are hungry. I have all this food.” He and his colleague were in the dressing room with Mary and me. Mary naughtily said to them, “Well, why don’t you take us somewhere, so we can go dancing.” They were both very quiet and proper. Very nice, unassuming. From college, straight, and they were still treating it as a bodyguard job. Well, that soon stopped.

I remember saying to Mary, “Ooh, I don’t know which one I want. You choose for me!” We were high after the show, and buzzing, being a little silly. We ended up in a club, dancing, and we were two girls thinking it over, for fun, and she said, “Well why don’t you dance with them both and see which one you like. See how they dance!”

I was feeling very vulnerable. It was my birthday, and I was feeling I couldn’t count on Jean-Paul, that his work was more important than me. All these insecurities were raining down on me like a fucking storm. I was feeling very depressed and trying to deal with that by getting high and forgetting. I still had the whole tour ahead of me—everything was conspiring. I thought, Well, I’m going to sleep with one of them . . . and I decided to go with Dolph.

When I came back to New York, I told Jean-Paul. I figured, He has to know, because I would want to know. I was always straightforward and honest. There were too many secrets growing up. I didn’t want that in my life, so from the beginning of a relationship, I was always very up-front.

It was all I could think about when I flew back to America. There was Jean-Paul, and I had a small child, and I had warned him that if he didn’t come and help me, things would change. I wasn’t married, I hadn’t made that commitment, and so there was still this place for something to happen. Once Jean-Paul had recoiled from the physical me, the one that existed off the page, outside of his carving and modifying, changed very fast.

I said to Jean-Paul, “If you can forgive me, I still love you. Why don’t you take some time to think about it?” He said, “No, I will give you my answer now. And it’s no.” So that was it.

It was very difficult, splitting up. I was childishly in love with him—I had so much love for him, and I never felt that he loved me in the same way. Later he told me that he was trying to show me how much he loved me through the work. I was too young to understand that. I was in my late twenties, but emotionally I was like a teenager.

Hans and I wrote to each other for a few months. Then he came over to see me. Jean-Paul and I carried on working together—a romantic breakup couldn’t break that up, not immediately. We were too intertwined. We’d had Paulo. It took time for the inspiration to fade away. We still inspired each other creatively, and there was still a sense that we might get back together again.

Jean-Paul was still editing A One Man Show in New York, which came out of the idea that Jean-Paul thought I was sexier dressed as a guy than as a Christmas tree disco star. He liked me more in disguise as a savage or a surreal superhero than obviously dolled up and stripping off to impress.

With Richard, I had played with the Marlene Dietrich imagery, my head on her body in the sailor suit. Jean-Paul saw me as the black Dietrich. There was something about the idea of her that he wanted to update. The French saw me as the new Josephine Baker, even before the music, and he updated that as well, an imaginary Africa dislocated even more than it was, a distorted reincarnation of the danse sauvage, an uproar of the senses.

I met Josephine Baker once at her last show in Paris. It was very brief; she passed away shortly after. We didn’t really have time to talk, but I remember she wore a lovely turban, and she was very sweet to me.

I had a friend, Patrice Calmettes, who managed at Le Palace after Fabrice died. Patrice and I are very close, and he was close friends with Marlene Dietrich. When I was with him one night he put me on the phone. I said, “Hello,” in my usual deep voice. And she said, “Well, you sound just like me.” It was close to the end of her life, and she had become a recluse—she didn’t leave her apartment or speak to many people. Patrice was one of those she still spoke to. Our conversation was very brief: “We have the same voice,” she purred. She wished me all the best.

I remember meeting Lauren Bacall at a party for Giorgio Armani. She was also taken with my deep voice, because she had one as well. She said, “We have the deep throats!” It was like being in this community of deep voices. Lauren loved my lips. She started kissing me. It was like we were in a little club of deep, manly speakers.

It was interesting, though, that a lot of the time it was others who wanted me to be the new this, the new that. Others said I was the new Dietrich, the new Josephine Baker, even the black Monroe after an Italian Vogue shoot for which they made me up like Marilyn. A lot of the acts I was compared to were white, and it struck me as being a way for critics to take the me out of me. The me I had worked so hard to be.

There was also a job I did that forced me to explore my male side in pictures. After a few months in Paris, I was hired for a shoot for La Perla in Côte d’Ivoire. I had turned down an important shoot with Yves Saint Laurent because although it had incredible prestige, it didn’t pay much, and the La Perla shoot paid well and I had bills and rent to pay. Also, it was a chance to go to Africa, and I had never done that before.

I got held up at the airport after the flight because, they said, my papers weren’t in order. They wouldn’t let me into the country after a long flight from Paris. I was frustrated and scared, as the rest of the party were allowed in with no trouble, and suddenly, in the middle of the night, I was on my own, surrounded by threatening security guards. I think they were after a bribe, but I had no money on me. They decided to deport me.

I was very tired and had taken a Valium for the flight. Three guards lifted me up like a sack of potatoes and threw me onto the plane, ready for the flight back to Paris. I pretended that I was ill and kept my eyes shut and let a little foam form at the side of my mouth. They were speaking in French and didn’t think I could understand them. They were talking about how Americans thought they were comedians, taking the piss out of them.

The pilot refused to take off with me on board, because he thought I was seriously ill. This was good news for me, because I wanted to get into the country. They carried me off the plane and put me in a cold, dirty cell—not much of an improvement on my circumstances. I was still playing ill, and started to cry. One guard definitely seemed in the mood to try something, and I was worried that I was going to be raped. Basically, I fought this by making it seem as though if they messed with me, they would catch a disease. Foaming at the mouth and being incoherent because of the Valium put a barrier around me. Do you want to catch what I’ve got? He didn’t. Eventually I was allowed into the country, although they took my passport, which made getting out of the country another adventure.

Because I was late, and the male models got sunburned in the boiling hot sun, I ended up having to play the male part in the shoot, and my openness in agreeing to this kind of thing, when a lot of the models wouldn’t, became part of my thinking. I was comfortable playing the man. Because of the trouble I’d had getting into the country, in all the photos I was in a bad mood, pouting hard, staring at the camera with a lot of aggression. I look at those early pictures, often taken in beautiful parts of the world by fantastic photographers, and it makes me laugh that it often looks like I was in a really foul mood. It made for a good photo, but also told the story of what was happening—the trouble I was in, the hangover I had, or the annoyance with some of the people I was on the shoot with.

Jean-Paul loved the man/woman idea, because he wanted to mix and split everything up in the pictures, so that they were tough but soft, manly but female, ancient but modern, mystical, everyday photos but hyperreal and painterly. It was all part of the puzzle that became the androgynous thing—it became the obvious direction for me to go in. The images also were made up of a series of lies, and here was the classic deceit—the woman dressed up as a man, or the man as a woman, or which was it? Masked and unmasked. I remember once when I was shopping at Bloomingdale’s in New York and I was trying some clothes on in a changing room. A woman saw me and complained that there was a man in the dressing room. I swiveled around, naked to the waist, and casually announced: “Can a man be pregnant?” Paulo was on the way at the time.

A One Man Show was my first world tour. I’d been seen in crowded discos, with the kind of cheap, improvised theatrics suited to the club scene, but never on such a grand level. It was everything I had always been, but made new. I would make the whole theater my space. I borrowed ideas from church—this formalized interpretation of desire, and yearning, and charisma. I was preaching pleasure as a certain sort of threat, getting the audience to get down on their knees, bringing them onto the stage, blessing them in my own way.

A One Man Show was the distillation of this process where I was as much a performance artist as a pop singer or actress. Or at least, I was interested in presenting myself as a singer in a way that broke away from what had quickly become a very narrow set of traditions. Most pop performance didn’t take into account pop art, or Warhol’s films, or a European catwalk, or Japanese theater. There seemed to be many different ways of doing a concert where you would be influenced not by a rock ’n’ roll show or a soul revue but by minimalist art, expressionism, and avant-garde film.

It was Jean-Paul inventing a new context for me to inhabit, as though Marlene Dietrich, Bertolt Brecht, and Piet Mondrian were as important an influence on pop as Elvis, as though music could be connected to art and theater. It was like the invention of a new genre, related to the musical, to opera, to circus, to cinema, to documentary, to the art gallery. To magic as well, because Jean-Paul was like an illusionist, creating magic tricks that somehow philosophically dislocated reality, and my image, and even my soul.

It was also about stripping back prejudice. It was about rejecting normal, often quite sentimental and conventionally crowd-pleasing ways of projecting myself as a black singer and a female entertainer, because those ways had turned into clichés, which kept me pent up in a cage. I wanted to jolt the adult world that is traditionally led by bland white men, to shatter certain kinds of smugness through performance and theater.

I never really thought of myself as black, so it wasn’t as though I consciously decided that I would behave in a way that black people didn’t usually behave. In America they tried to force me to be, in their eyes, a traditional black person, to limit myself to the limitations imposed from outside on a black American, but I didn’t want to go there. It seemed that would make me act like a victim, like the inferior person they wanted me to be by dismissing me as black—ruled by the language of the prejudiced—and I wanted to be ruled by my own language, my own way of putting and seeing things.

The unmoored power that people recognize in the One Man Show is possibly because I was simply being me, not thinking about the color of my skin, or my sex—I was outside race and gender: I considered myself an energy that had not been classified. Jean-Paul amplified my own exaggeration and perversion of how the female path to survival has often been through seduction.

I never wanted to limit myself to being A Black Woman, because that immediately puts a person on their back foot—beginning from a kind of negative space in order to prove the positive—and I never wanted to think of who I was as anything less than positive. If there was any woman in there, she was abstracted, hidden behind a mass of disorienting contradictions. I didn’t want to act black, or white, or green.

This was immediately shocking. I was behaving in a way that was certainly not perceived to be African, or Jamaican, not least because the show was clearly interested in things Africans and Caribbean people apparently had no interest in because it wasn’t part of their history—things like minimalism, cubism, musical theater, absurdism, Happenings. (This attitude completely underestimates and misunderstands the African and Caribbean openness to experimentation and renewal that is essential to how they deal with radically challenging circumstances.) And I was dressed as a man, or an animal, or an alien. I didn’t invite the audience into a familiar set of spaces, so there was no safety there.

There was also a robotic quality to my performance, a mix of the human, the android, and the humanoid, and that was also disorienting to those expecting to see a black woman essentially act either like a passive black woman playing along with the rules, or a strong, defiant black woman blasting through the rules with what were still essentially compliant black “soul” elements.

I was being entirely natural, given that the whole thing was deliberately heightened. I was never coached in how I moved, or regarding my facial expressions. I picked all that up from various places. From Issey and Japan, from my acting coach, Warren Robertson, who made me realize I was being my abuser, Mas P. This was why I was being so scary; this was what I was channeling.

Theatrically, I was not thinking, This is a way of finding a different way to be black, lesbian, male, female, animal. I didn’t want my body language to betray my origins. I wanted to use my body to express how I had liberated myself from my background, ignored obstacles, and created something original, based on my own desires, fears, and appetites. I was using my body as a language. A language that comes from a dark continent. And dark is dangerous.

We never discussed its being about blackness, or femininity, or masculinity, about the breaking of certain taboos and traditions. The power of a black female entertainer being so confrontational in a world where that meant you didn’t challenge or provoke was not something we set out to do, and maybe that’s why it was seen as so challenging and provocative. We were not limited by thinking there were barriers to break down. We didn’t even consider the barriers. As far as we were concerned, we were so far on the other side of any barriers that we never even thought of them. We were after a kind of freedom to experiment with performance, and we could do that more by not limiting ourselves to any categories. I was a human being, and more than anything we were seeing how far you could stretch being human before it became something else altogether.

Jean-Paul, perversely, as the creator/master of a show about freedom, might have considered some of these themes and processed them through me. The black woman as a weapon—the black woman who felt she could exist anywhere, who could change what it is to be black at will, who didn’t want to be fixed so that she couldn’t move through and into different worlds. Maybe he was scared of me, and this was his way of explaining it to himself. Perhaps he was exoticizing me, and these were his fantasies about me taken to the limits. Perhaps he wanted to reconfigure my celebrity status in a way that turned him on. He wanted to invent a brand-new sort of diva—Marlene Dietrich, the other side of Kraftwerk; Eartha Kitt, the other side of David Bowie and Klaus Nomi. We didn’t talk about it, but I know there were certain things he liked me to do, poses to adopt and expressions to use, as though moving through a dream about which he was making a documentary.

I was playing a character—a number of characters, masculine and feminine—but not feminine with big tits and a big butt, feminine in the brain, through mental discipline and flamboyance. And human, as an energy, a force, a creative act that did what creative acts are meant to do: to break outside of categorizing us sexually and racially, which causes problems.

The show came out of the minimalism, the cubism, and of creating a great effect without much money. It was also show business bent out of shape. It helped that I was fearless. I was prepared to take on whatever challenge Jean-Paul set for me, or I set for myself. A gorilla wearing lipstick? Absolutely. Bring it on. I loved it all—I loved his perfectionism and the madness that sometimes startled me that I could then turn into my own madness and startle him back with.

You don’t necessarily realize that you are onto something as you are doing it. It blossoms as you do it, and it turns into something that happens to be unique. At first, when we performed it live, people didn’t clap. They didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. And then jaws dropped. There was a slight state of shock. I could feel it coming off them, but of course I couldn’t react, as I was acting as if in a play. I was in another reality. It wasn’t Grace Jones onstage: it was Grace Jones playing Grace Jones, with the help of other people playing Grace Jones. I couldn’t come out of character.

My immediate reaction as I was doing the show was that it was a complete flop, except no one left the theater. They stayed. They watched. They wanted to work it out.

We used a catwalk, to refer back to the modeling part of me, that I would walk down into the audience. One night a fan handcuffed himself to my leg so that I couldn’t move. The audience rose up as one to demand that this person who had done it set me free so that I could finish the show. The bodyguards threatened to break his fingers if he didn’t let me go. I was shaken, and no one was sure I was going to continue after he let me go, and the whole theater stood up to urge me on. Then I realized it was working. They were quiet because they were seeing something new, not because they didn’t like it, but because they were concentrating on what on earth was going to happen next. It was a show that created a series of incidents, and you wanted to see how it ended.

Once you’re onstage, if they are not applauding . . . well, as long as they are not leaving, it is not a complete disaster. I concentrated on doing my part, making sure my voice was strong, that I hit my marks. It was a very new kind of show, even down to the fact the lights were shone on the audience. That was new in pop, that challenging of the audience, that bringing them into the show by making them a part of it. Big lights would come out at them, searching their faces, putting them on show. A huge fan blew confetti all over them. They weren’t used to that, to being abused. They were forced to keep their wits about them.

They weren’t sure how to react, not because they didn’t like it but because it had never been done before. The idea was that there was a story, or a series of stories, that was new. The idea that I was playing different characters, all based on me, or connected to me, but not really me, was also new. There was a lot to take in.

I was not being passive in the slightest, in the way most singers are. I whacked the cymbals. I dominated the audience. It was what I was always like, but much more so. I used to drag people onstage and pretend to sodomize them and pretend to whip them. It was total confrontation. I would beat the audience up. Bang them over the head.

Orson Welles once told me on a talk show, The Dinah Shore Show, that I raped the audience. I had just performed a song, and to be honest, in the confines of the TV studio, I was not particularly extreme. For me, fairly reserved. There was still enough of the drama for him to see something. He said, “Certain people seduce an audience, flatter an audience, beseech an audience. Grace, you rape an audience—your show is a sexual assault.” He meant it in a good way. . . .


I had bought a house in the Bahamas as part of my deal with Island, and I went there to write. I lived there with Paulo, and my family would come. After a while, Dolph came to visit for a holiday. Jean-Paul was working on me, but he knew I was with Dolph. We did try after Dolph left the Bahamas. Jean-Paul said he had changed his mind. He came over and we talked it through.

I think he realized he loved me when it was too late. He loved me as an object during our relationship, and he explained that to me. Later, he realized he loved me as me, but by then I was too aware of being loved as an idealized object, and I didn’t want to be loved like that. I don’t think I was selfish to say, “I am on tour, working hard; please come and help.” He might have understood if he had been a professional dancer and experienced what it was like, but he hadn’t.

One day, in the Bahamas, trying to fix everything, Jean-Paul suddenly said, “Well, let’s get married.” I was driving, leaving our apartment, and I panicked so much I slammed the car into reverse. I put my foot on the gas and went backward fast and almost crashed into a wall.

He thought that was what I wanted, but what I wanted was to get back together, not to get married. “No,” I said, “you don’t get it. That’s not what I want. Marriage is not going to solve anything.”

I knew he wasn’t going to change. The relationship wasn’t working because he was more intense than ever in trying to make it work. Which wasn’t natural. And I could not adapt to the pressure of being perfect. I had grown up with that and did not want to repeat it, even with Jean-Paul. I didn’t want to lose him as a friend. I didn’t want to lose him as an inspiration, as what made us work—I couldn’t lose that. I panicked. I could see the future. I knew Jean-Paul. That was it.

I didn’t want to change him. I couldn’t change myself. I knew deep down in my heart that if I had gone back with Jean-Paul, he would never have forgiven me for going with Dolph. For the rest of our lives he would always bring it up. I would have to pay for it for the rest of my life if we stayed together. I always made sure Dolph was never around when Jean-Paul came to visit Paulo.

Jean-Paul still brings it up—that I cheated on him. But I was always trying to tell him it was going to happen. He was always a little jealous—of John Carmen, of Chris Blackwell, of others who were part of presenting me to the world. He wanted to keep me to himself. Jean-Paul would be jealous of my press agent, even though he was gay. John could be sleazy, but he was very good at his job. Chris would say, “Your PR guy is the best.”

He would get me in the press all the time without it becoming too much. John was naughty—he’d say, “When you get out of the limo, scratch the car, jump on it, make noise.” Basic stuff, but it did the job. Pictures of me went in the papers. We would always be a bit high. Living the dream of the nightlife and the music, laughing and having a ball. Jean-Paul didn’t like to go out. He was a workaholic. I was the mistress; the work was his wife. By the time he realized that was the problem, it was too late. He would see me frolicking with John, laughing pictures of me on the town making the newspapers, and he thought there was something going on.

Dolph could see that I was unhappy, that I needed some reality, and to be cared for—not in the way that would turn me into this impossible, anomalous African queen, this battling elongated beauty encased in reflections of perfection, but as a person, in the real world, where I breathed, and cried, and bled. Dolph, being gentle and disciplined, a European and Australian karate champion, and also a Fulbright scholar, was exactly what I needed. I’d raced away from discipline after I left Jamaica, and Dolph brought it back. He understood the performance side; from the kickboxing, he appreciated the strain on mind and body of performing in a way that Jean-Paul didn’t. The way that, after you have performed and given so much, you can feel naked and exposed, horribly vulnerable and sensitive, and you need rebuilding. It’s as if you have been skinned alive. You open up a fantasy, and then you instantly revert to normalcy.

You can see why singers like Janis Joplin couldn’t cope. One way is to take someone to bed with you after a show, but I could see with Janis how that can make a person feel lonelier, more estranged. I didn’t want to go that way, but the physical distance between Jean-Paul and me, and his inability to understand what it meant to actually perform for real, not on paper or film, was putting mental and emotional distance between us. It was pushing me closer and closer to believing that taking someone to bed with me every time I felt alone was a solution and not adding to the problem.

Dolph could have been the beginning of that, of me taking the next available good-looking man to my bed. Luckily, Dolph didn’t take advantage of the situation, or quickly disappear after it was over. He wanted to get to know me, and he took me seriously as a person, not just a famous person.

He knew how to deal with my extremes in a way Jean-Paul didn’t. Dolph could see I was getting high a little too much, I was getting too wild, and Jean-Paul didn’t know how to ground me, or didn’t want to. At the top you are alone, and it was an intense cycle of records, shows, promotion—and I am not in a band. Sometimes I think it might be better to be in a band and share the pressure. Mostly, I think, You’re born alone, you die alone—handle it, but sometimes, especially during that period of the international hits and the growing fame, and Jean-Paul being in a band with me in a way, but always elsewhere, I would have liked the company. To be with the only other three or four people who understand what you are going through because they are as well.

Being with Dolph had nothing to do with him being big and beefy. He really took care of me when if he hadn’t done that, I would have died. I was so adrift because of how Jean-Paul refined the image of me but neglected the actual me. I would say that Dolph saved my life. I was touring so much. I felt super mature, but I was still very young in the sense that I was only really born when I moved to America—my childhood wiped out, devoured by my upbringing. So when I was twenty it was like I was eight; at thirty I was eighteen.

I think Dolph understood that. He didn’t accuse me of being immature and childish. He looked at my situation and he thought, I am going to help you. Instead of you waking up and feeling self-destructive, taking something as a barrier to the stress, you should do something healthy. He said, “You will find a different, better sort of high, a sports high. You will get addicted to an oxygen high.” My regimen changed, during that one world tour, which would have destroyed me if I had carried on indulging.

I was automatically drawn to Dolph because he was a gentle giant—very intimidating, being so big and fierce looking, but he was the opposite. He didn’t bully me, didn’t tease me when I was feeling fragile, and he turned me back on to sports. I had loved sports as a child; it was the one way I could play without getting into trouble. He renewed that enthusiasm I had, and he made me realize it could be a positive way of coming down after a performance, of dealing with the pressure of having to perform so regularly. He trained me to realize that exercise and discipline would save me.

Another problem was that I was becoming a big pop star, and yet I still considered myself an underground act, almost an amateur in a way. I’d never really banked on having to deal with all the pressures of stardom when I set out—the decisions you have to make, and the way it both opens up your world but also shrinks it. You travel the world, but the walls close in.

I knew that I was limited, but I understood how to make the most of those limitations. But I wasn’t really a singer or a dancer—a Jagger or a Tina—so I took things in unusual directions. In a way, I must always do that, because that is what works for me. If I got rid of that, it would be the end of me. I am not here to sing like Aretha and dance like James Brown. My goal was still in a way to do theater, and I was passing through. I knew that no one could match me in terms of theater; that’s where I was less limited.


Jean-Paul and I were nominated for a Grammy for the full-length video of A One Man Show. Jean-Paul missed his Concorde flight from Paris and couldn’t make it to L.A. for the ceremony. The Grammy publicists were trying to find me a date. They nominated a number of people to accompany me, and in the end settled on O. J. Simpson. Well, there was no way I was having that. I must have seen what was coming. So I asked my friend the actress Sarah Douglas, and we went together. I wore this massive Karl Lagerfeld hat shaped like victory, because I was fairly sure we would win. We didn’t.

Following the event, I lost my invite to the after-party. I had presented an award, and I had been nominated, but I didn’t have the right pass to get into the party afterward. I got incredibly upset—we were in this huge line, and they would not let me in. When they turned me away, I tried to hold it in, but I was so upset. There was a lady in the queue, and she said, “Don’t mess with Grace!”

I had had enough, especially because I didn’t even win the award. Duran Duran won, and they said to me, “Oh, Grace, you deserve the award, not us. You should have it.” I said, “Well, give it to me, then.” They kept it. They admitted that they had copied the staircase in their winning video from me and Jean-Paul in A One Man Show. To me, being beaten by Duran Duran reminded me of the Oscars a year or two before, when Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man were beaten by Ordinary People and Robert Redford.

There was a really long hallway in this big building where the party was. I let out a huge scream that lasted as long as I could make it as we left the building. The police were called, and they were going to arrest me for disturbing the peace. Sarah tried to calm things down: “It’s okay, she’s okay, she’s feeling very upset, she didn’t win her award, we’re leaving now, it’s okay.”

We had a limo pick us up. My hat was so big I couldn’t get it through the door. I ripped it off. I was in a really bad mood. The limo driver recognized Sarah from her appearance in Superman II, as one of the villains, and even though he had the glass partition up between us and him, he was eavesdropping on our conversation in the back of the car. He started to talk to her. I was livid and started screaming at him, “This is private!” And he said, “Well, this is my limo. Why don’t you get out?” He kicked us out of his car. I took my lipstick out and wrote all over the back of his car: ASSHOLE!

We ended up catching a cab, with this awful leopard-print pattern on the seats. I sat with my Lagerfeld hat on my knee, miserable because it had all gone wrong. A One Man Show lost to Duran Duran, enough to make me scream and scream.

Jean-Paul and I are still friends, more than thirty years later. We have our son, Paulo, a musician who often plays on stage with me, another of our masterpieces. We carried on collaborating. We still talk for ages on the phone. We exchange a lot of information about each other, which is true friendship. When we start talking we don’t stop . . . as long as I take time to listen. He always said, “You talk, but you don’t listen.” It’s because I get excited! He has to say, “It’s my turn now.” His ideas still thrill me and make me see things in a new way. He also still does things that annoy me. When he took a photograph of Kim Kardashian with a champagne glass perched on her ass in an impossible pose like the ones he did with me over thirty-five years ago, I asked him why he was giving her—as a basic commercial product—his ideas? This seemed to contradict his spirit of integrity, which he has protected for so long. Why was he repeating himself, just to give her a little flare of publicity, quickly absorbed by the next puff of self-promotion? Well, he replied, “I got the feeling that if I didn’t do the photograph, she would simply have the idea copied anyway. I might as well copy myself.” His ideas are so powerful that repeating them decades later still causes a hell of a fuss, however temporary. I also think he wanted to get a little respect from America for what he had done as an artist and in a way as a creative prophet. He might have done it to wind me up a little as well. Which he did.

I think I know him better than anyone, certainly after his current wife, Karen. He knows me and I know him because we did spend a lot of time talking very freely. Even when we argued, we would end up laughing.

Because we were working on A One Man Show before, during, and after our separation, it became pretty intense. Plenty of that positive and negative sexual, creative, and romantic energy went into the performing and making of it. It was entertainment, and the analysis of entertainment, and it was the story of a relationship. It’s what helps make it so fantastic. Ultimately, it is a love story, taken beyond belief.