Dolph and I toured America on a motorcycle, which was great for me, because I had not seen much of the country outside touring either with the church or as a performer. We traveled all over the country, and I would wear this full-length Issey Miyake leather outfit with a helmet that covered my entire head. You would not know what color I was, which was important in Middle America. I was covered and masked, so no one could see me. You wouldn’t have even known I was a woman.
It helped that Dolph was as much a gypsy as me. He loved discovering new places. He liked to move around and study, and earned a number of academic scholarships. He had a Fulbright scholarship to a college in Los Angeles, but that was too far away from me living in New York so he decided to go to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the world’s great engineering schools.
We traveled to Boston to see where he would be living. I moved some plants from my apartment to make him feel at home. We had a look around and liked what we saw; then we traveled back to New York. On the way back he suddenly said, “I don’t want to do this. I am only going to school for engineering because it was what my brother did, and it is not what I want.” Dolph decided he was not doing it for himself—he was doing it for his family, because it was what they did.
I said, “If you don’t want to do engineering, try something else.” I understood the whole family thing and knew how important it was to break out of the box. I encouraged him to find something else to do, and he listened. It’s horrible to be doing something you don’t want to do.
We moved back to New York, and I cut off his hair—worried I was taking away his power, like he was Samson. He came everywhere with me. We were inseparable. He became familiar to the people I was working with and for. Kenzo put him in a fashion show, but he did it in a loving way, because Dolph was very shy and very sweet. He was briefly in the Bond film I did, A View to a Kill, playing a bodyguard, because he was hanging out with me and looked the part. He loved the atmosphere on set, and he loved studying, so he started studying with my acting coach, Warren Robertson. I told him if he wanted to take it seriously he needed to study. He relished that, as he loved to learn.
This part came up in Rocky IV, as the mighty Russian heavyweight fighter Drago. There was a long search for someone to play Drago. Warren had once roomed with Sly Stallone, so it all fell into place. Before I knew it, boom, Dolph had a career.
It quickly took a toll on our relationship. It was Hollywood that tore me and Dolph apart: the place, the industry, the bullshit. Offers for film parts would come along for him, but they often wanted me to be attached. This caused problems. We want you, Dolph, but we want Grace too. We ended up fighting about it, even though it wasn’t really our fault. We were plunged together whether we liked it or not, and that led to us falling apart.
There was ego. Out of nowhere, the ego Dolph didn’t have before, he now had. You need it as an actor, as both a form of protection and a way of projecting yourself, but it can harm you as a person. Necessary self-confidence erupts into arrogance. Ego can get in the way of growth, because it makes you think you know it all. People started to fill his head with stuff because they saw a chance of making money through him, and he believed it.
Dolph and I ended up living in Los Angeles after all, because he wanted to be where he figured the action was. We went through bad patches. The relationship failed a few times, and we would try and resuscitate it. There was a magnetic attraction that would draw us together, but then the real world would intrude. We would be wrapped up in each other, and then we would be apart for two weeks.
When we first met, Dolph had brought me and the reality around me down to earth, from a very dangerous place that was beginning to swallow me. Once we were living in Hollywood, our relationship had left planet Earth, because Hollywood is not on planet Earth. Despite the magnet that pulled us together, it didn’t work. The ending to it dragged on, really. There was too much interference, too many people were giving advice, it became very complicated. We weren’t left alone to work it out for ourselves.
After Dolph did the Rocky movie and we moved to L.A., the New York restaurateur Tom Holbrook took over his management. He had never managed anything before, other than his restaurant. He wanted to represent me, but I didn’t want that.
Tom was no good for Dolph. He ended up stealing a lot of his money. They went on tour together to promote Rocky IV, and when they came back to Los Angeles, Dolph didn’t come back to our house. Holbrook decided he would move into the Sunset Marquis Hotel with Dolph. He said to me, “Well, you are filming during the night, and Dolph is working during the day. You never see each other anyway, so Dolph might as well stay in a hotel and be looked after.” He said it was a practical decision, that we both needed space. This was where other people began taking over the management of our lives, not only of our careers. Holbrook was trying to control me and Dolph, and I was having none of it.
I was filming a camp sex horror vampire comedy, Vamp, and we ended up shooting later and later into the night, which worked for me, and also worked because I was playing a vampire, Katrina, the leader of a nest of vampires running amok in the night. I ripped hearts out of chests, wore a wire bikini, and was an erotically fucked-up stripper taking her clothes off like she was in a kinky avant-garde Japanese ballet, and had a stare as creepy and evil as any cult overlord. For me none of this was weird. All in a day’s—or night’s—work.
I had no dialogue. I said everything I needed to say through how I moved, used my eyes, and feasted on the necks of my victims—silent-movie stuff, really. To prepare for the role I watched a few times F. W. Murnau’s gloriously sinister and brilliantly designed 1922 silent film Nosferatu. Playing a vampire, I had to honor the screen original. Max Schreck played the supernatural vampire—in this case, the hideous Count Orlock—for the first time in film. I loved how he portrayed the creature, and how the film established much of the Dracula mythology, including the idea that sunlight kills vampires. That detail wasn’t in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, which Nosferatu was closely, if unofficially, based on. Stoker added some elements to the traditional myths and legends he based his story on, such as the inability to see vampires in mirrors, but many other now accepted details came once the movie versions started. In the novel, vampires can walk around in daylight, although they lose some of their power. Really, they’re merely nocturnal. Night is their time, as it is for me. Nosferatu creates for the first time the notion that daylight is deadly to vampires.
I was enthralled by the shadow on the wall as Schreck glides upstairs, his elongated fingers and nails, the bald head, bat ears, and sunken eyes, the mental makeup—all of it was my kind of weird. The way Schreck rises abruptly from his coffin onboard a ship made a huge impact on me. The fact that the film was silent made it much more ominous.
In Vamp they wanted to give me words, and I said, “No, I am too powerful to speak!” Too many words and you can get tangled up, trying to coordinate the words and the expressions. When I saw The Artist, I thought, Well, I wasn’t that far off the mark. For me, a silent movie and the atmosphere it creates are the pure essence of cinema, and if I had been alive during their heyday I would have been in my element.
Maybe Tom Holbrook took Dolph away from our house because I was getting a little Katrina-ish in real life. It’s hard to tell in Hollywood. If New York is a tragic, comic, stupendous, absorbing, sexy, enchanting opera with huge sets, Hollywood is a bright, corny advertising jingle that doesn’t even rhyme. In New York, you know when you are going mad, and you can enjoy it, or deal with it, or make art out of it. In Los Angeles, you cannot tell that you are going mad, because everyone around you is consumed by their own madness, hoping to make a movie about it.
I was so angry that Dolph was not coming home after being away for a week that my sister-friends Sarah, Tara, and I descended on the Sunset Marquis like we were Charlie’s Angels on a dangerous mission. I actually had a gun. It seemed very natural that I would go and fetch Dolph holding a gun. I did so out of desperation—we had been together for years and had made this move to L.A., a place I absolutely loathed, against my better judgment, and then he comes back from being away and Tom blocks me from even seeing him. What is going on?
We three girls got ourselves worked up and then decided, Let’s go and get him! Sarah asked me where I’d gotten the gun. I said, “Well, it came with the house.” In L.A., everything came with the house, including a gun. We turned up at the hotel, not to shoot anyone, but to make sure he came with us. We banged on the door of his room. Bang, bang, bang! I’ve got a gun! Elsewhere, Los Angeles carried on being Los Angeles, expecting such behavior, a similar scenario being played out elsewhere across the synthetic city; it’s what they base their myths on—violence and despair and money. I’m screaming, “Let him out, you bastard!” It was as though Tom was holding him hostage and we had come to rescue him, hair flying, legs flailing, breasts heaving, guns flashing, music pumping. This was the kind of hysteria that took place in Los Angeles.
In one of the many lives I never got to live, another Grace (one who never came true) shot Dolph there and then. Or rather, the bloodsucking Katrina wired for sex shot the titanic Drago bound for glory, one savage beast pulled down by another, in a city teeming with savage beasts tearing each other’s hearts out for the sake of a part, a hit, a job, a high, a fuck, an award. And that was the end of the ballad of Grace and Dolph. Dolph lived to see another action movie, and another, until the end of time, and I got to move the hell out of Hollywood.
Jessica Lange went to Hollywood for similar reasons as Dolph after she modeled and then became an actress. I once bumped into her on the street in New York. I was pregnant with Paulo at the time and was going to the Carnegie Deli for a sandwich. It was raining, and I hate umbrellas. I wear a hooded coat by Issey Miyake, so I don’t have to carry an umbrella. And there she was, passing me on the street. We hadn’t seen each other for years, not since Paris. We were standing in the rain talking about what we were going to do with our lives. I said, “Come up to my apartment on Fifty-Seventh and Seventh.”
We were so cozy in my warm and dry little flat. She was telling me all about her film career after she had made King Kong. She had signed a big Hollywood contract, and I could see that the heartbreak had already started. No matter what you sign, they never pay attention to it. That’s why I don’t sign anything anymore. What’s the point? You sign something, and they still do what they want to do. You have big hopes, and that inevitably means big disappointments. She said, “I was supposed to get this role, but someone else got it. Nothing is going like they said.” You could see the frustration and despair written on her face—on the verge of becoming destructive. That kind of deal with Hollywood as the devil can be totally dangerous.
I remember saying to her, as if I were exorcising a demon, “GET OUT OF THAT PLACE!” It was like a monster movie: The bogeyman is going to get you unless you run! Don’t even collect your stuff, get the hell out of there! I said to her, “If they want you, they know where you are. If they really want you, they will go to the ends of the earth to get you.”
Jessica listened to me! Shortly after that, she did a movie with Bob Fosse, All That Jazz. And she never moved back to L.A.
Hollywood always maintains the illusion that in order to get a job there, you have to live there. That’s the most ridiculous thing ever—when you have jet planes, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump from New York. It’s not the other side of the world. My attitude was: If you want me, you know where I am. I don’t have to live among you. As free as L.A. is supposed to make you feel, that is where I feel the most in prison.
That’s why I hate it there—I’ll go for a couple of weeks if I have to now, but it is a very destructive and dangerous place. It was easy to see how horribly phony the place was after a couple of visits. It was like a little birdie told me: Here’s a message. A strong message. This place is not for you. This place is going to be the death of you. It’s a place that is cursed and that perhaps goes all the way to the early fallout of the big bang that created everything. It is dead earth, dry earth, a desert never meant to be built on. It is such a destructive place, and if you have to go there, go only for a short while, and make sure you protect yourself. Otherwise, they will suck you dry.
Some people only see the sunshine. But that disguises the disaster. They call it the City of Angels? Jesus Christ—it’s the opposite, it’s a demon city. That place can convince you to wreck your integrity just like that. It’s built on making people sell their souls for the smallest chance of a part. Perhaps I felt it through meeting Jessica on Fifty-Seventh Street, how trapped she was, how much pain she was going through. Get out now! Are you waiting for them to beat you up and bury you?
I had another girlfriend, Sarah Douglas, with whom I’d worked on Conan the Destroyer. She was the Bad Queen, and then she was in Superman with Terence Stamp. And then she went to Hollywood. I told her to get out of Hollywood as well. She didn’t leave. Years later, she said to me, “I wish I had listened to you.” She was made to feel that she had to stay in L.A. in order to get work . . . even though she wasn’t living there when she was cast in Superman II. The whole casting system makes it all seem so urgent. They act like it is all such a hurry: If you are not around, you blow your chance. It’s best to keep a kind of mystery. Maintain a kind of deception.
The whole Hollywood world loves the organized chaos of the process. Especially the casting process. They will write a role for you and then make you jump through hoops to get it, almost make you beg—even though they have already decided it’s for you.
I landed a part in an Eddie Murphy film, Boomerang. Jean-Paul and I had hired him early in his career as the support on the American shows for A One Man Show. We needed someone who wouldn’t get in the way of the show itself or the set—a stand-up comedian was perfect. And Eddie Murphy was the perfect comedian to hire. Years later he started to make movies that were essentially one-man shows, and he invited me to do the film as a thank-you for hiring him early in his career.
In Boomerang Eddie plays a debonair stud, naturally, and I, naturally, was hired to play someone raucously silly from the fashion world with a silly name—Strange, pronounced Strawn-j. My role involved taking my knickers off in public, rubbing them in people’s faces, chasing the pants off Eddie, and saying the word pussy a lot with an accent that is from nowhere on Earth. Styled like an Egyptian sex doll, I was launching a new fragrance, which I was thinking about calling Love Puss or Pig Puke or Steel Vagina. . . . I have no idea why they thought of me for the role.
They were apparently amassing information about me when they were writing the role, because they wanted the character to reflect who I was. They were asking people who had worked with me to tell them funny stories about me, so they could use them in the writing. Stories about my behavior to build up a cameo from real life, even though what they ended up with is as far removed from real life as you can imagine. They did the same with Eartha Kitt, and she ends up playing a nymphomaniac.
They asked the director of Vamp for stories about what I was like. How I behaved when I did certain things, what I did when I had to turn into a vampire, how extroverted I would be on set. There was one incident on A View to a Kill when I was recording some dialogue for the film in a vocal booth, and my clothes were rustling. So I took them off. I did my lines nude.
That became a kind of legend that was passed on to Boomerang. They built that into the film: I go through a metal detector wearing a metal dress, which sets off the alarm, so I take the dress off and walk through the machine naked. You find yourself acting out chewed-up versions of your life as you pass through something that has absolutely nothing to do with you. And a Hollywood movie doesn’t really belong to anyone; it is not really the result of a great, single vision. It is a peculiar misshapen collaboration between hundreds of people who only know what they need to know in order to make their contribution. No one is really in charge, just the momentum that is generated by the fact it is being made, and costs millions and millions of dollars. That movies end up looking in any way coherent is either a fluke, or because they have been so fastidiously designed. The standard kind of Hollywood movies are as empty and unreal, as strange and unnecessary, as the town itself.
You realize that you are easily replaceable as well, even if you are the only person on the planet who seems qualified to play the horny, eerie, vampiric, stripping, singing, alien, semi-naked, bloodthirsty character with funny hair. They will find someone else, and you find that you can replace someone else too easily as well. I later found out that Bianca Jagger was the first choice to play Katrina in Vamp, and during the preproduction of Boomerang I bumped into Iman at a fitting at Alaïa’s. She had been promised the role of Strange and had no idea that I had been given it. That was embarrassing, as we are really good friends.
In music, only I sing like I do; only I can make Grace Jones records. I star as myself in a setting and story I can control, and there can be no substitute, at least not one with my name, face, attitude, voice, and songs.
I really thought that acting was where I wanted to go. After making the kinds of films I ended up making I realized that this was not actually what I wanted. I had to have the experience to realize that it is not really for me. In the kinds of films I was hired for, I was moved around like a pawn; I was effectively a cartoon character. That is okay in theory, but not when I think of all the effort I put into it.
I always play a character clearly based on the public version of me. I wanted people to see through me to Strange, and it always pleases me when people see me in the streets and mention Strange, or May Day from View to a Kill, more than Grace Jones. These characters so obviously looked and sounded like me, and I was chosen more because of my scary, wayward pop image than for my ability to become someone else, so it is great that people see the characters, and not me. There were elements of the characters that I managed to make stronger than me, and that was very satisfying. To some people I did more than merely play myself, and even though I never got a chance to play a character who was not essentially me in a cartoon setting, I took the characters outside myself.
In the end, there are only so many times I can play the demented diva based on the zanier parts of my reputation. Maybe if I had accepted being the Snake Lady in Blade Runner I would now be acting in things a little more serious, in Game of Thrones, or the X-Men series, cartoons, still with semi-naked girls and far-fetched monsters, but with something realer and deeper added.
I saw that the film business was a motherfucking beast, and one that would have killed me if I had kept going. If I had taken more control, had attempted to become a more serious part of a project, not simply a loopy, sex-mad caricature, even directed, I would not have lasted. If I had gone into film full-time and become more creatively involved, I would have killed myself by now. It is next to impossible to get in a situation where all the people involved in the project are moving in the same direction at the same time with the same purpose. Even making a record with a few people, it is hard to get that, but more likely.
Making a movie is about climbing the highest mountain, flying through the sky, landing on your feet, swimming across oceans, surviving avalanches, walking in space—it all keeps coming. I have total respect for whoever can come through all of that without losing their mind, or being treated as though they have.