Jean-Paul Goude’s Constructivist Maternity Dress, 1979,
created when Jones was pregnant with her and Goude’s son, Paulo
Grace Jones, 67, has been model, musician, actress, and eternal disco diva. She just wowed the Afropunk festival audience in Brooklyn with her topless over-the-top performance and Harper’s Bazaar just published a sneak preview from her upcoming autobiography, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs.
JERRY HALL AND ME
Their first three girls at Euro Planning [modeling agency in Paris] were me, Jerry Hall, and Jessica Lange.… [We] 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.… 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.…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.…
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.”
Jones with Jerry Hall, Paris, 1975, photo, Antonio Lopez
MY BABY SHOWER, HOSTED BY DEBBIE HARRY
I had my baby shower at The Garage when I was pregnant with Paulo [Goude]. Debbie Harry of Blondie and Andy Warhol threw it for me. That’s showing you normal. (Paulo and Keith Haring would also become very close; to Paulo, he was Uncle Keith. They would draw together, like it was the most fun you could have in the world.) The papers called it the first disco baby shower, and Paulo was being talked about as ‘the first disco baby.’ I did an interview with a magazine, Jet:‘I want a boy—family tradition, boys first. It should be surrounded by music.’
The magazine said I was hoping for natural childbirth and breast-feeding, ‘if I don’t chicken out first.’ I was dressed up as a deviant toy soldier, carried onto the stage by my troops on a pedestal, with the audience of lusty Garage boys screaming, ‘Show us the stomach, honey.’ I then sang “Get Down on Your Knees.” The Garage was the kind of place where this kind of drama could happen—a world unto itself embedded in but separate from the surrounding city, where the party was more important than business, and the vibe reached higher than the skyscrapers.”
Performing topless at Afropunk last weekend in Brooklyn
(via Harper’s Bazaar)
The post #DivaHerstory: A Juicy Excerpt from Grace Jones’, “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs” appeared first on World of Wonder.