Grace Jones: Slave to the Rhythm

It’s both curious and revealing that the false rumour still persists that Grace Jones is actually a transsexual man. A quick online search is enough to discover that Jones is a mother and was born a woman, although others would say she was born a goddess. A capricious nature gave her a personality and a body that broke all the moulds and assumptions of her time. Turning sexual and racial conventions on their head, she became one of the most important icons of the 1980s. Model, actress, singer, a holy trinity of fame. Jones was successful in all three roles, but always in her own very individual way. She was foremost a model, heading to Paris in search of a market where her features would be found even more exotic. There, she shared an apartment with Jessica Lange, and soon fell in with illustrator Antonio López, who helped her to obtain her first covers for Vogue and Elle. Having made a name for herself, she returned to New York, the city she had first made her home, after abandoning her strictly religious Jamaican family and her studies. In Manhattan she rapidly became the epicentre of a new scene - disco music - which turned her into its latest diva. Helped by Andy Warhol, and with Tom Moulton and Richard Bernstein responsible for the music and artwork on her first singles, it didn’t take Jones long for her to become one of the most desired women on the New York gay scene. She was Madonna before Madonna. Her visits and performances in Studio 54 and other nightclubs were notorious, and her intention was anything but to go unnoticed. She would turn up semi-naked, on skates, riding a motorbike and surrounded by men in bathing costumes. Anything that took her fancy. Although the golden age of disco music had an expiry date, she foresaw its climax and recycled herself to become a pop artist, and one with an incredibly captivating aesthetic image. ‘Warm Leatherette’ (1980) and ‘Nightclubbing’ (1981) (the man responsible for her iconic album covers was the artist Jean-Paul Goude, the father of her son Paulo) were clear evidence that she was more than a simple Nubian mannequin, transforming her into one of the essential figures of a post-disco transition. She was never short on personality, either as a model, singer, or in her new guise as actress. Arnold Schwarzenegger even complained about her being too tough in the scenes they shared in the 1984 film Conan the Destroyer. And although it was more than toughness that earned her a Saturn Award and a Grammy nomination, there are a number of anecdotes about her indomitable character: on one occasion she slapped a presenter live on British television for turning his back on her, and on another she was removed from a performance in Disneyland for showing a breast. You can’t help wondering what Disney was expecting from a woman that fought tooth and nail to outshine the domineering personalities of the 1980s, driven by her insatiable hunger for fame and her overpowering personality; an ebony goddess who seemed capable of crushing any man with her vanity, a living sculpture, made of body and of art.

Cappuccino Grand Papier, volume 7