10 amazing things we learned from Grace Jones’ memoir
By Ben Kelly
When Attitude first learned that Grace Jones had consigned her life to words, in the aptly titled I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, we were poised for some of the most legendary anecdotes in pop culture history. However, even we couldn’t have expected half the gems that this book has delivered. The fact that this list was whittled down from 35 should demonstrate just how much incredible reading is in store for you eager fans…
1. She was propositioned on the casting couch and it didn’t end well
“He’s chatting away like it’s all innocent and nothing to worry about. The next moment he tried to kiss me. I remember I took my glass of champagne and I slammed the champagne so hard in his face it would have stung.”
It really would have.
2. She came on to Tina Turner
“I loved Tina. She was the first woman I felt that I could be with. I told her that. She just flat-out turned me on. I could go with you, Tina! She said, “Oh Grace, you are so crazy.”
She wasn’t wrong.
3. If you’re a taxi driver, you should always stop for her…
“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…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!’”
Imagine her on Charing Cross Road armed with a half-dozen free range. Terrifying.
4. She turned down Boogie Wonderland
“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.”
Has there ever been a better self-description?
5. Even she is no match for Keith Richards
“I sat next to him at the piano… 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.”
#RollingStoned
6. She’s been asked to do The X Factor – a lot
“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.”
Imagine her running through Wembley Arena in a naked fury though. Just for a second.
7. She’s not so great with biology
“Now and then I would panic, wondering how it [her baby] was going to come out of that hole. When I first saw a cock, I wondered how that was going to get into the hole. Now I wondered how a baby could get out of the hole. I thought about it, and then I forgot about it. It had to work.”
Honey, we know that panic all too well.
8. She believes the U.S. government created AIDS
“The way AIDS appeared out of nowhere, it makes you wonder. They blamed it on fucking monkeys…I think someone high up took a look at what was happening in the New York sex rooms in the mid-‘70s, in the secret Studio 54 chambers, the straights that swung, the colours that mixed, and the gays exploring everything, and thought, We need to sort this out. They spiked the punch.”
The monkeys have taken a lot of shit for it to be fair.
9. She terrified James Bond
“Roger Moore said to me, ‘Please stop looking at me like that, with such venom.’ It made him really uncomfortable. I was a killer. I was willing to kill. In my real life, I would only do that for my son. More for blood than for a lover.”
Well at least we’re all clear.
10. Russell Harty got off lightly
“I kept hitting him more and throwing his script at him…I really thought about tipping his chair over, because I could see it was teetering on the edge of the small stage where we were sat. That was very tempting, but I remember thinking, Well, he might break his neck, and then I will really get into hot water.”
Yeah, or jail, something like that.
Grace Jones releases I’ll Never Write My Memoirs this Thursday, 24 September. Read Attitude‘s full review in the October issue out now in print and digital.
