Chapter 1: What makes Grace Jones a true crime magnet?
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The stories about Grace Jones are fascinating. She was a true crime magnet. Arrested, set up, invaded. She was a global superstar, an actor, model, a multi-hyphenate icon of the 1980s, as big and attention-grabbing as Max Headroom and New Coke, and she, of course, made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music.
That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called New Kind of Bond Girl MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to The Look by Roxette. And why would I play you that specific slice of platinum flat top cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on April 8th, 1989.
And that was the day Grace Jones was arrested and thrown into a Jamaican jail cell, where she feared that her incredible life up to this point might be coming to a quick end. On this episode, an arrest, a setup, a home invasion, and 80s icon and true crime magnate Grace Jones. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. April 1st, 1989, Stony Hill, Jamaica.
40-year-old Grace Jones was hearing voices, too many to count and too muffled to know their true purpose. They sounded vengeful, diabolical, like a living, breathing conspiracy. At first, she thought they were coming from inside the room, that she was becoming one of those paranoid types here on the island.
Perhaps the voices belonged to duppies, malevolent spirits of Jamaican folklore, souls of the dead, veil piercers, somehow lurking in the land of the living, mumbling, searching for the flesh and blood of an unsuspecting warm body, somebody scared, somebody afraid, someone like Grace Jones. She shuddered at the thought. She looked around the dark room and there were no duppies here.
There was only her boyfriend, the record producer, Chris Stanley, fast asleep in bed. This was Chris' place, which also housed his recording studio, where he and Grace were putting the finishing touches on her new album, Bulletproof Heart. But Chris had been sick. The stroke put him in a brief coma, left him with brain damage, and now sleep came often.
And as Chris slept, the voices continued, a little clearer now. Grace could tell they weren't coming from inside the bedroom. They were coming from the next room over. The room where she dumped her stuff when she arrived here today. Her jacket, her hat, her purse. She assumed the voices belonged to one of Chris's studio employees, who was probably here with her friends.
Grace barely knew the girl, but she didn't trust her.
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Chapter 2: How did Grace Jones's upbringing influence her career choices?
There was tension any time the two were in the same room. The girl didn't hide the fact that she was jealous of all the time Grace spent with Chris. Grace had no evidence, but she imagined a scenario in which this employee did something that led to Chris' illness, poisoned his food perhaps. It sounded crazy, but then again it didn't.
And now, Grace wondered if a horde of kleptos were currently going through the contents of her things in the other room, with their sticky fingers desperately seeking something, just like Duppy's those ghosts out for blood, seeking something that belonged to Grace Jones. Grace Jones, the enduring icon of disco club fashion. Grace Jones, the model.
Grace Jones, the singer, the actress, the Bond villain. The woman with a face as recognizable as Princess Di, as Boy George, as Max Headroom, Pee Wee Herman, or any other face that came to define the 1980s. Grace Jones, however, exuded a different kind of cultural energy.
With her chiseled jawline, her flat-top fade, her oversized shoulder pads, and one of the deepest and most cutting-edge closets in the game, Grace Jones looked like she had simultaneously stepped out of the past and the future. Like when she once made her entrance into New York City's famed Studio 54 for her own birthday party, dressed as the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti while riding a Harley.
Her look, her style, her vibe, even the music that she made, it pushed the envelope and did so by design. Ever since she left her home country of Jamaica for the United States when she was a teenager, she had built her life and her art around risks because she had been denied taking those risks growing up. If you, like Grace Jones, took those risks as a kid in Jamaica, you were punished.
You felt the sting of your grandmother's new husband's leather belt, the whack of the headmaster's cruel ruler, and the curse of your hometown's Pentecostal bishop, who made sure Grace's parents knew in no uncertain terms that their daughter was the devil. The best way that Grace knew to distance herself from the trauma of her past was to take risks.
It was what separated her from those who wanted her to be so terrified that she would remain a meek, safe, boring person, just like all the rest. But Grace Jones was not like anyone else. She knew this, and so did the man sleeping in the bed next to her in this house high in the hills above Kingston.
Grace watched Chris sleep while listening to the voices in the next room rise and fall, and suddenly, they stopped. The silence was deafening. And then, cutting through the bedroom window, the bright, blinding blue swirl of police lights. She heard a knock at the front door of the house, followed by more voices, this time louder, deeper, male voices.
A couple of police officers talking with Chris's employee and her friends. And then another moment of silence, followed by another knock, this time on the door of the bedroom Grace was in. Grace opened the door, confused and even more out of sorts than when she was when the voices had begun minutes ago. Standing before her were two Kingston cops.
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Chapter 3: What events led to Grace Jones's arrest in Jamaica?
Andy, for one, never turned his back on the room anymore, not since he'd been shot by that crazy woman in his studio. Grace wasn't there when it happened, but in a way she felt like she was. Because what was quickly becoming apparent was that even though she would soon become known as an exhibitionist and a provocateur, Grace Jones was in fact something else entirely.
She was a magnet for true crime. The Jamaican jail cell was small. A concrete floor, a bench, also concrete, a small toilet, and a blanket. By day two, those initial feelings of disorientation and fear that Grace Jones had first experienced when she was handcuffed and hauled away from her producer and lover, Chris Stanley's house, were long gone. Those feelings were now replaced by panic.
The cops said it was open and shut. They had been called to Chris Stanley's house on an anonymous tip, and when they arrived, they found a baggie of cocaine hid inside a $2 bill in Grace's purse. It was a small amount, just 0.007 of an ounce. But cocaine was cocaine, and cocaine was illegal, and now the illegal cocaine having Grace Jones was fucked. And on top of that, the voices were back.
This time, the voices of police officers over at a desk just beyond the cell where she now sat. They spoke in tones that varied from loud and boisterous to hushed and protective. She wondered if they were talking about her. She wondered what they would say if she told them about the things going through her head.
that her sick boyfriend may have been poisoned, that the cocaine had no doubt been planted, and that there was a 50-50 chance that they, sworn officers of the law, were actually in on it. But they wouldn't listen. They wouldn't even let her make a phone call, which she knew was her right. If she could only explain just how ridiculous the charges were.
If you knew her, if you really knew Grace Jones, you knew that when it came to cocaine, she didn't mess with that stuff. She never put that stuff up her nose. Her nose was part of her face, part of her unorthodox beauty, her moneymaker, if you will. And she wasn't about to jeopardize all that just for a little cocaine, for a little high. Cocaine wasn't even Grace's thing.
She was more partial to Quaaludes, Valium, Mandrakes. Her ideal high was chilling out, not freaking out. But on the occasions that she did do coke, she'd opt for a disco cigarette, aka Cocoa Puffs, joints of marijuana laced with cocaine, or as Grace called them, Mary Ann's, since she was introduced to them by Mary Ann Faithfull.
Grace Jones' true preferred method of cocaine intake, however, was to stick a rock up her ass. Cocaine via one's butt meant no white residue lingering on your upper lip. No blood dripping from your nasal cavity. Just a nice, clean, small rock. Stuff it up there and forget about it. There was no forgetting her current predicament, so she sat in the jail cell waiting for the other shoe to drop.
and the shoe did drop, but just not in the way she was expecting. It dropped like this. The cops on duty were eventually relieved by others, and these new guys were more sympathetic to her plight.
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Chapter 4: How did Grace Jones handle the pressures of fame and legal troubles?
For a very public person, Grace Jones valued her own private life, even more so now that she was expecting. As Jean-Paul worked away in another part of the apartment, cutting up and arranging new photos of his muse, of Grace, on a desk, Grace put on clothes and stepped from the bathroom into the living room.
She was thinking about her upcoming trip to the Bahamas, to Compass Point Studios, where she would put the finishing touches on the Warm Leatherette album. And that's when she saw him. A man who wasn't Jean-Paul. And this man was just beyond the living room window, standing on an outdoor terrace. He was tall, perfectly coiffed afro, well-dressed.
Grace clocked his suit as Italian, so debonair that her first instinct wasn't to panic. And then she saw the gun. The man was coming through the window now, one foot down on the living room floor, followed by another. Calmly, deliberately, the pistol gripped tight and aimed straight at her. She thought about screaming for Jean-Paul and also about making a run for it.
In her elevated state, she opted for the latter. Instinct and then adrenaline. She wasn't even thinking about hauling ass. She was just doing it, heart pounding, breathless. She was in the bathroom now, and she slammed the door shut behind her and twisted the lock. She heard the footsteps of that tall man getting closer, and then the door was being kicked down.
She was now face-to-face with Mr. Armed Debonair. Jean-Paul must have heard the noise because he came running, and now the man had his gun trained on both of them. The man wanted cash. Grace had none. Jean-Paul, being European and worldly, only had some Deutschmarks, 2,000 of them, give or take. Give or take, the man was shaking his head now.
He rotated his neck in a way that indicated either his wins or not or this couple's lack of funds was irritating him. Most likely both. Give him cash. American cash, he demanded. And he tied them both up, one by one. And then he stood there, looking at Grace Jones and John Paul Goode in their faces and wondering what he was going to do with them. Grace feared the worst.
She thought about being shot dead in her boyfriend's apartment, the baby still in her belly, about not being found until Monday when the building opened for business. She thought about Paula Kilmack, aka Pola, her friend and fellow model, and how just a few years back, Pola took a bunch of Quaaludes and died, and how her ghost haunted the city in the pages of Cosmopolitan and Vogue.
That face of hers... staring directly into the lens, and how the rumors wouldn't quit that it wasn't a case of too many pills, and that Pola had actually been high on heroin and angel dust and walked right off the roof of a building. She thought about what it would be like to be a ghost, to be a rumor.
She thought about being laughed at by fashion moguls who'd once doubted her, and about her first music management team, how they wanted to make her a Vegas act in a few years' time. She thought about how she'd left that cocktail lounge stuff in the dust when she sang live for the first time.
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Chapter 5: What role did Grace's press agent play in her legal situation?
I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. All right, guys, thanks for hanging with me on another episode of Disgraceland. Hope you dug this Grace Jones story. Listen, question of the week, 617-906-6638. Leave me a voicemail, send me a text. I want to know your answer on who's your favorite multi-hyphenate singer, okay? Or, you know, which actor turned singer do you think did it the best?
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