I was a young punk newspaper reporter when I met Grace
Jones. I can’t remember the assignment, but it took me to her chic clothing
store in Salado. Ms. Jones greeted me with an air of sophistication that was slightly intimidating. A rich
woman from the East who somehow landed in Texas, I guessed. I was very wrong.
Mary Margaret Quadlander’s biography Grace Jones of Salado
makes that abundantly clear. Jones was Texan through and through. Her life is
straight out of Giant or perhaps a Larry McMurtry novel. It was big and got
bigger.
Born Willy Grace Rosanky (her father wanted a boy) in the
town bearing her family name near Lockhart, she was raised on a ranch by a
hard-drinking, risk-loving entrepreneur who was flush with cash one moment,
down on his luck the next. It was a swirling chaos that helped form Grace
Jones’ live of both success and tragedy.
Quadlander was my graduate fiction-writing student at St.
Edward’s University and already then a fashion designer of note when she first told me about this project. As the
book tells it, Jones helped put Quadlander on the fashion map and a friendship
was born. With it came great responsibility when the late Jones bequeathed her
papers to Quadlander. The result is this fine book.
It tells of Jones' quick path to adulthood: marriage to WWII
pilot-to-be, the loss of their twin children just after birth, a detour to a
University of Texas sorority house, and a LOOK Magazine article that sent
everything spinning.
That article spoke of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or
WASP, a program where women would be trained to pilot and deliver airplanes
stateside while the male pilots saw action overseas. Grace talked her father
into letting her sign up in support of her pilot husband. She was soon in the
air, semi-earning her wings, though the female pilots weren’t taken seriously
enough for actual wings to arrive in Jones’ mailbox until the ‘70s.
But like a good novel, Jones’ life was a back-and-forth
progression of wins and losses. Her husband divorced her for a woman he’d met
overseas. She hightailed it to New York City and became a successful fashion
model, then the wife of an even-higher profile pilot Jack Jones whose career
led Grace overseas. When he retired they ended up in Salado, Texas, where they
opened Grace Jones of Salado, an improbably successful, ultra-pricey home to
high fashion. Celebs like Henry Kissinger and the actress Loretta Young jetted
in.
Jack Jones turned from flyboy to errand boy for his famed
wife. He couldn’t take it and divorced here. Grace kept her chin up as she’d
always done. But underneath the story, Quadlander reveals, there is a deep sadness.
It’s however tempered with the full joy and bravado of Grace Jones’ life. Jones said, “There
are those who seek and those who wait. I’m a seeker. I have always been
curious, not just about fashion but so may other things that interest me…. I
took advantage of being in the right place to learn about all of these things
that interested me. And I also took advantage of anyone who could teach me
something new.”
There’s a lesson there. Perhaps a warning, too. Quadlander
has captured it well in this compelling book about a compelling life. Quadlander believes it would make a good film. I believe she's right.
