’15 Things I’ve learned from Chris Heath’s remarkable interview with Quincy Jones’
Quincy Jones’s interview in GQ magazine in gangbusters. John Lewis distills the glory in “15 Things I’ve learned from Chris Heath’s remarkable interview with Quincy Jones”:
1. Aged 84, Quincy Jones has 22 girlfriends around the world, who are all aware of each other.
2. He claims to speak 26 languages.
3. He seems confident that he will live until the age of 120.
4. He watched his mother being carted off in a straitjacket to a mental hospital.
5. He and his brother were forced to catch and eat rats as children.
6. He used to buy dope from Malcolm X when he stayed in Detroit.
7. He watched Ray Charles injecting heroin into his balls (that’s Ray Charles’s balls, not Quincy Jones’s).
8. He was very angry when Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee, Bubbles, bit his baby daughter Rashida. He also saw Michael Jackson’s boa constrictor eat a parrot.
9. His lunch companions have included Pablo Picasso (“he was fucked up with absinthe all the time”) and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (“she told me everyone in the Third Reich was on cocaine”).
10. He was due to be at Sharon Tate’s house on the night of the Charles Manson murders, but forgot to go.
11. He still wears a ring given to him by Frank Sinatra, bearing the Sinatra family crest from Sicily.
12. Barack and Michelle Obama came round his house in 2008 and spent six hours trying to convince Quincy to shift his support in the Democratic primaries from Hilary Clinton to Obama.
13. As a guest of the Pope in 1999, he was impressed by the pontiff’s footwear. John Paul II overheard Quincy as he remarked: “Oh, my man’s got some pimp shoes on.”
14. He stays at Bono’s castle when he’s in Ireland (“cos Scotland and Ireland are so racist it’s frightening”).
15. He is a good cook. “I cook gumbo that’ll make you slap your grandmother.”And that’s not to mention the stuff about Prince, and Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Monroe, and Tupac Shakur, and Nat King Cole, and the Dominican playboy Portfirio Rubirosa (“What a guy: 11-inch dong”).
Posted: 31st, January 2018 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
