As a music giant who produced everyone from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson, as well as composing countless film and television soundtracks, Quincy Jones reportedly had the largest address book in Hollywood.
He also had a wonderfully indiscreet anecdote in almost every entry in that book.
When the immensely talented and versatile producer (who knew Malcolm Advertisers hovered nervously, waiting. for him to drop the next bomb.
It was Jones, for example, who revealed the full extent of his friend Brando’s rapacious sexual appetite, telling an interviewer in 2018: “He’d fuck anything.” Anything! He screw up a mailbox. Richard Prior. Marvin Gaye.’
The widow of comedian and Hollywood actor Pryor later confirmed the veracity of his claim, saying that he had always been open about his bisexuality with close friends.
Michael Jackson holds eight awards while posing with Quincy Jones at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, 1984.
Quincy Jones produced the best-selling album in history, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (in addition to Bad and Off The Wall)
Jones with Frank Sinatra at the 21st Scopus Awards on January 13, 1991 at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City, California
It was also Jones who said that Elvis couldn’t sing and the Beatles couldn’t play. However, even stories that seemed too far-fetched, like his claim to have dated the much younger Ivanka Trump (which she denied), often turned out to be true.
Yesterday it was announced that Jones had died at the age of 91. The man, who was married three times and had seven children with five women, including actress Nastassja Kinski, was surrounded by his family when he died peacefully at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. on Sunday night.
When he was 84, he boasted of having 22 girlfriends and they all knew each other. But Jones, whose gentle affability was one of the main reasons so many artists wanted to work with him, was always happy to share scandalous revelations about himself, including his sex life and his drug use. He said he lost his virginity at age 12 and became addicted to heroin at age 15.
As befits the man who produced the best-selling album in history, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (as well as Bad and Off The Wall), Jones had a lot to say about the superstar who recorded it with him in just eight weeks in 1982.
They had fun working together, he said, except perhaps for the time when the King of Pop brought his pet boa constrictor, Muscles, into the studio and wrapped himself around Jones’s leg. On another occasion, Jackson’s pet chimpanzee, Bubbles, bit Jones’ young daughter, Rashida. However, Jones had few illusions about Jackson. In a 2018 interview, Jones accused the performer of stealing other stars’ songs, citing the similarity of Donna Summers’ State Of Independence to Jackson’s Billie Jean. ‘The grades don’t lie, man. “It was as Machiavellian as they come,” he said.
‘Michael stole a lot of things. He stole a lot of songs… Greedy, man. Greedy,’ he said. “I hate to talk about this publicly, but Michael stole a lot of things.”
Although he amassed a fortune estimated at $500 million, Jones – who won 28 Grammy Awards over a 70-year career – was born into poverty in Chicago in 1933, or as he put it, “the largest black ghetto in the worst depression. nothing but gangsters around us.” Her paternal grandmother was a former slave from Kentucky who was raped by her grandfather, a Welsh slave owner.
Quincy Jones works with Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg on the ET soundtrack in 1982
Quincy Jones at the 33rd Grammy Awards in New York in February 1991
Quincy Jones said he lost his virginity at age 12 and got hooked on heroin at age 15 (pictured, an Instagram post from Nov. 3, 2024).
President Barack Obama presents a National Medal of Arts to Quincy Jones at the White House in March 2011.
Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones at the ‘We Are The World 25 Years for Haiti’ recording session held at Jim Henson Studios in Hollywood in February 2010.
Jones’ schizophrenic mother was committed to a mental hospital when he was very young and he was raised by his carpenter father, who worked for local criminals. He began getting into trouble at a young age and, when he was seven, a local villain nailed his hand to a fence with a razor, scarring Jones for life. He vowed to become a gangster himself when he grew up.
The family then moved to Seattle, where Jones recalled how, at age ten, he and his siblings broke into a community hall.
‘I saw this piano in the dark. “I walked into that room and hit the keys and every cell in my body said, ‘This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life,'” he said. “That day I stopped wanting to be a gangster and started wanting to be a musician… I would have been dead or in prison if I hadn’t done that.”
He began practicing the trumpet and dedicated himself to jazz. Their first band was short-lived after their car was hit by a bus, leaving four of the members dead and only 14-year-old Jones alive.
Jones, who claimed to know 26 languages, including Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese, won a scholarship to music college at age 15 and never looked back. Although he continued to carry a gun in homage to his early days, he played trumpet for the studio band that supported Elvis and in several jazz bands before moving, in the early 1960s, to the more lucrative career of songwriting. . He became the first black vice president of a major record company in 1961, one of many firsts in a pioneering career.
His film credits included The Italian Job and In The Heat Of The Night while he arranged music for Ella Fitzgerald, Nana Mouskouri and Frank Sinatra.
Working with the notoriously aggressive Sinatra (for whom he composed Fly Me To The Moon) was a challenge. —It takes a lot of courage to tell Sinatra what to do, man. You better get your shit together because the man takes no prisoners,” Jones said in 2006. He made sure to never criticize Sinatra in public. The star easily resorted to violence: ‘You could say the wrong thing. It didn’t take much,'” recalled Jones. “But he ‘couldn’t fight for shit.'”
As for the Beatles, calling them the “worst musicians in the world” in a famous 2018 interview, he continued: “Paul was the worst bassist I’ve ever heard.” And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it.
Quincy Jones and Eddie Murphy at San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood in October 2019
Quincy Jones and Naomi Campbell at the American Icon Awards in Los Angeles in May 2019
Sir Elton John and Quincy Jones at the singer’s AIDS Foundation’s Academy Awards viewing party in West Hollywood in February 2019
‘I remember one time we were in the studio with (Beatles producer) George Martin, and Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix into a song. He couldn’t get it.
It wasn’t just musical icons he was willing to destroy. Black cultural heroes were also in his sights. Jones claimed that he and jazz legend Ray Charles bought heroin from future black civil rights activist Malcolm X when they were teenage members of Jones’ first jazz band. “Everyone in the gang” bought heroin from him, he added.
Jones, who was 15 at the time, said he was “hooked” on the drug for five months, but realized he had to quit after falling down five flights of stairs.
Jones’ love life was equally colorful, although one woman he never included was Marilyn Monroe. “Frank (Sinatra) was always trying to connect me with Marilyn Monroe, but Marilyn Monroe had a chest that looked like pears, man,” Jones said with his usual finesse in 2018.
He might have had more girlfriends than the 22 he still claimed at 84, but his daughters begged him not to date women younger than them. “When you’ve been a dog all your life, God gives you beautiful daughters and you have to suffer,” he said.
For their part, they complained that he had deeply neglected them in his career. ‘Everything else came second, which wasn’t so suitable for us. But that’s how it was,” said Jolie Jones, the oldest daughter.
In later years, Jones spent six days a year in a Stockholm clinic being treated with cutting-edge medical technology that he predicted would allow him to live to be 110 years old. It must have been one of the few goals he never achieved.