“Was it really possible that Grace Jones was showing and selling haute couture out of a rock bunker in the middle of nowhere? A rock bunker with its own landing strip?”
But she did. From 1962 to 2000, Grace Rosansky Jones, who grew up in Smithville, welcomed the world’s celebrities as well as top apparel designers to the little tourist town 45 minutes north of Austin. She threw epic parties, staged runway shows and sold the latest one-of-a-kind selections from Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass, Christian LaCroix and Jean Louis.
Her clients, who often became her friends, included Hollywood royalty like Loretta Young and Gene Tierney. Top Texas socialites, who otherwise shopped only at Neiman Marcus when they stayed in-state, flew or took the helicopter she and her husband, World War II ace pilot Jack Jones, thought was crucial for the business.
Jane Sibley of Austin and Carolyn Farb of Houston were among her devoted clients. Lady Bird Johnson, Ann Richards and, especially, Liz Carpenter looked to Jones for stylish guidance.
But how? How did she do it?
Quadlander, who teaches fashion and sold one of her first collections to Jones, attempts to answer.
A tomboy and a beauty with erratic taste in boys and men, Grace Jones joined the WASP during World War II to ferry planes from base to base.
After the war, she took up modeling before marrying her second husband, who came from wealthy but not abundantly wealthy South Carolina stock. That would become a nagging issue since his wife was free and easy with money, not only flying to New York or Paris on a monthly basis, but building a handsome O’Neil Ford home in Salado.
The anecdotes told across generations about the saleswoman’s family are not always pretty: Lots of drinking, some philandering and outrageous attempts to swindle — or at least sidestep the truth. The worst gambit involved Grace forging her mother’s will to cut out her supposedly beloved brother and surviving nephew. She was caught and the document was thrown out.
Yet few things stood in Jones’ way, including the husbands who left her. Using a cultured Southern accent — we know this because Quadlander reproduces her dialect, perhaps too often — she simply flirted, bossed and willed her way into people’s lives and pocketbooks.
No doubt, she was a fascinating woman who also aided Central Texas charities with benefit fashion shows. Yet how, exactly, she convinced women who could drop several thousands dollars on an outfit to drop by sleepy Salado is still something of a mystery by the end of this biography.
One wishes that Quadlander had more room to give justice to the scores of black-and-white images reproduced in this narrow book. Also, she could have used a much stronger editing hand.
Still, her story, witnessed up close and through numerous interviews, is well worth retelling.
Jones, who died in 2008, was one of those Texans, beloved by Hollywood, who lived large enough to fill the biggest screen.