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Quincy Jones’ interview in GQ is extraordinary and here are the 15 most amazing things

John Plunkett. Updated January 31st, 2018

We kind of assumed Quincy Jones must have led a pretty amazing life. But we had no idea just how amazing until we read his interview in GQ.

We recommend you look at the whole thing, written by Chris Heath, but in the meantime our grateful thanks to John Lewis who has found the 15 most extraordinary things about 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”).

Here’s a few more reactions to the interview on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Smooth_Orator/status/958409441090719744

In summary then …

https://twitter.com/laurenlaverne/status/958468355610030080

You can read Chris Heath’s full interview here and follow John Lewis on Facebook here.

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