Across The Margin / ATM Publishing presents Chapter Five of Arthur Hoyle’s The Jealous Muse — Nina Simone : The Melancholy Diva…
Chapter Five — Nina Simone : The Melancholy Diva
Nina Simone, famed black musician known for her distinctive musical style and her fiery presence on stage, was born in 1933 into a large family struggling to survive the Depression in Tryon, a small North Carolina town. Her mother, Kate, a deeply religious woman, served as an itinerant Methodist preacher and worked as a housekeeper for a white family. Her father, John Devan (J.D.), scrounged for work as a handyman and gardener after several business enterprises he had established in the town went under. Nina was the sixth of eight children, preceded by three brothers and two sisters, and followed by another sister and brother. Her birth name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon, a name that she changed when she began her career as a professional musician.
The family was musical. J.D. played the harmonica and guitar, and had toured as an entertainer. Kate sang gospels as she cooked, planted her vegetable garden, and tended her children. There was a pedal organ in the home, and later a piano. One day when Eunice was three years old she sat down at the pedal organ and played from memory a tune her mother had been singing. Thus did her musical gift become apparent. Her mother regarded this gift as a divine blessing from God, and believed that it should be put in the service of her ministry.
When Eunice was four, Kate installed her as the organist performing at the start of her Sunday religious services as a way to attract worshippers, who were drawn to the church to see the child prodigy. Eunice also accompanied the choir and played at the Sunday school, a busy schedule for a four year old. Kate forbade Eunice to play any form of secular music because she believed that to do so would profane God’s gift. But when Kate was not at home, J.D. encouraged her to play the popular music that he had performed. So from her earliest years Eunice was exposed to a wide variety of musical forms. But she was also burdened with guilt, because she had to keep her mother from finding out that she was playing forbidden music.
Eunice’s bond with her father deepened when he underwent abdominal surgery and became unable to work. Though she was only four, Eunice was assigned to nurse him through a slow convalescence. She changed the dressing on his wound and fed him liquid meals made with Carnation powdered milk. The older children were taken up with other responsibilities. Her sister Lucille, though only fifteen, ran the household and served as a surrogate mother to Eunice while Kate worked. The oldest child, John Irvin, had landed a job with the federal government and helped to support the family.
When Eunice was six and playing for the church choir at the Tryon Theater, two white women in the audience took note of her talent. Although Tryon was, like all southern towns during the 1930s, racially segregated, whites and blacks lived cordially amongst each other, perhaps because the town was a tourist destination for visitors from the north. Kate’s employer, Katherine Miller, was sitting with Muriel Mazzanovich, an Englishwoman who gave piano lessons. Mrs. Miller and another white woman, Esther Moore, offered to pay Muriel to give lessons to Eunice, and for five years, until she left Tryon for high school, Eunice went every Saturday morning to receive instruction from Miss Mazzy at her home, which had two pianos. Muriel was a loving and affectionate teacher with a devotion to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom she considered technically perfect. She exposed Eunice to his music, as well as to the music of other classical composers, including Beethoven and Mozart. Her five years of lessons with Miss Mazzy set Eunice on the path to becoming a classical musician.
“Once I understood Bach’s music I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist,” Simone wrote in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. “Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was Mrs. Mazzanovich who introduced me to his world.” (Spell, p. 23)
Miss Mazzy nurtured Eunice. “She gave me the kind of attention and affection I didn’t get from Momma, and the more she gave the more I needed it . . . In time she became another mother to me, one I had all to myself.” (Spell, p. 24) To ensure that Eunice’s musical education would not end in Tryon, Muriel established the Eunice Waymon Fund and solicited donations from the community. Eunice periodically gave recitals so that her supporters could hear her play, and thus acquired performing experience at an early age. Miss Mazzy also taught Eunice stage decorum, how to comport herself with dignity before an audience.
Her focus on music, her rigorous schedule of daily practice and playing at church services and community events, isolated Eunice from other children and made her feel alone, a feeling that would persist throughout her life. “No one in the family knew how isolated my music made me,” she wrote. “Of all the girls I hung around with I was the only one without a boyfriend. Naturally I started to think that there was something wrong with me.” (Spell, p.30) But shortly before she entered high school, Eunice befriended Edney Whiteside, a Cherokee Indian four years older than she, whose family had recently moved to Tryon. They spent time together every Sunday afternoon when Eunice had finished playing for her mother’s church.
In 1945 Eunice went to Asheville to attend Allen High School, a private school for black girls. Katherine Miller and Esther Moore paid her tuition. She was separated from Edney, but they wrote frequently, and he came to visit her every Sunday. Before she left, she gave a recital at the Lanier Library in Tryon. Her parents attended, and took seats in the front row. Before the performance began, a while couple asked to be given the seats occupied by Kate and J.D. Meekly, they moved. Eunice stood up from the piano and declared that she would not play until her parents returned to their original seats. Amidst tittering from the mostly white audience, an embarrassed Kate and J.D. displaced the white couple, and the recital began. This gesture was Eunice’s first defiance of racism, and foreshadowed her deep involvement with the civil rights movement during the 1960s.
Eunice shone at Allen High School. She rose at 5:30 every morning to practice piano before her classes began. The school arranged lessons for her with Joyce Carrol, a private teacher in Åsheville. She excelled in her studies, was elected president of the junior class, and was also president of the dramatics club. She joined the Allen chapter of the NAACP, and became its treasurer. But despite her many accomplishments, other students considered her “odd.” During vacations, she spent time with Edney and Miss Mazzy, who organized a recital at her home in 1948.
She and Edney were in love, and discussed marriage. “In Edney, whom I loved and who loved me, I had someone to connect with, to tie me to the real world, to love more than music,” she wrote in her autobiography. (Spell, p. 35) But Edney began to doubt that they could make a life together. Her music put her in a realm that was beyond his reach. When Eunice learned that he was seeing her best friend Annie Mae, she became distressed. Edney offered to marry her after she graduated from Allen, but Miss Mazzy had obtained a scholarship for her to spend the summer of 1950 in New York City and study piano at the Juilliard School. Edney came to her graduation, and told her that he believed if she went to New York, she would never come back to Tryon.
Eunice felt that with the weight of others’ expectations on her—her parents, her siblings, Miss Mazzy, Katherine Miller, Esther Moore, and the donors to the Eunice Waymon Fund—she had no choice. Later, she looked back on this decision with sadness. “I found a youthful love and lost it. That was the turning point. I lost a love and found a career . . . [But] I’m a long way from compensating for what I gave up.” (Light, p. 37) The melancholy that infuses many of her love songs—Miles Davis called her “the siren of sadness” —may be rooted in this lost youthful love. After Eunice left for New York, Edney married Annie Mae.
In New York, Eunice stayed with a preacher friend of Kate, Mrs. Steinermayer, who lived in Harlem. The city—its scale, its noise, its crowds—overwhelmed Eunice. From July 3 to August 11 she attended classes at Juilliard on weekdays from 8-4. Her primary teacher was Carl Friedberg, a former European concert pianist who had studied under Clara Schumann. Eunice practiced five hours a day. There were 720 students at Juilliard that summer, most of whom were white. Eunice had no social life away from the school. She kept to herself in Harlem, focused on her music.
Eunice was preparing to audition for admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a prestigious school that provides full scholarships to its students. Its roster of graduates includes such luminaries as Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Yuja Wang. Its admissions rate is 4.8%, making it one of the most exclusive educational institutions in the United States. So confident were Eunice’s parents of her acceptance at Curtis that they moved the family to Philadelphia, where Lucille, now married, and her brother Carrol, had already settled.
In mid-August, J.D. walked Eunice to Rittenhouse Square on the day of her audition. There were three openings for piano students. She felt that her audition had gone well, but when a letter from Curtis arrived at the family home, it brought news of her rejection. The decision shocked the family, and embittered Eunice. “They didn’t want me because I wasn’t good enough,” she wrote. (Spell, p. 41) But her brother Carrol believed that race had played a role. She had been rejected because she was black and poor. Although other black applicants had been accepted at Curtis, including one in the piano department, Eunice, perhaps to protect herself from the idea that she “wasn’t good enough,” fastened on the narrative that she had been a victim of racism. “When I was rejected by the Curtis Institute it was as if all of the promises ever made to me by God, my family and my community were broken, and I had been lied to all my life . . . Nobody told me that no matter what I did in life the color of my skin would always make a difference. I learned that bitter lesson from Curtis.” (Spell, p. 41, 44)
This version of events that Eunice clung to reveals the extent to which she had been practicing and performing not for herself, but for others. The belief that racism was behind her rejection accorded well with her sense of being the victim of others’ designs for her.
Carrol urged her to continue her studies and apply to Curtis again. She took piano lessons from Vladimir Sokoloff, a member of the Curtis faculty. He denied that race had been a factor in her rejection. Other applicants had simply been better. He saw that she had a talent for jazz, and suggested she pursue jazz professionally. But Eunice did not want to give up her dream of becoming a classical concert pianist. She saw the jazz label as another sign of racism. Blacks were meant to play jazz, not Bach.
Eunice worked to pay for her piano lessons, first as a photographer’s assistant, then as the accompanist for the Arlene Smith Vocal Studio. She lived alone in a storefront in Philadelphia with a dog named Sheba and her piano. She gave private lessons there. Eventually she opened her own voice studio, pirating some of Arlene Smith’s students. She began singing in order to demonstrate to her students how to interpret songs. She had a limited social life, and was lonely. She concealed from her mother that she was playing and teaching popular music. She had a boyfriend named Ed, whom she met at church, and went to bed with him. She also befriended a black prostitute named Faith Jackson who lived stylishly and shamelessly on the margins of society. (She may have been thinking of Faith Jackson when years later she sang the mournful song “The Other Woman.”) Eunice saw a psychiatrist named Gerry Weiss for about a year during this period. She felt adrift in her own life, uncertain who she was or what she wanted to be. As time passed, she became too old to reapply to Curtis.
In 1954 she learned that one of her students, whose talent was far inferior to hers, had been hired to play the piano and sing at a club in Atlantic City. He was making $90 a week, nearly twice her earnings. Through the student’s agent she was booked into the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. When she came to audition for the owner Harry Steward, she gave her name as Nina Simone because she didn’t want her mother to know that she was performing in a bar. She came to work the first night dressed elegantly, as though giving a recital. She played a mix of popular and classical music, improvising as she went, sometimes for as long as ninety minutes without stopping. She performed from 9 pm to 4 am. On her breaks, she sat at the bar drinking milk. The second night Steward told her that she had to sing as well as play. Because she had a limited two-octave range, she decided to use her voice as an accompaniment to the piano. She sang a blend of jazz, folk, and gospel, sometimes improvising her own lyrics. If the bar crowd became too noisy, she stopped playing. She was learning to control her audience. Later in her career, she defended her standards. “When you play you give all your concentration to the music, because it deserves total respect, and an audience should sit still and be quiet . . . If an audience disrespects me it is insulting the music I play, and I will not continue, because if they don’t want to listen then I don’t want to play.” (Spell, p.52)
Word of her unique playing style and manner spread along the Atlantic City boardwalk. Soon the Midtown Bar and Grill was packed with workers coming off night shifts at hotels and restaurants. These were her first genuine music fans, mostly young people who responded to her idiosyncratic style and haughty manner. If other customers became too noisy, these fans silenced them so that Simone would not stop performing. But again in Atlantic City she was isolated with her music. She lived alone in an apartment and felt that the music she was playing was beneath her. “I sat on the stage a diva, a professional entertainer for the first time, and played to an audience of drunken Irish bums,” was how she later summed up her gig at the Midtown Bar and Grill. (Spell, p. 47)
But the money brought her back. In September, as the season ended and she prepared to return to Philadelphia and resume her life as Eunice Waymon, Steward asked her to return for the 1955 summer season. She was moving along the path of the musician she did not want to be.
Back in Philadelphia, Nina resumed her lessons with Sokoloff. Her goal remained to become a classical concert pianist. But she continued to perform in clubs to support herself. Her agent booked her into the upscale Poquessing Club. When her act was reviewed in the Evening Bulletin, she confessed to her mother that she was performing as Nina Simone in order to earn money to continue her classical training. Her mother, considering it sinful, disapproved. But she accepted the money Nina gave her from her earnings. J.D. warned her of the perils of the road musician’s life.
She played two more seasons at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. In the summer of 1955 she met Ted Axelrod, a fan who came regularly to hear her play. One evening he invited her to his apartment and played for her a Billie Holiday recording of “I Loves You, Porgy.” Simone added the song to her repertoire and it immediately became a show-stopper at the Midtown. Her rendering of the tender lyric, poignant in its mournful yearning, brings to mind her broken love for Edney, a sign of how her music was becoming an outlet for her personal anguish. “I Loves You, Porgy” became one of Nina Simone’s iconic songs. When she sang it, she corrected the grammar to “I love you, Porgy.”
In the summer of 1956, while she was playing at the Midtown, two white men came into her life. Don Ross was a frequent patron of the bar. He hung around until closing time and began walking Nina home. She was again without a social life, and came to depend on him. “Before I knew it, the idea of being without him was unthinkable,” she wrote in her autobiography. (Spell, p. 56) Ross was a hustler who worked on and off as a fairground barker, becoming idle when he had saved up some money, and playing the part of a bohemian. He moved in with her, and before long she was supporting him. Although she didn’t love Ross, the thought of being alone terrified her, and so a dependency relationship was formed.
She also met, through Steward, the agent Jerry Fields, who came down from New York to hear her perform and offered to represent her. He assured her that he could book her into upscale clubs in Manhattan and secure a recording contract for her. She signed with him and began traveling from Philadelphia to New York for gigs. She was then earning $175 per week, continuing her lessons with Sokoloff, and helping support her family as well as Ross, who lounged around their apartment listening to jazz records and smoking weed. Under the stress, Nina began drinking and taking LSD.
In the fall of 1957, while performing at The Playhouse Inn in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Simone was joined on stage by Al Schackman, a guitarist who was in the audience. She ignored him at first, and tried to lose him with her virtuosity. But when he kept up with her, and even seemed to know where she was going with the music, she gave him a searching look. After the club closed for the night, Schackman came home with her and they played together for hours. Never her lover, Schackman became a lifelong friend and musical soul mate.
In December, Nina went to New York to record an album for Bethlehem Records, a jazz label founded in 1953. The tracks were songs that she had been performing at Midtown. She was paid $3,000 for the rights, with no royalty provision, an omission that would later cost her a great deal of money. The album was released in June 1958 under the title Little Girl Blue. The cover of the album was a photograph of a triste Simone sitting on a bench by a pond in Central Park. The songs included standards such as “Mood Indigo,” “Little Girl Blue,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “I Loves You, Porgy,” and “My Baby Just Cares For Me.” Bethlehem made little effort to promote the album, sales were disappointing, and Simone never recorded for them again, although the company in 1959, without Simone’s consent, released a second album, Nina Simone and Her Friends, composed of songs laid down for Little Girl Blue but not used. This experience was the first of many that fed Simone’s distrust of record companies and her belief that her musical talent was being exploited.
Sid Marx, a Philadelphia disc jockey, became enamored of Simone’s rendering of “I Loves You, Porgy,” played it repeatedly on his show, and lobbied Bethlehem to issue it as a single. It was released in June 1959 and climbed to #8 on the pop charts. The single spread Simone’s fame, but Bethlehem kept all the money.
Jerry Fields told Nina that if she wanted to advance her career, she should move to New York, which was the center of the jazz world. Nina was fearful of moving away from her family and being alone in New York. She decided to marry Don Ross and bring him with her. They wed in Philadelphia in a civil ceremony witnessed by a passing stranger. Her parents, though they had accepted Ross, did not attend. Early in 1958 Simone and Ross moved to New York, to an apartment in Greenwich Village. Nina continued to travel to Philadelphia to take lessons from Sokoloff.
In the two years after the release of “I Loves You, Porgy,” Simone’s visibility in the jazz world rapidly increased. She became associated with some of the most prominent musicians in the field, and performed at prestigious venues across the country. She signed a multi-record contract with Colpix, the record division of Columbia Pictures, and retained an entertainment attorney, Max Cohen, to represent her. Her performance at New York’s Village Vanguard in July 1959 was favorably reviewed in Billboard and Variety. At the beginning of August she appeared at the first Playboy Jazz Festival in Chicago. In September she performed at The Town Hall in New York on a program with Horace Silver and J.J. Johnson. Colpix later released Nina Simone at Town Hall. October found her at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. In December, back in Chicago, she performed at the Blue Note and was the featured artist on the Playboy Penthouse television show. She sang “I Loves You, Porgy” for Hugh Hefner’s all-white guests—men clad in tuxedos, women attired in cocktail dresses. Ebony magazine gave her a four-page spread. In March 1960 she performed at a charity event in Philadelphia with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, and The Four Freshmen. Then she appeared on NBC’s Today show with Dave Garroway, and had another booking at The Town Hall, sharing the stage with Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, and Thelonious Monk. She had formed her own band with Al Schackman, Ben Riley on drums, and Chris White on bass. She also appeared at The Village Gate whose owner, Art D’Lugoff, became her manager. Through it all, she continued her classical training, taking lessons from her old teacher at Juilliard, Carl Friedberg.
Her success brought the comforts that money could buy, but also marked the beginning of erratic behavior that gave her a reputation for being difficult and unpredictable. She bought a Mercedes Benz convertible and an apartment on Central Park West. She separated from Ross, who had fastened on her like leech, and divorced him at the end of 1960. She was given to backstage outbursts and to confrontations with her audiences. At the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem she mocked the audience for being boorish, provoking walk-outs. She never performed there again. These episodes made promoters wary of her. She invented a fictional narrative about her childhood and upbringing, claiming to have been a victim of poverty and racism, and failing to credit the white women in Tryon who had helped her. Her pious mother continued to withhold her approval of Simone’s career, but also continued to accept money from her. Nina’s feelings of loneliness persisted, and she resumed seeing a psychiatrist.
In March 1961 Nina met Andrew Stroud, the man who would become her husband and manager for ten years. They met at the Roundtable in Manhattan, a club where Simone performed and Stroud was often a patron. She flirted with him at his table, and after the performance he escorted her home. He introduced himself to her as a bank teller, but in reality he was a thrice-divorced police detective with the NYPD. He worked a beat in Harlem for the vice squad. He had a reputation for being both tough and corrupt, a man you didn’t fool with. He carried a gun. His fearlessness gave Nina a feeling of security. “I felt safe when he was around,” she wrote in her autobiography. (Spell, p. 73) But almost immediately there were signs that he might be a threat to her. Once he slapped her after she arrived forty-five minutes late for a date and was dropped off by another man. He warned her not to trifle with him.
In July, while in Philadelphia for a performance, Nina was stricken with a mild case of polio and hospitalized. Stroud came to her bedside every evening to comfort her. When she had recovered, he proposed marriage to her, and she accepted. Then she experienced a more ominous episode of Stroud’s violence. While they were out for an evening of dancing and drinking at the Palladium Ballroom, one of Nina’s fans recognized her and handed her a note. Nina put the note in her purse, infuriating Stroud, who had been drinking rum all evening. After they left the Palladium, Stroud began to beat her on the street as they waited for a cab. Back at her apartment, he pointed his gun at her head, stripped her naked, tied her to the bed, and raped her. She got free, and fled to Al Schackman’s apartment, where she hid for days. Stroud tracked her down, and when he saw her bruised and swollen face, asked her who had struck her. “You did,” answered Simone. Stroud claimed to have no memory of doing it.
Nina asked Stroud to see her psychiatrist. He went, and also saw another. Nina’s psychiatrist advised her not to marry Stroud. The other psychiatrist waffled. He said it was possible that Stroud’s assault had been an isolated incident, brought on by his drinking. It might not recur. Nina was unable to sever the relationship. Her fear of being alone was stronger than her fear of Stroud. She said, “I needed desperately to love somebody . . . When he was around, I didn’t feel lonely.” (Light, P. 77; Spell, p. 78). They were married on December 4, 1961 in Simone’s Central Park West apartment. Stroud’s five brothers, Nina’s younger sister Frances, Al Schackman, Ted Axelrod, and the two psychiatrists attended. Nina’s parents were not there.
Shortly after the wedding, Nina left for Lagos, Nigeria, on a cultural mission in company with a number of black artists, including Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. This trip was the beginning of Simone’s consciousness of herself as a member of a race whose tribal roots lay in Africa. As a result of befriending Hughes and Baldwin, and from them learning more about the history of her race, Simone began to identify herself as an African woman through her choice of wardrobe and make-up.
The following year, using money from a Colpix advance, Simone and Stroud bought a large house on four acres in Mount Vernon, a segregated suburb of New York located in Westchester County. Nina became pregnant. She hired a housekeeper and a gardener whose duties she compulsively micromanaged, thus increasing rather than relieving her responsibilities. Stroud kept her performing through her eighth month. On September 12, 1962 their daughter, named Lisa Celeste, was born, an event that brought great joy to Nina. “The first three hours after Lisa was born were the most peaceful of my life,” she said in an interview. (What Happened, Miss Simone?) She wanted to breast feed her baby, but Stroud opposed it, saying it made him jealous.
In 1963, Stroud resigned from the NYPD, became Nina’s manager, and set a course for her career. His goal was to make them rich, so that they could retire early and live in luxury. Simone was then earning up to $4,500 a week when performing in top venues. He formed a production company, hired a publicist and a promoter, and put Simone on a rigorous schedule of appearances and recordings. He booked her into Carnegie Hall, and she performed there in April 1963 to a sell-out crowd that included her parents and Muriel Mazzanovich. The appearance raised Simone’s profile and placed her among the top performers of popular music in her era. “But,” Simone later remarked, “I wasn’t playing Bach.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) She had realized her dream, but in an altered form that she could not fully embrace.
Simone had become friends with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who often came to hear Nina play at The Village Gate. Hansberry urged Simone to use her music and her celebrity to advance the cause of civil rights for black people. Hansberry raised Simone’s awareness of race and gender inequality in America. “Through her I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.” (Spell, p.87) A series of events in 1963—the arrest of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, the march on Washington, and the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four black children—propelled Simone into activism. She wrote an incendiary song, “Mississippi Goddam” that many radio stations in the south refused to play and put her music and her performances in the service of the movement. This commitment transformed Simone’s attitude towards her music. “I felt needed . . . For the first time performing made sense as a part of my life.” (Spell, p. 98, 94)
The civil rights movement gave Simone’s music a deeper purpose by elevating it above the category of popular music. The movement made her music comparable in importance to classical music, and brought a spiritual dimension to her performances. She discovered that many people in the movement, including Stokely Carmichael, were fans who played her records constantly.
But her politicizing of her music troubled Stroud. He saw it as a threat to her commercial success, jeopardizing her appeal to mainstream audiences who wanted to be entertained, not preached to. He kept her on a rigorous schedule of touring and recording with the result that she felt pulled in two directions, one charted by her husband who wanted to make money, the other answering an inner need to feel wanted for who she was. The pressure on her increased to the point that she was admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for treatment of depression. She began keeping a diary in which she recorded her bouts of melancholy, and her sense of alienation from Stroud. The diary reveals that he periodically beat her, and that she felt she deserved it. “Andrew hit me last night (swollen lip). Of course it was what I needed after so many days of depression.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?)
Simone tried to walk two paths. For Stroud she played concerts, cut records, and toured to promote them. For the movement she gave benefit performances with other activists like Pete Seeger, Odetta, and Harry Belafonte. She moved from Colpix to Phillips. But the regimen exhausted her and filled her with resentment. “I was always tired,” she said in an interview. “I could never sleep. The more I played, the less I could relax. Andy wouldn’t let me rest.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) Her resentment showed in outbursts of anger against her musicians, producers, and audiences. She developed a reputation for being difficult to work with, demanding, ungrateful, and unpredictable. She so antagonized the technicians at Nero’s Nook in Caesar’s Palace that they sabotaged her microphone, ruining her performance.
As Simone continued her balancing act, events beyond her control added to her stress and feelings of alienation. In January 1965 her close friend Lorraine Hansberry died from pancreatic cancer at age 34. Simone sang at her memorial service and later recorded the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” whose title was taken from Hansberry’s posthumously produced play. The song became a kind of anthem for the civil rights movement. A month after Hansberry’s death Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam. Simone’s growing disenchantment with race relations in the U.S. disposed her to be sympathetic to black nationalism. She received Louis Farrakhan at her home in Mount Vernon when considering conversion to Islam. Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz was friends with Simone and moved to Mount Vernon with her children. Her daughter Lisa often stayed at her home.
In January, three days after the death of Hansberry, Simone gave her second concert at Carnegie Hall, a solo performance witnessed by her parents and Miss Mazzy. A classical pianist, Céline Gorier-Bernard, remarked the split in Simone’s musical style. “Nina Simone never left classical music, she never ventured into jazz. Even with pure blues pieces, she always plays through her classical sensibility. She uses a range of gestures, linking very short notes and rhythms, that you only find in classical music, never in jazz.” (Brun-Lambert, p. 178) This observation points to another manifestation of the split within Nina that was gradually tearing her apart. Simone had ceased her piano lessons due to want of time, but the pull of her classical training remained strong.
In March, with Art D’Lugoff’s blessing, Simone broke an engagement at The Village Gate in order to perform at a benefit concert in Montgomery, Alabama that preceded Martin Luther King’s voter registration March from Montgomery to Selma. The concert was organized by Harry Belafonte and featured performances by Sammy Davis, Jr., Odetta, and Tony Bennett. Simone sang “Mississippi Goddam” as King and Ralph Bunche sat in the front row along with other dignitaries. The song fired up her audience.
For the remainder of the year Simone toured continuously. In June she left with Stroud and Lisa for her first European tour. It began in London and took them to Belgium, France, and Germany. She discovered that she had a large fan base in England owing to Eric Burdon and The Animals, who had covered her song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and made it into a hit in England. Simone resented the fact that white musicians had capitalized on her artistry. While in London she met David Nathan, a music aficionado who had started a Nina Simone fan club. Simone and Stroud brought Nathan and his sister Sylvia into their inner circle and used them to promote Nina’s records and appearances. She returned to the United States for a fall tour and in December she and Stroud were back in Europe, staying in Holland as guests of Wilhelm Langenberg, the head of Phillips. By the time she was back in the US for a concert in Chicago to benefit the Congress on Racial Equality, Simone was exhausted. “Inside I’m screaming ‘Someone help me’ but the sound isn’t audible—like screaming without a voice,” she wrote in her diary. (What Happened, Miss Simone?) She broached the thought of suicide to her husband. Stroud was unmoved. “He let me know that he would not only not suffer, but he would be relieved.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) His only concern was keeping her working while her star was ascendant. He switched the recording contract from Phillips to RCA.
Early in 1967, while touring with Bill Cosby, she cracked. Stroud entered their hotel room in Baltimore where Simone was preparing for her stage appearance to find her applying black shoe polish to her hair. She was hallucinating and delusional, thinking that Stroud was her nephew. Though Stroud was fearful of letting her go on stage, she insisted on performing. Stroud brought her to the theater and escorted her on stage to the piano. Then he watched from the wings. She got through the concert somehow, and Stroud dismissed the episode as an anomaly that wouldn’t be repeated. He kept her touring.
Other blows fell in 1968. On April 4, King was assassinated in Memphis. Simone was scheduled to perform at Dartmouth College that evening and cancelled. On June 5, while Simone was touring Europe again, Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. Simone saw these events as ringing down the curtain on the civil rights movement, to which she had given her heart, only to have it broken again.
In August 1969 Simone fled. Without telling Stroud where she was going or when she would be back, she left her wedding ring on the bedroom dresser at the Mount Vernon house and flew to Barbados, where she had booked a room at Sam Lord’s Castle Resort. She initiated a romance with a bellboy named Paul who took her for rides on his motorbike. Paul had no idea who Simone was, and Nina kept it that way. When she returned to Mount Vernon, she discovered that Stroud had moved to an apartment in New York, taking all his belongings with him and parking Lisa, then seven, with his mother. Simone and Stroud never lived together again, although their business relationship continued for another year.
Over the next three years, Simone’s life began to unravel. The structure that Stroud’s management had established for her appearances was still there, and she kept the concert dates that he had scheduled. But without his steadying hand and stern discipline, Simone struggled to maintain her professionalism with promoters and audiences. She went to Philadelphia to ask Sam Waymon to manage her, and he agreed, but he lacked Stroud’s authority. Nina was not afraid of him, and he became a target of her abuse. She behaved erratically at her performances, arriving late, and sometimes berating her audiences. Occasionally there was a racist tinge to her remarks. She once told a mostly white audience that she was singing for the black people in the theater, a slight that was met with embarrassed titters. She refused to perform at the Academy of Music in New York because she had not been paid in advance, triggering an audience riot. Scheduled to perform on NBC’s The Tonight Show, Simone missed her cue to go on and the producer shuffled in another guest in her place. During an appearance in New Orleans where she was opening for B.B. King, she returned to the stage during his set, disrupting the show. Her eccentricities alienated a great many people, and alarmed her closest musical ally, Al Schackman. Sam Waymon was hard-pressed to control her, and came under considerable stress. Her long-time attorney, Max Cohen, ceased to represent her.
Simone’s self-destructiveness severely impacted members of her family. While in Philadelphia to recruit Sam as her manager, she overheard her father telling Sam that he had always been the main provider for the family. J.D. was a proud man, perhaps ashamed that his role as bread-winner had been diminished. Stroud had been sending the Waymons money every month, and Kate had carried the family during J.D.’s period of illness and unemployment during the Depression. Simone broke with her father, a rupture that must have caused her enormous regret and guilt. She wrote in her autobiography, “I felt the same disgust as when I heard the news of the Birmingham church bomb . . . I walked into the kitchen and told him he wasn’t my Daddy anymore because I disowned him. From that moment I had no father.” (Spell, p. 124) Two years later, J.D. was back in Tryon, dying from prostate cancer. He asked for Nina, but she refused to see him. On the day of his funeral, she performed at the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington. A month later, Lucille also died from cancer.
Simone also had a troubled relationship with Lisa, who moved in and out of her life, and was shuttled from one caregiver to another. For a time she lived with Betty Shabazz in Mount Vernon. Then she alternated between Kate’s home in Tryon and Al Schackman’s farm in Massachusetts. In 1973 Lisa accompanied Simone on a tour of Australia and Japan. Simone made Lisa a target of her racism, berating her for being light skinned, and physically abusing her. Lisa arranged to go to New York to visit her father, and did not rejoin Simone on the tour. Simone blamed others for her unhappiness. “I began to feel that all my troubles were pieces of the same problem, which was that I had been betrayed.” (Spell, p. 123)
Simone sought solace for her troubles in Barbados. She resumed her affair with Paul the bellboy, and in a fit of vanity decided to impress him with her celebrity. The prime minister of Barbados, Errol Barrow, was hosting a reception at his home. Simone had Paul drive her there, and burst in uninvited. Barrow handled the intrusion with grace, and offered to put her and Lisa up at a cottage by the sea on his estate. During nightly visits to the cottage, Barrow became her lover, and they trysted when he traveled to New York. Simone had fantasies that Barrow would leave his wife and marry her. She made plans to move permanently to Barbados, and shipped all her belongings there. When Barrow learned of her plan, he instructed customs not to admit her possessions, and shortly thereafter he broke off with her out of fear that she would ruin him politically.
In July 1974 Simone performed at Philharmonic Hall in New York, and recorded her last album for RCA, aptly titled It Is Finished. A few months later, she accepted an invitation from her friend Miriam Makeba to join her in Africa, where she was then living with her husband Stokely Carmichael, who had changed his name to Kwame Touré. Simone traveled to Liberia with Lisa and took up residence in Monrovia, the capital. She remained there for two years, during which time she performed only twice, once at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and once in Paris.
Simone did not find peace or happiness in Africa, the place she hoped would become her tribal home. She continued to look for salvation outside herself, and her dysfunctional life continued. Not long after her arrival, she created a sensation in Monrovia by stripping naked as she danced in a nightclub. The president of Liberia treated her as an honored guest and provided her and Lisa with a residence on the beach. She was courted by a wealthy, elderly Liberian who upon meeting her proposed marriage. He brought her to his country estate, but when during a visit to his bedroom Simone was unable to arouse him sexually, his ardor cooled. A friend took Simone to see a witch doctor who immediately asked her, “Who is this person on the other side who loves Carnation milk?” (Brun-Lambert, p. 223) The witch doctor told her that she could re-establish contact with her father if she observed a ritual. She must stay in his house for three days without seeing or speaking to anyone. She must abstain from alcohol and tobacco, wrap her head in a scarf, and go to bed with a tin of Carnation milk under her pillow. She must imagine her father sleeping next to her in the bed. At the end of three days Simone awoke and felt a great weight lifted from her. She claimed that she saw her father, who had forgiven her.
Simone’s relationship with Lisa continued to be turbulent and abusive. Lisa, later in life, said that her mother could be “a monster.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) Simone enrolled Lisa in a boarding school in Switzerland, and then moved there herself in order to be near her daughter. Before she left, she fell in love with Imojah, a wealthy farmer, and carried a torch for him after she settled in Geneva.
In Geneva, Simone lived with Susan Baumann, a lesbian who wanted to become her manager. Sam had relinquished that role before Simone left for Liberia. To escape her mother, whose visits to the boarding school upset her, Lisa returned to New York to her father’s custody. He placed her with his sister-in-law, who lived in upstate New York, and Lisa attended public high school there. Simone returned to Liberia in hopes of persuading Imojah to marry her and move to Europe, but was rebuffed.
While there, she made the acquaintance of Winfred Gibson, who presented himself to her as businessman who could restart her career. They went to London together on his assurance that he would arrange bookings and a recording contract. After several days had passed at their posh London hotel, Simone was approached by the manager, who inquired when she would be paying down her bill. Simone angrily confronted Gibson, who assaulted her and left her unconscious in her room. When she awoke, she called hotel security and the police, who gave little credence to her story. After they left, she swallowed thirty-five sedatives. A hotel nurse found her and called for an ambulance. After being treated at a hospital, Simone was transferred to a clinic near Oxford, where she underwent a psychiatric evaluation. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive. Lithium and rest were prescribed.
Simone called Stroud to ask for his help. He offered to manage her career again. She arrived in New York in June 1977 and was immediately taken into custody on charges of tax evasion. During her absence, the Internal Revenue Service had been investigating her for failing to file returns. Stroud had always handled such business details, but since their divorce in 1972 he had no legal connection to her. A sympathetic district attorney who was a fan of her music persuaded her to plead guilty to the charge of failing to file her 1972 return. She was fined and given a suspended jail sentence. But the ordeal unnerved her, and she was a no-show for a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Carnegie Hall. She returned to Europe alone. Before she left she was awarded an honorary degree from Amherst College, and from that time forward she called herself Dr. Nina Simone.
For the next several years Simone drifted aimlessly, a waif without a home or a manager. She performed in Amsterdam, London, Israel, New York, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Montreal. She recorded the album Baltimore in Brussels. She returned to Geneva for a stay in a clinic. She lived for a time with her brother Carrol in San Diego. In June 1979 she came uninvited to attend Lisa’s graduation from high school. Lisa joined the Air Force in search of order. Simone’s erratic performance behavior continued, and her reputation for instability and unpredictability spread. Audiences came as much out of curiosity to witness her eccentricity as to hear her sing.
In 1981 she moved to Paris, where she remained for a year. She performed regularly at Les Trois Maillets, a nightclub in the Latin Quarter. Word spread quickly, as it had in Atlantic City when she first began performing. Jacques Bonni, the owner of Les Trois Maillets, found her an apartment and served as her financial guarantor. While giving a concert at Palais des Glaces in Paris, she met Raymond Gonzalez, a manager, who booked her into a festival in Pamplona, Spain. She scandalized the town, appearing naked in the hallway of her hotel, performing drunk, insulting the audience with racist remarks, and calling the organizers of the festival thieves. To avoid arrest, she and Gonzalez fled across the border to Biarritz.
Simone came to Los Angeles in the summer of 1983 to seek distribution of a concert video recorded in France. She met Anthony Sannucci, who offered to manage her. She moved into an apartment he owned and recorded an album he produced called Nina’s Back. They traveled to London together, where Sannucci had booked her into Ronnie Scott’s, a top tier jazz club where Simone often performed. Sannucci set up a two-week engagement, then agreed to extend it for a third week without consulting Simone. Simone fired him, and re-teamed with Gonzalez.
Gonzalez was assisted in managing Simone by Gerrit De Bruin, a Dutch fan who had met Simone in 1967 before she gave a performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. De Bruin finessed his way into Simone’s presence by pretending to be one of the crew bringing her musical equipment into the theater. They became friends, and he followed her career and her personal life through its ups and downs. De Bruin persuaded Simone to move to Nijmegen, an ancient city in Holland near the German border. With his help, she rented an apartment there. He arranged for her to see a doctor for treatment of her violent mood swings. The doctor diagnosed her as suffering from bipolar disorder, and prescribed Trilafon, an anti-psychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia and depression. The drug, when she took it, stabilized Simone, but over the long term would take its toll on her motor skills, affecting both her voice and fingers. Gonzalez and De Bruin hired a personal assistant, Jackie Hammond, to keep Nina on her medication and help her with daily functioning. They also brought in from London Roger Nupie, who had taken the reins of the Nina Simone fan club and kept an extensive archive of her recordings. This team worked together to restart Simone’s career. She began touring Holland and England. Lisa, then stationed in Frankfurt, came to visit her.
Simone’s revival was given a boost in 1987 when Chanel No. 5 used her recording “My Baby Just Cares For Me” as the theme song in an advertising campaign. Simone had recorded this song for Bethlehem on her very first album. The song became a hit in Europe, to the financial benefit of Charly Records, which had acquired the copyright from Bethlehem. Her exclusion from the revenue stream flowing from this hit reinforced Simone’s belief that her talent had been exploited by the music industry, that she had been betrayed professionally. She had retained an attorney, Steven Ames Brown, to track down and recover unpaid royalties from her numerous recordings, and he succeeded in obtaining $150,000 from Charly Records as Simone’s share of the “My Baby Just Cares For Me” bonanza.
Nina tired of Nijmegen, moved briefly to Amsterdam, then resumed her nomadic lifestyle. She toured South America, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. She performed in Italy with Miriam Makeba and Odetta. Although her musical ability had peaked years before, she still earned up to $60,000 for her concerts. But happiness eluded her. She continued to feel undervalued and unappreciated as a performer. She declined physically, gaining weight and walking with a shuffle. Her terror of being alone never left her. Gerrit De Bruin, a man who understood her and cared for her selflessly, remarked, “Nina wanted to find love, protection and a home where her brain would not attack her. Of course, that was impossible, being the Nina she was. That led her to search for substitutes and be hurt by deception a lot of the time.” (Hampton, p. 173)
In July 1992 Simone purchased a house in Bouc-Bel-Air, a small village near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France, and moved there alone. De Bruin, fearing that she would fall apart without the support of her team, urged against the move, but Simone ignored his advice. She stopped taking her medication and quickly became a danger to herself and to others. She started a fire in her kitchen that might have destroyed her house and possibly killed her, but fortunately De Bruin was visiting at the time and extinguished it. More troubling was an episode of violence against her neighbors. Teenage boys who lived next door were making noise that bothered Simone. When she asked for quiet, the boys responded with a racial taunt. Simone went into the house and returned carrying a loaded shotgun that she kept for protection. She fired it at the boys, injuring them. She was arrested and brought to trial. A local attorney, Isabelle Terrin, who had befriended Simone, represented her in court. Simone avoided a jail sentence, but was ordered to pay civil damages and undergo psychiatric treatment.
Following this episode, Simone’s brother Carrol, a psychologist, came to Bouc-Bel-Air and brought Simone to Los Angeles with him. She visited her mother Kate, then living in Sacramento with John Irvin and his wife. Simone owned a condominium in Los Angeles, purchased during the time of her business relationship with Anthony Sannucci. She got into a violent altercation with one of her neighbors, was arrested, and then hospitalized. While in the hospital she became attached to a gay orderly, Clifton Henderson. Upon her release from the hospital, Simone hired Henderson to be her caregiver and brought him with her to Bouc-Bel-Air.
Despite the turmoil of this period, Simone continued to perform and record. De Bruin and Gonzalez arranged bookings for her in Europe, Brazil, Lebanon, Australia, and the U.S. Michael Alagro, a young record producer working for Elektra, signed her to make an album that was released in 1995 as A Single Woman. Alagro skillfully handled Simone on a promotional tour for the album, once joining her fully clothed in her bubble bath at a London hotel. Nina could be playful when in her manic phase.
But gradually Henderson took control of Simone’s life and made her inaccessible to De Bruin and Gonzalez. In 2000 she fired Gonzalez and moved to Carry-le-Rouet, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean near Marseille. She was then living with Henderson, now her manager, and Javier Collado, a young musician who played in her band and also served as her bodyguard. De Bruin was shut out. When he tried to reach her by telephone, he was told that she was not at home, but he could hear her voice in the background asking who was calling. He once came to Carry-le-Rouet and rang her doorbell. When the door opened, her heard her voice and called out to her. She welcomed him and asked him why he had not been in touch with her. Simone had again fallen into the clutches of men who were exploiting her.
In 2001 Simone was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent surgery and a program of chemotherapy. Her mother died in April. In June Simone gave a last concert in Paris, and struggled to perform. Still, in July, she gave another ten concerts, nine in the U.S., and one in England. She was paid $80,000 for a concert at Carnegie Hall, but sang only four songs. A year later, in Sopot, Poland, she performed for the last time. In the spring of 2003 she suffered a stroke, and on April 21, 2003 she died from a tumor on her brain. Four days later, a funeral service was held for her in Carry-le-Rouet. Gerrit De Bruin was denied access to the church. Simone was cremated and her ashes scattered in Africa. Two days before her death, Lisa arranged for the Curtis Institute to confer on Simone an Honorary Doctor in Music and Humanities degree.
* * *
All artists struggle with the tension between their commitment to their art, through which they define themselves and express their identity, and their need for and responsibility to others. In both their art and their personal lives, they are connecting to other human beings, though in vastly different ways—one formal, governed by the rules of their art, the other informal, following social conventions and norms.
In the career of musician Nina Simone we see the artist’s torment over the imperatives of her talent at full boil. Though extremely gifted with musical ability, Simone from her earliest years regarded her talent as an isolating force that separated her from other people, including members of her family, and prevented her from being loved for herself. “Talent is a burden, not a joy,” she said once during a concert at Royal Albert Hall. (Cohodas, p. 298) The conviction that people were drawn to her because of her unique gift was reinforced by her experience with her mother and both of her husbands, who made her musical skill an instrument of their own ambitions and needs, giving rise in Nina to feelings of unworthiness and betrayal. The acceptance that she sought beyond her music she could only give to herself. But her lifelong search for an other with whom she could overcome her fear of being alone kept her looking outward, not inward, for serenity.
Her bipolar disorder, long ignored and undiagnosed, was a major factor in her unhappiness. Though physicians as far back as the Greek Hippocrates recognized melancholy and mania as mood disorders, the illness did not enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until the early 1950s, about the time that Simone’s loneliness and chronic sadness began to appear. These affections infused her music, giving it a profound poignancy and yearning.
Bipolar disorder is believed to be genetically based, but environmental factors such as abuse and stress can play a role in exacerbating it. Certainly the treatment that Simone received from Andrew Stroud during the ten years of her marriage to him increased Simone’s risk of manic-depressive episodes. Even when confronted with obvious manifestations of psychosis, such as she experienced on her tour with Bill Cosby, Stroud kept her in harness like a mule. Her suffering may well have accentuated what many came to regard as her musical genius, her ability to fuse two radically different styles of music, classical and jazz. This ability was on display when she performed her hit “My Baby Just Cares For Me” at a concert in Europe. As she vocalized the words, her fingers played a Bach concerto on the keyboard, astonishing the audience. De Bruin played a recording of this performance for Miles Davis, who exclaimed, “How does she do it?” (What Happened, Miss Simone?)
Both De Bruin and Roger Nupie addressed this aspect of her artistry. “There has always been the question that Nina was a genius, but would she have been a genius without her disease?” he wondered during an interview with Sylvia Hampton. “I don’t know, but I’m sure her music would have been less intense.” (Hampton, p. 172) Nupie observed of her, “Behind the ‘diva’ Nina Simone, the one people described as moody or difficult, was a single woman who was trying very hard to find love.” (Hampton, p. 173)
View video of Nina Simone singing “Wild is the Wind” here.
Further Reading
Brun-Lambert, David. Nina Simone. The Biography. London: Aurum Press, Ltd., 2009.
Light, Alan. What Happened, Miss Simone? New York: Crown Archetype, 2016
Simone, Nina, with Stephen Cleary. I Put a Spell on You. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.
