What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  The Waymons were returned—somewhat awkwardly—to their original seats, and the recital went on as planned. Eunice was especially proud that she was allowed to improvise her last number; five audience members were asked to each choose a note, and then she created a piece using their selections. The juxtaposition of Bach-inspired structure and the freedom of improvisation, a thrilling tension that sat at the heart of Nina Simone’s artistry, was taking shape even at her very first concert.

  Despite the slights—with the Millers, at Owen’s Drug Store—that she had already experienced in her young life, this recital was the first time that Eunice ran up against the full sting of racism. After confronting it directly, Eunice started to resent that racism was an issue her family never discussed. To her, that silence was irresponsible. “Of course I wish they had admitted that it existed and told me all about it, so that I wouldn’t have been so shocked when it happened,” she reflected. The Waymons may have been trying to shield their children from the full effects of prejudice, but of course there was no real escape. Even after taking on the mantle of an activist, though, Nina Simone focused on conditions larger than just her own experience.

  “When [my mother] talked about Jim Crow and segregation, she rarely referred to it at that stage in her life, even though it did touch her,” said Nina’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly. “She did tell me about times when she was told her nose was too big, her lips were too full, and her skin was too dark. I assume she was told that there are only certain things you’ll be good for in your life.”

  As she prepared for high school, despite her time on the road with her mother, Eunice remained especially close to her father, who continued to offer the tenderness that her mother held back. “He is the first person who showed me what to do when I had my period,” she said. “My father told me how to destroy the cotton and where to do it, because we had a wood stove and we had an outdoor toilet. My momma didn’t tell me anything.”

  Her maturing body coincided with the arrival of her first boyfriend. When Edney Whiteside and his family moved into the Waymons’ neighborhood in Tryon, Eunice immediately took notice of the handsome boy, two years older than she was. Soon they were meeting every Sunday afternoon at four o’clock for a ritual drive, with no chaperones, to the town of Edneyville, from which he got his name. The parents all liked one another, and despite Mary Kate’s strict sense of decorum the young couple received everyone’s full approval.

  “I had no boyfriend,” Simone recalled. “I was hanging around with a little gang of five girls, but most of them had been taken, and I felt so left out of things. I was alone most of the time. I tried to fit in, but I couldn’t. But when Edney came, something did fit, he was the perfect person to be with. He was quiet, sensitive as all hell. What I liked about him the most was how well he dressed and how much in order he kept. And we obeyed the rules, that American dream where you go together a long time and get married.” It was the first of many times that she believed a relationship could help her “fit in” and solve deeper problems.

  Despite this new romance, however, her family and teachers decided that in order to continue with an education that would challenge her talents, Eunice would be sent to a girls’ boarding school, Allen High School in Asheville, North Carolina. The first thing to do, naturally, was to set her up with a piano teacher there. Mrs. Mazzanovich contacted a former music professor at Columbia University to look after Eunice in Asheville. That professor, in turn, arranged for weekly lessons with Clemens Sandresky, a Polish-born instructor, to be paid for by the still-active Eunice Waymon Fund.

  Eunice arrived in Asheville in the fall of 1945 and was thrown into a far more rigorous educational environment than the one in Tryon. “It was a black boarding school for girls, with white teachers,” she said. “I like to say that I’ve been international all my life, because those teachers came from Redwood, California, from France. They had three black teachers, the superintendent was black, and the rest of them were white. Unbeknownst to me, these women were preparing me to be the world’s first great black classical pianist. That’s what they were preparing me to do.”

  As it had been in Tryon, her schedule was demanding, the discipline of going from classes to homework to piano practice unrelenting. She would wake up at four o’clock in the morning to play the piano before the school day started. “In high school, all I did, sweetheart, was study,” she would tell Kiilu Nyasha in 1986. “If it was not the piano, it was studies in science and French and the regular studies that you have in high school. I studied all the damn time.”

  This intense focus, however, probably had as much to do with discomfort in her new setting as it did with the school’s strict approach. Though only about sixty miles from Tryon, Asheville had a very different vibe, and the cultural shock may have propelled the teenager to take solace in the familiarity of her strict piano routine. She described the contrast to Maya Angelou—“from the Black town with its easy rhythms, its smiling and familiar faces, its well-known sights and scents, to the bordered and tight, frightened and frightening ash-pale face of white Asheville.”

  While at Allen, Eunice kept up a frequent correspondence with her mentor, Mrs. Mazzanovich. “She constantly, constantly in her letters assured me of her love,” Simone said. “I mean, it got to the place where she knew how much I needed to hear it. But she would underline sentences—‘Of course I love you child, you know I love you.’ And she’d send me poems, the most beautiful poems that she would read, if they were applicable to the situation, ’cause I used to write her a lot.”

  According to some people in Simone’s circle, she had some same-sex affairs at the all-girls school. “I met her girlfriend, who was by then a middle-aged woman in her early fifties,” said Nina’s longtime friend Al Schackman. “When Nina and I did a tribute to Paul McCartney with the Boston Pops, she was invited and she came to the performance at Symphony Hall. She came backstage and we had a chance to talk. I said, ‘How was Nina back then?’ And she said, ‘Nina was always a little odd.’ To me, that said a lot. She was always remote, removed.”

  In Asheville, then, Eunice Waymon was searching for affection where she could get it. But what she claimed was really happening at the time was that she was being kept from Edney, whom she would regard as perhaps the great love of her life.

  When Eunice left for Allen, her beloved Edney would write her letters every week; acutely aware of the social pressures of an academically competitive high school, she hid these from her friends because his spelling was so bad. He would drive up to visit her most Sundays. After a while, though, the letters’ frequency dipped, and Eunice began to feel as if something was off between them. Her gut was right. Not long after Edney’s correspondence became more sporadic, she discovered that he had started seeing Annie May, her best friend back in Tryon.

  “I cried and I cried,” Nina said later, “and one day I confronted him, and he said, ‘Yes, I’m going with Annie May—you’re not home and I miss you too much.’ And I got really worried, my love was leaving me.”

  As graduation approached, she was working feverishly, practicing longer, and hearing from Edney less often. Mrs. Mazzanovich was encouraging her to go to New York’s Juilliard School of Music, but Edney had issued her an ultimatum. “He told me, ‘If we don’t get married in June, it’s not gonna happen. If you go to New York, you’re never coming back and I know it.’ ”

  Eunice and Edney never slept together. “We petted all the time and we waited for our parents to approve our going to bed,” she said. “I was deeply in love with him—he could look at me and I’d get hot.

  “I never got over the fact that Edney and I never went to bed. We should have done it years before. I had those feelings from the time I was twelve.”

  It soon became clear, though, that even her strong attraction to her childhood sweetheart wasn’t enough to stop her from pursuing a career as a classical pianist, and she decided to move to New York. In a last-ditch effort to keep Eunice from leaving, E
dney made an attempt at overpowering her sexually, an attack made more bizarre by the cavalier way she brushed it off in later retellings. “He tried to rape me, but he didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Somebody had talked about raping; he didn’t know what to do and it was pitiful. He was just trying to keep me there any way he could.”

  Eunice was offered a scholarship to the world-renowned music school at the liberal arts college Oberlin. Mrs. Miller advised Mary Kate Waymon that she should accept the offer so that she could be around kids her own age with different interests, perhaps the closest thing to a normal college experience that someone with Eunice’s talent could have. But the Eunice Waymon Fund benefactors and Mrs. Mazzy continued to insist that she pursue the conservatory focus of Juilliard, so the teenager had a big decision to make.

  Edney attended her Allen High graduation—at which she spoke as the class valedictorian—but because he knew that he was losing her to her musical aspirations he decided to marry Annie May after all. The demise of this relationship would stay with Simone forever and, in some ways, shape the person she would become. Years later, after she had become famous, she even came back to Tryon to declare that now she was ready to be with him, but by then Edney Whiteside was a broken-down, middle-aged man, in no way suited for the life she was leading.

  The way that things played out with Edney would become familiar to Nina over the years, with a string of different lovers; she would fall deeply in love, then hesitate or sabotage the situation, propelled out of those relationships by the emotional explosion. Sometimes she was afraid to get hurt; other times she was unwilling to compromise her own desires. But always, she would later second-guess herself and her heart and attempt to rekindle the flame, only to find that her efforts left her even more shattered, wounded, or angry.

  Nina’s failure to make Edney her own would haunt her well into her adult life. “How did Eunice Waymon, protected by the customs and comforts of the Black South, emerge as today’s brilliant, obsidian gem, Nina Simone?” asked Maya Angelou in 1970.

  “ ‘I found a youthful love and lost it,’ Nina said. ‘That was the turning point. I lost love and found a career….[But] I’m a long way from compensating for what I gave up.’ ”

  CHAPTER 3

  I had been looked down all my life, being colored. Now I had the added stigma of show business.

  Despite Mrs. Miller’s case for Oberlin, following her graduation Eunice opted to move to New York City. She would spend the summer of 1950 there, studying intensely prior to the auditions for music conservatories. The plan was to attend Juilliard for six weeks, with her primary focus on preparing for the examination for a scholarship at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute.

  She moved in with a friend of her mother’s, another female preacher named Mrs. Steinermayer, who lived in Harlem on 145th Street. Shy and overwhelmed by the city, Eunice didn’t stray far from the Steinermayer apartment and didn’t make many friends. She did apparently meet a few men during this time, though—including a boyfriend named Chico. He was the first to call her by the nickname “Niña,” using its Spanish pronunciation, as a term of endearment.

  Mostly, though, her time was occupied by work at Juilliard. She studied with a teacher named Carl Friedberg, whom she held in the highest esteem, working on repertoire by Beethoven, Bach, and Handel and perfecting her finger placement and posture. She had a lesson with Friedberg once a week but spent four or five hours a day practicing.

  A month after she moved north, the rest of the Waymon family relocated to Philadelphia in order to be closer to her, operating under the assumption (or at least the hope) that she would land the invitation to attend Curtis. After a long summer of preparation and dedication, she sat for her exam in August.

  Though she was pleased with the performance she delivered, Eunice Waymon was denied the scholarship. For the rest of her life, she maintained that she didn’t know the reason for her rejection but that eventually those around her made it clear that it was because she was black and female. Her brother Carrol was particularly vocal about this theory.

  “There was some talk about they were not going to accept an unknown black for Curtis, and [that] even if they had accepted a black, it would have been a male,” said Carrol. “But not a little black girl, unknown, and more than that, a very poor black unknown. The people in the know suspected it was simply because she was black. It was a double, race and poverty…had she been a rich kid and black, it might have been different, but not a little poor black girl.”

  In retellings of the story, Simone would sometimes alter key details depending on the point she was trying to make. “I went to Curtis and I passed the test,” she said in 1984. “I know it was good—I was, at that time, kind of humble. Not too much these days. I was playing Czerny and Liszt and Rachmaninoff and Bach, and I knew it was good.

  “I didn’t understand why I didn’t get that scholarship for anything. And there were people around me who knew about my talent as well, and they said, ‘Nina, it’s because you are black.’ And that shocked me.”

  Sometimes she placed the focus of her rejection from Curtis not on the institute but on Juilliard, implying that it was a failure of the program she completed to prepare for the exam. In 1970, she presented the situation this way:

  “ ‘When I was seventeen, I left my love to go north and study. I had gone to the Juilliard School, in New York City, for a summer’s course, and at seventeen I went back to compete for a scholarship.’ Pause. ‘I was not accepted.’ ”

  And while sometimes she made a point of saying that she had received a scholarship for her summer studies at Juilliard, she also claimed the opposite. In 1967 she said on Dick Hubert’s Celebrity’s Choice that after her high school graduation she came to New York hoping for a Juilliard scholarship but that she wasn’t “good enough.” She continued: “So the [Eunice Waymon Fund] money that had been saved during those years sent me to Juilliard for a year and a half as a special student.”

  Regardless of the particulars—which schools rejected her and for what reasons—Eunice Waymon’s dream of becoming the first great black American classical pianist, the goal she had fiercely been working toward for most of her life, had now essentially collapsed. The racism she had encountered at that first recital back in Tryon had now solidified in her mind as an institutional issue in classical music and, by extension, mainstream America.

  But according to Vladimir Sokoloff, the piano teacher in Philadelphia who subsequently accepted her as a student, it was not so cut-and-dried. “It had nothing to do with her color or background,” he insisted. “She wasn’t accepted because there were others that were better.”

  “Whatever the truth is,” said Roger Nupie, a Nina Simone fan and collector who would become a friend and adviser, “we should realize in those days there were no black students of classical music in Curtis Institute, and certainly no black women. Was she not accepted because of her color, was there another reason? We will never know.”

  With an acceptance rate of less than 5 percent, Curtis was extremely difficult for anyone to get into, much less a black applicant. In fact, Curtis had admitted African American students as far back as 1928, including the future Pulitzer Prize winner George Walker. Even as Simone sat for her audition, a young black woman named Blanche Burton-Lyles was studying in the piano department.

  More important than the actual outcome, though, was how it affected Nina and shaped her future, her career, her understanding of her place in the world. “The thing is that it was a kind of trauma for Nina, and it never really disappeared,” Nupie said.

  After being denied admittance to Curtis, Eunice had no real reason to remain in New York. Her Waymon Fund money was running out, and her family, still stationed in Philadelphia, needed financial support. So she moved down to Philadelphia and took a job as a photographer’s assistant, assuming that her musical days were behind her. But, of course, the piano was too much a part of her identity for her to really abandon it. Soon enough, wit
h the encouragement of Carrol, she started lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff.

  “[She was] not a genius, but she had great talent,” he said. “I accepted her on the basis of her talent, and with the understanding that I would prepare her for [another] audition at Curtis. It was during that early period that she demonstrated, at one lesson, her ability to play jazz. I remember distinctly telling her, ‘Why don’t you pursue this as your profession?’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, my first love is classical music and I want to be a pianist.’ ”

  Simone would claim that Sokoloff’s instruction didn’t measure up to the instruction she had been getting from Carl Friedberg. (“Friedberg was much more gifted and much more learned than Vladimir Sokoloff,” she said. “He [Sokoloff] was a great teacher, but Carl Friedberg was from Juilliard and Juilliard was the best school, so naturally I preferred him.”) But she stayed as diligent as ever about her training, continuing to practice four or five hours a day.

  She also found a job at Arlene Smith’s vocal studio working as an accompanist. It wasn’t concert work, but it did allow her to make money playing the piano—enough to cover her lessons, pay her own expenses, and have some left over to contribute to her family. “I accompanied students who studied popular singing,” she said. “I used to hear them talk about agents and things. I didn’t know what agents were, but I knew that I was gifted. I knew that I could play anything I heard.”

  Eventually, Eunice was ready to move into a place of her own and also decided—in a further fit of independence—that she could increase her income by giving private lessons. The most efficient setup, she felt, would be to find a space that could double as a work studio and an apartment, a requirement that led her to a storefront at Fifty-seventh Street and Master—a big room, with a kitchen and a toilet, that looked directly out on the street. There she taught young students, ages seven to fifteen, for $2.50 an hour. Eight kids left Arlene Smith’s studio to work directly with her, leading to some tension, though Smith would continue to offer Eunice some part-time work when she was in need of some quick cash.