What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  This period also saw her begin her first lengthy relationship since Edney Whiteside, with a man she met in church. “I was near my family. I was studying music. I had a boyfriend, and I had a storefront. So that was a pretty normal existence.”

  Her day-to-day circumstances may have seemed stable, but Eunice was still in the process of recalibrating her life’s plan. She felt unsettled, troubled. She began seeing a psychiatrist named Gerry Weiss and visited his offices every Thursday afternoon for about a year. “I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere,” she said. “I did not understand the people in Philadelphia, I didn’t understand what I was doing with them. And so I went to a psychiatrist, not because anything was particularly wrong with me, but I didn’t fit anywhere.”

  These feelings of alienation would stay with her, in one form or another, for much of her life. She did have a few close friends, though presumably not the sort of folks her mother would have chosen—in fact, she was drawn to women who displayed an independence and a sexuality in sharp contrast to her church upbringing. Her best girlfriend was a prostitute named Kevin Mathias, also known as Faith Jackson; after allegedly meeting at a brothel where Nina played the piano, they saw each other practically every day. There was also Faye Anderson, a blond woman who “took care of me and dressed me at that time.”

  For some time, Eunice had been overhearing some of her vocal students talk about the work they were getting over the summers in seaside resorts and supper clubs. Most took jobs as waiters or bellhops, but one of them—and not, to her mind, the most talented—told her he had gotten a job as a pianist. The students bragged about the money that they could make, up to $90 a week; the success of these moderately gifted students gave Nina an idea. She thought maybe she could pick up that kind of work for the season.

  She called the agent of the boy who had scored the piano job, and the agent soon got back to her with the news that she had an offer to spend the summer of 1954 as the house entertainment for the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. Eunice quickly realized, though, that pious preacher Mary Kate Waymon would never stand for her daughter playing secular music in a nightclub. In an effort to avoid discovery, Eunice came up with the solution of adopting a pseudonym—at least until she could break the news to her mother.

  Recalling her first taste of freedom that summer in New York, she chose “Nina” in reference to her old boyfriend Chico’s pet name, flattening the Spanish accent. “Simone” she took from the French actress Simone Signoret, inspired by the foreign art films she had become a fan of since moving to Philadelphia. So “Nina Simone” was how her name would appear in newspaper ads and all billing at the Midtown. (Of course, in classic Nina style, competing versions of how and why she settled on this moniker abound. A press bio for the Philips record company, her label during the mid-1960s, opted for a more general, awkward explanation: “The name derived from her childhood when she sometimes had been called ‘Nina,’ meaning little one. Simone was euphonic and just happened to sound well with it.”)

  She showed up at the Midtown—“a very crummy bar” a few blocks in from the beach—in an evening gown. Asked what she wanted to drink, she requested a glass of milk. She had never been in a bar before.

  She played classical numbers and instrumental improvisations for her first set. “I played everything that I could think of,” she said. “Classical, spirituals, all kinds of things. It was very strange.” The cigar-chomping owner, Harry Steward, told her that her piano sounded nice but she should also be singing. She replied that she was only a piano player, that she had never sung in her life. He told her that here she was either a singer or out of a job.

  So she started to sing. Early on, she still kept the focus on her piano playing—she would play for most of her set and sing a few standards, like “My Funny Valentine” or “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” to fill out the time remaining. It was a tentative shift, but after unleashing a vocal power even she was unaware of, Nina noticed a change in the Midtown’s clientele.

  “It was a joint, but it became quite well behaved after about five nights when the students started coming,” she said. “The first two nights was just these Irish drunks. I closed my eyes and played on, anyway. I played for five hours without stopping.”

  According to Carrol, it didn’t take long for Nina Simone’s audience to find her. “They knew she was a star,” he said. “It was not a pop place. It was an intimate place. And immediately, word got out of this tremendously talented pianist and singer. And from then on, every night we went there, the place was crowded. Couldn’t get in. Everybody heard about Midtown. For the serious music lovers, Midtown became the spot. No talk and no whispering, just music.”

  “A cult was developed right then,” said Simone in 1986. “Kids who were working as waiters in Atlantic City, in these hotels and things, heard me playing like this at the nightclub and they filled it up every night and made everybody be quiet.”

  From her very earliest performances, Nina was apparently able to hold a crowd’s interest fully—much more like a classical or sophisticated jazz artist, playing for people who are there to listen, than a conventional pop or lounge act, happy to provide background music for the drinking, socializing, and flirting that are the priorities for most bar patrons. The fact that she was able to establish this hierarchy so quickly would lead to an expectation that it was how all audiences behaved, which of course was soon followed by her disappointment and frustration that it wasn’t always so.

  Though she was playing from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every night, with fifteen-minute breaks each hour, Nina discovered that she was having no trouble filling the time. In fact, having the opportunity to explore these songs so freely was unlocking for her new ways of thinking about music.

  “All the time I was practicing, I’d practice Bach and Beethoven and Handel and Debussy and Prokofiev,” she said. “Man, all the talent that I had inside me, that was created from me, songs that I should have been composing, I didn’t know anything about those songs until I first started playing in a nightclub. Then, all of a sudden, the fact that I had to play five hours, I started improvising—but I didn’t know I could improvise like that. I was repressed to the point where I hadn’t played any songs of my own for fourteen years, and I didn’t even know I had them down there. I didn’t know until I first started at the Midtown Bar, and it came out.”

  But even though she was finding some interesting possibilities in her nightclub work, Simone still felt that the environment was a waste of her gift. “I felt dirtied by going into the bars,” she said. “That made me feel dirty. To me, it was so inferior to classical music that it was like water falling off a duck’s back to play ‘Little Girl Blue.’ That was just nothing. That’s why I infused it with ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ to give it some Bach in the background.

  “The popular world was nothing compared to the classical world. You didn’t have to work as hard, and it was easier to please an audience. All they wanted to get was the words. It was just another world.”

  After the summer in Atlantic City, she returned to her routine in Philadelphia, teaching in her storefront and studying with Vladimir Sokoloff. But the next year she returned to the Midtown nightclub, where she found a cluster of fans waiting for her, including a college student named Ted Axelrod, who was working as a waiter for the summer. Axelrod, who was gay, had become her first dedicated fan, and at her late sets much of the room was filled with his friends after they got off their dinner shifts. These were the aesthetes and outsiders of the Jersey Shore scene, the community who would make up the core of Nina’s following for years to come. (One of the other outcasts who became a fan at this time was a young Jewish man named Shlomo Carlebach; he went on to become a Hasidic rabbi, and a highly fictionalized version of his friendship with Simone was the basis for 2007’s Off-Broadway production Soul Doctor.)

  One night Axelrod, a record collector, brought in a Billie Holiday album for Simone and suggested that she learn one of the songs, “I L
oves You, Porgy,” from the Gershwins’ pioneering opera Porgy and Bess. Ever the dutiful student, she practiced it the next day and added the song to her set that night. She’d included it mostly as a favor to her friend (she was never a big fan of Holiday’s), but when she saw how well the audience responded she kept it in.

  After her second summer at the Midtown, Simone had become so comfortable as a performer that she asked the agent who had first gotten her the gig if he might find her some work in and around Philadelphia during the year. He booked her into the Pooquesin club, which led to more work at local supper clubs like the High-Thigh Club. The audiences were older and wealthier than the Atlantic City crowd but not as attentive as her devoted collegiate following—they were just looking for some simple dinner entertainment to impress their dates, and they often chatted through Simone’s sets.

  This kind of behavior was something that she wouldn’t tolerate for long, but it was more lucrative and more rewarding than accompanying young vocal students. She even thought about reapplying to Curtis, now that she had some more funds to pay her way and wouldn’t be dependent on a scholarship offer. The major drawback, though, was coming clean with her parents. Since she was now playing in public more than just seasonally, and much closer to home, Simone finally had to stop hiding behind her stage name and tell them what she was really doing for work.

  “It had been our secret that she was playing at a nightclub,” said Carrol. “And we discussed who was gonna tell Mom. I said, ‘Well, eventually I’m just gonna tell her, get over the shock. This is crazy.’ I had been the one who always said, ‘Forget all that other mess. Do what you’ve gotta do. You’re an artist. Mother would have to change or not change, but do it anyway.’ ”

  As had been the case when Nina was growing up, former aspiring musician John Divine Waymon—her more lenient and tolerant parent—was immediately supportive of her new direction. “Our father was real pleased,” said Carrol. “That’s why they had that secret bond. He thought it was great, and he knew what the life was about. It’s dangerous but also okay. Mom didn’t know anything about all that. If you don’t know about it, it’s dangerous until you know what it is.”

  Though Simone explained that she was performing mostly classical music and spirituals, and that she never drank anything stronger than milk in the clubs, Mary Kate Waymon didn’t spare her daughter from her disapproval. Simone felt that her mother never accepted the fact that she was playing the devil’s music in dens of iniquity.

  “Mom always said that my grandmother [hid] her albums under the mattress,” said Lisa Simone. “I don’t know if that was true, but the message was that Grandma did not approve of what she was doing. And that even though the whole world revered Nina Simone, she still could not have the blessing of the one person whose blessing meant the most.”

  —

  Simone had started to make some progress with her career. She made some demo recordings and played in more upscale venues like the Queen Mary Room in the Rittenhouse Hotel. Despite such professional advances, though, she felt alone and adrift. But just as she was most lonely, she found some new company; there was now a man in her life.

  Simone met Don Ross—a white self-styled beatnik, aspiring painter, and drummer—at the Midtown in Atlantic City. “He was one of the people who came and befriended me,” she said. “He was at the bar every night and I was lonely and drinking milk. I was very shy. And he befriended me and got rid of my loneliness.”

  Ross worked as a salesman, a “pitch man,” selling trinkets to fairs and boardwalks. It’s difficult to get a sense of Simone’s attraction to the man; those around her were asked about Ross only many years later, and no one seems to have a good thing to say. Carrol Waymon called him a “charlatan,” and Simone’s sister Frances said, “I couldn’t stand him. Don was a leech.”

  If this courtship with Ross seemed to be leading nowhere good, in August of 1957 Nina Simone was introduced to someone who would go on to be perhaps the most consistent and stable relationship she ever had. Al Schackman was a guitarist who had recently returned from the army and was living in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He was working as a session musician in New York, playing with R&B acts like the Drifters, the Isley Brothers, and Solomon Burke, as well as performing with his own jazz group in the Village. He had worked with Billie Holiday and Burt Bacharach, and with comedians like Mike Nichols and Lenny Bruce.

  That summer, he was playing at the Canal House restaurant with his trio. One night after his set, a few audience members suggested that he meet another musician who was in town, performing at the Playhouse Inn. On a Sunday evening, he went over to see this woman named Nina Simone, bringing his guitar and amp in case she was amenable to letting him play with her. She was between sets when he arrived, but their mutual friends asked her if it would be okay for him to sit in on the rest of the performance; she agreed, and before they had even exchanged pleasantries he set up onstage.

  Simone finished her break and came up to the piano. She didn’t look at the guitarist, said nothing, and started playing the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas,” which she used as an introduction to “Little Girl Blue.”

  “After about eight bars I came in, and before you knew it we were just weaving in and out, we were off and running,” said Schackman. “Right at the height of this—you couldn’t get more intense—she brings in her vocal, this love ballad with all of this going around, impossible.”

  Simone’s long hours of work at the Midtown had helped hone her artistry, and she was now able to incorporate the use of multiple, independent musical lines that she had learned from Bach into pop songs and improvisation. This intricacy would allow her to stake out truly distinctive creative territory. “Years later,” Schackman said, “Miles Davis asked me, ‘How does she do it?’

  “I have no idea how anybody could isolate so many parts of music at one time. And that was my introduction to Nina Simone.”

  When she finished her set, the pianist and the guitarist were formally introduced. Simone asked Schackman if he would join her for tea the next Saturday. She gave him her address and as she was leaving said to him, “By the way, please bring your guitar.”

  That weekend he went to her place—now she had a bright, sunny, third-floor apartment, a considerable upgrade from her old storefront residence—and they played for hours. It cemented a connection that was truly remarkable, that went beyond sympathetic accompaniment and into a blending of two uncommon, unlikely, uncanny styles. The relationship built by the music was so strong, in fact, that it would sustain them through decades often marked by Nina’s challenging personality.

  “I had never felt such freedom in knowing that someone knew exactly where I was going, and that she knew that I knew exactly where she was going,” Schackman said. “In other words, we couldn’t lose each other. It was like telepathy.

  “I think we saw, in each other’s playing, a reflection of the way we approached music, which was to tell a story beyond the notes and with color. Nina had a way of taking a piece of music and not interpreting it but…morphing it into her experience, and that’s what I always liked to do myself. I wanted the freedom of playing my guitar like a saxophone, more like a horn player, rather than the more angular lines of a guitar player. That allowed me to travel all over the fingerboard and harmonics and everything. And that’s what Nina did.”

  It took a certain adaptability and a keen ear to accompany Simone’s inventive, virtuosic flights, but Schackman easily kept up with her. Beyond their own musical camaraderie, he also quickly realized that he was dealing with an extraordinary talent, a player whom he rated next to the true giants, regardless of genre. “The closest person that had a sound that was not Nina but similar was Thelonious Monk. The way he used chord clusters and it sounded like dissonance or like somebody slamming an elbow, but it was a real musical experience, like Jackson Pollock throwing a can of paint on a canvas. I put her in a place with Ravi Shankar or Glenn Gould.”

  Schackman wasn’t
the only person taking notice of Simone’s exceptional playing. Someone at Bethlehem Records in New York had apparently heard the demo recordings she’d made in Philadelphia and was interested in signing her to the label.

  In December 1957, she went to New York and recorded thirteen songs backed by bassist Jimmy Bond and drummer Tootie Heath (Schackman was touring and unable to make the session). The selections were essentially the songs she played as her set at the time but, given the time restraints of a studio recording, without her extended improvisations. “I had sung all these songs in 1952,” she said, “so when I recorded them it was just like doing them again.”

  The opening track was a stunning, surprisingly upbeat version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo.” She also included, of course, “I Loves You, Porgy,” the crowd-pleasing song Ted Axelrod had brought to her; her reading was magnificent, yearning but still strong, clear and deep but restrained, with none of the simpering or histrionics that other singers ladled onto the song. The thirty-second piano solo was a marvel of fleet concision. (She pointedly left out the “s” on “loves” in the title phrase, a remnant of the Gershwins’ effort at “Negro dialect.”) Simone also cut a one-take instrumental titled “Central Park Blues” because the album’s cover photograph had been taken earlier that day in the park.

  The tone of the album was melancholy—“I didn’t know any happier love songs,” she said, “I only knew wistful love songs, things about unrequited love”—so near the end of the session the label requested an up-tempo song to lighten the mood. She quickly tossed off a breezy shuffle called “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” including a memorable, elegant piano solo. (Though Simone would often identify the song with Frank Sinatra, he didn’t actually record it until 1965; when she pulled it out for this album, the tune was relatively obscure, first written as a feature for Eddie Cantor to sing in the musical Whoopee!) The album took its title from “Little Girl Blue,” the first song she had played onstage with Schackman that featured the Bachlike embellishment; once the session was finished, she sold the rights to Bethlehem for a reported $3,000 and went home the next day.