What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  Little Girl Blue was released in June 1958, and Simone was getting more and more calls to perform outside the Philadelphia area. Though she was still studying classical piano with Vladimir Sokoloff (such was her distaste for popular music that she said she played Beethoven for three days after the Bethlehem session to cleanse her system), she was considering making the move back to New York City, which had more professional opportunities for her, despite the sting of her youthful experiences.

  “I had an agent named Jerry Fields,” she said. “He came and heard me and he said, ‘My name is Jerry Fields and I’m going to make you a star.’ I didn’t know what a star was.” Fields remained her agent until he died a few years later. He also introduced her to an attorney named Maxwell Cohen. “Max was very good for her,” said Schackman. “He was very strict, which was very good, because Nina was already showing her diva temperament and she couldn’t put it over on Max, he was too old guard.”

  There was one thing she wanted to take care of, though, before relocating. Two years later, out of habit or a fear of facing solitude, she was still dating Don Ross. And still, no one in Simone’s life approved of him.

  “I met him when I visited Nina for tea, but he pretty much stayed out of the way,” said Schackman. “I think that he hovered around her and took care of some things, paid attention to her.

  “I didn’t care for him myself. To me, he always had some kind of scheme going and he needed money for it. He was insipid, inconsequential, a hanger-on who somehow captured Nina for a moment.”

  According to her sister Frances, Simone was drinking heavily, abetted by the freebies offered to her at clubs. In addition, Simone had started taking LSD—she said that it was prescribed medication, but her sister wasn’t buying it. Decades later, Frances recalled seeing Simone “just out of it” back in these early days and felt that her intake had a long-term negative effect.

  “I think she was very innocent, very gullible,” said Frances. “She was not exposed to a lot of stuff because of family, what we came from. In a small town, they didn’t have a lot of sophistication.”

  Whatever the basis of their relationship—and even Simone seemed baffled by what had kept them together—in late 1958, following the release of Little Girl Blue, she and Don Ross were married at the county clerk’s office. Nobody attended, and she later wrote that she couldn’t even remember the wedding date. As for her family’s reaction, it was a moot point—in addition to struggling to recall the day, she was unsure she had ever even bothered to tell them that the wedding had happened.

  Simone would look back on the decision to tie herself to Ross with clear-eyed regret. “I married him because I was so lonely,” she said. “Nothing happened with Don Ross. There was no sex with Don Ross. He just was no good. He was a creep.”

  CHAPTER 4

  My music had such power, I was so good at it, that [club owners] were scared of me. People believed me when I told them things.

  Though Simone was unhappy with the support she was getting from Bethlehem Records, something strange was happening. Sid Mark, a disc jockey at WHAT in Philadelphia with whom Simone was friendly, had started playing her recording of “I Loves You, Porgy” on air, sometimes multiple times in a row. Ironically, part of Simone’s frustration with Bethlehem came from their resistance to issuing a single. Eventually, prompted by Mark’s support, they put out this one, which was becoming a local and then a regional hit.

  In June of 1959 the song entered the national charts, and as the year wore on “Porgy” kept gaining steam. It peaked at number 18 on the pop charts, number 2 on the R&B list. At age twenty-six, Nina Simone had arrived as a recording star. The song she had learned overnight to humor Ted Axelrod would remain her signature number for the rest of her life, and the biggest hit she would ever have in the United States. In 2000, forty-one years after it was first cut, the recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

  “Porgy” was an ideal introduction to Simone’s approach, a distillation of her strengths—emotional but not overwrought, a familiar standard given a new mood, occupying an indefinable space between pop and jazz, with a hint of the direct impact that would come to be called “soul.” In addition to the single’s surprising commercial appeal, it was also immediately clear to the music cognoscenti that Simone’s was a talent both unique and special.

  “When I heard the real version of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ after hearing hers, I was like, ‘They need to throw that version away and go study her version,’ ” said critic Stanley Crouch. “She makes the lyrics extremely important. Oftentimes, singers who sing songs written by George and Ira Gershwin, they’re perhaps overly impressed by the melodies. Nina Simone doesn’t ignore the melody, but her idea is that she’s going to sing every one of these words with ultimate value emotionally. So she lifts the song up in the air that way.

  “She may have discovered how to solve the problem of aviation in music. What makes an aviator what he is? An aviator is a person who deals with getting heavier-than-air objects off the ground. She could do that, musically and emotionally. She could take a feeling and actually lift it off the ground, and it would stay there. That’s what she does with ‘I Loves You, Porgy.’ ”

  She had signed with a new manager, a literary agent in New York named Bertha Case who had initially contacted Simone when a young writer submitted a potential musical project to Case’s office. The singer on the demos he gave her was Nina, and Case reacted immediately to her voice. Under this new management, and with the success of “Porgy,” Simone was approached by Colpix Records, the music division of Columbia Pictures. Joyce Selznick (niece of the legendary movie producer David O. Selznick) made the initial contact, and in April 1959 Simone and Case inked a new deal with Colpix.

  As her bookings in New York grew following the release of Little Girl Blue, Simone and Ross moved to the city, initially staying in the East Village apartment of a friend of ever-loyal Ted Axelrod’s. As she started playing the club circuit, word quickly started to spread about Simone’s mysterious alchemy of showmanship, technical prowess, and husky vocals.

  “She did One Fifth Avenue, and that was prestigious for that level of playing,” said Al Schackman. “Suddenly, the jazz aficionados discovered her, and she really became the darling of the upper crust of the music. People were awestruck by her ability, and also by her presence and her formality. You just didn’t get close to Nina. She was extremely cautious and protective of her space.”

  From her very first shows, Simone was frequently showing up late, sometimes in a prickly mood. This hard line had been her attitude from before she came to New York, even before she had made a record. On the very first night Schackman met her in New Hope, people in the audience were talking and she just sat at the piano and waited them out, refusing to start playing until they had quieted down and given her their full attention.

  “My first piano teacher taught me, you do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you,” she said, referring to her beloved Mrs. Mazzy. “You just make them wait.”

  Schackman asserted that audiences truly weren’t prepared for what Simone was offering them. “What Nina was doing in her performances was a far higher level than people might assume a so-called jazz artist was going to do,” he said. “When Nina did a concert, it was truly, in a classical sense, a concert. I think people are uplifted when they identify with something that’s truly unique, that’s with us only for a very limited time. There are some people in the world [who] know it when they see it. Nina has been touched with that gift of transmitting, and people want to be in its presence.”

  Promoter (and sometime pianist) George Wein pointed out that Simone was part of a new generation of singers that were emerging in the 1950s, following the “four reigning queens”—Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington. She was coming up alongside such vocalists as Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, and Dakota Staton. Wein liked Simone and was impressed by her musician
ship and the range of her repertoire, but he hadn’t singled her out.

  “But I had a partner at that time whose name was Albert Grossman,” said Wein. “He ended up managing Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary and Odetta and many important artists. He saw Nina at my club and he said, ‘She’s the one.’ ”

  Crouch felt that Simone’s actual approach lifted her into a category above her peers, creating music that was genuinely unique—a talent that would serve as both a great strength and a challenge. “She could bring deeper meanings to songs, that was her gift,” said Crouch. “She didn’t sing jazz, because in jazz you have to submit to the force of the band—it’s a collective experience, and I don’t think Nina liked to play like that. I think she liked it to be about her.

  “Her sound is freer than many sounds, because she doesn’t imitate an instrument,” he continued. “She actually wants her sound to be a human sound. Many jazz singers miss the boat by trying to sound like a horn, and that’s a mistake, because the human voice actually has greater freedom than any horn has. But Nina Simone knew that—different registers, different inflections, she knew all that. And so nobody sounded like her.”

  In May 1959, Simone had made enough of a name for herself to play at the Village Gate, a club run by Art D’Lugoff that would become a consistent and important venue for her for many years. The Gate was a nexus of the creative explosion happening in Greenwich Village at the time: Woody Allen opened for her there, and she shared bills with Richard Pryor, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Richie Havens, Yusef Lateef.

  Even as a new artist at this vibrant club, Simone had an uncompromising, often challenging onstage personality. During her first stand at the Gate, she noticed a piano string that had a buzz in it. She apologized to the capacity crowd for the condition of the instrument and then made it her night’s mission to destroy the faulty string. She used it as a pedal tone through the evening, and in the last set, toward the end, the string finally broke. “There!” she exclaimed triumphantly.

  But more exciting for music buffs than her onstage antics was her sheer inventiveness as a performer. “It was almost always electric, exciting,” Art D’Lugoff would say in 1991, looking back on Simone’s early appearances on his stage. “You never knew what she would do. She would start playing a Bach riff, and she had the most unusual musical arrangements. I don’t think anyone in the world could get people as excited as she did, and for me, her greatness was what kept me going with her, because she was a very difficult person.”

  She often arrived at the Gate so late that the first set started at the time announced for the second set. She also had bodyguards with her—though, according to at least one bouncer at the club, not for the usual reasons that a celebrity would hire security. They were “to protect the public from her, not to protect her from the public,” as on at least one occasion she got into a fight with a fan who wasn’t sufficiently grateful for an autograph.

  Having won over the Atlantic City bar crowd in her first nights as a performer, she never learned to accept anything less than an audience’s full attention. Sometimes this was now becoming more openly confrontational, even to a room of customers who might seem like her most sympathetic fans—as on the occasion of another eventful night at the Gate.

  “There were lines around the corner, the people were energetic and there was talking and laughter and glasses and stuff like that,” Al Schackman recounted, “and she belts out, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on, don’t you know how to behave yourselves?’ She said, ‘You people want equal rights’—black crowd, yuppyish, New York—‘You want civil rights? You don’t deserve civil rights, you don’t know how to behave yourself. How were you brought up? Don’t you have any manners? I’m here trying to tell you things and let you know where things are at and you’re just rude. I’m gonna tell you right now how to get civil rights. Go home, take a bath, use underarm deodorant, and that’s how you get civil rights.’ Boy, did that shut them up.”

  Part of the excitement of a Nina Simone concert was seeing whether or not it was actually going to happen—if she would make it to the stage, and then, if she would be able to get through a full set without incident.

  “I had my music and if you didn’t want to listen to it, go the hell home,” she said. “I wasn’t making that much money that I had to compromise. I felt that I could always go back to classics. When the students came to see me, they would tell each other, ‘You got to be quiet or I’m going to throw you out of here.’ They protected me themselves, and because they did that early, I had that same attitude when I played bigger places. I had gotten that from being a classical pianist. You’re supposed to sit down and be quiet. If you couldn’t be quiet, then leave.

  “I regarded myself as one of the most gifted people out there. As far as I was concerned, I condescended to play for them. If they couldn’t listen, fuck it. I thought they needed teaching, because they didn’t know how to listen.”

  In certain ways, artists—as opposed to entertainers—need to be arrogant. They have to feel confident that what they’re doing is important, that it needs to be heard, that it’s taking their form to a new place or level. So Simone’s sense of her own artistry isn’t necessarily that far from what those she considered her peers also believed. But there were a few crucial differences in Nina Simone’s relationship to her listeners.

  First, she was working in the context of popular music, playing bars and nightclubs and signed to record companies who needed to see her songs embraced by radio—a far different sphere from the world of “high art,” where difficult temperaments and noncommercial work are excused in service of creative breakthroughs. And Simone may have simply lacked (or been indifferent to) the filter that defines polite, “acceptable” behavior from a performer—the displays of modesty and gratitude that we expect from our celebrities as our compensation for buying tickets and records; of course, it would also later be discovered that this impulsive, volatile style was likely something more than simple rudeness—it may have been related to Simone’s periodic chemical imbalances and the emotional turmoil that resulted from her troubled relationship with her second husband.

  In August, The Amazing Nina Simone, her Colpix debut, was released. The album was a mix of standards (“Willow Weep for Me,” “It Might as Well Be Spring”) and gospel songs. An even bigger milestone came the following month, when she made her concert debut at New York’s Town Hall, a performance that would be recorded for the first of her many live albums.

  Despite the show’s visibility, she had not rehearsed with, or even met, the musicians who would accompany her on that stage until the curtain rose. Fortunately, she had Wilbur Ware, a veteran who had often played with Thelonious Monk, backing her on bass. “If I had had a choice in the matter, I wouldn’t have done it that way,” she said. “Jazz musicians like Wilbur Ware are rare. Most of the youngsters don’t know beans about music, and I would never trust myself to do anything cold with them.”

  Some of the material would have to be rerecorded in the studio a few weeks later. When it was released in December, though, Nina Simone at Town Hall gave a fuller sense of the range of her material, introducing several songs that would become staples of her performances and would appear on later albums—“Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” “Wild Is the Wind,” the traditional country song “Cotton Eyed Joe”—mixed with several instrumentals that showcased her piano virtuosity.

  Though she was still making weekly trips to Philadelphia to continue her studies with Vladimir Sokoloff, Simone was developing her own distinct style and was fast outgrowing those lessons. She was now a critics’ darling, a marquee name, a signifier of downtown hip. She claimed, though, that this burst of success didn’t sink in immediately. Although she always believed in her talent, the way that she arrived on the scene was such a surprise that it didn’t seem real.

  “It didn’t hit me that I was sensational,” she said. “Town Hall, the press was so good, I felt like it was a dream. When people came aro
und, famous people, I wouldn’t take their names and numbers and call them. You know that song by Janis Ian called ‘Stars’—‘They come and go, they come fast, they come slow/They go like the last light of the sun, all in a blaze?’ I felt very much like that. All the men who say they love you, you never can believe they really love you. Everybody be kissing on me and asking for autographs, but I never went home with them or anything, because I didn’t believe them. I thought it was a dream.”

  But she certainly didn’t question her right to look like a star in public. When she received her first big royalty check from the success of “Porgy,” the first thing she did was buy a fancy car. Al Schackman found her a gray Mercedes 200 SCE convertible with a red top and matching red leather luggage. They would drive down the West Side Highway to the Village; Nina liked to wear a long scarf, and when they had the top down it would blow in the wind and she’d turn to Schackman and dramatically say, “Grace Kelly.”

  Beyond the glamorous clothes and the car, the most significant purchase she made with her new money was her first real apartment on West 103rd Street, across the street from Central Park. It was a seven-room unit on the building’s twelfth floor, complete with two furnished bedrooms, wall-to-wall carpeting, a $700 couch, and a live-in maid named Mary.

  Although she was still married to Don Ross, he was more of a shadow in her life than a real presence. She described herself as “very much alone,” hanging out in Village coffeehouses, befriending the folk singer Odetta but few others. “I missed my parents first of all,” she said, “and I missed being home, the feeling of home.”