What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  Some of these feelings of rootlessness might also have emerged from the touring Simone had undertaken for the first time. Backed by an extraordinary trio—Schackman, bass legend Ron Carter, and frequent Monk drummer Ben Riley—she played a number of the country’s leading black nightclubs in the second half of 1959, including the Showboat in Philadelphia, the Casino Royal in Washington, and the Town House in Pittsburgh. These dates culminated in five nights, including New Year’s Eve, at New York’s celebrated Copacabana.

  She was on her best behavior for these shows. “It was great,” Schackman said. “In the clubs, there was never really a problem—there was noise and talking, and she would put up with it. I think a lot of it was the scene. There was so much energy, but different than a concert.”

  When Simone was booked into the Blue Note in Chicago, she received an additional, surprising offer. She was invited onto Hugh Hefner’s new talk/variety television show, Playboy’s Penthouse. Hefner introduced her as “a star who came out of nowhere last year,” and Simone—in a white gown, and surrounded by tuxedo-clad Playboy wannabes and their dates—performed three songs: “The Other Woman,” “Where Do the Children Go,” and, of course, “Porgy.”

  “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, with all of these hip white people sitting around on sofas smoking their cigarettes,” said Schackman. “It was a riot. We left there and we’re in the car going to the hotel. And she turns, she said, quiet, ‘Do you believe where we just were? Do you believe what we just did?’ She’s grabbing my hand, ‘Do you believe what we just did?’ ”

  It would be the first of several high-profile TV appearances over the next few months. She performed on the Today show and on May 8, 1960, paid her first visit to the Ed Sullivan Show—the crown jewel of the small screen for entertainers of the time. Eager to capitalize on Simone’s success and visibility, Bethlehem Records issued the few extra songs she had recorded for Little Girl Blue but had never released on an album titled Nina Simone and Her Friends. The label also put out “Little Girl Blue” itself as a single, followed by “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” None of these legal but unauthorized releases met with much success, but they helped solidify in Simone an intense distrust of record companies that would escalate as the years went on.

  She was equally suspicious of the club and theater owners who were booking her. Though her television performances all went well enough and upped the buzz around Simone, exposure on this kind of national platform didn’t smooth out the rough edges of her stage conduct. At her concerts, she insisted on receiving her performance fee up front, in cash, which sometimes resulted in near comic situations.

  One night at the Apollo Theater, she refused to go on until she had her money in hand. Honi Coles, the great tap dancer who served as the Apollo’s house manager, informed her that her fee was in an envelope on the piano.

  She went onto the stage and the audience began applauding. Without acknowledging them, she sat down, opened the envelope, and counted the money by carefully spreading the bills out on the piano. Satisfied that every dollar was accounted for, she put it back in the envelope and stood to take the cash backstage—but as she made her way from the piano, she tripped over the stool and wiped out. The audience laughed at the absurdity of it all, and Simone sat on the stage telling them off, insisting that none of them cheer. Someone called out, “We love you, Nina,” and she yelled back, “No, you don’t,” then they went at each other for a while.

  Finally, she got up, walked off, stashed the envelope, and came back onstage. She repositioned herself at the piano, said, “Good evening,” and started the show, as if none of the earlier slapstick had ever happened.

  Still, she continued to rise as a concert draw, and in June another prestigious booking came with the invitation to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival. “We paid attention to her, and in 1960 I put her on at Newport and she was a hit,” said George Wein. “That was a very tumultuous year, ’cause there was a riot in the town and the festival was closed down. But Nina became part of our life, part of our professional life, and remained so over the years.”

  Her Newport set was recorded for a live album. It was the first document of the trio that would be her backing group for a number of years—the ever-present Schackman, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton.

  A highlight of the show was a fired-up rendition of the traditional “southern dialect” song “Little Liza Jane,” which would become a staple of her concerts. It’s a different sort of performance for her; rather than sitting at the piano, Nina sat on a high stool, with a tambourine. Schackman said that she had second thoughts about doing the song and asked him for encouragement. “We’ll get some rhythm started here and see what happens,” she said, before starting in with an arrangement more spare and propulsive than her usual intricate piano backing. (There’s footage of the performance on YouTube, and Schackman says that when he watches it “she has that little smile from time to time, and it was really cute.”)

  Against the backdrop of this excitement and success, and despite a glowing article in Sepia magazine about her home life, Simone had finally reached the end of the line with Don Ross. The couple was divorced in late 1960. To her friends and family, it was as if the marriage had never happened—and there were even some questions among them about whether it really had. “I don’t remember very much about it,” said Carrol Waymon. “I know it was a tumultuous thing, didn’t work out too well. If she did marry Don, it was like an error and it seems to me she got out of it.”

  As Ross was exiting her life, though, there was another community that offered her companionship. The gay following that she had begun to develop during her early nights in Atlantic City, when Ted Axelrod was spreading the word, was playing a bigger role in her offstage hours, centered on the Village lesbian club Trude Heller’s. With her unconventional, stylized sound and image, Nina’s appeal to those marginalized by society—and, in turn, her own interest in such people—was solidifying.

  “When she would leave the club where we were playing, she’d be going to a gay club,” said Schackman. “They would be taking her to Trude Heller’s or another one, below the [Village] Vanguard on Seventh Avenue. And it was real dyke stuff. They were all white. They would dress like men, and some of them wore jackets. They wore loose kind of dress shirts with ties, and pants and men’s shoes. They were all tough. They were formidable.”

  Simone later recounted that she felt uncomfortable with her popularity in the gay community. “I attracted a lot of gays, a lot of them,” she said. “They always thought I was gay, so it was very difficult being with them.”

  Speaking to Stephen Cleary in 1989, she said, “Have I been approached by women? Yes, I have. Trude Heller, who owned a discotheque in New York City. She used to say she went with Sarah Vaughan, and she tried to make me for about five years. I never would do anything with her.

  “I’ve started liking gay people when so many of them were attracted to my music,” she continued, “and there’s so many still attracted to my music, so I had to change my view of them.”

  Her relationship to the gay community, reaching back to her high school days, was even more complicated than her often contradictory statements indicate. People close to Simone claimed that in the early days in New York Simone had several physical relationships with women. Schackman and others said that her close friendship with the prostitute Kevin Mathias had developed a sexual component. Mathias was a downtown “party girl,” and she and Simone spent much of their time together. Simone apparently helped Mathias financially, telling her, “You’re costing me $50 a week”—not an insignificant amount at the time.

  “Kevin was a very light-skinned black woman, long black hair,” said Schackman. “She had her schedules in different cities, different towns—she had a route. Nina was going with her. They’d go shopping, sometimes she’d have this scarf and she’d drive this thing and she was gorgeous. Sometimes she’d stay down there, whatever she was doing.”

  It�
�s hard to know how much credence to put in these accounts. Was a friendship with a highly sexual woman like Kevin definitely the basis for a physical relationship? Were close friends at an all-girls school necessarily sexual partners (as some speculated), and if so, would that be explained as adolescent experimentation? Was her own stated “difficulty” being around gay people an example of homophobia or bad experiences or overcompensating?

  She did, however, express her admiration for the independence that someone like Kevin represented. “I have envied other women and their freedom,” she said. “For example, the whore that was my close friend. Kevin Mathias, I always wanted to be like her. She was free, and she could get men all the time. She was pretty and she had beautiful clothes and beautiful shoes. And she never had to worry about men, and I envied that. She would whip them—she would actually come to my house, make them fix Christmas dinner, and take a whip to them when they wouldn’t do it.”

  Yet all of Nina Simone’s relationships would change in March of 1961 when, while playing a midtown supper club, she was introduced to a larger-than-life New York City police officer.

  CHAPTER 5

  She had her own mind. She didn’t give a fuck about anybody or anything. She said at one point that I represented strength, and that this is what she liked. And this was her MO. She always looked for security. She was looking for protection.

  —ANDREW STROUD

  “My dad was the fifth son of a fifth son,” said Lisa Simone Kelly, née Lisa Stroud. “He was born in Virginia. His father was Dutch, his mother was dark as night. A mulatto child in Virginia, and the youngest son—so that sets our stage right there.

  “I believe something happened to my dad early in his life that made him so hard that he swore he would never be a victim again.”

  When he met Nina Simone, Andrew Stroud was a thirty-five-year-old Harlem-based detective who had served in the navy. It was said that he was so feared on the streets near his precinct that when he stepped out of his squad car everyone would scatter—guilty, innocent, passersby, it didn’t matter; they just wanted to stay out of Andy’s way.

  “And that’s what attracted my mom to him, because she had this love affair with fire,” said Lisa. “On top of being charismatic, he was not afraid, and he could be a bully—he could be very mean. I think they were both nuts, because that’s like inviting the bull with the red cape, ‘Just come on into my kitchen and let’s see what we can do.’ ”

  Stroud could often be found at a Harlem bar called the Lenox Lounge, where he was friendly with the manager and his wife, a sometime nightclub entertainer named Becky Harding. One night while Stroud was drinking at the Lenox, Harding told him that she had just seen a fantastic singer named Nina Simone at a midtown supper club called the Round Table and that she was going to go back and he should join her.

  Stroud drove them down to the venue. Harding had introduced herself to the singer on her first visit, so after her set Simone came to their table to say hello. Stroud was eating a hamburger next to Harding. Simone playfully snatched up some of his French fries and, as he said later, “We got cute and whatnot.”

  Stroud was driving his friends home, so following her final set Simone joined them and they headed up to Harlem. She hung out for a few drinks at the Lenox Lounge, and then he dropped her off at her Central Park West apartment, just a few blocks from his police station. Before getting out of the car, she handed him the Round Table business card, which had a note on the back saying, “Nice to have met you—Nina,” and her phone number.

  They started seeing each other immediately; she claimed at one point that when she said goodnight to Stroud after their second or third date, he broke into her apartment with skeleton keys, just to show that he could (Stroud denied this story). Not that this kind of aggression frightened her off. “By this time,” she said, “I was quite hot for him.”

  “He scared me to death,” she said in 1967. “He knew what he wanted and he was gentle with me. It was like he just took over, and I’m glad of that.”

  “I had met a lot of women in show business,” Stroud said. “These women are a little stronger than the ordinary women that you meet. They have a lot of character, spunk. She stood out as a person, strong character, and could really turn on the charm when she wanted to. She was very unusual, and a chemistry just set in.”

  Stroud had been married three times already, and he had two sons in addition to a daughter who had died. “His first wife was from the West Indies,” Simone said. “His second wife was a high-yellow woman, and his third wife was Puerto Rican. Obviously you can see what he was trying to do with me, trying to find himself. He knew about his problem with the race, and he didn’t know where he belonged. So he wanted a woman who he knew would accept that and understand that.”

  As her personal life was undergoing this thrilling, dramatic transformation, Simone’s career was continuing to thrive. Her single “Trouble in Mind” / “Cotton Eyed Joe” had been a Top 10 R&B hit, and the At Newport album—documenting her high-energy festival appearance—peaked at number 23 on the pop charts, the highest spot any of her LPs would reach. She went back into the studio for the first time in almost two years, and an April performance at the Village Gate was recorded for another live album (a show that was also notable because her opening act was a young and terrified Richard Pryor, in one of his first-ever public appearances).

  On weekends, Stroud would sprint out at the end of his shift and race to meet her at out-of-town gigs. “I’d catch an eleven or twelve o’clock p.m. plane out of LaGuardia, fly to Boston, or one time to Chicago,” he said. “Another time I drove down to Philly. I used to go meet her on the last day of the engagement, and we’d hang out, then come back together.”

  Even the early days of their relationship, though, came with some obstacles. As he was getting involved with Nina, Stroud was actually still in the process of breaking up with his previous wife. It wasn’t necessarily a clean break: once his wife saw some lipstick on his shirt and, he claims, threw a pot of hot lye at him.

  Meanwhile, he was insisting that Nina abandon the downtown lesbian scene. Stroud, who described Simone’s high school days as the time she “got contaminated” with “gay associations,” was clearly uncomfortable with gay men and lesbians around his woman. “I got rid of that,” he said. “I made that as part of the deal—‘Hey, you want to be serious, you want to be steady, you got to be straight.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to be involved with all of these people. That’s not a part of my life.’ ”

  He felt that Simone was testing him, not just with the women in her life, but sometimes with men, too. Once she kept him waiting forty-five minutes for a date, then pulled up in a car with one of her other suitors. “I don’t know what their relationship was,” Stroud said, “but he was one of the guys that I beat out, you might say.” As they went up to her apartment, he slapped her—hard—in the elevator. It was the first time Stroud hit her.

  “I felt that I had been insulted,” he said. “I just slapped her and I said, ‘Look, forget it, I don’t need this bullshit. You want to play games? I don’t have time. Bye.’ And I left.”

  Simone tried downplaying the situation, telling Stroud that nothing was going on with the other man and that it was no big deal. But after he left she immediately sent an apologetic telegram to the police station.

  That July—on the heels of the release of the Forbidden Fruit album, her second studio record for Colpix—Simone was scheduled to perform in Philadelphia. She drove the short distance south from New York, but by the time she arrived she was in agonizing pain. “I couldn’t see, there were hammers in my head,” she said. She called her former psychiatrist, Gerry Weiss, who sent for an ambulance.

  They placed her in an isolation ward and did multiple spinal taps. At different times she claimed that she had been diagnosed with nonparalytic polio, with spinal meningitis, or with some mystery illness that the doctors couldn’t identify. She also wasn’t sure who had first contacted Strou
d, or if she had called him herself, but he was there within a few hours.

  “He came and he saw me in this room eating oatmeal with a spoon,” she said. “Andrew stood over me and it was so much love in the air. It was like a dream. The tenderness and affection that he held the spoon with, to feed me.”

  She was institutionalized for seventeen days, and Andy drove from New York to Philadelphia each day. When he wasn’t there, Simone wrote to him, clearly in the absolute thrall of new love (and lust), in a note from July 1961:

  Darling Andy—

  …I feel like you are a bottomless well that I can pour water into endlessly and it would never be all you needed or wanted….

  As I told you—you’re the most pleasant thing to think of when I want to go to sleep or not think of anything disturbing…then I imagine all sorts of places we haven’t been, and what we’ll do when we get there—besides that! We’d go dancing and dance and dance—can you ballroom? We must sometimes—I don’t do it very well and its so beautiful to watch. You know something? As much as we both like to dance, we’ve only been to one! That’s typical of me—not to do the things I most enjoy—Maybe when we are not so “hungry” and don’t have to go to bed the minute we see each other, then we’ll go dancing or do something else, huh! Meanwhile, I enjoy you so much and there’s so much more there that I’m actually in no rush to do anything but stay in bed with you—to hold you, to feel you so heavy beside me—to feel so terribly protected when I go to sleep beside you—I’ve never felt that way, particularly that way, with a man before—it’s so hard for me to trust, you know…and you’re so gentle—you’re my gentle lion, my Saint Bernard and sometimes my Stud Bull! and sometimes Bully.

  Standing over her hospital bed, with a surgical mask covering his face, Stroud proposed to Simone, almost exactly four months after they had first met. She said that she laughed and cried at the same time, and nodded her answer. When the hospital dismissed her, he announced their engagement to his family.