by Alan Light
“He had five brothers and sisters, and he did it right,” Simone said. “That’s the biggest thing—Andrew dotted every I and crossed every T, the way the system said it should be done. Everyone thought he was strange, and he was strange, ’cause being a cop ain’t funny. It ain’t easy.”
Simone made no secret that she was attracted to Stroud’s macho, aggressive style. But soon after the engagement he revealed that he was capable of brutality that she never imagined. Nina Simone would come to understand, very acutely, the temper that caused people to scatter when they saw Andy Stroud on the street.
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As Nina had suggested in her letter from the hospital, she and Andy went to the Palladium Ballroom to celebrate their engagement. Stroud seldom drank, but on this night he was downing white rum. They stayed late into the evening, until it was almost closing time. During the course of the evening, a fan came over to Simone and handed her a note, which she slipped in her pocket. This exchange—its meaning presumably amplified by the alcohol—upset Andy, and when the newly engaged couple left the club, he started pummeling her.
“He started raining blows on me,” she said. “In the cab, he beat me all the way home, up the stairs, in the elevator, in my room. He put a gun to my head, made me take out all the letters that Edney had written to me, and he examined them with my hands tied behind my head. He thought that I was having some affair going on with some of these men that I’d been dancing with at the discotheque where I was celebrating my engagement to him. Then he tied me up and raped me.”
In different accounts of the incident, the details Simone offered would vary in their severity—though the incident was clearly terrifying regardless of the specifics. “My husband beat me nineteen hours, or perhaps it was nine,” she said in another interview. “With a gun at my head after the beating was finished, and laughing, saying, ‘You thought I was gonna kill you, didn’t you?’ ”
“I had a gun,” Stroud said. “I took the bullets out of the gun, and I was telling her, ‘If you don’t do this, that, or the other, I’ll shoot you, whatever.’ ”
He grabbed her again, leading her down in the elevator and through the building’s courtyard; a bellman on duty turned his head away. Simone saw some policemen, but Stroud said, “You think they’re gonna help you? As far as they’re concerned, we’re just two niggers on a Saturday night.” Stroud later said that he knew the cop who saw them and that (especially since Stroud outranked him) he wouldn’t help.
He took her, bleeding in the street, up to his apartment, and continued to beat her until his hands and knuckles were bloody. “After he was exhausted, he tied my legs and my hands to a bed and struck me, and raped me, and fell asleep,” she said.
Eventually, she freed herself from the ropes while he slept. First she ran to the nearby apartment of Becky Harding, the woman who had introduced her to Stroud, but Harding didn’t want to get involved.
She then called Schackman, in the middle of the night, and fled to his apartment on the Upper West Side. “She needed to hide out, and she came to my place, and she was beat up. I put her to bed, and she rested for a couple of days.” Stroud figured out where she was and called, expressing remorse and asking if he could see her. “Nina was lying down, and I told her that Andy was on the phone, wanted to see her, and wanted to apologize. And she said okay. He came over, and they talked and patched it up.”
According to Simone, when Stroud tracked her down at Schackman’s home he had no memory of the assault. “He asked me who had done that to me,” she said, “that he had gone to the apartment, seen it ransacked, seen all the blood, and he thought I was dead.”
Stroud said that he remembered going to sleep and that Simone was gone when he woke up. It took him four or five days to locate her at Schackman’s apartment. When he arrived, her face was still swollen. “I said, ‘Who the hell beat you up?’ I didn’t remember.”
“I told him that he had done it,” Nina said. “He says, ‘I couldn’t have.’ He felt he had gone temporarily insane. I said, ‘Will it happen again?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure, you have to take your chances.’ ”
Speaking about the incident years later, though, Stroud didn’t deny the assault—in fact his own account of the evening mostly aligns with Simone’s version. He said that he had gotten annoyed because she disappeared at the Palladium, keeping him waiting for a long time after the club had emptied out. He yelled at her—“What have you been doing? Where were you at?”—on the drive home, before launching into the brutal beating.
Stroud maintained, though, that his actions did not come out of nowhere and that it wasn’t an isolated event that set off his rage. “This beating, it was provoked,” he said. “It was a culmination of maybe five or ten different incidents that ticked me off. Her being unfaithful, disrespectful, and everything else, several months of what I suspected to be infidelity and fooling around with guys and girls and the whole bit. And then she pulled this on me, and that’s what happened.”
Asked directly by Joe Hagan whether he regretted his violence that night, Stroud said that he didn’t, showing no remorse or shame. “This is retaliation—when you chastise a child if he did something wrong, you don’t regret having done it, because what you’re trying to do is a correction. I had several run-ins with her where I had told her, ‘Hey, you play the game, you play it straight. Don’t fuck with me.’ ”
Now Simone needed to decide whether or not she would go forward with the wedding. Confused about how to proceed, she insisted that Stroud see two psychiatrists for evaluation. One told her not to marry him. (Her Philadelphia psychiatrist, Gerry Weiss, also advised her against the marriage.) The other doctor concluded that Stroud’s fury might have been a temporary state that might or might not appear again, so she’d have to make her own judgment call.
Willfully vetoing the doctors’ opinions, she ruled that her wedding to Stroud would go on. “I married him because I needed desperately to love somebody,” she said. “I had lost complete self-respect for myself and knew it. I determined the only way to get it was to stay with him long enough to absorb what made him violent in the first place.”
“She was lost,” her brother Carrol said. “She didn’t know which way to go and Andy came along and gave her some direction. She didn’t know what to do, and he was the one that saw that she had big potential. Therefore, when she married Andy, he took over her life completely.”
Al Schackman could certainly confirm this kind of domination, but even after seeing firsthand the kind of explosive violence that Stroud was capable of he ultimately viewed him favorably. “I knew Andy as a decent friend, and always fair and honest. You treat him fair, and he treats you fair.”
On December 4—Andy’s birthday, and nine months after they met—Simone and Stroud were married in her apartment. She dressed all in white and carried fifteen white roses. His five brothers attended, as did her sister, her two psychiatrists, Schackman, and the ever-faithful Teddy Axelrod.
Notably absent were Simone’s parents; having spent time with Stroud while she was hospitalized, they had mixed feelings about her new husband. “My father didn’t like him,” she said. “He didn’t think he was good for me. My mother liked him.”
There was little time to celebrate the wedding, though, because two weeks later Simone and Schackman left on a historic trip. Since her move to New York, the city’s black intelligentsia had discovered Simone, responding to her independent spirit and unconventional sound; Langston Hughes (whom she had actually met when he came to speak at Allen High School) and the young literary sensation James Baldwin in particular had sought out her friendship.
Hughes invited her on an excursion to Africa organized by the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC). She joined a group of musicians, artists, and writers including Baldwin, Lionel Hampton, Randy Weston, and many more. “It was like a black who’s who,” said Schackman. “It was unbelievable.”
The plane carrying these luminaries landed in Lagos, Nig
eria, in the middle of the night, more than ten hours behind schedule. When the doors opened, they were greeted by hundreds of people, including tribal drummers who had come to pay tribute to the visitors. At the Federal Palace Hotel, the country’s prime minister met them and the group was feted with an enormous banquet.
“Everybody on the plane—not Langston, Langston’s too cool for that—everybody thought they were going home, back to their motherland,” said Schackman. “And that wasn’t Nina. She was like Langston, she’s a tourist in a way, she wasn’t going back to her homeland—not at that time.” It wouldn’t be until years later that Simone would feel that Africa offered the truest sense of home that she would ever find.
Still, she had a great time. She and Schackman walked around the grounds of the hotel one night, holding hands, on the perimeter of a forest. “Suddenly we realized that there was somebody standing there behind us in the dark,” he recounted. “I said, ‘There’s a man back there.’ ‘Is he handsome?’ ‘I don’t know, Nina, it’s dark.’ I turned around, and I see he’s got a uniform on. It turned out to be a Federal Palace guard, one of the guards that stand all night and protect the grounds.”
Schackman went over to say hello, and Simone walked up to him and said, “Good evening. You’re very beautiful.”
“Thank you very much, ma’am,” the guard replied.
“He was very formal and he had a very big gun,” said the guitarist, still tickled by this silly, playful side of Nina. “It was just fun to see how she was acting, having a ball and being flirtatious.”
A letter she sent to Stroud from Lagos indicated her excitement about the trip and a fondness for the people of Africa that would stick with her and help introduce the idea of her return to the continent.
i didn’t want to write until I finally knew I was here—it has taken me this long, too. I don’t know how to start talking about this experience—it is so so fantastic—like leaving the security of a womb where you’ve been all your life and running head long into a volcano—about to erupt! Can you imagine??
they are exceptionally warm and friendly and uninhibited (needless to say) although they are bashful and shy at times—in this category I feel quite at home—the southern negro is very much like that.
The trip to Africa was brief—“Such a short introduction was cruel,” she would say—but it planted some important seeds in her thinking about the world. For one thing, it had an impact on her personal style and image. Rather than continue wearing the usual formal wear or cocktail attire that signaled success and sophistication, she had the designers Joe Fouts and Louise Gilkes make African-style gowns, shoes, and accessories for her at their studio on the Bowery, an early example of her interest in the idea of a specifically black sense of beauty.
After Simone returned, the newlyweds began to discuss their plan moving forward. They both had professional aspirations; Simone’s career was unsteady—although she was growing as a concert draw (largely thanks to her television appearances), she hadn’t come close to duplicating the commercial success of “I Loves You, Porgy”—while Stroud was moving ahead in the police department, up for promotion to lieutenant, and was talking about starting law school.
“It was a gamble,” said Stroud. “At first it was a love affair, then it became business. In the early days of our marriage, we discussed many times what way we should go—whether she should be a policeman’s homemaker, or whether she should be a career person. So after many discussions, we agreed she had the greatest potential and I would resign from the police department.”
Beyond just committing their resources to Simone’s music, the couple decided that Stroud would assume the reins as her manager. She still had dreams of playing Carnegie Hall as a classical pianist. More pressingly, she needed a systematic, directed plan for what was becoming an erratic recording schedule.
“When [Andy] took over, for the first time I knew what it was not to be just floundering out there,” said Simone. “Before then I played and sang, and that was my pleasure, but all of the agents and managers that I had known were just taking advantage right and left of me. When Andrew came into the picture, he straightened it all out.”
Stroud formally began his new responsibilities in early 1962, initially working out of a home office. He started by evaluating the sorts of deals and contracts that Simone had been signing and then concluded that he would handle her concert bookings by himself—an unusual role for a manager.
The Newport Festival’s George Wein, probably the most important promoter in the jazz world, asserted that he had seen female artists go down this road over and over again and that hiring a husband, family member, or friend as a manager was usually a mistake.
“Most of them were treated badly because they picked the wrong men to manage them,” he said. “Singers wanted somebody close to them to manage them. They should have got people that were not close to them, business people. I knew [these guys], and they weren’t professional managers. I always call them ‘coat holders.’ You need a professional manager, and professional managers are very rare people. It’s not just a matter of taking phone calls and signing contracts. It’s a manager directing your career, and a career is not just making a record. It’s an overall structure of a person’s life.”
But Simone had total confidence in Stroud, partly because of his own history—including those famous, street-tested intimidation skills. “Andrew has a degree in business administration, and he simply applied what he had learned as a sergeant of police to my business,” she said. “Which is very easy, because the business was so wide open. There are crooks in this business all over, so he applied what he had learned in the police department to show business and it worked.”
“He didn’t take no shit,” said daughter Lisa. “There were times that he would grab people over the table when they didn’t have the money. I guess being a cop helped, ’cause you could be your own security.”
The middle of the year saw the release of two new Nina Simone albums. First came another live album, the set recorded at the Village Gate. That album included her version of “House of the Rising Sun,” a song that Bob Dylan would record a few months later for his debut album and that would become a global hit for the Animals in 1964. She also sang Babatunde Olatunji’s “Zungo” (the title track of the Nigerian drummer’s follow-up album to his groundbreaking 1959 smash Drums of Passion) on At the Village Gate, her most African-inspired recording to date. The progressive music community was widening its range to incorporate both folk and world music, and Simone was right on top of the pulse in multiple ways.
A few months later came Nina Simone Sings Ellington, on which she recorded eleven songs associated with the jazz giant, backed by strings and the Malcolm Dodds Singers. Material ranged from familiar Duke classics (“Satin Doll,” a gospel-tinged “I Got It Bad”) to more obscure selections like “Hey, Buddy Bolden” and “Merry Mending.” Taken together, the two 1962 albums solidified the range and self-assurance of her work, but both failed to chart.
Privately, Simone continued to struggle with her feelings for Stroud, still reeling from the emotional fallout of the brutal attack the previous year. She felt that he hated sharing her—even with the public—and she always harbored fear for the anger she knew he could potentially release. In a letter to him, she wrote:
I’ve been scared to be happy. I think I figured the change or transition would be too much and kill me.
Each day I grow more beautiful (for I feel beautiful) and it must be awful hard for you to watch your little “jewel” that you’ve polished and loved being admired all over the goddam place! I don’t blame you—I’d want to put it in a box and hide it somewhere, too! Specially when you’re the jealous type anyway!! I’m so glad I was able to see this more today, for unfortunately, my sweet, the words “I own and deserve you because I made you” coming from your lips automatically would antagonize me—and so I say them for you—and they actually are true—I want to lick you all over and keep saying “
I love you, Andy” I love you—for you gave me my life back—and so, in turn, I give it back to you. I don’t think I’ll ever lose my fear of you (though I hope it won’t be so extreme) and to a certain extent trust’s good…for though I don’t understand you when you’re mean, it isn’t as necessary for me to understand as it was. I just must respect and handle it (and hope I can) when it comes—not the beatings, Andy, not the beatings—those I can’t take—for some reason, they destroy everything within me—my confidence, my warmth and my spirit! And when that happens I feel that I must kill or be killed—you know how I just about lost my mind the last time—well anyway, I do understand and I respect the message you so crudely got across (smile) that message was “I will be heard I will be seen I will love you And you will love me back, or I’ll kill you!!!!”
By the time you get home today, I’ll probably hate your guts but please keep this letter; especially for those times when you’d like to throw me against the wall—
Stroud maintained that Simone’s use of “beatings” as a plural noun and the anxiety in this letter were exaggerations. “After that beating—and she did it the rest of the relationship—she’s using that incident as if it was common,” he said. “She told everybody that, told Lisa for years. One bad thing is recalled and remembered a thousand times and never forgotten. Like all the good things that followed didn’t mean a thing; there’s no healing.”
Whatever her complex emotions about the marriage, Simone and Stroud ticked off the milestones of a young couple. Their next major step was buying a house on Nuber Avenue in Mount Vernon, a rolling, leafy, and largely black suburb in lower Westchester County just outside New York City limits.
As the civil rights battles were heating up in the southern states, new opportunities were arising in other black communities. Motown Records was fulfilling its motto as “the Sound of Young America,” and Ray Charles (one of Simone’s few rivals as an explorer of multiple genres) had one of 1962’s biggest albums with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Mount Vernon exemplified a new African American prosperity and was becoming a hub for black professional families; a generation later, a number of hip-hop stars (including Sean “Puffy” Combs, Heavy D, and Pete Rock & CL Smooth) would emerge from the town, rhyming the praises of “Money-Earnin’ Mt. Vernon.”