What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  Finding the house seemed almost like kismet. It sat atop a hill on a one-acre corner lot, with entrances on three sides, the perfect home for a growing family. It sported a flagstone patio, a spacious glassed-in front porch, elaborate gardens bordered by twelve-foot lilac trees, a two-car garage with an apartment above (which Simone would dub her “treehouse”). The previous owners of the house were a black couple; the husband owned a fleet of taxicabs and a private, after-hours club in Stroud’s Harlem precinct. The wife was a big Nina Simone fan, delighted to sell to the singer.

  To raise the money for the down payment, Stroud approached Colpix Records with a proposal: Simone would record and hand over five albums in exchange for the advances for all of them at once. The sum would cover what they needed for the house, while also fulfilling her contractual obligations to the label (and giving Stroud the ability to negotiate a new deal with them, or the freedom to move to another company). Colpix apparently agreed to these terms, and Simone’s team set up a home studio on Nuber Avenue, plugged in a four-track recorder, brought in her musicians, and quickly rehearsed and recorded enough material to fill the quota. Since Simone’s albums were often assembled from different sessions scattered over multiple years, it’s hard to track exactly how these recordings were ultimately used; regardless, Simone and Stroud got their payday and secured their new home.

  Trading up happened at exactly the right time, too, because Simone was pregnant. It was not the first time; she had gotten pregnant while still living in Philadelphia, and then several times again in later years. Oddly, in different interviews, she had claimed that she had lost four, five, or six previous pregnancies, some through abortions and some in miscarriages, saying that she “sacrificed it all for my career.”

  She spoke in painful detail about her first abortion. “You weren’t ever supposed to even fuck, let alone get pregnant,” she said. “That was the end of the world, and my mother conducted funeral services over my body when I was sitting there with this tube in me, waiting for this thing to come down. I was in all this pain, didn’t know what I was doing, had gone to some quack doctor in North Philadelphia. He had butchered me. I was in great pain. He put a tube up in me, and I had to stay that way for, oh, God, eighteen, twenty hours, but I was in so much pain I called my mother. She came down and did not help me at all, just told me how bad I was, how terrible I was, then left me there. That was cruel.”

  But if Simone was concerned that her body had been so badly mangled that it could not safely deliver a baby, she needn’t have been. She was easily able to carry to term. In fact, she was three weeks past her due date when her sister Frances came to see her and instructed Nina to get herself to the hospital immediately.

  Frances told Stroud that she didn’t care what the doctor said, the baby was coming that day. He sped home in his Mercedes and shuttled his wife to the hospital, and the baby arrived forty-five minutes later. When Simone recovered from the delivery, she asked Stroud, “How’s the baby?” He replied, “How’s the mother?”

  “I loved him for that,” Simone said.

  Lisa Celeste Stroud was born on September 12, 1962. And with her arrival, at least for a short time, Simone at last felt true bliss.

  “The first three hours after Lisa was born were the most peaceful in my life,” she said. “I was in love with the world. The dust that was in the air, I loved it, the air itself. There was nothing in me that had any tension at all. I’ll never forget it. I had a feathery feeling of floating and loving, being completely at peace and loving everything, in tune with everyone.”

  But when she got home, she quickly began to feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities. Though they had hired staff to help with the housework, she claimed that she still took on most of the effort. “I had to show the servant girl how to clean the house, help her with the cooking, help her with the cleaning, help her take care of my daughter,” she said. “I had to take care of Lisa, I had to supervise taking care of the house, supervise the gardener, I cooked, and I worked at night. So I worked at night and I worked during the daytime. And I thought I was supposed to do that.” This micromanaging, of course, was probably better explained by Simone’s need for absolute control than by the staff’s incompetence.

  To lessen these burdens, they hired a professional nanny, complete with white uniform, named Rose Stewart. “Nina hated her,” said Stroud. “Rose Stewart was as crazy as she was when you get her upset. Rose Stewart would put her fist in her face and call her a bitch or whatever, and said, ‘I’ll kick your ass if you don’t shut up and leave me alone.’ Rose was one of the most beautiful people that you would ever want to meet—just don’t cross her. Then the streak comes out and she could be very, very forceful, much more than Nina. And I loved her for it.”

  Stroud would later tell Lisa, “Let’s face it, she didn’t physically take care of you. When there’s a nanny all the time, the mother doesn’t have any responsibilities or things like that. She would handle you and play with you. You weren’t a tit baby, so it was formulas for you.” (Simone would say that Stroud had instructed her not to breast-feed Lisa because it made him jealous.)

  With the addition of this staff to help take care of Lisa and the house, the Mount Vernon residence was rapidly filling up despite its spaciousness. Frances also came to live with her sister. She had a young child of her own but was having some issues with her husband and moved from Philadelphia to help Simone for several months. It also meant the chance to know her brother-in-law better.

  “Andrew was funny, but also serious, a businessman,” she said. “I don’t know that he was domineering, but he was a strong character. This is an independent man, strong-willed. And self-motivating, self-starting, entrepreneur. Tough, but I think also gentle. I think he was very good for her.

  “Andy had been married and had children before, so he had experience with newborn children. Nina never really had that experience. With an assistant, other people around to do the actual care, she never had the full or total responsibility of doing it herself. I told them, ‘I wouldn’t marry either one of you.’ I used to tell them that all the time.”

  But Simone abruptly threw her sister out of the house, seemingly without provocation. Stroud came home from the office one day and she was gone. He asked Frances what happened, and she said that Simone had just exploded and sent her away. It was perhaps a sign of the stress she was feeling, and a harbinger of the instability and emotional outbursts that would escalate in the years to come.

  After losing the room and board she had been given in exchange for helping with Lisa, Frances had no other income and was doing domestic work to pay her expenses. Stroud lent her some money, and she started attending business classes to begin a career in accounting. Simone lit into Stroud for giving Frances the loan, but he brushed her off.

  “Subsequently, when Nina would visit her family, she never spoke to her sister,” he said. “At somebody’s funeral, Nina walked through the room where her sister was and it was if she did not exist.”

  That December, on “Andy’s Birthday Our 1st Anniversary,” Nina seemed highly self-aware, both loving and logical, when she wrote to him:

  I am so proud of being a woman now—I gave your little girl back to you—that makes me happy!

  You know about my ambivalence toward work. But I think you should know that because I understand and know why I’m working, i not only don’t mind it but at time find it enjoyable and exciting; which is definitely a contrast to the old me—anyway, you and I will be going through all kinds of stages during our marriage and I look at this one as simply being the work period—so try to get me another week in December (smiles)

  One day, I’ll fix up the house—when we don’t need money so badly—until then, don’t you do anything around here that isn’t—conserve your strength for the police work and getting me jobs and breathing down my neck when you hold me at night

  With the baby at home and the staff in place (though turnover was high), it was time to get back to
work. The Mount Vernon house was now being set up as a full-service headquarters for the Nina Simone operation, a space to create, rehearse, strategize.

  Nina and Andy had separate bedrooms. Her bedroom—about forty feet wide and twenty-five feet deep, with walk-in closets for her clothes and her shoes—took up the whole front of the house. That room was her real headquarters; it was where she met with designers and took lessons from her dance instructor, Pearl Reynolds. “Everything happened in that bedroom,” said Stroud. “It was like a little studio where she worked.”

  Simone was concerned about the schedule and the pressure, but Stroud had broken things into more manageable pieces. He had her visualize her goals, looking at her career as a series of finite projects rather than something shapeless and indefinable.

  “He used to tell me to put on the blackboard, ‘I’ll be a rich black bitch by such-and-such date’ and then I could quit,” she said. “And I always believed him, and I never could quit, and that’s why I left him in the end, because he worked me too hard. And he was mean. I was always afraid of him.”

  Nina believed in Andy’s vision, and in his love. But she felt that both his professional and his romantic requirements were ultimately just too demanding. Her need for freedom, creatively and personally, was bringing her into increasing conflict with her formidable husband.

  “Andrew loved me like a serpent,” she said. “He wrapped himself around me and he ate and breathed me, and without me he would die. That’s the way he treated me. And it was just too much.”

  CHAPTER 6

  There were two things that people in the movement would fight over. One was if you took their books. The other was if you took their Nina Simone albums.

  —ANDREW YOUNG

  Andrew Stroud was making moves. He had resigned from the police force and was now in the music business full-time. In addition to his attempts to maximize Simone’s career, he started a production company, with an office at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. His staff included a publicist he hired from RCA, where she had worked with Elvis Presley. There was also a promotion person who had been at Atlantic Records, and someone specifically doing promotion to college radio stations—a full-service operation. “Every time a record came out, or concert appearances, we would do a mailing with a photo, a bio, and whatnot to the magazines, to get newspaper coverage and to bring out the critics,” he said.

  “He was the original Puff Daddy,” said Lisa Simone. “He had pads where it says ‘Andrew Stroud, exclusive manager of Nina Simone.’ He had his office on Fifth Avenue, he had Stroud Productions and all these different artists and publishing companies. He really had a vision, and he was a very astute businessman who had a strategic plan in terms of how Mom’s career was gonna go. And it was working very well until she got touched by civil rights and the plan went out the window.”

  The contract with RCA later gave Stroud the finances to sign and produce other talent, and he would work with such R&B artists as Sonny Til and Percy Mayfield. Stroud also did record promotion and joined the DJ Association so that he could attend their conventions.

  Simone’s career was benefiting from this increased focus. People started recognizing her, stopping her on the street. She seemed excited by the attention, if still a bit baffled by her whirlwind success. The couple decided that it was time to take a big gamble, to fulfill a deeply felt, lifelong dream. Stroud booked Nina Simone into Carnegie Hall.

  Even if Nina seemed to have the devoted following to justify the appearance, Stroud was a complete unknown to the iconic theater’s powers that be. Carnegie Hall wasn’t about to rent the hall to some unknown manager, so just to be able to get in the door he had to partner with experienced classical promoter Felix Gerstman, who agreed to handle the actual booking in exchange for a commission on the ticket sales.

  Despite the help from Gerstman, Andy was still heavily invested in promoting the event. Stroud paid for a thousand three-by-six-foot posters throughout the city, brochures that went into record stores and department stores, newspaper advertisements—“especially in the New York Times, because her fans were New York Times people.”

  The Carnegie Hall performance was on April 12, 1963. Backstage, Nina was swallowing her anxiety as best she could. “She was nervous,” said Al Schackman, “and I said, ‘Hey, it’s your time now.’ And she said, ‘I know, but still, this is Carnegie Hall.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it’s Carnegie Hall—this is where you were heading for and now you’re here, on your own terms.’ I said, ‘Now, how about breathing?’ And she went [exhale], ‘Now can I have a cigarette?’ I said, ‘Come on—hold on,’ and it was great.”

  She played eighteen songs in total, though only seven of them made it onto the resulting live album (another eight would make up the 1964 album Folksy Nina, while the remainder would be located in a label vault in the 1990s and would finally surface on a 2005 reissue). The complete set list reveals the extent to which she was still searching for any material she connected with, regardless of genre—two Israeli folk songs (“Eretz Zavat Chalav U’dvash” and “Vaynikehu,” which may have been introduced to her by her Atlantic City friend Shlomo Carlebach), “Theme from Samson and Delilah,” Leadbelly’s “Silver City Bound,” an original titled “If You Knew” that she had written for Stroud.

  Her performance revealed none of her anxiety—on this night, she was in total command. As strong as the more theatrical (and more accessible) songs were that made up the bulk of the Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall LP, the more spare and personal folk-based repertoire that was collected on the follow-up album is, if anything, even more arresting. This magical night showed that her singing truly stood on its own, even separated from her stunning piano work.

  The show also met its goals commercially; Stroud broke even and the couple was spared financial repercussions for his undertaking. More important than the money, the night was an artistic triumph. The live album became one of Simone’s signature recordings and established her reputation as an artist who could draw in big crowds for big venues. It was impressive enough that she had been able to reach audiences from the folk scene downtown to the Apollo uptown, but conquering Carnegie Hall elevated her to the top tier of popular music performers, validating her as a musician to be taken seriously. And personally, it represented something that couldn’t be quantified: Simone’s parents and even Mrs. Mazzanovich came to New York to witness her achievement.

  “We had a party after and her father played a little thing on the piano,” Schackman recalled. “Strange man, never really spoke. Tall, bony, sat down at the piano and only played the black keys.” The guitarist felt that he could recognize some of Nina’s eccentricities in her father’s behavior. “I saw that and I said, ‘Aha, that’s some of it.’ ”

  Simone had finally made it to Carnegie Hall, but as a pop singer instead of a classical pianist. If she felt any bitterness about this, though, she didn’t let it show. “It felt glorious,” she said many years later. “It was the same thing…didn’t change what I felt in my heart and didn’t change my classical training.”

  But the same night Nina was making her sensational, life-changing Carnegie Hall debut, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. She had, of course, been following the developments in the fight for racial equality, but from a bit of a distance—she had listened to her intellectual friends debate the issues, had laughed at the hip Village comedians’ topical jokes. But it wasn’t until playwright Lorraine Hansberry took Simone under her wing that she really began to prioritize these issues—and after the concert, Hansberry pointedly pulled Simone aside and asked her what she was doing for the civil rights movement while its leaders were being put in prison.

  Hansberry, the daughter of an activist family, was best known as the author of the classic Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a black woman ever produced on Broadway. She was emerging as a mentor for Simone. “Nina idolized Lorraine Hansberry and had the utmost respect for her, never a bad word,” said Scha
ckman. “I think Nina really started to glean her ability to compose story lines and poetry and lyrics from Lorraine.

  “New York was a hotbed of music, art, theater,” he continued. “Lorraine would come to the Gate. They hung out a lot together. There was so much going on in New York at that time. The art scene was incredible, and she gradually got used to being in the in crowd in the New York scene. We’re talking about a country girl here from Tryon, North Carolina.”

  Simone was spending as much time as she could with Hansberry, who also lived in Westchester, and it was shifting her attitudes about social ills and racial barriers. “Lorraine was a very staunch activist,” said Stroud, “and she was convinced that certain things must be done in order to push the revolution.”

  “When you reference political enlightenment, Nina Simone was really already there,” said Attallah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, whose speeches were also something Simone was absorbing. “What Lorraine Hansberry gave was permission to dare. I don’t think there was a lot of teaching you give Nina Simone—I think she entered the world ready. Lorraine Hansberry was a free spirit, an open spirit, was not caged. So what someone like Lorraine Hansberry would be for Nina Simone is a wink of permission. It inspired her to just go head-on.”