What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  At the end of June, Simone flew to London, where the Cumberland Hotel would serve as her base for her first tour of Europe. The trip lasted just over a month and took her to the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and France. In England, she built on her popularity there through the Animals’ cover of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which she had recorded on 1964’s Broadway-Blues-Ballads album (the song’s lyrics, initially inspired by a fight that the album’s arranger, Horace Ott, had with his girlfriend, seemed tailor-made for Simone’s temperament—with lines like “Don’t you know that no one alive can always be an angel” and “If I seem edgy, I want you to know/I never meant to take it out on you”). She even made several appearances on the BBC’s new pop music TV show Ready Steady Go!

  It was a time when many black American musicians, especially blues legends like Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters, were venturing across the pond, visiting the country that had embraced their recordings, and were greeted as heroes. Though Simone wasn’t always quick to compliment other artists’ versions of her repertoire—much less white acts performing material created by black musicians—she seemed to get a kick out of the London rockers who had popularized her work abroad, as she indicated in a letter home to her brother Sam.

  The Animals (the rock & roll group that recorded my “Don’t Let me be misunderstood”) took us to a dance hall that was just like all the old singing negro halls where they dance the “Slow Drag,” “Fish”—All the old dances that we used to do plus the new ones these kids do….Sam, all these groups imitate us to a T and don’t mind admitting it—they don’t try to pretend that they started it….

  They’re more familiar with all negro blues singers more than all the colored kids in the States put together. Over here, I’m a big hit because (Listen to this) The Animals recorded “Don’t Let me be misunderstood” and every time they sang it they said they got it from me. So that brought about an interest in me—so every where I play I have to sing that damn song!

  Although she gave props to the Animals, her songs didn’t have the same meaning when they were performed by the band. White Englishmen may have venerated her music, but they could not truly inhabit it the way she could. Nina also increasingly felt the need to emphasize the social mission and black pride that were now informing her work. In an interview with a French journalist, she said, “Because of the lack of respect that endures even after hundreds of years, each time I go to a new country I feel obligated, proudly, to assert my race. And don’t fool yourself. No matter what I sing, whether it’s a ballad or a lament, it’s all the same thing—I want people to know who I am.”

  At one of Simone’s Ready Steady Go! shoots, the Who were also filming a segment, and guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend remembered the awe that he felt meeting her. “She was towering, formidable,” he said. “She was wearing an African dress and holding a baby. I really wanted to talk to her—all of the girls at art college were huge fans of hers, because she was the first true music industry radical feminist. She was coming down the stairs and I was going up, and I said something like ‘Really big fan’ and she just kind of looked at me, didn’t say anything. But that was important that she didn’t bow to that, that she just was who she was.”

  Townshend remembered Nina as “really troublesome” at the tapings. Her own sexual questioning may have led to discomfort, even hostility. Vicki Wickham, a legendary figure in the UK music scene, was one of the show’s producers, and she was a very open lesbian. “There was something that Nina didn’t like about that,” Townshend said.

  “Nina Simone terrified me,” Wickham later said. “She had a real presence. On the show they made me tell her she was only going to do one number, not two. She wasn’t pleased.” Still, her encounter wasn’t as tough as the one suffered by Dusty Springfield, the white soul singer managed by Wickham. “It’s not much fun having a glass of whisky thrown in your face by Nina Simone, who called me a honky and resented me being alive!” Springfield said. “She was having a few problems, which I thought I could solve by being nice….I was warned not to approach her but—I knew better, didn’t I?”

  A story in London’s Evening Standard by prominent journalist Maureen Cleave (who would, the following year, conduct the infamous interview in which John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus”) focused on Simone’s personal story rather than her difficult reputation. “She is a tall, powerful woman of 32,” wrote Cleave. “She has a great proud face, with a huge nose and a wide mouth. Her eyes fill readily with tears and her whisper is more compelling than most people’s speech. On stage, as though she were not really arresting enough, she often wears sequins glued to her eyebrows. Her whole self…comes out and makes a grab for you and she is utterly irresistible.”

  Cleave described a pleasant domestic scene in Simone’s hotel room, with Lisa asleep on her lap and Stroud seated quietly in the corner. The singer offered that her greatest triumph was finding a happy marriage and family life.

  “Ms. Simone believes [Stroud] was the result of a bargain she made earlier. ‘Don’t hurt me by laughing at this,’ she said, ‘but somewhere in the back in my career, I said, “All right, God, if you want me to continue to play this music, you better give me a man. If you don’t, I will drink and go to the dogs. You gave me this talent, but that doesn’t mean I’m not also a human being. I’m a girl and I have desires like other girls. There’s too much to enjoy out there.” ’ So God sent her the man.

  “ ‘You see,’ cried Ms. Simone triumphantly. ‘I wanted it all. I wanted everything.’ ”

  And in moments during this period, she seemed to have it. Judging from a lighthearted poem that Simone wrote about their time in Paris, Stroud struggled acclimating to the foreign city, but apparently not so much that his wife couldn’t joke about it with a bit of tenderness.

  “When Andrew Came to Paris”

  When Andrew Came to Paris it was so very cold—the porters they were nasty the taxicabs were old—the fellows were bewildered the baby was asleep and Andrew was all alone because not a word of French could he speak—he was so very Angry at everyone around it would have been nice to take his walking stick and them all down—instead he kept his temper and took care of everything he felt as tired as a fighter who’d been knocked down in the ring But Alas! His spirits lifted and he went to get something to eat he remembered that he only had one night in Paris So he wouldn’t admit defeat—he grabbed a taxicab and went to see the Eiffel tower the river Seine, and the Champs Ellyse and later grows the hour, he feels much better now, even though Paris greeted him cruelly—for next year when he returns he will conquer her most assuredly.

  —

  After Nina returned to the United States in early August, the Pastel Blues album was released. It was a more intimate, piano-based effort than her last few LPs, and it reached the Top 10 of Billboard’s new “Black Music” album chart, the trade magazine’s latest in an ongoing series of attempts at figuring out how to categorize shifting pop tastes. It included a new version of “Trouble in Mind,” which had been a hit single for her in 1961, and her rendition of “Strange Fruit.”

  Most notable was the album’s final track, the ten-minute “Sinnerman,” based on lyrics that she had absorbed during her mother’s revival meetings. It was another example of her ability to adapt a traditional lyric into an allegory about justice and civil rights, and, like “Mississippi Goddam,” it was an upbeat (if menacing) treatment of a dark subject. It would be among Simone’s most enduring recordings, turning up in numerous soundtracks and covered by artists including Bob Marley.

  In the fall she returned to the studio, cutting songs that would appear on her next few albums, before heading back to Europe in December, where she would perform additional concerts and do a number of television tapings. It was a triumphant time for Simone professionally, but her husband felt that something permanently shifted for her then—perhaps prompted by these successes.

  “The first five years was a love story,
” he said. “There was a lot of feeling and affection for one another. But after the European tour in ’65, she realized she had achieved stardom—world recognition, so to speak—and she had attained her Carnegie Hall dream. Then came all the doubts after that—self-doubt, self-questioning. ‘Who am I? Why I am here?’ All that sort of stuff.”

  He felt that they worked for several years before breaking through in 1965 with the European tour and the hit with “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” From there, Stroud said, “it leveled off….We had reached the summit, then it was maintenance, keeping her up there.”

  But having attained this success while accelerating her political engagement and onstage commentary, Nina presumably felt that she had won by sticking to her guns. So where Stroud saw that this was the time to strike, and try to really build a stable career, she wasn’t willing to make that push. “That’s when she started complaining about always being tired,” he said, “and all of these other thoughts about having doubts about relationships, associations, the baby, and everything else.”

  Nina Simone was ambitious and driven when she was fighting to achieve something, but much less eager to work for its own sake. Unlike performers who find their reward in nightly applause and adoration, she maintained an ambivalent relationship with her audience, and even with her own talent. Whether restless, bored, or distracted, Simone would never fully come to terms with the idea of making music as a job.

  After the second European tour, Simone spent most of 1966 in a steady routine of touring and recording. But although she proclaimed in a telegram to Andy that “everything is going to be fine 1966 is still our year I love you,” her diaries indicate that during this time she was also grappling with fear, despair, and fatigue. For the first time, she articulated a desire to leave the United States. She was also beginning to experiment with drugs. Perhaps most significantly, she recognized the stirrings of her own emotional chaos—a self-awareness that would largely fade as her problems became more apparent. In January 1966 she wrote in her diary:

  my frame of mind is the same as usual, these days, weary, tired, and alone. Last night on the plane, after 3 drinks I felt giddy and happy. Andrew & I had a nice fist fight on the plane (real fun) scared the other passengers—the time went fast and I felt totally “involved” for the moment—Maybe this death wish is just my protest against boredom. This T.V. show is all me—but it doesn’t mean much to me. Perhaps I should live out of this country for a while—the same way we left the south knowing that in that atmosphere we’d never survive No matter how much we tried—maybe that is also true of the entire U. S. for me. I’m really scared

  An entry from ten days later reads:

  I’m looking at “The 3 faces of Eve”—think it’s significant in a psychological study of myself. It is interesting how people sometimes think I’m going to strike them and “duck” (automatically when I’m in a certain mood). At a certain point in the movie, I burst out crying because the chick said that when Mrs White was going to kill herself another personality came out of her & saved her. Suppose someone had 6 or seven personalities? Is psychiatry prepared to help each person?

  I like getting high now—I’m more relaxed I wish I could have some religious or spiritual or hypnotic experiences—maybe I’ll have hypnosis again. I had LSD this summer

  it’s funny how I didn’t record that before—I remember right this moment that I fought so hard the experience was “hell”—maybe I was scared (I don’t know) but I’m anxious to try it again—I won’t be as scared this time: when I’m tired, I’m not really tired, just bored I think—cause when something happens (a phone call etc) interests me I perk right up.

  I am sure that sometime in the future I shall suffer a terrible punishment for the way I treated Lisa today—I do so want her not to be like me. I do so remember what Jerry said to me “Nina the best thing for you would be if you didn’t care” (Just didn’t care) Wouldn’t it be marvelous. No guilt—no fear—Just irresponsible and having a ball—WOW!

  Despite Nina’s apprehension about how she was treating her daughter, Lisa’s earliest memories of life in Mount Vernon are generally idyllic. “It was like a fairy tale,” she said. “My mom was much less guarded when she was at home, the times that she could take time and be my mom, and didn’t have to worry so much about every little thing, ’cause her and my dad were together, and they had the staff, and they had the whole machine.”

  Lisa remembers the glamorous details of the house—the flocked, paisley wallpaper; the sauna; the storage closet for her mother’s fur coats and stage costumes. She dressed up her dolls in her old baby clothes and sang into a hairbrush in front of the three-way mirror to harmonize with her very own girl group.

  Simone was clear about wanting Lisa to have a different childhood from her own, to experience things differently. “I don’t want her to ever feel like she’s alone the way I have felt it,” she said. “I want her to just soak up life.” She hoped to avoid not only the example of her own youth but also the way she was already feeling trapped by her career—singing about freedom while believing herself to be caged. “I want her to live as fully as she can and not become enslaved by music or by anything. I want her to always feel she has a choice in things, in where she lives and how she lives, what she wants to be. That’s all I want for her, and I don’t want her to ever have to feel the type of isolation that I have felt.”

  Perhaps seeking some respite from that solitude, on Valentine’s Day she went to see her old friend Kevin Mathias. Though the diary offers no particulars, Simone writes that the visit was “a shocking revelation to myself about myself.”

  If this indicates some sexual activity, it would be consistent with her heightened focus on that topic throughout 1966. On June 10, she seems to allude to some kind of sex toy or stimulant in her diary. An entry titled “A List of Happy Times,” dated June 13, is almost half-filled with allusions to sex with Andy (“3. My first real fuck with Andrew. 4. The time A. left home for two days, returned And we first fought on the grass And then fucked in the garage. 5. All the times he made up stories to soothe my mind—‘Pimp Piggy’—‘Abominable Snowgirl’—‘The Indian Story’ ‘Pussybeater’—‘Titty-tickler’ ”).

  The final “Happy Time” she mentions isn’t sexual at all, however, but the joy of new motherhood: “The first moment of consciousness After Lisa was born And I held her in my Arms.”

  The sense of Simone from these entries is primarily someone still wrestling with her own identity—given that she’d always defined herself by her relationships (“God, if you want me to continue to play this music, you better give me a man”), was her role as a mother now her truest manifestation? If so, what impact did that have on her sexuality? Was her activism the driving force behind her or an obstacle to her purpose?

  Despite Stroud’s later claim that their relationship was never the same after the European tours, Simone’s private writings generally depict these months as a relatively stable, even happy time in their marriage. Though she did note, on June 6, that “with Andrew it feels like we spend most of our time (At least for my Part) trying not to step on each others toes,” most entries focus on her rekindled connection to her husband, such as this one in February 1966: “had a new feeling yesterday with Andy—a new old feeling of being totally alone with Andy—I got an inkling of the intimacy that can happen between two people when nothing is bugging ‘one’ (them) want to remember this feeling…it’s important.”

  And the card Simone sent to Stroud on Father’s Day certainly implies that their relationship was, at this moment, on solid ground: “Today is Father’s Day & wouldn’t you guess why It’s because I’ve got the world’s sweetest, funniest, most lovable guy Happy Father’s Day! I love you, Nina 1966.”

  Nina and Andy had both fought hard for this sense of stability, and though it was temporary, it would be something she never stopped seeking.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Four Women” was a song about what enters the minds of
most black women—their hair, their complexion, how they feel about each other, how they feel about themselves. That was a consuming theme all over America. Black women always had this problem.

  In 1966, Simone made another dramatic, more public change, one that would prove pivotal in redefining her image and her role as a cultural leader.

  “The first time I wore my hair African was after Pastel Blues,” she said. “It reflected black pride, and that’s when I changed it. I identified a lot with Africa, and learned what they did, and started wearing my hair in an Afro.”

  Her archivist and friend Roger Nupie tracked this revolutionary new look with a more regal bearing on- and offstage. Early on, he pointed out, she was wearing a wig in her photo shoots and on her album covers, as most black singers and actresses did in an effort to conform to white conventions. But Nina was the first celebrity to wear an Afro and dress in African styles. “The ‘black beauty’ thing started around those days,” he said, “and it was very important that somebody like Nina Simone came onstage and was there in a very proud African way. And from that moment, her attitude changed completely, because when she comes on it’s like ‘Here I am. Who am I? I’m an African queen’—or, as she sometimes said, the reincarnation of an Egyptian queen.”

  This decisive change represented a rejection of standards of white beauty—standards that Simone had been acutely aware of her whole life. In her diaries, she complains about the photographs chosen for her album covers, and Stroud noted that Simone had long struggled with her self-image. “She would get very depressed at times staring into the mirror,” he said. “Even though she was so committed to the black cause and preached it and everything, most of her friends were white. So she’s crying about her hair and her other features. Before she got her teeth capped, they weren’t that nice. It came from deep inside—she was just unhappy to be black, and what she termed ugly.”