What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  “I’m born of the young, gifted, and black affirmation,” said Attallah Shabazz. “It wasn’t that we didn’t know it. It was daring to proclaim it, and then share it joyously. It’s stated in a way that you know your African-ness without apology, without explanation, and it’s put into a contemporary, hip song, which means you get to hum it in public. And you didn’t have to be black to sing it, because it was just a truth.”

  The studio version of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was released only as a single; Simone’s next album would be another live set, titled Black Gold and recorded at an October show at New York’s Philharmonic Hall. The closing number was a nine-and-a-half-minute version of the new hit, which she introduced by saying, “It is not addressed to white people primarily. Though it doesn’t put you down in any way…it simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get.”

  As the focus of her work increasingly shifted to singing about and for her black audience, Simone’s political thrust had moved from the drive for civil rights and racial equality to the priorities of independence and self-sufficiency that defined the Black Power agenda. “She made the transition from movements demanding the acknowledgment of our rights as citizens to insurgent movements calling for the economic and political restructuring of our society,” wrote Angela Davis. “With her, I moved from an assimilationist project to a revolutionary project.”

  Black Gold would be Simone’s only gold-selling album with RCA Victor. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (although she would once again lose to Aretha Franklin). A separate LP containing an interview with Simone was mailed to radio DJs for promotion; in this conversation, she expressed her satisfaction with the record.

  “There is a great deal of electricity in this album,” she said. “There is a great deal of rapport between the audience and myself, which has been missing in so many of the previous albums.”

  Simone was finely attuned to her audiences, and to which nights she was truly on her game. If this meant that her performances could be uneven, it also resulted in her ability to maximize her powers when she felt in command. “If I’m in a good mood, in very high spirits, I can tell how I’m going to move them,” she said. “But, on the other hand, if they are in a very different mood, they may be able to sway me their way. Usually I know as time goes on how it’s going. Sometimes I may know the minute I get onstage.”

  Following the run of “Ain’t Got No / I Got Life,” “To Love Somebody,” and especially “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” the mainstream media began paying attention to Nina Simone in a way they hadn’t since the days of “I Loves You, Porgy.” In the fall of 1970 alone, there were features about the singer in LIFE magazine, the brand-new black women’s publication Essence, and Redbook, who had Maya Angelou—a cultural icon with the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings the previous year—pen an extensive, ambitious profile that was presented in an introduction as “the impressions of a poet.”

  “Nina Simone is able to stand upon a shadowed stage, take in all light and then return that luminescence to her audience in opulent, pulsating rays,” Angelou wrote. “At other times and with no seeming reluctance she rejects the audience, rejects their physical fact, rejects their loyalty, rejects their devotion.”

  But despite her sudden turn as a media darling, she was still plagued by the same issues. George Wein said that he booked her for a successful show at the historically black Hampton Institute but that when he put her on the bill at the Playboy Jazz Festival she was acting strangely. “You really could not grab ahold of this woman. You could not do it, much as you tried,” he said.

  Trouble seemed to follow her. Wein had a house in France near James Baldwin’s house, and the two men had become friendly. Simone came to visit Baldwin and got into some altercation. Whatever transpired, it was ugly enough that Simone was asked to leave. “I don’t know the details, but Jimmy could put up with anything,” said Wein. “Jimmy Baldwin was one of the most generous, sweetest, nicest people, but he couldn’t make it with Nina, and that was very bad.”

  But Baldwin’s friendship ran deeper than one bad night, and he would return to save Nina during a dark moment at the Village Gate in New York. Tickets for the show were ten dollars (expensive for a nightclub), and the set started about ninety minutes late. “She had a certain kind of regality, mixed up with a kind of pretentious arrogance,” said Stanley Crouch, who was covering the show. “She was really a very frightened person; she wasn’t as arrogant as she seemed. She was definitely afraid of being rejected, but she was ready to go out and tell the audience, ‘I am here, I am Nina Simone, I don’t care.’ ”

  Al Schackman remembered this particular set. “At the Village Gate, she wouldn’t have anybody play with her, just the two of us. We’re on, and somehow she gets this thing going about Jews, ‘That Jew, he owns this club, all these Jews,’ and I’m going to myself, ‘Oh, shit, Nina, most of your audience is Jewish.’ ”

  Song after song collapsed midway through, with Simone complaining about the microphones and the lights, until eventually Baldwin came out and sat with her onstage. He said, “Nina, I think you should sing,” and she replied, “James, yes, of course—I like you, I know you like me, so if you think I should sing, I will sing.” Schackman recalled, “Jimmy was an angel come to earth, he really truly was.”

  “He was a little drunk, and you couldn’t tell if she was drunk,” said Crouch, of Baldwin and Simone that night. “She stopped and said, ‘I bet you all think I’m drunk—well, I am not, and you better remember that, because if you act as though you think I’m drunk and you abuse me, I will just stop and leave and you still have to pay and I am still going to get paid.’

  “She had that kind of thing in her, that if you actually outdid her in a form of obnoxiousness, she could be more obnoxious than you could. And at a certain point, you would just surrender, because you would realize that you were not going to win, because she was going to be more obnoxious than you could be.”

  Still, when she turned it on, she could transport crowds to incomparable heights. If she and an audience could feed each other’s energy, the results were something beyond a concert experience. A breathless review in the San Francisco Chronicle by John L. Wasserman offers an example of her still-incandescent potency.

  “She is Priestess and she is Leader, mystic and political scientist, dancer, actress, playwright and chemist,” he wrote. “I have never, ever seen a singer exercise the kind of control, the kind of benign manipulation that Miss Simone did on Saturday night.” Wasserman described the show as “one hour 35 minutes of spiritual sex…if one talks about sex in singing, Tina Turner is a stripper, Nina is a woman.” She is, he concluded, “a person making the final merger of life and art.”

  “If you’re striking at the heart of five thousand people, there’s more being plugged into you,” said Simone. “There’s more electricity coming from you, because you’re getting it from them and they’re getting it from you. It’s like when lightning strikes a town, or a hurricane or a tornado, it builds. If it’s getting ready to capture or to hurt thousands of people, it comes stronger as it goes through the oceans and the waves get bigger—it gets stronger all the time, because it’s been building wave by wave by wave all that time. That’s the way I think of myself.”

  If Simone saw herself as a force of nature, her young daughter was just becoming aware that hers was not a typical upbringing. “I didn’t know that my mother was famous, or that she sang for a living, until I was maybe ten,” said Lisa Simone. “I just knew that Mom was always traveling, and I never knew half the time that she was leaving or when she was coming back. I looked at her passport, and I saw the name ‘Eunice K. Stroud, aka Nina Simone.’ And I asked, ‘What’s aka?’ And she’s like, ‘It means “also known as,” ’ and then I started to really consciously realize that my mother had two different lives.”

  But this awareness wouldn’t be something that Lisa w
ould have much chance to work through with her mother. “By the time I started to put things together, and get a wider sense of our family and the roles taking place in our home, [my parents] divorced.”

  She doesn’t remember Simone and Stroud ever telling her that they were splitting up. At this point, her parents didn’t seem to know what to do with her. She had already spent third grade in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, where she lived with her aunt Lucille for a year. But then one day her father was gone, and her mother was still touring. Lisa went to stay with the Shabazzes. Betty Shabazz couldn’t reach Simone, so eventually she enrolled Lisa in school with her own daughters.

  It was confusing and painful for a nine-year-old girl to be abandoned by her parents, but Lisa still found something to be positive about. “They stayed together ten years,” she said. “That’s a long time, so there had to be something fantastic to balance out all the other stuff. Maybe that was me.”

  Her love for her daughter may have been strong, but left to her own devices, Nina Simone wasn’t always able to meet even the basic requirements of responsible parenting. “I went to the camp where we all went and I saw the director,” said Ilyasah Shabazz, recalling research she had done for her own book. The camp director reminded her that one year, at the end of the camp season, all the kids were gone, but Lisa was left there alone—her mother hadn’t come to pick her up.

  “When he mentioned it, I started to understand why she was with us,” said Shabazz. “And it was never anything that my mother ever talked about, we never even addressed it. She was with us for about six years, from when we were six to twelve or thirteen, on and off. I had no idea that her parents had split up. I had no idea.”

  “The breakup was really sad,” said Al Schackman. “There was so much that they offered each other in the relationship, and Nina was always fighting it. Nina was just against Andy promoting her and making her work. He would say, ‘Nina, you’re making money. We’ve got a career here, and that’s not gonna continue if you don’t nurture it.’ And she couldn’t care less, and she could get violent, she could get really physical. She came to resent Andy, and he represented a part of her giving of herself that she only wanted to give when she wanted to give it.”

  For the rest of her life, Simone would blame Stroud’s role as her manager for their breakup. She resented how hard he pushed her and hated what she perceived as the grueling pace of work he insisted upon. “He treated me like a horse, a nonstop workaholic horse,” she said in 1999.

  Stroud maintained that even if he had wanted to drive her harder, there was only so much he had control over. “All contracts were with her approval,” he said. “She had to approve everything. I could never push her or make her do anything.

  “But I took her out of the big booking agencies, because they were taking 15 percent of the expense money. I took her out of the clubs and put her in concerts where she made twice the amount in one night that she made in the clubs for one week, two shows a night. I made her have hit records. That’s all that I did.”

  The people who surrounded Nina later in life would take a more nuanced view of Andrew Stroud and his ultimate impact on her career and her attitude. According to Gerrit De Bruin, Stroud was “the best husband for Nina that she could have had. Andy was a good guy, and I know he loved Nina very much.”

  Others agreed that Stroud was one of the rare people who could motivate Nina. “He was a strong guy who could control her, who could take care of her and her career,” said Roger Nupie. “And up to the very last years, she kept on calling him, and deep inside I think she still loved him.”

  The most immediate need upon Andy’s departure was to decide on a new manager. Simone again opted to keep things close to home, asking her brother and sometime band member Sam Waymon to take over the job. Having toured and recorded with her in the last few years, he was in the unique position of being close at hand and being someone Nina trusted. And Sam, not surprisingly, had a less generous opinion of Stroud.

  “Andy was a son of a bitch,” said Sam. “I think he realized he had a good thing, a workhorse. I think he realized that she was not as knowledgeable about contracts, about the business end of the music industry.”

  When Simone first offered the job to Sam, he talked it over with their mother and indicated that he was aware of how severe her issues were becoming. “Mom, she’s my blood,” he told her, “and nobody is going to hurt her as long as I’m around. If I can be of some good to her, if I can keep those bastards away from her, if I can show her that things are not like she’s been used to, if I can show her that ‘if you keep hanging in there, Sis, day after day, you’ll see some improvement, things will get better’—the paranoia, the voices that she hears.”

  Al Schackman was not convinced. “I always had a problem with Sam….It was like a push-pull relationship, and I really didn’t want any part of it. When Sam was around, I was not.”

  In addition to the change in her business structure, the divorce also meant a new chapter in Nina’s romantic life. In fact, she told Stephen Cleary that after splitting from Stroud she had the one real same-sex affair of her life. “I’ve had sexual relationships with one woman that I loved very much,” she said. “And it’s just one. I’m not bisexual. I prefer men. I’m essentially a heterosexual person, and when I left Andy is when I had this relationship with this girl. But I loved that girl.”

  Simone said that she was “stupid” to break off the relationship. “I wouldn’t dance with her in public,” she said. “I was more hung up about music than I was about her.”

  As she navigated this uncertainty in her love life, Simone had moved, along with Lisa, to a Manhattan apartment near Lincoln Center. It was a different existence than they had in quiet Mount Vernon, but, at least for the time being, mother and daughter were together—even during Nina’s frequent travels.

  Perhaps not surprisingly given all the upheaval in her life, she released only one album in 1971, the mostly indifferent Here Comes the Sun, which again focused on recent rock songs (more Beatles, more Dylan) and was most notable for a radical up-tempo reworking of “My Way.” In Rolling Stone, Timothy Crouse wrote that “unfortunately, neither Nina’s grande dame intensity nor her old musical bravado find their way onto her new album.” He felt that her signature eclecticism had become a distraction, noting that “except on her very first LPs, Nina has seldom found more than two or three really good songs to put on each album.”

  Her biggest priority at this time seemed to be spending time in Barbados, where she continued her affair with Paul, the hotel porter with the motorcycle, and where the actor Geoffrey Holder was showing her the sights of the island. Though she was blissfully happy there—“All I saw was its beauty”—she felt that Paul, who refused to come visit her in New York, didn’t fully appreciate her celebrity and was taking their relationship for granted.

  “One day I got mad,” she said, “put my clothes on, took my daughter, and said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna show you who I am, Paul, you dirty rat.’ I said, ‘Take me to the prime minister.’ Went, walked in, said, ‘My name is Nina Simone, this is my daughter,’ and before I said scat—a southern term there—there were reporters all around us. We were on the TV news that night.”

  The prime minister—the first in the island’s history, in fact—was named Errol Barrow. A member of the Royal Air Force during World War II, he had helped lead his country to independence from Great Britain as a founder of the Democratic Labour Party and would later be named one of ten official National Heroes of Barbados by the country’s parliament. When he met Simone, he was approximately fifty years old and had held the top position in Barbados since 1966.

  Barrow was immediately taken with the island’s larger-than-life new celebrity, and he invited Nina and Lisa to live in one of the cottages on his beach estate. A servant named Mrs. Drake was delegated to take care of them. He would come to the cottage every night about one o’clock, when he finished the day’s work. In light of this luxury and the attention
from the island nation’s most powerful man, Paul the hotel porter was soon left in the dust; Simone and Barrow began an affair.

  Simone returned to the island every few months, breezing past customs and being picked up in a waiting Mercedes. She begged Barrow to divorce his wife, which he refused to do, but when he came to visit her in New York—showing the respect that Paul refused to grant—she decided that she would officially move to Barbados and live there full-time.

  “I moved everything down to Barbados—my piano, the rugs, the furniture, everything—and didn’t tell him I was moving,” she said. “I took the stuff to [luxury resort] Sam Lord’s Castle, and I didn’t see hide nor hair of him. Someone came to the Castle and said I had to post a bond to live there, that the Queen didn’t want any foreigners there. I somehow got the bond, but I was surprised that Errol Barrow didn’t come to my aid at that time. To my surprise, he wasn’t particularly happy that I had moved down to Barbados. So I rented a cottage on the estate of Sam Lord’s Castle and moved into that.”

  Barrow moved her into another house, but she became frustrated with the limits of their relationship. Though he treated her with genuine affection and tenderness, she hated that he wouldn’t say that he loved her. She sought his constant attention in dramatic ways. One day, she stripped naked in a meadow, just to get him to run after her. “He was chasing me all over,” she said, “the prime minister chasing this naked woman, and he cooked for me that night and made Chinese food, and sang a song called ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill.’ ”

  “Out of all her boyfriends, Prime Minister Errol Barrow was the only one I liked,” said Lisa. “He was very sweet, very kind, and he was different from my dad. His energy was different. I remember when he would come around, I always felt good, he was very nice to me, and that wasn’t something that happened a lot with people at that time.”