What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  “I think [the Errol affair] was all theater,” said Schackman. “I think he was infatuated with a star. And she was very magnetic, but it wasn’t this wild love affair. She was having fun with it, she was having a good time. We went dancing at night, swimming in the sea, and it was good, it was good for her.”

  Whether the relationship was ultimately impossible to sustain, as much fantasy as reality, Al Schackman captures the good humor of this era in a story from his first visit to Barbados, which he arranged as a time to rehearse with Simone. Upon his arrival, she had asked him, with little explanation, if he could change the locks on her doors because someone had been coming around the house and scaring her, so he went into town and got a new tumbler and new keys. When he got back, Simone was gone and he set to work alone.

  As he was fiddling with the lock, a Town Car drove up to the house and a black man got out. He walked over to Schackman and asked, in a British accent, if Miss Simone was home. Schackman replied that she was out, prompting the man to ask who Schackman was. “I’m her guitarist. I’m a friend of hers,” he said, adding with some suspicion, “Who are you?” The stranger said casually to tell her that Errol came by; then the stranger returned to his car, and left.

  A few nights later, Simone and Schackman were invited to a dinner reception at the prime minister’s mansion. They arrived and went through the reception line, mingling with well-dressed guests.

  “I meet this ambassador, I meet this minister and stuff like that,” recalled Schackman. “I meet the prime minister’s wife, a lovely woman, and then the prime minister. I go up to shake hands and look at him. He looks at me and grins. And I said, ‘Oh, no.’ And he says, ‘That’s all right, my friend.’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I had no…how could I know?’

  “He said, ‘That’s right. What can any of us know with Nina Simone?’ ”

  CHAPTER 11

  My dad was God to me until the time I turned on him. He was my dad. When I pray now, and say, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” to me I ain’t praying to God. I’m praying to my daddy.

  Simone’s time in Barbados was notable as a period of some respite and stability. Lisa was doing some work for a moving company on the island, and she fondly remembered a time when her mother did something unexpected. “Mom decided to make me lunch one day,” she said. “She made me a peanut butter and flying fish sandwich, and I dutifully bit into it and was amazed that the flavors actually kind of went together. She was just so proud of herself. When she wasn’t playing piano and she wasn’t performing, she was like a fish out of water when it came to those kinds of little things. So for her to even do that was really a big deal to us both.”

  Elsewhere, though, her actions continued to spiral in disturbing ways. As her daughter was coming of age, Simone wanted to avoid replaying the distance that she felt from her own mother as a young woman. But her relationship with Lisa was so irregular and her judgment so skewed that the intimacy she attempted to cultivate with her child by educating her about puberty sometimes manifested in wildly inappropriate ways.

  “She made a vow that when she had children she would make sure that we knew more than she [had] about [sex],” said Lisa. “I think that things started to get a bit twisted for her, the sense of right and wrong. I think a lot of times she forgot that I was her little girl, and what I needed was someone to make me feel safe, as opposed to treating me like I was your girlfriend.”

  But Nina’s instinct to teach her daughter about her changing body could also play out in maternal ways, like when she helped Lisa with her first period (something that Simone had specifically recalled her own mother avoiding). “The best conversation I ever had with my mother,” said Lisa, “that helped me come into my womanhood, was that she showed me what tampons were and what Kotex was, so that when that time came for me I wouldn’t be afraid. She was very meticulous, and very loving, and it was a very special time for me to just have her take time with me.” If Simone’s actions with her daughter weren’t always fully thought out, her intentions were at least loving.

  But, of course, Nina wasn’t always so tender, nor were her decisions always clearheaded. Her anger at Andy Stroud continued to flare up and make her want to lash out. During this time, Lisa overheard her making plans to have two men show up at Stroud’s brownstone and shoot him when he answered the door. When they arrived, he wasn’t home. After this hasty, botched attempt on her ex-husband’s life, Simone lost interest and abandoned the plot.

  Though Barbados had offered some temporary peace, those around her continued to worry about her deteriorating condition. “Early on, I thought there was something eating at her, and gradually that got stronger,” said Schackman. “I realized that she was fighting demons that could appear at any moment. The change in her would be dramatic, like a switch, and after a while I realized that I wasn’t with my sister, I was with that one, and that one was menacing. I felt a multiple personality thing going on.”

  The guitarist recalls an argument with Simone when she was so upset that she spoke in an entirely different voice, low and guttural and involuntary. “We finally realized this was a lifetime project of really trying to get Nina through those times,” he said. “To keep her creative spirit alive, and keep her emotional space calm, where she wasn’t being so destructive to herself.”

  Still, she kept working. In 1971, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland asked Simone to sing for the black American soldiers who had just come home from Vietnam to Fort Dix. The show was part of their FTA tour, an acronym that officially stood for Free Theater Associates but was usually referred to as either “Free the Army” or “Fuck the Army.”

  She met the actors in Greenwich Village and told them that she would perform, but only if they promised to use her music in their next two films. Fonda burst into tears, asking why she wanted to make this a commercial exchange.

  “I said, ‘I don’t want to sing for your people, I want to sing for my own people, and so I want something for my services,’ ” Simone recalled. “She couldn’t understand my attitude, that I wanted something in return for my services. So they wrote on a napkin, ‘The next two films that we do, Nina Simone will do the soundtrack.’ And of course they didn’t, then I never saw them anymore.”

  With this uneasy settlement reached, she went through with the Fort Dix show, where she was struck by how docile the GIs were. “It was very strange, because they weren’t full of joy,” she said. “They were very depressed. They had just come back. They were just quiet. It was about five hundred of them maybe, and they didn’t say anything, they didn’t do anything. They responded to the choir, and they clapped appropriately. But they didn’t jump up and down.”

  The show was recorded, and some of it—though it isn’t entirely clear how much, since material was rerecorded in the studio and the label copy doesn’t specify what comes from where—was used for Simone’s next album, Emergency Ward! Though the album cover was made up of newspaper clippings about the Vietnam War, the material (just three songs over two sides) feels more spiritual than overtly political. The entire first side is an eighteen-minute medley of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” with interludes from a poem by David Nelson titled “Today Is a Killer.” It’s a fascinating, odd record, the lengthy, meandering tracks journeying through sections hypnotic, dull, and stirring.

  But this focus on the war, even though it wasn’t very specific, earned her points from the rock-and-roll crowd. Calling the album “undoubtedly her greatest record,” Stephen Holden’s review in Rolling Stone said that Emergency Ward! was “the most direct, desperate musical outcry against the war and the system supporting it that I’ve ever heard.”

  Holden attributed almost supernatural power to Simone’s music. “Today, more than ever, Nina Simone’s art comes directly from the cutting edge of reality, where love, rage, and despair are inseparable, and there is no other choice but action,” he wrote. Still, the album—which obviously couldn’t spin off any singles, given the length of the tracks—
was demanding and a bit perplexing and didn’t connect with a larger audience. It was her first LP in several years not to chart.

  Simone’s mind-set didn’t make for an easy fit with the antiwar activist community, but she remained in close contact with the leaders of the Black Power movement. In 1971, she went to visit jailed activist Angela Davis in her California prison cell. When she didn’t appear at the scheduled time, Davis was afraid that the appointment had been canceled.

  The delay was actually caused by the jail’s refusal to allow Nina to bring the gift she wanted to present to Davis into the secured area—a red helium-filled balloon. Even in a high-security environment, she was ready to argue with the authorities about the rules, and to win. “As it gradually lost its buoyancy, this balloon remained one of the few permanent fixtures in my cell,” wrote Davis. “Even when it was entirely deflated, I preserved it as a treasured artifact of my time with the amazing Nina Simone.”

  While she was visiting Davis, further disaster struck in Mount Vernon. The house, which had been abandoned and was now in disrepair, overgrown, and unsafe, was further compromised by a fire, which also destroyed all of Simone’s professional records. The Internal Revenue Service had started inquiring about unpaid back taxes. Simone’s financial situation was headed for trouble.

  —

  Based once again in New York while still shuttling to Barbados, Simone continued to visit her family but remained frustrated by her relationship with them. She felt a distinct lack of gratitude and sympathy, that they didn’t understand or care to understand her life. “I lived apart from them,” she said. “I worked and gave them money, but they didn’t come to share my life. They didn’t know what was going on with me. My personal insecurity goes unnoticed. Even when I go home now, we don’t talk about what I do.”

  Her anger toward her mother was most acute, still the same resentments building up year after year. “My mother acts like I’ve never even left the house. She never asks me what I’ve been doing and how I feel and where have I been, and how do I feel and who I’ve met, no. My mother was never close to me—I just played for revivals for her, and she never took any interest in me.”

  But in 1972, she caught a conversation between her father and her brother Sam that abruptly upended her feelings about John Divine Waymon and changed everything about their relationship. She claimed that she heard him tell Sam that he had been the provider, the one to bring in the money and take care of the family. Knowing that he had struggled to maintain steady work for much of her childhood, and that her mother had carried the financial burden of supporting the large Waymon family, Simone was horrified and felt betrayed by the father she adored—so much so that she dramatically, unbelievably disowned him on the spot.

  “We were brought up to think that lying, killing, stealing were simple things,” she said. “And my father lied, and it was the first time I had heard him lie in all the years I had known him. That doesn’t begin to tell you how much it bothered me—if you take in consideration twenty, twenty-five years of no lying, and the affection I had for my father, and his for me, his lying to my youngest brother…It just crushed me.”

  The pressure that she put on her father to be perfect, and her extreme reaction when she felt he had disappointed her, are echoed in the idealized relationships she had with her lovers—her expectation that they could fix all her problems inevitably followed by confusion and anger when faced by more complex realities.

  Later, her anger would dull, tempered by some compassion. She would say that she understood what her father was doing, that he was telling Sam something he needed to hear, that it was a case of “an old man being tactful to his son.” But at the time, that rage was uncontainable, and she obstinately insisted that she had no father.

  Soon after this rift, her sisters told Nina that their father was sick, that he was in the hospital with cancer and probably wouldn’t survive. Though she was staying close by, with her eternal confidante Mrs. Mazzanovich, she refused to visit him.

  “I was determined not to see him,” she said. “As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a father, whether he was sick or not.” Her sisters couldn’t believe this stubbornness and told her day after day that he was asking for her and was getting weaker and frailer.

  Though she often made choices impulsively, inconsistently, this time she dug in her heels. “I wanted to see him, but I had said I wouldn’t see him, and I had to go by what I said,” she reiterated. “And my daddy died without my seeing him at all in the last six months of his life. After he died was when the full shock of it came to me.

  “I didn’t realize that death means that you never see them again. I didn’t realize it was so final. I was unaware of what I was doing. I guess I didn’t know anything about death.”

  John Divine Waymon died on October 23, 1972. Five days later, Simone flew to Washington, D.C., for a concert at the Kennedy Center. Skipping the funeral, she went onstage at the same time he was being buried in North Carolina.

  She performed a song that she had been writing for her father during the last few weeks of his life, a very loose interpretation of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s recent hit “Alone Again (Naturally),” with nine lengthy verses grappling with the story of his death.

  I remember this afternoon

  When my sister came into the room

  She refused to say how my father was

  But I knew he’d be dying soon

  And I was oh so glad, and it was oh so sad

  That I realized that I despised this man I once called father

  In his hanging on, with fingers clutching

  His body now just eighty-eight pounds

  Blinded eyes still searching

  For some distant dream that had faded away at the seams

  Dying alone, naturally

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  And after he died, after he died

  Every night I went out, every night I had a flight

  It didn’t matter who it was with

  ’Cos I knew what it was about

  And if you could read between lines, my dad and I close as flies

  I loved him then and I loved him still, that’s why my heart’s so broken

  Leaving me to doubt God in His Mercy

  And if He really does exist, then why does He desert me?

  When he passed away I smoked and drank all day

  Alone. Again. Naturally.

  “Nina’s relationship with her father was very complex, very confusing to her,” said Schackman. “I think there were some memories, some aspects of her relationship with her father that she really never talked about.”

  This unbreakable connection continued after her father’s death, taking on a supernatural quality. During one concert, she noticed that a fly had landed on her piano, and she said to the audience, “My father is here tonight.” For some reason, she had adopted the fly as the symbol of her father, and wherever she was, if the insect appeared, she would tell the people around her that her dad was visiting.

  Further evidence of the mysticism that anchored Simone to her father can be found in her recollection of how she finally forgave him several years later (and, perhaps, forgave herself for her treatment of him on his deathbed), in an elaborate three-day ritual performed while she was living in Africa. Feeling especially unsettled, she arranged for a witch doctor to come to her home, where he threw some bones and asked, “Who is this person on the other side who likes Carnation milk?” She recalled feeding her father the sweet milk when she was a young girl tending to him after his stomach surgery and knew immediately who the witch doctor was talking about.

  He went on to describe John Waymon’s appearance and said that Waymon could help her from the other side if she let go of her anger toward him. As instructed, she slept with Carnation milk under her pillow for three nights to complete the rite. The witch doctor claimed that her father’s spirit would be with her from then on.

  —

  In 1973, Simone embarked
on a longer tour, spending two weeks in Japan and then heading on to Australia. She pulled her daughter out of school to keep her company on the trip, but their relationship became so strained in Japan that Lisa refused to go on with her to Australia.

  At a restaurant one night, on the Japanese leg of the tour, Nina started screaming at Lisa; Al Schackman said that Lisa was stoic, “like stone,” taking this abuse from her mother. “I remember Mom saying that I was a robot, and that was my only protection, that I didn’t show any emotion,” Lisa said. “Because when Mom would see you cry, she knew she could push your buttons, and that’s what she wanted. And I would not give her that satisfaction. When she would hit me, I would look her dead in her face. And she’s like, ‘You better cry, you better cry.’ I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Nina was berating her, it was just horrible,” said Schackman. “I had enough of that, and I told Nina that this wasn’t gonna work. And she said, ‘Just get her out of here.’ ”

  Her anger directed at Lisa may have been driven by a need to exert control, which could also manifest on her daughter’s behalf. At other moments, Nina would want to protect her child with a primal ferocity. “We were in that same dining hall on a different day,” said Schackman, “and there was a man standing near Lisa and he reached up and patted her head. She had an Afro at that time, and Nina flew in a rage and tried to attack the man. He said, ‘I didn’t mean anything, I liked it,’ and he was South African. We had to restrain her—‘How dare you touch my daughter?’ So there was that there, too.”

  After these incidents in Japan, Simone gave Lisa the choice of going to see her grandmother in North Carolina or continuing on to Australia with her. Lisa opted to go back to the United States. Bouncing from residence to residence, after this tour ended, she went to stay at Schackman’s farm in Massachusetts rather than return home to Nina. “Those are the two places that wound up being my salvation,” she said, referring to the farm and her grandmother’s house. “Al said that at one point I was walking on the porch and I fell through the floor and I started crying, and he had never seen me cry. He was my blanket of comfort, he was always a ray of sunshine, and he was always available for me to talk to or just be in his presence.”