What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  About six weeks after arriving in Liberia, Simone had another chance at romance. She was at home alone, after turning down tickets for the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight in Zaire, when the telephone rang. It was Doris Dennis, a Liberian woman she had recently met, inviting her to come and meet her father-in-law. When she got to the Dennis family’s house, there was a card left for her that read “Don’t move. I’ll be back in an hour. And we will be married in six weeks, signed C.C. Dennis.”

  Intrigued, she waited, and after about an hour a tall, handsome man swept in, seventy years old and wearing a stylish gray suit. He grabbed Simone, kissed her squarely on the mouth, and told his daughter-in-law to fetch the silver set. The cups were filled with wine, and he surprised Nina by toasting their upcoming wedding. He explained, “You’ve been sent here to me—my wife put me out her door after my second son, and I have to marry a younger woman.” She had arrived in Liberia on his birthday, he explained, a clear sign that she was to be his bride. Simone may have been enjoying life away from performing while in Liberia, but her ego was still flattered when he indicated that he had been studying up on her and knew, for instance, that her piano was still in Barbados.

  They drank and talked for hours before Dennis announced that she must be tired and eager to get home. He instructed that she would be picked up at seven o’clock the next morning and they would drive to his house in Bomi Hills, two hours outside the city. After watching her down many glasses of wine, he told Simone that he was concerned about her alcohol consumption and would reward her if she didn’t drink for the first three days they were in Bomi Hills, and that, after the sixth day, promised she would get to teach him about sex. Simone was smitten with how confident he was in his desires. “I never met a man like that in my life,” she said. “I don’t know where I am.”

  After returning to her house on the beach, Simone went to speak with an elderly neighbor named Martha Prout, who had become a surrogate mother figure for the singer. When she recapped the evening’s events, she was surprised by the older woman’s response. “I know where you’re going,” Prout said. “Are you going to live in the city or in the country?” Simone was taken aback, and replied that Martha must be confused, and that she had no idea what the older woman was talking about. Martha said, “Yes, you do, child—everybody in Liberia knows you’re going to marry Mr. Dennis.”

  At promptly seven the next morning, Simone was whisked away to Bomi Hills in a car with Mr. Dennis. When they arrived at the mansion, an old man hoisted the flag, calling the staff together to greet their guest with a forty-five-minute prayer. Simone was fed Spam on crackers, and she changed into a white satin negligee in a style worn by Marilyn Monroe, an outfit Dennis asked her to keep wearing in order to impress his staff.

  The elaborate, confusing story of her week at Dennis’s estate dominates a disproportionate number of pages in I Put a Spell on You; to Nina, it seems to have represented her final chance at true love, and thus assumed greater significance as she lived out her days still single. The rituals and the old-fashioned romancing made her feel wanted, important. But there were still many steps to take before the plans for a future with Dennis could proceed.

  Four days passed at the Bomi Hills estate, and despite the instructions she had been given to wait until the sixth day, Simone could wait no longer; she went to Dennis’s room and tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce him. Distraught, Simone went back to her beach house and sought the wisdom of Martha Prout, unaware that Prout had been pursuing C.C. Dennis herself for thirty years.

  “She took the opportunity to fill me full of wine,” said Simone. “She says, ‘Tell me all, child.’ So I told her everything. She planted a rumor in the neighborhood that I had hit her, and she got his sister to come over, and they divided up the community against me.”

  A few days after her run-in with Prout, Simone left Lisa in Liberia and, looking for guidance, flew home to see her mother, without informing Dennis that she was leaving or where she was going—much as she had fled Andy for her trip to Barbados. “It was the stupidest move I ever made,” she said. “My mom hadn’t the faintest idea what to tell me.” Nina returned to Monrovia after about a month with no more information about Dennis than when she left. Maybe he had run out of patience for Nina or felt insulted that she disobeyed him, maybe his romantic vision of her and their relationship had simply been shattered, but she saw the man only one more time. Eventually, she found out that, indeed, he had married Martha Prout.

  Simone never forgave herself for losing Dennis, but she remained in Liberia for two more years. She was serious about taking a break from work of any kind; there were no performances or recording sessions in all of 1975, and just two concerts—one at the Montreux Jazz Festival and one in Paris—in 1976.

  “She always said Africa was the happiest time in her life,” said Roger Nupie. “She could just be there, enjoy herself, and do nothing. She was invited by kings and they gave her a beautiful house, and they just asked her to sing a few songs. She lived the life of a queen.”

  Simone later said that the high she got performing was replicated in even the most ordinary moments in Africa. “Everyday life was fulfilling as my stage appearances are now,” she said. “It took two hours to get from your house to town, because you had the rainy season and the dry season, and you fought the weather as much as we fight to get onstage here. I wore nothing but bikinis and boots, all day long. That’s all I wore.”

  According to some of her musicians, though, things weren’t always pure bliss for Simone, and she was still finding it hard to let go of her ex-husband. “I found Nina to be very, very lonely,” said Leopoldo Fleming. “I had met some Moroccans, and my Moroccan friends took Nina out on the town. We took her swimming, we took her dancing, we took her to hang out in the coffee shops. She had such a wonderful time. And while I was dancing with her, she was telling me about how much she loved Andy.”

  For his part, Al Schackman claimed that, although Nina may have enjoyed herself, other people didn’t. “They couldn’t stand her in Africa,” he said, chuckling. “Her maids—oh, she was just awful. If she were a queen, the streets would rumble.”

  —

  True to form, Nina eventually grew bored in Liberia. Before she made her next move, though, and fresh off her rejection by Dennis, she took one more shot at winning over Errol Barrow. They met in Florida, but no romance blossomed, though he was courteous and inquired after Lisa’s well-being.

  When Simone replied that Lisa was happily living with her in Africa but that she was concerned about her daughter’s education, he advised that she should send her daughter to boarding school to establish some consistency and stability. “I resented the fact that he said it,” Simone said, “but I respected the fact that he was a prime minister and he seemed to know what he was talking about.”

  The people around Nina clearly felt some obligation to help her take care of Lisa; sometimes it seems as if she was crowd-sourcing her child-rearing. Claude Nobs, the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival, recommended a school in Lausanne, Switzerland, for Lisa, who enrolled and moved there shortly afterward. Though Barrow had suggested to Nina that it would be best to establish some genuine separation from her daughter for a few years, about seven months later she rented a house in Switzerland, much to Lisa’s dismay.

  Lisa had been having a great time at school, at least until her mother appeared—“It’s always that,” Lisa said, “it’s like the sun is shining and the birds are singing, and then the rain comes.” Simone wanted her daughter to visit her every day, even to move into her house. Different people suddenly started asking Lisa why she refused to live with Simone.

  Lisa could tell that her mother was instructing her contacts to report back on anything they could glean about Lisa’s real feelings. She met with Nina’s banker, and he began probing Lisa about why she didn’t want to live with her mother. Tired of the game, she gave him an honest answer, unloading her anger and exasperation. After she left, he called Ni
na and told her what Lisa had said. Nina, in turn, called Lisa and asked her to come home so that she could take her to a party—but Lisa knew what was really coming.

  “When I got to the house, the door was ajar,” she said. “The house had a hallway, and I saw a branch go by—it wasn’t a switch, it was the branch of a tree. And she proceeded to beat my ass for telling the truth. I got a black eye, and then she took me to the party.”

  “She had grown up too fast,” said Simone. “She was making a fuss all over the neighborhood, and people were coming to my house complaining about my daughter. And it was because I had visited her and [Barrow] had told me not to.”

  Back in the orbit of Nina’s harsh and sometimes violent behavior, Lisa turned to her father in an attempt to escape. She flew to New York for a three-day weekend to visit Stroud. “For many years, [my mother] told me that he didn’t love me,” she said. “I told her, ‘I’m going to go see Daddy, and I’m going to prove to myself that he doesn’t love me, like you’ve been telling me all these years, or I’m going to prove to you that he does.’ ” She called her father and told him she was coming—but didn’t inform him that she hadn’t purchased a return ticket.

  When Lisa arrived and it was revealed, after a weekend had passed, that she didn’t have a way back to Europe, Andy, living in a one-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend, called Simone and said she needed to pay for a flight back to Switzerland. She said that she would do so only if Lisa agreed to live with her.

  “I said, ‘Well, then, I’m not going,’ ” said Lisa. “I put him in a very awkward position, because what do you say to your child? ‘I don’t want you to be here?’ So he took responsibility for me.” In yet another in an endless series of abrupt life changes, Lisa went from attending boarding school in Switzerland one week to enrolling at a public school in New York City the next.

  Nina remembered it a little differently, blaming Andy for Lisa’s move back to New York. “I let her come back during midterm to see her father, and he never returned her to Switzerland.”

  Eventually, Lisa moved in with Stroud’s sister-in-law in upstate New York. Simone stayed in Switzerland and would not see her daughter again for many years. “So what the prime minister predicted actually happened,” she said in 1989. “It happened. I’m not close to my daughter now because of that time.”

  —

  One thing the move from Africa to Europe signaled was that Nina was ready to get back into music. “Switzerland was the complete opposite of Africa,” said Roger Nupie. “She needed the quietness to be able to get into show business again, and the fact that everything is very, very well organized in Switzerland. In Africa that’s a totally different situation, of course, so I think it was her choice to find a basis to put her life back on track and be able to reenter show business.”

  Back in the game, Nina was plagued by the same sorts of trouble and ran into yet another fraught, murky situation with management. Apparently during the inactive years in Africa Sam Waymon had drifted out of his role as manager, and a lesbian couple named Susan Baumann and Josephine Jones wanted to take over her operations, an arrangement she vaguely accepted while refusing to sign any formal contract.

  Jones and Baumann had made their initial inquiries about Simone through Raymond Gonzalez, who had booked some of her European dates. They had already promoted a Ray Charles show via Gonzalez and then asked for an introduction to Simone.

  “I explained that she was very difficult, especially that particular time,” he said. “I’d see what I could do and we left off like that. She wanted to live with them and I guess it went well for a couple of weeks and after that it just went completely wild.”

  In January 1977, Simone returned to the MIDEM international music trade show in Cannes. She used her set as an opportunity to blast the gathering of record executives from the stage, including them on her long list of tormentors.

  “I am a genius,” she said. “I am not your clown. Most of you people out there are crooks. I am an artist, not an entertainer, and five record companies owe me money.” She was booed and walked off the stage in silence.

  “I cursed out the entire music industry and didn’t remember it,” she said later, indicating perhaps that returning to the stage was a catalyst in her stress. “I called them snakes, thieves, spineless worms. They asked me to do two concerts, and I resented them asking me to do it for free, but since I had no money, and since it was a chance to tell them, I said, ‘I’m going.’ I did the first concert and it went smoothly, but the second concert, I was too tired. I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t feel like doing this, and I shouldn’t be doing it, anyway,’ and something changed in me. I went on the stage and I remember playing the first number, and that’s all I remember.”

  Getting back into performance mode with Nina Simone came with all the expected obstacles. Leopoldo Fleming recalled that she was essentially operating without management after things with Jones and Baumann went awry and thus had to pay the musicians herself. After long delays, Simone eventually gave them cash, but couldn’t work out the correct exchange rate—giving them a tenth of what they had earned.

  “Sometimes she just got fed up with you and she let you go, and then after a while she calls you back,” he said. “I think sometimes it was because the money wasn’t enough, and she also liked to experiment with different sounds. She was always changing up. She had fired me several times, but she called me back.”

  After Fleming had not heard from Simone for a long time, she called him one day and said that she wanted him to come back on the road but that he needed to bring a gun with him. “For what?” he wondered. “There was no reason for a gun. She had a little bit of paranoia and she was on the warpath, but there was really no war.”

  Simone returned to America for a few landmark moments. On May 29, Amherst College awarded her an honorary doctorate; it was a tremendous source of pride, and for the rest of her life she would insist on being called “Dr. Simone.” In June, she returned to New York, with a concert scheduled at Carnegie Hall as part of the Newport Jazz Festival, which George Wein was now holding on various Manhattan stages.

  “I talked to her,” said Wein, “and I said, ‘We want to do a great concert.’ We put an orchestra together, and we had the rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, and everything was okay, we thought.”

  Apparently, though, everything was not okay. Simone finished her sound check, went to the airport, and booked a flight back to Switzerland. Wein’s wife and a friend went to the airport hotel where Simone was staying until the plane left the next morning in an effort to locate her; the house detectives thought they were prostitutes wandering the halls. But Nina never appeared, and Wein was forced to announce that the concert was canceled and then make a statement to the press.

  “I said that she was a woman that could not adapt to being an African American in the American scene,” he said. “We lost a lot of money, but I never held that against her. Nina was somebody that you accepted with all the craziness because she was such an artist. Promoters and producers learn to live with that problem. It’s difficult, you try to get to trust in people—sometimes you do, sometimes you never gain their trust. I could do that with Miles Davis, I could do that with Monk, Mingus. I never could get that with Nina completely.”

  Simone rallied for a few more concerts in Europe over the next few months—in the Netherlands for the North Sea Jazz Festival, in Paris, in London for her first appearance in that city in eight years. On New Year’s Eve, she played in Jerusalem—where, for once, she felt she was given the treatment she was due. “Israel is the first place I felt like a star, the first time in my life I ever felt like a star,” she said.

  In London, Simone met Creed Taylor, whose CTI label was becoming a leading force in jazz in the 1970s. With polished arrangements and a stable of top session players, CTI was helping to establish the “smooth jazz” format with popular albums by artists like George Benson, Bob James, and Freddie Hubbard. Taylor persuaded Simone
to return to the studio for what would be her first new recording in four years.

  They started the sessions at a studio outside of Brussels, but Taylor was annoying everyone and soon Simone insisted that he leave—not just the studio, but the entire country. He exited and the recording proceeded, though he had already established what much of the material and sound would be. The album was a wildly mixed bag, with moments of transcendence matched by overwrought orchestrations, and repertoire ranging from traditional gospel numbers to the recent Hall and Oates hit “Rich Girl.” Simone would often express her distaste for the album, mainly because she had no input in the arrangements, song selection, or cover photo—and, of course, because she said that Taylor never paid her, though the album would reach number 12 on the jazz charts.

  She did allow that she liked the title track, Randy Newman’s spare, bleak “Baltimore,” which perhaps mirrored some of her own views on urban America and on which she delivered an emotional vocal. “There’s a song I sing called ‘Baltimore,’ ” she said, “and it directly refers to ‘See the little seagull, trying to find the ocean, looking everywhere.’ And it refers to, I’m going to buy a fleet of Cadillacs and take my little sister, Frances, and my brother, and take them to the mountain and never come back here, until the day I die. When I went to Africa, I thought that I would be taking them with me.”

  At the very least, Baltimore established, for the moment, that it was possible for Nina Simone to make it through the sessions for an album at this unsteady stage in her career. Al Schackman recalled, though, that she remained as unpredictable as ever, and it was impossible to anticipate when she would fly off the handle.

  After the band sessions, she wanted to record a few things with Schackman alone, even letting him play piano on one track. They got back to the hotel late after this additional tracking, and ace studio guitarist Eric Gale joined them in Simone’s presidential suite. The musicians sat together on a sofa, under a huge mural, while Nina sat facing them, in front of windows overlooking the city. They were making idle chatter when she suddenly picked up a silver bowl of peanuts from the coffee table and hurled it across the room. “Man, I’m telling you, a quarterback couldn’t have thrown a better pass,” Schackman said.