What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  The bowl flew over their heads, hitting the mural and tearing it. As Nina sat shaking in her chair, Gale jumped up and said he needed to go get some sleep. Schackman followed his fellow guitarist into the hall, where Gale gave him a hug and said, “God bless you that you’re with her, bro.”

  CHAPTER 13

  I don’t want anything to do with her. That’s it….We would wait for the call in the middle of the night. She might be dead or in jail or whatever.

  —CARROL WAYMON

  In 1978, the IRS contacted Carrol Waymon, asking if he knew where his sister was. He hadn’t seen her for years, but they spoke often. “She was losing it emotionally by that time, because she was convinced that she could not come back to this country,” he said. He became the liaison between Nina and the agency.

  Carrol had more questions after looking over her records. He discovered that she signed her payments over to Stroud, who kept their holdings under several corporations. “He was very smart,” said Waymon. “He would sign a contract today for this company, but it would go into this other company. All kinds of shenanigans.”

  (Around this same time, Simone actually approached Stroud about taking over her management again. He handled her through a brief American tour, but she felt that he was no longer up to the task and dismissed him.)

  While she was in the United States, she appeared before a federal court in New York to face the tax evasion charges. Her lawyers had worked out a deal in which she would plead guilty to not filing her 1972 return (perhaps tellingly, this was one of the last years Andy served as her manager), in exchange for other charges being dropped. According to a story in Jet magazine, she was “visibly shaken by her ordeal,” potentially looking at a year in prison. She was ultimately put on probation and given a ninety-day suspended sentence.

  Simone’s trouble during this time didn’t begin and end with the IRS. She had found a wealthy patron named Winfred Gibson, who offered to cover her living expenses while she got her career back on track. He put her up in a London hotel, but after a few weeks she determined that he had not been paying his bills and was avoiding the staff. She confronted Gibson, and the two got into a fight in her hotel room, she said. He knocked her unconscious and ran out. “I had to crawl to the telephone with my neck twisted, and I had to call the police,” she claimed. “The police come and will not do anything. They threaten to arrest me.” She took thirty-five Valium, and a nurse came to pump her stomach.

  Simone was taken to St. Stephen’s Hospital in Chelsea. “I had to have my neck straightened out because of the karate blow,” she said. “I was pleased that I was still alive, but I was by myself. That was the lowest point.”

  —

  Given her estrangement from her family, it was a complete surprise when Simone showed up in 1979 at Lisa’s high school graduation in Hudson, New York, accompanied by her lawyer. Far from being invited, the singer had found out about the ceremony only because Mary Kate Waymon had mentioned it to her.

  “Everybody was all just full of joy and happiness,” said Lisa, “and by the time I walked down the aisle and glanced down the row of seats, all of [their] faces looked like something sad had happened. Then when I got down to the bottom of the aisle, I heard my name—and of course we all know our mother’s voices. I turned, and I saw her face, and I think I held up the procession line briefly. The entire time that I was up on the dais I had a smile on my face, trying to appear involved, but I was praying that I could get through the ceremony.”

  Andy didn’t notice Simone until after the graduation and didn’t stick around to say hello. He just got in his car and drove back to New York City. “I avoided her as much as I could,” he said. “The few times I was nice, she’d be asking for information. Then I would hear from an attorney a week or two later, looking to use the information against me, to sue me for something. When they called, I would always ask, ‘Did you get any money or retainers yet?’ And they would go silent. I said, ‘Because you’re about the fifth attorney that has called—and they’ve all called back later wanting to know where the money was.’ Because she hadn’t paid them, looking to get money from me and put a lien on any money coming in for her.”

  Lisa, in turn, surprised her family by announcing her postgraduation plans; she had enlisted in the air force. Clearly she was searching for some of the consistency and discipline that she had never been able to count on during her life. Her inseparable childhood friend Ilyasah Shabazz reconnected with Lisa during her time in the military and found that time had changed the girl she called her “twin” when they were growing up.

  The two former neighbors met up when Lisa was passing through New York. “We went out to eat,” Shabazz said. “I reached to get something on her plate, and she yelled at me, and I was shocked. I didn’t know where that came from, because I never knew any of the challenges she had experienced. I would never take a fork and dig in someone’s plate today—I might do it to one of my sisters, and Lisa was one of my sisters. So it was the nerve, the audacity that I would do that, but I was surprised that she snapped at me. But then I started to learn more about some of the things that she was experiencing.”

  The anecdote is telling; the first time Nina met Andy Stroud, she had taken French fries from his plate, and recognizing and respecting boundaries was clearly an issue that manifested in various ways for her. If Lisa’s sense of guardedness remained heightened, perhaps her opening up to Ilyasah related to things unraveling further with her mother. On the heels of her encounter in the hotel with Gibson, Simone told the lengthy story of another bizarre, life-threatening scenario, this time during a stay in California and indicating even more paranoiac tendencies. She claimed that while she was in Hollywood she was tricked into entering a psychiatric institute. There the staff allegedly tried to silence her with medication until an Ethiopian priest mysteriously appeared to discharge her.

  Simone invented wild theories for why she had been committed, indicating just how far her fears about the US government had gone. She concluded that a social worker had her put away in order to steal an unreleased concert video and prevent her from receiving royalties.

  “They figured if I got my money, I’d have too much power in the United States,” she said. “So I’d never get my money, and the black community would never know what happened to me until it was all over. That was the only real time I knew they were trying to kill me.”

  Carrol Waymon, living in San Diego, was the family member who was both geographically and emotionally closest to Simone; he was a witness to her declining state. “By that time she was under medication, but we couldn’t get her to take the medication on a regular basis,” he said. “She would say nothing’s wrong with her. Yet at the same time she was having all these episodes of getting into scraps here and there.

  “She couldn’t get any work. She lived off of friends. Began to be more paranoid than ever. She’d call everybody, all our friends, any time of night, any time of day. My phone bill was four hundred and some dollars. She became so upset here that she got mad at me and I took her down to one of the hotels. Two days later, the hotel called me up and said they were going to arrest her.”

  But when their mother had a stroke, Simone was contacted by the hospital and decided to go home. She stayed in North Carolina for a week while her mother recovered, and things were calm; they stayed that way, at least with her family, for a while. “Part of it is that Nina has chemically multiple personalities,” said Carrol. “I tried to deal with her around that, but she rejects it. Part of the memory is that one part doesn’t really remember the other. There are different compartments. She’s not in contact with all the realities around. She doesn’t remember some things—literally, she doesn’t. And she’s aware of that, but she won’t go through all the therapy.”

  The intensity of Simone’s emotional swings can be heard in the interviews she was recording at this time, in one of several abandoned efforts to write a memoir. This time she was working with southern-born, Philadel
phia-based arts journalist Mary Martin Niepold—at least, until she abruptly decided that she wasn’t.

  “If we’re through with all this shit, let’s put it in the waste-paper basket,” Simone erupted suddenly one day. “You’re draining my energy. I bring you in here in good faith thinking you need it and you take it back. If we don’t need this shit, let’s throw it away. Are you finished with that? Then throw it the fuck away. I don’t like to keep this shit around. I only kept it around because of you.

  “I’m not answering. You’re not going to play me no more for this fuckin’ book. You don’t care nothing about my music. All you care about is your book.”

  —

  In April of 1980, Simone received bad news. There had been a coup in Liberia; the standing government had been overthrown and numerous officials had been killed, including C.C. Dennis’s son and the country’s president. C.C. Dennis had burned down his own house rather than have the new government seize it; he was paraded naked through the streets with Martha Prout, and shortly thereafter died of a heart attack before he could be assassinated.

  “I didn’t realize until he was dead that I made the biggest mistake of my life,” said Simone, perhaps overeager to romanticize another in a series of powerful, ultimately unattainable men. “It was another world that I lived in when I was with him. He was rich, he was tall, he was handsome, he was older than me, he would have taken care of me, given me money. He told me I was beautiful and wonderful and that he loved me, he told me he loved me from the first minute I met him. He was the most honest man I’ve ever known.”

  —

  As her condition deteriorates, it becomes almost impossible to track the chronology of Simone’s different residences. In the early ’80s, she stayed in Montreal for a while, in an effort to be close to the United States without paying its taxes. She briefly seemed to settle in, playing occasionally in a local café called the Rising Sun, but then she left the city without so much as returning to her apartment; eventually, her furniture and belongings were cleared out.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult just to get her to show up for a performance, even dates that were only a short drive away. Longer trips had become epic challenges. She refused to get on flights, and when she did board she behaved so badly that the pilots would threaten to make an emergency landing just to get her off the plane.

  At least once, in Paris, she simply would not get onto a connecting flight. Her entourage slept in the airport, waiting for her to agree to continue on to the concert. Finally, when the very last option was leaving, Simone had to be physically restrained and forced onto the plane.

  Raymond Gonzalez, who had promoted some Simone dates in Europe, assumed a new role at this point in her life. The first time he met her, backstage after a show at the Palais des Glaces in Paris, he said she was “horrifying,” brandishing a bowie knife and attacking one of her fans in the dressing room. He wanted to exit quietly to avoid the raging singer, but when Simone found out that he was the artistic director of a music festival in Pamplona, she insisted he stay. As a fan of the bullfights in Pamplona, she then proceeded to spend months trying to get Gonzalez to put her in his lineup.

  She was booked at the festival, and a day before her concert Gonzalez went to Geneva to accompany her to the site. She wasn’t home, but he came back early the next morning to get her onto the one flight that would arrive on time.

  The door to her hotel room was wide open when he arrived; Nina was inside, wearing black tights and drinking cognac. She informed Gonzalez that she wouldn’t be going to Pamplona. “After hassling me for months, you’re not gonna go?” he said, and she replied, “No, I don’t need the money anymore.” She had recently received a payment from Claude Nobs for the rights to her film of her Montreux performance, as she was writing Gonzalez a letter to explain (he noted that the letter was written in different colors and different-size letters). He started to leave, and she said, “You’re not a man—if you were a man, you would have called a taxi.”

  The trip was anarchic; after summoning a cab herself, Simone threatened the driver, disappeared when she saw bootleg Nina Simone albums in an airport record store, and insisted on a wheelchair to get her onto the flight. When they arrived in Pamplona, they found that all of her luggage was lost. The sizes she gave Gonzalez for replacement outfits were long out of date, and when he returned to the hotel with the new clothes that didn’t fit her, she was swimming naked in the pool, having drained three bottles of champagne.

  Somehow, they made it to the stage, where an inebriated Simone played a terrible set and cursed at the audience. The next morning, city officials showed up and told Gonzalez they had to arrest her. He defused the situation, hustled her out of town, and put her on a train home, assuming he would never hear from her again after such a disaster.

  “Needless to say, it wasn’t over,” he said. “After that I got a phone call from her brother, who asked me if I would book a tour.”

  Maybe it was easier to just keep moving than to confront her escalating problems. Simone determined again that it was time for another change and moved from Geneva to Paris. She recorded the odd, fascinating album Fodder on My Wings, her first new release since Baltimore four years earlier. The record featured some of her most personal songs, including the rewritten version of “Alone Again (Naturally)” for her father; “Liberian Calypso,” recounting her arrival in Africa; and “La Peuple en Suisse,” a farewell to her unhappy years in Switzerland.

  The title track was less literal—but just as autobiographical—as the other material. “It’s the story of my going to Africa, in the form of a bird who fell to earth and reincarnated from her birth, which is me,” she said. “She flitted here and there. She went to Europe; England; Denver, Colorado; Switzerland; and Spain, everywhere, trying to find out if people still knew how to give. And when she didn’t find this, she went on to Africa, where, of course, they certainly still know how to give. That’s the story of that song.”

  But the album, released on the obscure Carrere label, wasn’t widely distributed, and its failure set the tone for a disappointing period in Paris. “I went back to Paris thinking that I could resume my career,” she said. “I did it alone, and I landed in the wrong place and I fell from grace. I didn’t know that you had to stay at the George V to be regarded as a star. People didn’t come and see me; they didn’t believe that I was in this small, small place, and I was working for about $300 a night.”

  Living in a tiny apartment, Simone would stand on the sidewalk in front of various Latin Quarter nightclubs and invite passersby to come in and see her perform. “She didn’t take her medicine, so the concerts were incredible if she did them,” said Gerrit De Bruin. “But could you imagine Barbra Streisand outside the venue—‘Hey, come in, I’m singing tonight’?”

  De Bruin visited Simone and cleaned her filthy apartment. “That was the worst period, but at that moment she was still uncontrollable,” he said. “She had to dive deeper in the shit before she realized she had to change something.”

  One bright spot in Paris was that Simone reconnected with old friend James Baldwin. They spoke at length about their religious families (Baldwin had been a preacher in his youth), and he sometimes joined her onstage. She recalled that Baldwin would often say to her, “Nina Simone, you have made this world you’re living in—you’re going to have to deal with it.”

  —

  During a swing through Los Angeles in 1983, Nina met Anthony Sanucci, a businessman who had, among other interests, a video company. The two got on and discussed the possibility of Sanucci managing her. Though he had no real experience, when she got back to Paris and considered her situation she called him and agreed to move forward.

  Not surprisingly, she would express mixed feelings about this high roller, sometimes within the same conversation; she was impressed by his style but not always with his results. “Sanucci had twelve cars, and a home in Palm Springs, one in Las Vegas, and one in California,” she said. “He’
s a salesman, but I don’t think he was dishonest. He’s full of fun, and no matter what you say to him he’s always your friend—you can curse him out, and he will say, ‘You’re cursing me out because I won and you didn’t win.’ I admire winners, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  She was also trying to sort out the right musical direction. When she was asked if she would continue to sing protest songs, she expressed uncertainty. “I stopped singing love songs because my protest songs were needed. So the direction I’ll take in the future depends entirely on what happens to my people. If my people go back into hiding, perhaps I’ll start singing love songs again. If we continue to make more strides, then I shall go on singing protest songs—protest songs that are acceptable, however, because I don’t particularly want everybody to die. I just want everybody to know who we are.”

  Simone demonstrated her continued involvement with liberation politics when she went to Guinea at the invitation of President Sékou Touré and spent a few weeks visiting with Miriam Makeba and Stokely Carmichael. While she was there, Touré died and she escaped, she claimed, with Carmichael’s aid just a day before a military coup.

  She said that her periodic returns to Africa were essential for her to maintain her identity. “I have to hide my blackness in order to stay in white Europe and white America,” she said, “and then of course I don’t hide it when I’m in these black places. I’m in atmospheres that are less black, and therefore I tend to act like the people around me. But I have a secret self that is very black, and I don’t get a chance to show that very often anymore. I get more lonely when I can’t show it.”