What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

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  In January 1984, Simone started performing at Ronnie Scott’s famed jazz room in London; at the same time, she met drummer Paul Robinson. Both the venue and the musicians offered high points (and rare markers of stability) in what had been a difficult decade for Nina. Sam Waymon had scouted Robinson during a big-band gig and asked him to play with Simone. He joined her through two stands at the club, but he had no idea that the third time around he would be playing as half of a duo.

  “She had great taste,” said Robinson. “She could pick a good tune, or a tune that you would think has been rubbed in the ground, and she would Nina-ize it, put her own angle on it. If she wasn’t in the mood she’d be very lazy, and if she’s got a guitarist and a bass player and someone else there, they might fill in the holes, which she’d be very happy to let them do. But with me, there was a big hole, and that added to another one of Nina’s strengths, which was drama. Sometimes she wasn’t musically right on it, but she knew how to handle the audience and the room that you were in by using silence and space.”

  The drummer recalled that she would arrive at Ronnie Scott’s as late as she could, not even stopping in the dressing room but walking directly onstage. Tony Sanucci would take her fur coat, she’d already be wearing a gown underneath, and she would sit down and start. She also tried not to play one minute more than the hour she was contracted to do. “If she could milk the audience,” Robinson said, “if the audiences start going crazy and clapping, she’d use that for about four or five minutes, so we could get out of playing something else.” But the fact that she could get this kind of reaction shows that whatever the challenges of getting Nina Simone onto a stage in this period, she was still capable of controlling and mesmerizing a room.

  Though her live performances were holding steady, Simone had grown increasingly obsessed with what she was convinced was a widespread bootlegging of her recordings. “I don’t crave recognition, I crave money,” she said. “I want my money. I will never get it. I hate them because of it, and I hate with a consuming rage they ate my music and they gave me nothing. I crave what meant most to them, because I gave them what meant most to me.”

  She fought for what was rightly owed her and did recover some payments due, but some of her friends felt it wasn’t a useful battle. “Every artist feels that, and in most cases they’re right,” said George Wein. “Because the record companies have their way of keeping books that the artists don’t understand. Even if they’re not legally ripped off, they feel ripped off, and, in a sense, they are. Anything, any angle the record company could find to legally give themselves the money—every time they would come to a club to see their artists they’d sign the check and charge it to the artist’s account, something like that. But it is also the fact that maybe she didn’t sell as many records as she thought she was selling.”

  “She thought that everything that was out was illegal because she was not getting any money,” said Raymond Gonzalez. “I think she was completely traumatized by the IRS—all of a sudden she found herself [going] from being a superstar to being poor, of course blaming it on everybody else, and maybe she was right.”

  Out of rage or the sense that she could not rely on anyone else for protection, Simone started taking it upon herself to exact revenge. One time, she witnessed someone badgering her brother, trying to force his name onto a concert contract. She asked the man to step outside the room and started to beat him with her belt.

  She told him to take his glasses off, and then hit him three times. “By the third time I saw the fear,” she said. “I thought I would stop, but I got a taste of him in my mouth, and I wanted to cut him.” She told him to pay the bill and take care of the proper payments, which he did in a matter of minutes. “I will kill anything that moves that’s going to make me not get what I deserve in terms of the treatment I get, the respect I get,” she said.

  Simone was increasingly fascinated by weapons and violence, so much so that others who knew this could read even her innocuous actions as potentially aggressive. Roger Nupie told of one show in England where she asked for half of her fee before she went onstage. The promoter didn’t want to give her the amount she requested, and she opened her handbag—and took out a handkerchief. “He was so scared,” said Nupie. “He was turning pale because he thought, ‘Oh, my God, she’s taking a gun or a knife or whatever.’ So she had this reputation and she could use it anytime. She got her money.”

  This all came to a head during yet another strange episode in Casablanca. Convinced that Susan Baumann and Josephine Jones were following her, Simone brought a gun to Morocco, ready to shoot the erstwhile managers in self-defense. When she arrived, she told Al Schackman, “The dykes are after me. They want to kill me. The police took my gun but they said that they would protect me.”

  Simone and Schackman were in Casablanca to open a new penthouse club in a hotel to be called the Nina Simone Room, with the idea that she would have a regular place to perform and stay in luxury. The space was beautiful—lounge chairs and sofas, surrounded by wraparound windows—and it seemed like an ideal, easy setup for her to make some steady money. But when they started playing, Schackman could tell that something was bugging Simone.

  She started snapping at the audience, telling them that they didn’t understand her music. A woman with a French accent called out, saying that they loved Nina and just wanted to hear her play. Simone started arguing with her, and the woman said, “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this,” and walked out.

  Nina leaped up to follow her, with Schackman trailing behind. As she was chasing the woman, Simone pulled out a knife; her guitarist grabbed her and held her back as the woman got onto the elevator. Schackman took Simone to her room, put her to bed, and returned to the lounge and played piano, trying to keep the audience distracted from the evening’s chaos.

  Simone’s solitude was also getting the best of her. Leopoldo Fleming and Raymond Gonzalez both resorted to hiring male companions for her on the road. “Nina would always talk about sex,” said Gonzalez. “It was a fantasy thing, but she was not obsessed by it physically. I think it was just a conversation piece actually—‘I’m not getting enough attention.’ ”

  “Nina was a very shy southern girl, very innocent,” Schackman agreed. “She could put on a show, she could come on voracious, but I think that in some ways sexuality scared her.”

  One happy moment came when Nina became a grandmother. “When [Lisa] had the child, she softened and she became a woman again, and she called me,” said Simone. She added that it was too complicated for her to visit Lisa, so she should bring the child to her instead. “I tried to get out there, but because I’m chased by most of the Western world, I never made it. So I told her, ‘You come here and bring that baby.’ ”

  But then Lisa called again with more news, this time less joyous. She had gotten a divorce, and the baby was staying with Andy. Nina told Lisa, “I’m not gonna have that child like I was passed around, like you was passed around.” She hired detectives to locate Stroud and find the baby but didn’t sustain the efforts.

  As she grappled with issues of anger and desire and the arrival of a new generation in the family, her living situation remained unsettled. She lived in Trinidad for a while and then stayed with Amiri Baraka and his wife in New Jersey. Baraka believed that Nina had long been punished simply for standing up for herself. “The fact that many times she was in the right and was trying to do what most of us would do, defend ourselves, seldom got through,” he wrote. “She knows, as does any person really clear about American life, that such injustice is rooted in the racism and class bias of the society’s history and development.”

  But Simone was in a downward spiral. Schackman got a call one night from a hospital where Simone had been brought after the police found her lying on a bench in the Newark train station with a jug of wine. Gerrit De Bruin and Raymond Gonzalez decided that it was time to intercede. They determined that, though she was still being managed b
y the American-based Sanucci, it would be best for her to be close to them and to the European audience that remained her most loyal fans. They found her a home in Nijmegen, near Amsterdam, and moved her there in 1985.

  “Gerrit and Raymond worked hand in hand to try to get Nina in a place where she was comfortable,” said Fleming. “They did bring Nina out of a financial funk and a spiritual funk, I believe, and they had her working more. She was happy in Nijmegen for a while. Nina was this kind of person that needed to be on the move a lot, but she was there for a good while.”

  The move also meant that her friends were ever more aware of the severity of her emotional issues, which their new proximity made difficult to hide. They took her to see several doctors in search of an explanation for her condition.

  It was around this time that word reached Lisa Simone about her mother’s declining mental state. She was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, and went to visit Nina in Nijmegen. “I still had a lot of unresolved issues,” Lisa said. “There was a lot of anger in me when I went to see her, to the point where the way she chewed her food, the way she walked, the way she sat, just made me want to throw up. But at the same time, that’s my mother, and I was very concerned because she had a nervous tic—she’d be talking or sitting and her mouth would always be twitching. And when she would walk, it was more of a shuffle.”

  She knew that Nina was on medication, and heard words like manic-depressive and bipolar, although those terms stopped short of being an official diagnosis. And Lisa also had doubts about the treatment and its effects. Still, she recognized that having a clinical explanation for Nina’s behavior meant reconsidering her mother’s life and her actions.

  “A lot of things that I had dealt with, where one minute she’d be happy and the next minute I’d be dealing with someone that wasn’t in the room five minutes ago, started to make sense,” said Lisa. “It also helped me to not take so much on myself, in terms of the fact that I did something wrong or I helped to cause this. But I was also very angry, I just wanted her to die. There was a lot going on in me that I had to make peace with.”

  Gerrit De Bruin believed that when Simone told people that she was the reincarnation of an Egyptian queen, she was really indicating that she knew she was different. She had always stood out because of her talent, because she was a Waymon, and because she had different priorities than others in her field, but she also realized that she truly was wired unlike other people. Simone was aware, for instance, that most people were able to recognize when something was worth being angry about, but her chemical imbalance wouldn’t allow her to make those distinctions.

  “She couldn’t control herself,” he said. “I’ve always understood that Nina couldn’t help it, and that it was not personal, because you can’t blame somebody who has fever for shivering, and it’s the same with Nina. I had to be careful and take her out of situations that could harm her or the people around her. In the Grand Hôtel in Paris, somebody looked her in the eyes a bit too long and she was already a bit nervous. She made a movement, and I thought, ‘She’s gonna hit him.’ So I threw my arms around her and dragged her out [to] a taxi, and said to the taxi driver, ‘Drive!’ A few months later she said, ‘Gerrit, thank you for getting me out of that situation in the Grand Hôtel.’ ”

  De Bruin understood that Simone’s problems were further complicated by being tied up in the ego and persona of a performer—that she also had an image to uphold, even when she knew she had been out of line. When everything lined up and she could still get on a stage in the right mood, and hold a crowd in her hand, she needed to be ready. “She lived a life which often was full of shame the day after,” he said. “She had a row with somebody or whatever, and the next day she felt guilty. But she was Nina Simone, so how can you say ‘I’m sorry’?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Nina was never really gone, she just had a very bad reputation as far as promoters were concerned. “My Baby Just Cares for Me” [reached] a younger public, but the halls were always filled anyway—it just meant that instead of two days, we could do three.

  —RAYMOND GONZALEZ

  Under Anthony Sanucci’s management, and despite weathering the harsh effects of emotional stress, Simone had increased her activity. A 1985 studio album, Nina’s Back, was an odd mix of songs—from as far into her recording past as “Porgy” to as recent as a remake of “Fodder in Her Wings,” from the preceding album—but offered an unusually high proportion of original compositions. She also played much more frequently in the United States during these years, including a return to the Village Gate in September of 1985. This performance surge was documented on two live albums recorded at Hollywood’s Vine Street Bar & Grill.

  “I left this country because I didn’t like this country,” she said in 1985. “I didn’t like what it was doing to my people and I left. I would do it again if I have to. But they have treated me so well, perhaps I won’t.”

  Along with this softening toward her home country, she had grown uncertain about how to utilize her protest material within her current set. “It’s hard for me to incorporate those songs anymore, because they are not relevant to the times,” she said. “There aren’t any civil rights, there is no reason to sing those songs, nothing is happening….There aren’t any leaders for the civil rights in 1985. It leaves you in a particularly sad state.”

  If Simone’s affairs seemed relatively steady again, though, the stability didn’t last. In early 1986, she returned to Ronnie Scott’s in London for another extended engagement. She played two weeks at the club, but when Sanucci booked her for a third week she didn’t show up, forcing the management to cancel the shows. By the time the dust settled, her relationship with the manager, always uneasy, had come to an end.

  “He wanted me to do more work at Ronnie Scott and I refused to do that, because they were working me overtime there,” she said. “He wanted to sell me again for another week there, with the same amount of money and the same amount of hours, and I walked out. I was overworked.”

  To his credit, Sanucci had been able to create some momentum around Simone, but Raymond Gonzalez felt that he was never the right match for her as a manager. “Sanucci was not into music—he was a car salesman,” he said. “He was the type of guy that didn’t want to admit he had faults. If you don’t know the European market, you go to someone who’s worked with her before and she has security with. He might have had some experience in producing records, but producing a record is not touring, it’s not booking. He was basically a moneyman, but he was afraid of being around pros because they would see that he didn’t have the experience. His problem was his own basic pride.”

  In the immediate aftermath of Sanucci’s departure, Simone’s shows were hit-or-miss. She showed up hours late for a concert at Boston’s Symphony Hall; trumpeter Freddie Hubbard played the equivalent of two long sets, as the audience waited patiently for Simone. When she finally appeared, the show was so weak that one review said, “The performance indicated [that] she should have stayed at the hotel.”

  Bouncing between an apartment in Los Angeles and Amiri Baraka’s house in Newark, Simone had a vision. Increasingly desperate for one last chance at true love, she decided that there was “still a man in the world for me to marry” and got back in touch with Errol Barrow. She called him, and he said that she could come to Barbados and he would find her a place to stay.

  When she arrived, she found a note from Barrow, but he was in the middle of an election and never made the time or effort to see her. She flew back to Paris from the island, then stayed in Amsterdam. One night in 1987, she was performing in Sweden. Backstage, someone informed her that Barrow, who had recently been reelected as prime minister after a decade out of power, had died of a heart attack. “I suddenly felt more alone than I could remember,” she said.

  While there had been some recent blows, though, Simone was about to experience an unexpected windfall—a once-in-a-lifetime surprise hit that would make her more popular than ever.


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  Drummer Paul Robinson remembered going out for a rare evening at a nightclub. “At the end of the night, the closing song was ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’ and all these kids got up on the dance floor,” he said. “I thought it was weird ’cause we played it at Ronnie Scott’s, not thinking that it had any significance at all. I didn’t understand what it was all about.”

  Unbeknownst to Nina, an ad for Chanel No. 5 perfume featured the song, as it had been recorded on Simone’s very first album back in 1958. A new, young audience had discovered the number for the first time. Some credited its initial boost to the Caribbean community in London, who noticed the island feel to the song’s shuffle groove. Charly Records, who had the rights to the album, released the song as a single, and it spent eleven weeks on the UK singles chart—nineteen years after her last appearance—peaking at number 5.

  “My Baby Just Cares for Me” also reached the Top 10 in several other European countries and made it all the way to number 1 in Holland. Its popularity was extended by a music video created by the Oscar-winning studio Aardman Animations; in Aardman’s signature Claymation style, the clip depicted Simone as a cat, singing in a club, pursued by another feline who ultimately falls through the roof and into her arms.

  “It put her career on a new track,” said Roger Nupie. “From that moment on she had a complete new audience, brand-new people who just came for one song and who discovered completely different things. Sometimes she started a concert and said, ‘Okay, we’ll do the inevitable one, so you won’t have to beg for the damn song.’ ”

  The ad should have brought Nina a windfall, but back in 1958 she had signed away the rights to the recording, and everything else on Little Girl Blue, before she had even left the studio. She was outraged that an ill-informed decision almost thirty years earlier now cost her “over a million dollars” when this song, initially a throwaway added to the album at the last minute, exploded out of nowhere.