by Alan Light
With the help of attorney Steven Ames Brown—who told her when they first met that he had read a story about her stabbing a Charly Records executive at a restaurant because she had not been paid for the commercial or the subsequent reissue of her first album—she filed a series of lawsuits that resulted in the largest sum a singer had ever received for a “reuse” fee. (Simone’s music would be used in a number of other advertisements over the years, including “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life” in a Müller yogurt spot that would be one of the most-played commercials in England between 2005 and 2010.)
Simone had enough clarity to see that beyond being profitable for her in the short term, the hit was also something she needed to capitalize on. “When ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’ came along,” she said, “I said, ‘I have to take this opportunity now to go all over the world and promote my records, whether I make the money or not from the [sales]. I have to go, because this is my last chance.’ I worked very hard to take advantage of my second coming, because it was my last time as far as I was concerned.”
Raymond Gonzalez stepped up to answer this opportunity. While Brown set about rebuilding Simone’s recording portfolio, renegotiating her contracts and consolidating her catalogue, Gonzalez began increasing Simone’s bookings, starting with eight dates in Holland. As word spread that she was showing up and delivering, other offers came; the summer and fall of 1988 brought her back to London, Paris, Spain. At some point, Gonzalez asked her about expanding his role and moving from booking her shows to taking the reins as her manager.
He quickly determined, though, that turning Simone’s career around was a job for more than one person and that doing so would also require her complete trust and participation. He considered who were the most reliable and consistent figures in her life and homed in on a few men whose help he considered essential.
“I was at my farm in the Berkshires,” said Al Schackman, “and I received a call from Raymond in Paris. Leopoldo Fleming was there with him, and they convinced me that she was better. I said, ‘I don’t know, but okay.’ I went back on in and had a really lovely reunion with Nina, who was very nice and calm and cordial.”
Next, Gonzalez approached Simone’s friend and sometime aide Gerrit De Bruin and asked him to move back to Holland to act as a more full-time assistant. “When Gerrit came into the picture,” said Schackman, “I said, ‘I guess we’ll call it the A Team,’ after Mr. T and those guys.”
This ragtag group of men, representing different backgrounds and different nationalities, made a commitment to keep Nina on track. They had all had their conflicts with her—only someone who knew exactly what they were up against had any chance of helping her—but they all believed that hers was a unique gift, a contribution to the world that was worth fighting for. And their strengths were perfectly complementary. “Al was the music, Raymond was the money, and I was the heart,” said De Bruin.
Having a structure and his own support system enabled Gonzalez to think more strategically and to survive the inevitable moments when Nina became too much. “She would call me at any hour,” he said. “She was exhausting, so I needed these guys—I was nowhere without them, and I guess it was vice versa. Maybe I could have done it, but it was much more fun as a team. When you get beat up, then you can go to someone and they go, ‘Don’t worry about it, do you want me to go in your place right now? You need a half hour?’ So it was teamwork and love and music.”
Gonzalez put Nina on a monthly allowance paid out of an account in England, while he handled her rent and taxes. She trusted him enough to be comfortable with the arrangement, and she was rebuilding from being extremely cash-poor when they started. As revenue from the concerts and increased royalty payments started coming in, she bought an apartment in Los Angeles, and then rented a condo in Nijmegen, returning to a more stable living situation after many years of impermanence.
De Bruin also reached out to Simone superfan Roger Nupie in Antwerp. The team was attempting to gather a comprehensive list of her copyrights, and Nupie’s archive was a useful resource. He came to London to meet with the group and hit it off with Simone, who demanded that he stay on the road with them.
Initially, he served informally as De Bruin’s assistant. Nupie took advice from the more experienced De Bruin about how to handle Nina’s ever-changing moods. He was told not to react to her or interfere, to just let her rant and scream (that was how she tested people), and then to try to distract her by making funny faces or cracking jokes. Doing something that might make her laugh was the best way to disrupt her internal tension. “Most of the time it worked,” he said.
Nupie observed that Gonzalez had to be the bad cop because he was the one who made her work. Even after her “second coming,” she didn’t enjoy touring any more than she ever had. “I think she did enjoy performing, but not everything connected to it—the traveling, the interviews, and all that,” said Nupie. “Being onstage, that was really her thing. That was the real Nina Simone, but everything around it, I think it was too much for her.”
Though the A Team claimed absolute allegiance to the cause of Nina Simone, some questioned the scope of their involvement. “I think that the team made a lot of decisions that my mother wasn’t aware of,” said Lisa Simone. “And there were times when I questioned that—what about her heart? What about her well-being? They saw an opportunity, understandably so. But if it was about well-roundedness, then I think there was more that could have been done.”
Nina’s lawyer and accountant also didn’t reveal her finances to her touring squad. The A Team were never told about her royalty or licensing income, perhaps to prevent them from stepping out of their zones of responsibility or challenging their own fee rates.
One additional key to stabilizing Simone was making a medical change. De Bruin asked a friend who was a doctor to examine her in Nijmegen. He prescribed a medication called Trilafon. He told the team that it would help keep her calm without knocking her out the way a Valium would, but that over time it would affect her motor skills, her speech, her piano playing; he advised that they could deal with those effects or deal with the degenerative effects of her illness.
Eventually, the changes in her dexterity resulting from the medication would lead to widespread rumors that Simone had become an alcoholic or a drug addict. “All of us were asked, for quite a few years until she died, about her being crazy,” said Schackman. “We never offered up that part of her being. We protected that until she was gone. It was nobody’s business. She started taking the Trilafon and it really helped. When she was on her meds, it was really good.”
What helped was that Nina had now understood the need for treatment and its requirements. “They’re to keep my stress down,” she said. “It’s more psychological than anything. I take four tablets a day, two in the morning and two at night. We keep the same level all the time. And even though you’re not stressed, take them anyway because they work over a period of time in your system.”
Although she had experimented with recreational drugs when she was younger, now Simone required chemical assistance to stay on track. It made a huge difference—though ironically, whereas in the usual celebrity story self-medication or thrill seeking leads to dangerous drug abuse, Simone now needed to keep herself on a regular and disciplined schedule of drug taking; the problems started when she did not take her pills.
Which is not to say that she always took them. “When she’s not taking the medicine, no one can do anything,” said Gonzalez. “It’s complete panic and we look like three chickens without a head running around—‘Where is she? Does she have a gun? Does she have a knife?’ ”
According to De Bruin, Simone lived in extremes, perhaps a remnant of the chaos and abuse she endured in her relationship with Andrew Stroud. Tellingly, her volatility frequently presented itself in violence or the threat of violence toward men with whom she was close. One night in Athens, she decided that she was going to kill Gonzalez—and was insistent on this plan until her team calmed her dow
n in London. Yet on other days she could be charming and pleasant. Her friends never knew which Nina they were going to meet. “She used to sit in my office and help put the faxes in alphabetical order,” De Bruin said. “The people who worked for me loved when Nina came to the office and worked with them.”
In 1989, she received an offer from an old fan. Pete Townshend was working on an adaptation of The Iron Man, a story by England’s poet laureate, Ted Hughes, and was casting various singers for the different parts. He sent a note to Gonzalez asking if she might be available to sing a song as the Space Dragon.
“The letter he wrote let me realize what a star she is,” said Gonzalez. “It was like a young kid writing to her, saying, ‘Dear Nina, I don’t even know if you remember me. When I met you in London, I was a starving musician—I don’t know if you remember the name of the group, it was called the Who.’ It was fantastic. And when I was in the studio with them, he handled her with kid gloves and you could tell he was so pleased that he was doing this album with her.”
“When she arrived, she was like the queen,” Townshend said. “She said, ‘You can all call me Doctor!’—she had just gotten a doctorate. We modified her voice in places, using an old analog vocoder so that she sounded like a dragon. And she was quite happy to do that. I paid her really well, I gave her twenty-five thousand dollars for one song.
“About halfway through one of the days, she started to demand tickets to go and see Les Misérables. She would turn to her manager and he would kind of go (shrug), and I said, ‘My PA will work it out for you.’ But she was a complete delight.”
But Simone was getting tired again and attempted to lay down some boundaries about how her touring was going to go. One night in France, Gonzalez, De Bruin, and Schackman all found notes slipped under the doors of their hotel rooms; Simone was calling a meeting. When they gathered, she presented a long list of new rules: she would play only two concerts per week, she wouldn’t ride for more than an hour in a car, no more flying on small airplanes.
Her new travel moratoriums had created an immediate problem that night: They were in Toulon, and the next day they had a show in Deauville. The travel would require either a small plane direct to Deauville, or a big plane and then a four-hour drive, both of which she had just prohibited.
De Bruin started to improvise a plan. He told Simone that she deserved a private plane, like Michael Jackson’s. Then, to buy himself some time as he worked out his next move, he sat in the bar and had a glass of wine. He came back to her, saying that a jumbo jet would cost $225,000, so would she give him permission to rent a cheaper, smaller plane. Meantime, he told Gonzalez to book the tickets on the Air France flight to Deauville that they intended to take in the first place.
Next, he returned to Simone and said that if she would give him $2,000 he could sell the remaining seats on the flight, trying to fool her into thinking that the small commercial plane they were taking was actually a private plane for her and that he was defraying the cost by filling it with additional passengers. It was a ploy she likely saw through, but she played along. They arranged for her to sit in the front row, and as soon as the plane took off she got out of her seat and started asking the confused passengers how they liked her plane. When they arrived, she told De Bruin what a good trip it had been.
A few weeks later, De Bruin and Simone had dinner at Simone’s home in Holland. De Bruin recalled that she looked at him and said knowingly, “Gerrit, you got me there with that plane, didn’t you?” He responded, “Yes, Nina—oh, by the way, here is your $2,000.” Returning the money confirmed the scheme. In these cases, it didn’t really matter whether she bought the ruse or not—it was more important that she know to what lengths her associates would go to make her happy and comfortable, and that they didn’t judge her when she was overly particular.
But even when she put together a productive touring run, her extravagance was becoming expensive. She insisted that she travel first-class and required that someone stay with her. And her impulsiveness meant things could add up quickly. She once took a vacation in Puerto Rico, an all-inclusive package, and then decided she wanted to stay a few days longer—which meant buying another first-class ticket, costing an additional $7,000 or $8,000. The problem wasn’t necessarily the money—she was sometimes pulling in as much as $60,000 a night for her performances—but it was indicative of a renewed sense of entitlement that, if some of her friends felt was earned, others found off-putting.
A phone call with Roland Grivelle, her sometime drummer and tour manager, recorded by Stephen Cleary during the sessions for I Put a Spell on You, demonstrates how adamant she had become about traveling in a certain style. “You better get this straight,” she snapped. “I told you I am not going unless it’s first-class. You tell him that Nina refuses to go second-class. There is no but about it. If I tell you that again I’m going to fire you, man. Did you hear me?”
As Simone’s touring took several laps through Europe, Gonzalez worked to reconnect her with Lisa, whom she had not seen for years. “I’m very family oriented,” he said, “I’m Latin, and I really wanted to get Nina with her daughter, because I thought it was just the right place to be. I wasn’t gonna force it, but if I could help it along, why not?”
He suggested that Lisa come to Simone’s concert at the Olympia in Paris. “I didn’t prepare Lisa at all,” he said, “but I did prepare Nina. ‘You see how I am with my mother’—little stupid things—‘It would be nice to see you together.’ You have to start from somewhere.”
Roger Nupie said that the Olympia show worked out in the end. “Lisa was there as a surprise for Nina. Nina was moved, and she sang ‘Brown Baby’ for Lisa—just one verse, and she started to cry and she went into another song.”
“Lisa came, and it seemed to be better,” said Gonzalez. “After that, I don’t get involved in personal relationships, I’m not a psychologist. I can’t remedy years of hurt when you don’t even know where the wound is.”
Simone had grown tired of the residence in Nijmegen; she shuttled back and forth to her home in Los Angeles. In 1992, her touring took her much farther afield—she played in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan and returned to the United States, including stops at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. For a while she stayed in an apartment that De Bruin found for her in Amsterdam, but after a trip with a music publisher to the South of France she bought a new home in Bouc-Bel-Air, near Aix-en-Provence. “She felt comfortable, she felt at home in southern France,” said Leopoldo Fleming.
On top of the more extensive touring, there were other shining moments in her professional life. In 1992 I Put a Spell on You was published, and a few months later the John Badham film Point of No Return was released, with five of Simone’s songs featured in the soundtrack—major exposure in a film that opened at number 2 at the box office. Nina’s legal counsel used this placement as a chance to renegotiate her deal with RCA, quadrupling her royalty rates.
There were other opportunities that she didn’t take advantage of. Elton John asked her to participate in a duets album. In the studio, Simone was being difficult, and rather than sing her part in “Sacrifice” in her own style, she uncharacteristically decided to imitate John’s delivery. “Elton doesn’t want you to sing like Elton, he wants you to sing like Nina,” Gonzalez told her. In the end, John, who was a huge Simone fan, grew too frustrated and Sinéad O’Connor sang the second part on the recording.
But the biggest news was that Simone released A Single Woman, her first new studio album in eight years. She was on a new label, Elektra Records, and working with a prominent producer, André Fischer. Formerly the drummer in the funk band Rufus, Fischer had worked with numerous R&B singers and such artists as Tony Bennett and Nancy Wilson; in 1991, he had produced his then-wife Natalie Cole’s Grammy-winning Unforgettable.
The material on the album was an odd mix—three songs by Rod McKuen and some schmaltzy Broadway ballads (“Papa, Can You Hear Me?,” “If I Should Lose You”). One song i
n particular had a special emotional resonance for her and took her back to a moment when she felt loved and desired. A version of “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” was dedicated to Errol Barrow; it was the song he had sung to Simone after chasing her through a meadow in Barbados soon after they met.
It was a survivor’s record. “The songs on this album reflect a life lived with risk and integrity, humor and somber realism,” wrote Ntozake Shange in the liner notes to A Single Woman. “A woman in the process of defining her life, deciding her fate, accepting, without shame or guilt, her own needs and desires….The rights and responsibilities, thrills and dissolutions of love between friends, paramours, parents and children are explored with legendary Simone dexterity and compassion.”
The album reached number 3 on the jazz charts, but reviews were largely indifferent. Though it was inspiring to see Simone back on a major label, with actual arrangements rather than hastily recorded live performances, the material was subpar and the production dull and gloppy. “A Single Woman aims to do nothing more than entertain pleasantly,” wrote Arion Berger in Rolling Stone, “and that’s the one thing Nina Simone, effortless when provoking, grousing or despairing, just can’t do.”
A Single Woman would be Simone’s last album. When it was released, she had just turned sixty years old. Asked how she felt about getting older, she had replied, “Don’t like it. Does it have a good side? Wisdom, I think, but that’s all. I don’t like getting fatter, I don’t like losing my voice. I like gaining money, that’s a good side of it.
“I don’t want to be alive after I’m sixty-five,” she had said in another interview around that time. “I want to enjoy some of the fruits of my labor now before I get old, before I’m seen as being old. Young people, they’re attracted to me and I want to keep it that way. I may change my mind when I get a lover and when I get someone that I’m married to, I may change my mind about when I want to die. But I don’t want to be around until I’m sixty-nine or seventy.”