What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  CHAPTER 15

  To be a Christian, you do certain things, you don’t do certain things, and these things are rules that are unbreakable in Mama’s eyes. Now, I broke all her rules and still became a preacher. What you going to do with that?

  Nina’s move to France, against the wishes of the A Team, gave her a measure of independence that challenged her. She was geographically separated from her closest allies and her mood swings required constant attention and management; being on her own carried great risks.

  De Bruin had to work in Holland, so he started a business. He came to France as often as he could, but without her advisers nearby, Simone stopped taking her medication. She called him excitedly one day, saying that she was in a restaurant in Aixen-Provence, reading a copy of the Herald Tribune, and that she truly felt alive. He asked if she had taken her pills and she said, “No, the medicine is downing me. I don’t want it anymore.”

  “I took the plane to get there, but it was too late already. The furniture was burning. Accident with the car. She refused to eat her medicine. I mixed it in her food and that calmed her down after two days. But I wasn’t able to do that all day, I had my own life.”

  The Trilafon needed to be taken consistently to be effective, as Nina knew, so her decisions to skip doses when she felt steady could have disastrous consequences. “She would think that she was cured, and then she’d not take it,” said Gonzalez. “We’d go through a week of hell, because sometimes we had dates waiting and had to plan how we could keep her. We didn’t know what was gonna happen. There was a point that even the A Team couldn’t control.”

  Other than a visit to Tunisia, all her concerts in 1994 took place in France; a date scheduled in August for Lörrach, Germany, was canceled. Meanwhile, Bouc-Bel-Air was proving an uncomfortably isolated spot to settle.

  When Roger Nupie came to visit her, he was distraught to see how she was living. Simone had called Nupie and asked him to come because “something bad happened,” but she wouldn’t tell him what it was over the phone. He flew into Marseilles and got in a taxi; when he gave the driver the address, he initially refused to make the trip, saying that he knew who lived there and that she was too dangerous.

  “She was all alone in the house,” he said. “There was no water, no electricity because she hadn’t paid the bills. The girl working for her had run away. I found her there in a very poor condition. She was sitting there on the porch of her house, and this image I will never forget, she looked so lost and so lonely.”

  When he arrived, she informed him what had happened: she had shot two boys who lived next door.

  She had been making phone calls in her garden, and the neighbor kids were imitating her deep voice. She yelled at them to stop, but when they didn’t she fired buckshot into their yard, injuring them both; one boy had to have eleven pieces of shot removed from his leg. (“It’s the one time on record she actually shot somebody,” said Andy Stroud, “after all those years always threatening that she had a gun and she was gonna shoot you.”)

  In August, a month after the shooting, Simone was given a suspended eight-month jail term and was ordered to undergo psychiatric counseling. The following week, she moved back to Los Angeles.

  Back Stateside, Nina was again hospitalized for observation after her sister Frances filed a complaint with the LAPD following a particularly nasty fight with a neighbor. There Nina met a young man named Clifton Henderson—he was an orderly, but Simone apparently thought he was a nurse. He was a young, gay fan of hers, and she befriended him quickly. She even stayed a few extra weeks beyond what was required, treating the hospital like a spa retreat, just to be close to Clifton. When she finally left, he was hired to work for her in France, making sure she ate well and rested sufficiently, as her outbursts seemed closely connected to irregular eating and sleeping habits.

  “With the sense of humor that we have, we laugh all the time,” Henderson said in 2000. “We spend a lot of time together and the relation just grew from there, and it continues to grow. I think by being an artist as she is, and me being just a simple person, our relation just clicked together.”

  But while Henderson, unlike the A Team members, was easily able to relocate to her remote location, some people felt he was less than an ideal guardian. “Clifton cooked for her and cleaned the mess, and slowly Nina got weaker, and Clifton didn’t take very good care of her,” said De Bruin. “I hadn’t seen Nina for two months. I came to France, and she gained so much weight that I got so angry with Clifton.” (Others speculate, however, that her weight gain was the result of cancer medications she was taking, rather than any neglect on the part of Clifton.)

  Concerns about Henderson, though, weren’t just restricted to his abilities as a caretaker. As Simone became more dependent on his help, he started to push her for greater responsibilities.

  “Gradually, he took over managing her,” said Schackman. “He said, ‘I’m gonna leave if you don’t make me your manager.’ She bought him a Mercedes, he had a little condo a couple of miles from her house—he made her believe that he was away with his mother somewhere, but he was enjoying quite a life.”

  And as Henderson moved in, he made sure that Simone’s friends and associates were moved out. “It’s the old Hollywood story of pushing your close people away,” said Schackman. “He pushed us all away.”

  De Bruin, meanwhile, thought there might be some sketchy maneuvers on Clifton’s part around Nina’s finances. He confronted her, asking how she—who had always watched his spending like a hawk—could let this happen. She said that she had no choice; he was in Holland, Al was in America, she had no one to help or even to feed her.

  “That was not the Nina that I knew,” said De Bruin. “I knew a furious lady. If I would have ever stolen a dollar from Nina and she would have found out, she would have killed me. But now she was weak, she could hardly walk, she needed people around her to [take] care of her. So she let go.”

  But it might not have been as simple and villainous as the A Team, with their limited perspective on her finances, thought. Henderson never handled any of Simone’s business affairs—the title he was given was largely ceremonial. And he may have driven the Mercedes that Simone bought, but the car wasn’t his own; it belonged to Nina and he chauffeured her from place to place in it. So Gonzalez remained Simone’s manager and Henderson was her “personal manager.”

  Tensions remained high between Henderson and the A Team. For his part, Schackman hit his limit at one show when Henderson removed his daughter from the side of the stage because the young manager felt that she had disrespected him. The guitarist lunged at Henderson and they had to be separated. After that, Henderson refused to let him speak to Simone and wouldn’t put through his telephone calls.

  “It became very difficult for any of us to have contact with her,” said Nupie. “If we tried to call her, she was never there, she was in hospital. Once I called her during the night, and when she heard me, she said, ‘You son of a bitch, you never call me.’ I said, ‘I call you all the time, but they always tell me you are not there.’ ”

  —

  New to Simone’s business was agent Rusty Michael, president of Nashville-based Fat City Artists. A company bio said that Fat City worked with over 135 artists, none of the others especially distinguished, providing “management and booking services for clients as diverse as Nina Simone, Max Weinberg Seven, John Carter Cash, The Amazing Kreskin, and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.” A series of undated recordings of Simone’s telephone conversations with Michael in the mid-1990s offers a rare and often disturbing glimpse into her mind at the time.

  She frequently started from a place of paranoia and hostility—about her business, her health, her family, her neighbors. She claimed that her dogs had been poisoned, that she didn’t trust the doctors who wanted to take blood samples. In truth, she didn’t trust Michael, her family, or anyone—and she was very much alone, and, she said, “very angry and violent.”

  Michael repeatedly ca
me to her with offers to perform for fees of $20,000 to $25,000, but she refused to consider anything under $35,000. He described himself as a “turnaround specialist,” and practically pled with her to listen to him: “I’m an excellent negotiator. I also used to be a stockbroker. These people don’t have anything on me. This is what I do for a living, and if there was a nickel more that I could get, I would get it.”

  Though money was steadily coming in from record sales and licensing, Simone insisted that her financial situation was dire, that she “ain’t got no more money than what’s in [my] fucking pocket” and that she often lived day to day. Yet she also maintained that she needed larger fees because she had major expenses to cover, such as $17,000 to have her car shipped to France if she played there, because she was a big star in that country and couldn’t be seen riding in an ordinary Renault. When Michael said this plan was crazy, she upped the ante, saying that she needed a Learjet “like Bill Cosby,” complete with a diplomatic passport so that she could breeze through customs and be “given first-class treatment all the way.”

  Michael tried many times to persuade Simone to get back into the studio and make a new album. She refused, but in conversation she teased out the outline of what could have been a fascinating record—Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times,” Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” a novelty tune about Jackie Robinson, Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry,” “Love Me Tender,” the gospel song “When I See the Blood I Will Pass Over You.” (Several of these, including the Prince and Marley songs, she had actually tried for A Single Woman, and the mostly uninspiring recordings were included on a 2008 “Deluxe Edition” reissue of the album.)

  Michael Jackson was all over the news during this time, and Rusty Michael asked her if she had ever met Jackson. She seemed to identify with aspects of Jackson’s plight, especially his wrestling with issues of fame and race.

  She said that she had met Jackson once when he was young. “I told him not to change his hair, his face. He was too small to listen then.” Michael asked Nina if she understood Jackson’s marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, and she said that she had initially thought it was great because he needed to be with someone at his level of fame, but that then she had seen that it could never actually work. “I should have known that being in the United States, people don’t let you alone,” she said, adding, “I had hoped that he had married somebody black, but of course that’s dreaming.”

  This undying dream of black pride would soon come to symbolic fruition when she participated in a truly historic event. On July 24, 1998, Simone was a special guest at Nelson Mandela’s eightieth birthday in Johannesburg. “It was awesome, to meet a man who’s been in jail twenty-seven years, and comes out without bitterness,” she later told the Guardian. “That’s incredible! But he had faith in the people and he had the knowledge that they were behind him.”

  Amid other guests, including Stevie Wonder, Naomi Campbell, and her old friend Miriam Makeba, Simone stood next to Mandela onstage at Ellis Park Stadium; on her other side was Michael Jackson, the only time she appeared with the self-proclaimed King of Pop. She was overweight and appeared a bit shaky—at one point, Jackson seemed to be steadying her—but she stood out in her strapless white blouse, surrounded by the two black-clad legends and dozens of celebrants in African dress. It was a triumphant moment for her, standing in front of an ecstatic crowd, on the continent she loved, at the invitation of a hero who had carried forth the kind of struggle for racial equality to which she had devoted so many years and so much of her soul.

  By this time, Simone was collecting honors and tributes for her storied career; in the next few years, she would be named an honorary ambassador of Côte d’Ivoire and an honorary citizen of Atlanta and would receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in Dublin and a Diamond Award for Excellence in Music from the Association of African American Music. Her recording of “I Loves You, Porgy” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

  Despite such long-awaited recognition, Nina remained unhappy with her personal life. Her primary concern was the fact that she was getting old and that she had never remarried after leaving Andrew Stroud. “My music is first in my life…but secondly I would love to be married,” she said in 1999. “I’m unlucky at marriages, not so unlucky at love.” The stories of her lost loves—Edney Whiteside, Errol Barrow, C.C. Dennis—dominate the pages of I Put a Spell on You.

  Even after her failed unions with Don Ross and Andy Stroud, the institution of marriage meant something powerful to Nina—unconditional love, absolute acceptance, or the sort of stability and reliability that had always been missing in her life. The final song on A Single Woman, and the album’s only Simone composition, was titled “Marry Me”—“Marry me, marry me / Come and share my destiny / Pair with me, dare with me / Stand up and declare with me.”

  Some of Nina’s friends thought she might be addressing her longtime confidant Gerrit De Bruin. “Nina was very much into that,” he said, “but I explained to her, ‘Listen, Nina, friendship is more valuable than love, and we should keep it as a friendship.’ That’s how we went on, and in the later years she became more and more dependent. She was lonely, and the group around Nina made it a bit less sharp because we were always there.

  “She had always those stories about the deep love she felt for somebody. But it was never answered, and that, sad enough, is because of her condition. People weren’t strong enough to support Nina’s mind being joyful, suddenly being very sad, very angry. She chased people away. She attracted people and then chased them away.”

  She also asked Roger Nupie if he would marry her. He reminded her that he was gay, and she replied, “That’s your problem, darling—I never wanted you to be gay in the first place.” She insisted on meeting his boyfriend, as proof that he wasn’t just spurning her. When he brought his companion to a concert in London, and she saw that he was black, her tone changed. She asked if he had any brothers who were single, and then played “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” for them backstage—changing the words to “Young, Gifted, Black and White.”

  Nina remained loyal to Clifton Henderson. He kept her eating and sleeping regularly in a safe environment, but he also hired a bodyguard/assistant named Javier, an aspiring musician who started joining her onstage. “There was a time Nina Simone never would have let someone like that play with her,” said Schackman, “but by that time, she didn’t care, and she was very medicated.”

  Most significant, though, is that sometime during her time in France Nina Simone developed breast cancer. Her physical decline was exacerbated by her isolation, and also by the serious weight gain from her cancer medication.

  “To me, Nina was very open with her physical problems,” said De Bruin. “I had a friend who was a doctor, and he took care of Nina when she was in Holland. She had her own dentist, her own doctor, and if she phoned they came or she could go there immediately.

  “That was not the case in France, plus there was not the intimate ties that Nina and I had, that made it possible for her to be open over her physical things like disease or whatever. She would have shown me, because she had a wound on her breast, which didn’t heal. Apparently that had gone on for a long time, and I had no possibility to visit her. They kept me away from her.”

  Maybe because she knew she wasn’t well, Simone’s thoughts turned to her own aging mother, who was into her nineties. Aware that time was running out for a reconciliation, she expressed her wish to make peace with the woman who had never seemed to appreciate or recognize her accomplishments.

  “I want the opportunity, before she dies, to give her either a trip around the world—by ship, preferably—or that mobile home she’s wanted for twenty years, or/and to have her as a guest in my home, with servants and all the high ways I used to be,” she had once said. “I want her to see me as Nina Simone, someone she maybe will never like, but someone who she’s compelled to respect.”

  Late in Mary Kate’s life, she was staying in the Sacramento area, in the care of one of the Wa
ymon siblings. Nina came out to spend time with her mother, and afterward described a joyful visit; she felt so at peace following their reunion that she briefly discussed retiring to the Bay Area to be closer to her mother and assist with her care. Although she never relocated to northern California, Nina did establish a trust for Mary Kate Waymon that supported her until her final days.

  If Mary Kate—who died in 2001, at the age of ninety-eight—had never supported Nina’s entertainment career, Lisa was now making the choice to follow in her mother’s footsteps. After she finished her air force service, she began singing professionally, working under the name “Simone.” Her stage debut was a national tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. In 1996, she took a slot as a swing and female understudy in the original Broadway production of Rent, and later that year she performed the lead role of Mimi Marquez in its first national tour.

  Unlike her own mother, Nina showed her support for Lisa; when Rent came to Chicago, she had second-row seats, and her daughter’s performance moved her to tears. But while she was visiting, the cast had its holiday party and Nina played the star rather than the mother, holding court and treating Lisa like one of her subjects. Though she respected her daughter’s accomplishments, it was still difficult for her to act maternal toward Lisa—or anyone else.

  In 1998, Lisa was pregnant—which didn’t make things any easier when she was asked to open for her mother at London’s Royal Albert Hall. As the concert approached, Simone called her daughter, saying she was in a bad mood and threatening to cancel the show.

  But Lisa stood up to her mother. “She started saying all kinds of mean things,” said Lisa, “and I said, ‘I’m not gonna deal with this, and if you want to be a part of this family you’re gonna have to learn to be nice.’ I called my father and told him what had happened, and he said to me, ‘She has reached the height of her career, you’re trying to get there—you do everything short of embarrassing yourself to get on that stage.’ ”