Not Feelin’ Good… meet Nina Si- moan
Her piano playing was amazing. Her voice was sublime. My Baby Just Cares For Me made her a star. But as this unsettling biography reveals, Nina Simone didn’t seem to care for anyone, especially her fans, who she called ‘snakes’ and ‘spineless worms’
‘Dusty Springfield tried to be friends. Simone called her a honky, and then hurled a glass of whiskey in her face’
Nina Simone was never the easiest of performers; in fact, she might well have been the trickiest. In the early Eighties, I went to see her play at a concert in the Royal Festival Hall in London. A uniformed nurse sat near her onstage, and from time to time would lead her offstage for a short break before leading her back on.
Towards the end of the concert, Simone turned to the audience and explained that in the early hours of the morning, back in her hotel room, she got very lonely, so she’d like us all to write our names and phone numbers on a piece of paper and bring them to the front of the stage.
The predominantly white middle-class audience dutifully queued to deliver their phone numbers to a woman who, in any other walk of life, they would have taken pains to avoid. Heaven knows how many of them were subject to a late-night call, or what happened when they were.
One shudders to think. Simone was never any good with strangers. As the author of this biography explains, she would sometimes be accompanied by bodyguards ‘ to protect the public from her, not to protect her from the public’.
In Paris, she attacked a fan with a knife. Around the time of her Festival Hall concert, when she was living in Marseille, a taxi driver refused to drop one of her associates at her house ‘because she’s too dangerous’. In Casablanca, at the opening of a swanky new penthouse club, to be called The Nina Simone Room in her honour, she started snapping at the audience, berating them for not understanding her music. When a female fan called out that they loved her, and just wanted to hear her play, Simone started arguing back, so much so that the woman said, ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to this’, and walked out.
Simone then leapt from her piano stool and chased her with a knife. The day was saved by the quick reaction of the guitarist who ran after her and held her back. She liked to pick fights with audiences, or at very least goad them: I once saw her at Ronnie Scott’s in London playing an unbelievably monotonous version of
When The Saints Go Marching In for 20 minutes with the sole purpose of annoying us.
On another occasion, she refused to go onstage until she had her money in hand. When the theatre manager told her it was in an envelope on the piano, she went on and, without a word to the audience, began counting the money by spreading it out on the piano. She then decided to take the cash backstage, but as she made her way from the piano she tripped over the stool. The audience began to laugh, at which she harangued them from the front of the stage. ‘We love you, Nina!’ someone called out. ‘No you don’t,’ she replied.
Another time, two boys in a neighbouring garden made the mistake of imitating her deep voice on the phone. She yelled at them to stop. When they carried on, she fired a gun at them. Both of them were injured; one had to have 11 pieces of shot removed from his leg. She was sentenced to a suspended eight months in custody, and ordered to undergo psychiatric counselling.
It may be worth pointing out that she was never hierarchical in the way she distributed her temper: she would turn on fellow stars with equal gusto. Feeling sorry for her, Dusty Springfield once tried to extend the hand of friendship. ‘She was having a few problems, which I thought I could solve by being nice... I was warned not to approach her but – I knew better, didn’t I?’ In return, Simone called Dusty a honky, and then hurled a glass of whiskey in her face.
What Happened, Miss Simone? is the title of this new biography, as it was of the fine documentary film on which it is based. It’s a good question: how could this woman who was blessed with such a rich, touching, empathetic voice, have been quite so monstrous in person? What happened?
It is a question that is never adequately answered. ‘If she was both brilliant and unstable, did she not live through a moment in history that was also brilliant and unstable?’ asks the author – to which the only possible answer is ‘yes, but so did millions of other people’. If her psychopathy was purely the product of her conflicted times, then how come other, equally talented black performers such as Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald and Odetta were able to remain sane? She was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina in 1933. Her parents were poor, but not desperately poor: her father owned a car and had his own dry-cleaning business, while her mother was an ordained Methodist minister.
From the start, she was prodigiously talented. She was still pretty much a toddler when she started playing the piano in church. Aged six, she accompanied a choir in a theatre, and was spotted by a British woman, Muriel Mazzanovich, who was married to a Russian painter. Mazzanovich took her up, gave her free lessons, introduced her to the work of Bach and other classical composers, and sowed the seed in her head that she was destined to become the very first black female concert pianist.
She was just ten years old when she gave her debut classical recital in front of 200 people. When her parents were asked to move out of their front-row seats to make room for white people, young Nina put her foot down and refused to perform until they were returned to their original seats. It was characteristically bold, and perhaps the most purely fair-minded action that she would ever perform.
A few years later, she failed to win a music
scholarship at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.
‘It took me about six months to realise it was because I was black,’ she said. But, as the author points out, there had been black students at Curtis since the year before she was born.
Though associated throughout the rest of her life with the civil rights movement, she was equally unpleasant to black people, even managing to ostracise the amiable black intellectual James Baldwin, and refusing to admire Billie Holiday. She once rounded on a chattering black audience in a New York club, saying, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on, don’t you know how to behave yourselves? You people want equal rights? You don’t deserve civil rights, you don’t know how to behave yourselves... I’m gonna tell you right now how to get civil rights. Go home, take a bath, use underarm deodorant, and that’s how you get civil rights!’
So Nina Simone was no Martin Luther King: indeed, the only time she met him she told him firmly where they differed. ‘I’m not nonviolent,’ she explained. Her love life was a bed of nails. Her second husband – who later became her manager – was a Harlem police officer who had been married three times before. Insanely jealous, he pulled a gun on her after she had pocketed a note from a fan, then beat her up and raped her. This was before their wedding, but she went ahead with it anyway.
‘They were both nuts,’ is the simple explanation offered by someone who knew them both well.
She was also pretty unpleasant to her daughter Lisa, perhaps jealous of her beauty and her easy-going personality.
And yet, for all her disastrous character flaws, she possessed the most profoundly beautiful voice, a voice that seems to resonate with a sublime understanding of the human condition.
If it didn’t come from her heart, then where on earth did it come from? This is the age-old question, asked of every first-rate artist who also happens to be a fifth-rate human being. The genius of some artists is born of their yearning to be what they are not.
In 1977, at a music trade show at Cannes, Nina Simone rounded, once again, on her audience. She was a genius, she said, and they were snakes, thieves and spineless worms.
They booed her, but she was probably only telling the truth.