Nina’s move to Switzerland complicated Lisa’s life. “Everything was fine as long as she wasn’t around,” Lisa recalled, “and then she decided to come and turn my world upside down.” Lisa resolved to visit her father and find out once and for all if he loved her. Maybe he didn’t, but whatever the case, she told Nina, “we gonna get this straight.” When she arrived in New York, Lisa didn’t tell Andy she had no return ticket to Switzerland. He thought she was staying three days. On the fifth, she told him she wasn’t leaving.
Lisa’s separation from Nina had been building over time and marked the beginning of occasional estrangements between mother and daughter that would last more than a decade. A full-fledged teenager now, Lisa had ricocheted between intense love for her mother and anger, especially in the immediate aftermath of the split with Andy. Nina was “not the same person I remembered living in Mount Vernon,” Lisa said. “I remember thinking she had turned into a monster. Mommy was selfish in a lot of ways, and I often felt that if she had taken two seconds to consider people around her, especially me, who depended on her 100 percent, she would have made a different decision with her behavior.”
Lisa’s departure came at a fortuitous moment given the uncertainty in Nina’s life. She had almost no work, but at the end of January sponsors of MIDEM, an organization of European music executives, invited her to perform before a thousand members at the group’s annual convention in Cannes. In theory, any number of these individuals might help her career, but Nina was in no mood to curry favor. She showed up forty-five minutes late to the gilded Les Ambassadeurs Room of the city’s casino, and instead of opening with a song, Nina asked the restless crowd to join her in a sing-along. They were having none of it. She spoke in English, which probably hindered communication, but even if many couldn’t understand her precise words, they caught the irritation in her voice. “Loosen up!” she hollered. “Are you all dead or something? The only ghosts I ever saw were white…you asked for that. Come on now,” she went on, her agitation growing. “Let’s have you all a lot less tight. I guess you people are from the inside track of the music business, and I was supposed to be dead in 1970.”
“SING!” someone shouted from the audience.
“You can’t pay me enough money to sing when I don’t feel like it,” Nina hissed back at the anonymous provocateur. “I will never be your clown. God gave me this gift—and I am a genius. I worked at my craft for six to fourteen hours a day, I studied and learned through practice. I am not here just to entertain you. But how can I be alive when you are so dead?”
“SING!” someone else shouted.
“Come up here and and say that,” Nina retorted. “No you won’t because you are a worm, a spineless worm without spine in your body. I sing when I am ready.”
Nina’s good friend James Baldwin, who was in the audience, hurried onstage to embrace her, realizing that something was terribly wrong even if he didn’t know what had set her off. His comforting gesture temporarily relieved the tension in the room, and Nina started to sing, glaring at the audience much of the time. Before her final song, Bertolt Brecht’s “Alabama Song” from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny, Nina declared, “The inside track of showbiz is deadly. It denies everyone the right to have fun.” Not only that, according to Variety’s reporter, Nina charged that some of her unreleased tapes had been acquired from record companies by unscrupulous operators; tapes had been pirated by crooks and reissued on their own labels; and she had gotten no publishing money for seven years. “You are all crooks!” she thundered. “You owe me… . I don’t wear a painted smile on my face, like Louis Armstrong,” she said as she left the stage, lobbing her last insult, this one aimed at a beloved music legend.
Those who had not already departed applauded, exhausted by an evening that had been extraordinary in its bizarre spontaneity, “and because we stayed,” one fan said, “and because we loved her, it was sheer agony.”
NINA HAD NO PLANS to return to the United States until she received an invitation from an unlikely place. Amherst College, the prestigious school in western Massachusetts, wanted to present her with an honorary doctor of music degree at the May 29 graduation ceremony. She could hardly say no to such an award, which was, considering Amherst’s reputation, even more unexpected than the honor from Malcolm X College in Chicago. Amherst was taking care of everything. All Nina had to do was show up.
By long-standing custom the board of trustees made the annual selection in private and pledged to secrecy those few individuals who had to coordinate the graduation ceremony. No one knew Nina was an honoree until just a few days before the event. The proclamation that accompanied her degree recognized the range of her public life: “Nina Simone, a singer, pianist and composer, who has recorded many performances with RCA Victor Records. She has also spoken out about drug abuse and the political rights of black Americans.” The honor thrilled Nina. From that moment she took to calling herself “Dr. Simone.”
She went back to Switzerland after the event, but it wasn’t a very long stay. George Wein had invited her to be part of the Newport Jazz Festival in New York City and had scheduled her for a midnight performance at Carnegie Hall Sunday, June 26. He either hadn’t heard about the MIDEM flare-up, or if he had, he went ahead anyway. This would be Nina’s first performance in the city in three years, and the press coverage suggested that she would be warmly welcomed. Her program with Lukas Foss at the Brooklyn Academy of Music early in 1973 had been a success, and the plan was to pair her again with Foss and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
Nina arrived back in the city in time for rehearsals, but they went poorly. “She just freaked ‘cause she wasn’t comfortable,” said Darlene Chan, one of George Wein’s associates, and with Carnegie full of expectant fans Sunday evening, Nina went missing. Wein had known earlier that something was wrong and sent Chan and his wife Joyce to learn whatever they could. “Joyce Wein and I called all the hotels at the airport. We found her at the Ramada Inn,” Chan recalled. “And then we went up to her room. We kept knocking on the door. She had the chain on the door. She would say, ‘What do you want?’ We told her the hall was sold out, people are upset… . She just wasn’t going to let us in. We made enough commotion that security came up,” Chan added. “They thought we were like prostitutes! The bottom line—she didn’t come.”
Ticket holders received refunds, and the next day, Wein spoke graciously when reporters wanted to know what had happened. “She has a fear and unhappiness when she is in America,” he said. She had stayed a week after receiving her honorary degree, “but then she couldn’t stand it and went back to Switzerland. We tried to surround her with love, but there’s no understanding her unless you live with it on a day to day basis… . Nina hasn’t had much of a career lately,” he added, “and we wanted to help. I just feel sad and sorry. I have great respect for Nina. I think she is a fantastic artist.”
Wein had advanced Nina $8,000, and though he told Jet he didn’t intend to sue her, he nonetheless retained the option to file a claim for another $15,000 in related musicians’ fees.
The day after Nina’s no-show, Gino Francesconi, who worked in the Carnegie Hall box office, took the most unusual call he could remember. It was one of Nina’s fans, distraught at her failure to show up. He just wanted someone to know, he told Francesconi, that he was breaking all of her records, and over the phone Francesconi could hear the sound of splintering vinyl before the man hung up.
NINA’S DEBUT ALBUM on Bethlehem Records, Little Girl Blue, now almost twenty years old, was reissued once again in the summer, this time by a British company. “Porgy,” “Plain Gold Ring,” and “Love Me or Leave Me,” among others, were a reminder of Nina’s originality, which sometimes had gotten lost when she became, as one foreign reviewer put it, “a more mannered and stylised singer.” The release served another purpose, too: keeping Nina’s name in front of the music-buying public during another long absence from performing.
Nina did a job in Amsterdam October 1 and then returned to the London stage early in December, her first show there in six years. She played solo before a packed house at Drury Lane, no sidemen at all. Perhaps anticipating the question of where she had been, she provided a simple answer. “The music business punished me,” she announced, an interpretation of her troubles that revealed just how much she felt the victim.
Even her most controversial compositions, “Mississippi Goddam” and “Four Women,” still had power with the piano as her only accompaniment. “Elton John can’t play piano worth a damn,” she sniped at one point, putting some distance in her mind between his pop success and her classical training. The evening, however, had a dark tone. Derek Jewell of the London Times, an admitted fan, wrote afterward that Nina seemed “to be carrying the cross of some great personal tragedy.” She occasionally lost her way during a song but just kept going, he noted, “and made up free-form ballads as she went.”
Spending Christmas in Israel before a New Year’s Eve concert in Jerusalem “was exactly what I needed,” Nina recalled, “to go to the Holy Land, get in touch with myself and with God.” But she didn’t like Bethlehem, she told The Jerusalem Post, even on Christmas Eve—too commercial for her taste.
Nina’s solo concert December 31 was at Binyanei Ha’ooma, one of Jerusalem’s main halls. These outings required a good deal of audience participation to make them work, though not every effort succeeded. On “Zungo,” which had been a staple of her earliest performances, she exhorted the audience as only she could in Israel. “Come on,” she shouted, “you’ve got two thousand years of spirit with you!” But it failed to achieve the desired effect, and Nina abandoned the effort. By the time the evening was over, however, her fans had forgotten the botched “Zungo.” The audience tossed bouquets her way, a few rushed the stage for a handshake, and one fan even handed her a bottle of liquor, all of it proof that even by herself, Nina could still move an audience.
Nina on a beach in Tel Aviv, January 2, 1978, after a concert two days earlier in Jerusalem
(Associated Press)
VETERAN JAZZ PRODUCER Creed Taylor, who ran his own label, CTI Records, thought Nina might be a good fit with his catalog, so he had flown from New York to London to see her at Drury Lane. By the end of the evening he was ready to make arrangements for a studio in Brussels to record what would be Nina’s first album since 1974, when RCA released It Is Finished. In mid-January Taylor brought in a top-notch rhythm section along with CTI arranger Dave Matthews, and he put Nina up at the Brussels Hilton, which was near the studio. But by the time they started work on the seventeenth, the compelling performer he had seen in London had all but vanished. “Nina didn’t want to record,” Matthews remembered. “She wanted to hang out. The vibe was very, very uptight. It was tense.”
Even if he couldn’t hear the conversations, Jimmy Madison, the drummer, could feel the unease during several impromptu conferences among Taylor, Matthews, and Nina in the control room. The only bright spot on the first day came when Eric Gale, the guitar player, started fiddling around with a reggae beat, a sound he had mastered during visits to Jamaica, and the other musicians joined in. Matthews tried to build on this spark, though Nina, to his surprise, didn’t get it. “What is this corny stuff?” she asked. Matthews paid her no mind, believing the reggae concept would work for some of the tunes.
Nina was still out of sorts by the third day in the studio, and no one could figure out why, including Al Schackman, who had come over for the sessions. Taylor was fed up and told Matthews he was going skiing with his sons in Switzerland. If Matthews could get anything from Nina on the fourth and final day, fine. If not he should pack up and return to New York, and they would figure out what, if anything, to do then.
The musicians’ work was done, and that evening Nina invited them to her hotel room for what they thought was an informal going-away party. She had drinks ready and then decided she wanted to have some food sent up. When a hotel employee came to tell her the kitchen was closed, she was furious. As soon as the young man left, Nina picked up her glass and hurled it across the room, “and it smashes into a million bits,” Madison said. “For a great grand pause nobody says anything. Then Eric Gale says, ‘Well, it’s gettin’ kind of late. I got to leave.’” The other musicians, understandably unnerved, took their cue, and within thirty seconds, Madison added, “the entire room leaves.”
Nina’s behavior didn’t bode well for the next day’s session, but Al promised Matthews she would be ready to do her vocals. When Matthews came to her hotel the next morning, however, he realized Al had been overly optimistic. Nina greeted him “saying all this crazy stuff,” Matthews recalled. “I said ‘good day’ and went back to my room.” Al didn’t want to give up, understanding, even if Nina couldn’t, that her career would continue to suffer if she bungled this opportunity. He called Matthews and assured him Nina really would be ready. Matthews said OK. Finally in the studio, Nina sat down at the piano and reminded him of why Taylor had wanted to do the album in the first place. She ran through her songs in just over an hour—”brilliant vocals,” Matthews thought to himself, and maybe in the end, when they had a finished product, worth all the trouble. A day later he was on his way to New York to work on the arrangements with a full complement of strings and backup vocalists.
Matthews had picked some of the city’s most respected session players. By coincidence, John Beal, one of three bass players, had seen Nina at the very beginning of her career. He was playing in Atlantic City with Woody Herman’s band and late one night stopped in at the Midtown. He was captivated by the young woman playing the piano in a way he had never heard before in a nightclub. He asked the owner who it was. “Oh, that’s Nina Simone.” “What she was doing was unique,” Beal said, and now, twenty-two years later, here he was on one of her recording sessions. Chuck Israels, another of the bassists, was more bemused than anything to have been called for the session. He had played a few dates with Nina fifteen years earlier when Lisle Atkinson was not available. “She was arrogant, a self-important person with a lot less ability than she believed she had—that’s just one man’s opinion,” Israels said. But he wouldn’t refuse the chance to work with the top-notch musicians Matthews had assembled.
The new album was called Baltimore, taken from the song of the same name by Randy Newman, performed here with the reggae beat that Eric Gale had first laid down. Fans who had been waiting four years for another record from Nina would be pleased to find the drama that always infused her vocals as well as her distinctive piano work. Other selections were songs by well-known pop writers, among them Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates with “Rich Girl,” and Judy Collins with “My Father,” a somber counterpoint to several midtempo tracks but one that gave Nina freedom at the keyboard.
After its March 15 release, Baltimore drew attention from a number of music writers if for no other reason than Nina’s long absence from the studio. But it didn’t do much. The record registered on the Cash Box pop album and “Black Contemporary” album charts for a month in May, and it didn’t crack the Billboard Top 200. That hardly mattered to Nina. She professed to be unhappy with the entire thing, and her comments after the fact helped explain her unprofessional behavior during the sessions.
“The material was not my personal choice,” she declared, “and I had no say whatsoever in the selection of songs. It was all done before I could make any decisions.” According to Nina’s friend Sylvia Nathan, however, Nina herself had chosen “My Father,” and had tried to record it for RCA but was too overcome with emotion after the death of her own father to do it properly. Taylor had loved the studio they used, a historic barn that had been restored, but to Nina it was “a basement in Belgium where I was forced to sing songs in order to get out of there. This went on for three days,” she claimed, her perceived slights now escalating to match her distress. “There was no sleep and there was no water and there was no release.” She was unmoved that Taylor had hired the best musicians. The way she saw it, “he took the tape to New York, put voices on it without my consent, put orchestrations on it without my consent, and I have not seen the president [Taylor] since that day.” Nina didn’t like the cover either—a three-quarter-length shot of her smiling, wearing a headdress and wrapped in white fur. It was reminiscent of Ma Rainey, the great blues singer, in top form. “Some of the photos taken were infinitely better than those used,” she sniffed.
NINA KNEW SHE HAD money problems, not simply the lack of funds to cover her personal needs but more serious matters involving taxes the Internal Revenue Service claimed were due on previous years’ income. Fear of U.S. government action against her was one of the reasons her part of Baltimore was recorded in Brussels rather than New York. As she recalled, it was at this moment that a smooth-talking Liberian man, Winfred Gibson, came into her life and invited her to come to London, where he promised to provide lodging and work on her career—for Nina both an escape and a rescue. She trusted him but made clear that this was a business relationship only.
Things hardly turned out as she hoped. Not only did Gibson fail to do the things he promised, he beat Nina when she finally questioned him about his plans, hitting her so hard she lost consciousness. When she came to, she struggled to call for help at the hotel and asked for the police. But as she remembered it, hotel personnel refused so she sent them away. When they left, she reached for her bottle of sleeping pills. “I counted out thirty-five and took them one by one.”
Fortunately for Nina, someone had come back to her room, found her, and got her to the hospital. The hotel was discreet when reporters came around, telling United Press International only that Nina had “collapsed in her room” and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. A hospital spokesman was equally evasive: “We are not prepared to say what the nature of her illness is …The medical staff feels she needs plenty of rest.”
Nina found it at a spa outside of London before she moved in the middle of May into a friend’s apartment in the city. And she called Andy, the one person she thought might help her out of her predicament. After several entreaties begging for his assistance, Andy agreed to help. But he insisted on having a business relationship only, nothing personal. Any new work, especially in the United States, however, would have to wait because Nina still didn’t feel like herself. She had even had a CAT scan on her brain May 18 to determine if there was any new medical problem.
In spite of her precarious health, Nina agreed to do a solo concert July 18 at Royal Albert Hall for $2,000. Her hesitant gait when she walked out onstage shortly after eight p.m. signaled that something was amiss. At the piano she bowed and folded her hands in front of her, a gesture that could have been a thank-you for those who came and a silent prayer to make it through the evening.
She spoke but slurred her words, as if she was drunk, but it soon became clear that her condition was more serious than mere tipsiness. She played a few songs, meandering around a melody as she usually did to find a comfortable groove. Then she got up from the piano and walked offstage. She returned almost immediately, aided in the first few steps by a nurse who had been waiting in the wings. She sat down at the piano and played some more, this time distinctly somber melodies. And then she left again for a much longer period, ignoring the loud applause. In the meantime, two fans had jumped onstage and left her notes at the piano. When Nina returned, she read them, tossing one aside, and then after re-reading the other, which said “Are you all right?” asked for the author. The person came onstage and clasped hands with Nina as they visited.
Nina started to leave the stage again as members of the audience rushed forward. One woman grabbed the microphone and exhorted the crowd on behalf of “Women Against Rape.” Nina reclaimed the mike, invoking Judy Garland and Billie Holiday as she talked about her own struggles. “Talent is a burden not a joy,” she said. She asked all those who considered themselves her friends to write down their names and addresses and leave them with her attendant at the stage door.
But Nina hadn’t finished. “I am not of this planet,” she said. “I do not come from you. I am not like you.” She tried to discuss her artistic pain but gave up when she couldn’t find the right words. She went back to the piano for one last song, a dark rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” sung as a dirge. And then she left the stage for good.
Five days after the concert Nina returned to Switzerland, taking up residence for nearly a month at the Clinique Medico-Chirurgicale in Genolier, a municipality north of Geneva.
NINA’S FINANCIAL PROBLEMS were mounting. She hadn’t paid the bills for her stay in the London apartment or at the Swiss clinic, nor did she pay for a week’s stay at a hotel in Geneva in October. She hadn’t paid the bill for the CAT scan either or for a shopping trip eleven months earlier before she went to Israel (among the purchases a Dior purse and scarf and a pair of Italian-made boots). And she owed roughly $10,000 on her American Express credit card. But more important than all of these, the Internal Revenue Service claimed that she owed back taxes for 1971, 1972, and 1973 on income respectively in dollars adjusted for 2009 of $194,102, $393,669, and $446,984.
Her complicated feelings about the United States aside, Nina knew that if she wanted to come back for any reason, she risked arrest. She also knew she needed help. Though Max Cohen had announced in the summer of 1973 that he no longer represented her, he couldn’t let her flounder. He was not a criminal defense attorney, but he stepped in and initiated discussions with Alan R. Naftalis, an assistant United States attorney in Manhattan who had been assigned to Nina’s case. Cohen didn’t know ahead of time that Naftalis was a fan. But as the discussions proceeded, Cohen realized that Naftalis would work with him so that the tax matters could be resolved with as little embarrassment to Nina as possible. Cohen wanted to avoid the spectacle of Nina stepping off a plane from Switzerland and being arrested and handcuffed on the spot.
Naftalis didn’t want such a spectacle either and sought to assure Cohen and Patricia Murray, another lawyer Cohen had brought in, that he would handle the case both fairly and delicately. From what he understood of the record, Naftalis believed that Nina had been badly served in relying on others to handle her business affairs. This didn’t excuse her from the duty to pay taxes, but the circumstances informed how Naftalis went forward. “I assured Max that if Nina came back she would be treated with great gentility,” and the goal would be to find the best way to resolve all the issues, he said.
The first week in November Nina returned to the United States, and as Naftalis promised, she was not arrested. The authorities set bond at $10,000, which Andy co-signed. Instead of going to a grand jury for an indictment, Naftalis filed an “information” that laid out the allegations. Nina admitted in her first meeting with Naftalis that she was nervous and told him that she had had a drink the previous night. This made Naftalis uneasy, and before he went any further he needed to make sure that Nina was fully aware of what was going on and that despite her benign description of the evening, she didn’t have a hangover.
No, no, she assured him. She had only had some orange liqueur, a rare brand, she said, that few in the United States knew. But Naf-talis did. Her face lit up, he recalled, and she calmed down at the connection the two of them had just made. She tossed out a few words of French, and Naftalis, who could speak the language, answered back. Nina was delighted. From that moment on she insisted that the rest of the meeting to discuss a plea bargain be conducted in French.
“I don’t think your lawyers understand French,” Naftalis told her.
“It only matters that you do,” she replied, so Naftalis found himself in the awkward position of speaking to Nina in French, translating in English for her lawyers, and then waiting for Nina to reply in French to start the process all over again.
The lawyers worked out a deal to allow Nina to plead guilty to one count of failing to file her income taxes for 1972. The other two counts would be dropped. All that was left was the actual proceeding in front of the judge. Beforehand, Nina had dictated a formal statement and then signed the transcribed version. She was led to believe that her affairs were in order, she said. When she learned this was not the case, she hired a well-known New York firm, Phillips, Nizer & Blumenthal, to resolve her problems. “I engaged them because I believed deeply that they would take care of the matter. They wanted a lot of money, at which time I informed them that my funds were limited because I was not receiving any royalties from any source,” Nina continued. “Let me clearly state that I had already worked for my money but had not been paid.”
She asked the firm to accept what she could spare, and at first they did. But then, she went on, after she had already left the United States, “they wrote me that they would not represent me anymore unless I paid more money.” It was likely to be more than $10,000 all told. “I wrote them that in view of my still nonexistent funds and their knowledge of same that I thought their dropping me was unfair and cruel… I was also bewildered by this abruptness and confused as to what to do next.”
Nina asked Al Schackman for advice, and he put her in touch with his accountant, who “told me to get on with my concert work and he would take care of the matter. I was greatly relieved and did not know that my taxes had not been filed until approximately one month ago. I believe that I have been reckless in not insuring that my return was filed,” Nina concluded, “and I am deeply sorry.”
She signed it Madame Nina Simone, which she often alternated now with “Dr. Simone.”
Naftalis arranged for Nina to appear in front of one of the few black women judges in the United States, Constance Baker Motley, who had had a distinguished career as a civil rights lawyer. Naftalis had to miss one of the preliminary sessions and sent a colleague instead. But Nina threw a fit when when she saw that Naftalis was not in the courtroom. Judge Motley immediately wanted the plea withdrawn, fearing that Nina didn’t understand what was going on despite having signed the relevant documents. The judge appointed a new lawyer for her, Elliot Sagor, who had more criminal defense experience than Murray.
On December 22, the parties reconvened, Naftalis back representing the government and Nina now represented by Sagor, a former assistant U.S. attorney in private practice who Motley knew understood tax matters. He had warmed to Nina enough so that he gave her his home phone number. A day or so before the proceeding, she had called at six-thirty a.m. and wanted to talk.
“He’s running now,” Sagor’s wife said.
“He better be,” Nina replied and hung up, leaving both Sagors to ponder the ominous-sounding message.
In court for the final resolution of the case, Naftalis’s hopes for smooth sailing were dashed when Motley innocently referred to Nina as “Miss Simone.”
“I am Dr. Simone,” Nina shot back in a loud voice. The judge was known for running a tight courtroom, and for a moment Naftalis worried that an irritated Motley might decide right on the spot to impose a much harsher penalty than everyone had agreed to. But she didn’t. And she didn’t press the matter when Nina refused to give her age during the plea proceeding. Motley accepted the government’s recommendation and imposed a jail sentence of ninety days, which was suspended, and ninety days’ probation. No fine was levied, Naftalis noting years later that it would have done little good given Nina’s financial straits. She had liabilities of nearly $290,725 in current dollars adjusted for 2009 and assets just over $35,500 in the most generous reading. She told Motley she didn’t even have enough money to pay her hotel bill in New York.
Speaking to reporters after one court date, Nina acted oblivious to the effort that went into helping her. “When one gives so much to millions,” she said, “why?” and then walked away.
NINA’S RETURN to the American stage after nearly four and a half years came right in the middle of the tax proceedings, Sunday evening, December 10, at Avery Fisher Hall. She dressed for the concert like visiting royalty, in a multicolored ceremonial robe with a long train, golden disks glistening around her neck. “I heard you wanted to see me,” Nina teased. “And so I roller-skated on home and said I must see all my children who want to see me in spite of everything.”