The day I discovered Jacques Brel was one of the most exciting days of my whole life,” Nina wrote in her memoir. “So Paris seemed to make sense.” She knew the city had a large African community with residents from several countries, “so I would be able to create my own Africa in the heart of Europe, Africa in my mind.” She found a small apartment and decided to book herself into small clubs until she got established rather than work with a promoter. She distrusted them all. She liked the New Morning, one of the city’s popular jazz spots despite its out-of-the-way location (northeast Paris, not the trendy Left Bank), and she brought her old habits with her. On the night that Jazz Magazine reviewed a show, Nina arrived more than an hour late, but she looked fetching, combining Indian-rose pants, a black leotard and a dashiki with several bracelets and silver chokers as accessories. She gave the impression of being a new-age African priestess. But she sang spottily, announcing a song and then changing her mind, or starting a song and then brusquely changing the key in the middle. “Vous êtes seuls” (You are the only ones), she sang in French, repeating the line over and over in a rhythmic chant. “Je desire être avec vous.” (I want to be with you.) For many in the audience, however, the evening was, as Nicole Cerf-Hofstein wrote, “a missed rendez-vous.”
Nina found enough creative rejuvenation to return to the studio in January 1982 for her first album in four years, this time on the local Carrere label. She recruited three musicians—two African percussionists, Sydney Thiam and Paco Sery, who between them played congas, bells, woodblock, and timpani, and bassist Sylvin Marc, who also did backup vocals. This eclectic mix accounted for the calypso-reggae feel to most of the tracks. With songs in English and French and some that alternated between the two, the entire project felt both international and deeply personal. “I Sing Just to Know That I’m Alive” reflected Nina’s belief in her art, and “Liberian Calypso” celebrated her African adventure. And if “Alone Again Naturally,” her improvisation about the death of her father, still seemed overwrought, it suggested, a decade after J.D. died, that Nina was still coming to terms with the loss. She thanked her father on the record jacket.
The album took its title, Fodder on My Wings, from a somber track. “It’s about a bird that fell to earth and was crippled when it landed in fodder and other human debris,” Nina explained. “Although it was able to survive, it couldn’t fly. So it walks from country to country to see if people had forgotten how to live, how to give. As it went, the bird found that most of the people had forgotten.”
Nina was especially proud of the record. Except for borrowing from Gilbert O’Sullivan on “Alone Again,” she composed, arranged, or conceived every song, and she insisted that the liner notes say so. “What I did on this new album was to try to get myself deep into joy.” But that joy was short-lived. When she came onstage May 7 at Barbican Hall in London, she gave another disjointed performance of unexpected exits from the stage followed by hasty returns, bits of quasi-African dancing, a tête-à-tête with a chattering fan, and a smoldering exchange with a few in the crowd who asked her to sing “Baltimore.” She offered the first chorus and then stopped. “Randy Newman gets the money from this,” Nina said. “We are not going to sing it tonight.”
“Because I said so.”
“Those who had paid to hear music walked out in droves, laughing incredulously,” Richard Williams told London Times readers after the concert.
But this evening was nothing compared to the embarrassment in Pamplona, Spain, on July 23. Raymond Gonzalez, a promoter in Paris who was artistic director of a festival there, had booked Nina, but the day before the event, he couldn’t find her. He knew she was temporarily back in Geneva, and he finally tracked her down. After much argument, he persuaded her to get on a plane for Pamplona via Madrid. Nina changed planes for Noain, the airport near the event, but she arrived without her luggage, and she had been drinking. This made her even more tired, and she demanded a wheelchair to take her to the terminal, then changed her mind and tried to get back to the plane. Guards stopped her. Finally, after a heated discussion through an interpreter, she agreed to take a taxi to her hotel—but she insisted that a case of champagne be sent to her room. “I talked her into half a case,” Raymond recalled.
Barely settled in and completely untethered now, Nina went out in the hotel hallway naked and announced that she was going to the pool for a swim. She was stopped before she could get too far. Event personnel thought about canceling her performance but didn’t want to disappoint the two thousand people who were at the festival grounds. In the meantime other individuals raced around to gather suitable clothes for her and managed to get her dressed and delivered backstage. She finally came on a half hour after the appointed time. She started to sing Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” but abandoned the idea. She left the stage and came back, repeating the routine three times. “I don’t sing for bastards. I don’t like white people,” she said during one of her interludes in front of the audience. “I believe that your race is ill…. You are stupid.” She insulted the organizers, too, calling them a bunch of thieves, though she had been paid an advance as her contract required.
Then came an abrupt farewell. “Thank you. I love you. You will never see me again.” The audience jeered and booed, and most of them went for the hastily offered refunds. One spectator offered a piquant summary: “To see Nina Simone hallucinating and improvising, a lost drunkard on stage, is a unique spectacle.”
Raymond couldn’t get her out of town fast enough. He drove her three hours to Biarritz, France, for a train back to Geneva. “You are not going to say a word,” he ordered. But Nina was all smiles when they parted, as though nothing had happened. “You were great,” she told him. “I love you.”
“Well, I don’t love you,” Raymond replied, thinking, incorrectly as it would turn out, that he would never work with her again.
NINA’S FINANCIAL WORRIES likely contributed to her distress. She was livid that she was not receiving royalties owed on her compositions, which were supposed to be protected by the two publishing companies she had set up with Andy, Ninandy and Rolls Royce Music. Her frustration was palpable during a meeting with a British lawyer when she laid out her bill of particulars. She hadn’t seen any money from Aretha Franklin’s album, which not only featured Franklin’s version of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” but used that title as the name of the record, too. From a cover of “Four Women,” “I never got a dime.” Most aggravating of all were the bogus explanations from a purported business manager in the United States. She found them insulting. “They must think they’re talking to an idiot,” Nina told the British lawyer, her words mixed with tears. As she poured out her feelings, her language became even more extreme. “I feel I’ve been made a fool of, that somebody doesn’t appreciate my intelligence. I am one of those angels, and there is no braggadocio in that. I expected money and honor for what I did well. Now I have no shame for that. The fact that I am dealing with pigs and hogs and slime—they’re not human beings—is beside the point. My initial reason in being in this business and putting my talents here was because I expected the world to compensate me for what I gave to it.” What she wanted, she told the lawyer, was someone like the late impresarios Sol Hurok or Mike Todd, someone with “money and the power and the guts to do a godfather job because he must be a man who has those three qualities. He must not hesitate to cut off legs if it comes to that to get what’s coming to me, be that literal or figuratively. He must have power and authority so that when he speaks he’s listened to, and he must have money of his own so that he will not supine or bow to the temptations of ripping me off or sell me short as he works for me. Where is such a man?” she asked plaintively.
The lawyer must have been nonplussed. In any case, he had no answer, but Nina didn’t seem to mind. She said she felt better just getting this off her chest. “I haven’t got any money,” she added, “but I’ve got power, which means people think I got tons of money, and I continue to let them think that. I live like I’ve got money. I act like I’ve got money. That is the way I am. I’ve always assumed money as long as I can remember.” She was not about to sell herself short now. “I will live with two pair of pants and no clothes to keep my house,” she declared. “I am very strong-willed, and I will pick potatoes like the farmers here… . I can get down and lie down on the ground and sleep with the pigs, but it doesn’t make me any less than what I am because of what I think of myself.”
Though the meeting produced no resolution, Nina thanked the lawyer just the same. It would be far from the last time she was caught up in a tangle over money.
WHEN NINA RETURNED to Los Angeles in the fall, fans at the Roxy Theatre cheered as the curtain rose and they saw her sitting at the piano. “You like me still?” Nina teased. But after this pleasant beginning, the evening degenerated. She talked her way through some songs, failed to finish others, and snidely asked an under-rehearsed sideman, “Do you know how to play, boy?”
Nina had spiraled into such turmoil by the end of the year that she went to the Los Angeles county hospital for what was obliquely termed “a nervous disorder.” On her release, she moved to Montreal, perhaps hoping a change of scenery would help. She was turning fifty on February 21, 1983, and she hardly expected to find herself in these circumstances after a quarter-century career: unmoored and the prospects for her future uncertain at best. “When I die,” she had told Melody Maker a decade earlier, “I want to have left some particular mark of my own.” That she had done so musically and by the force of her personality was inarguable, and if at times she was her own worst enemy, it was just as obvious that she couldn’t help it. More than one friend or acquaintance—Gerrit DeBruin, Hannibal Means, Art D’Lugoff, Warren Benbow, even Andy and her own daughter Lisa—could recall moments when Nina erupted for no apparent reason, and no one yet had the magic formula, let alone appropriate medication to help her. Sometimes, Warren said, when Nina acted out in a restaurant, he just took her firmly by the shoulders, got her outside, and shook her with a strong hand, not enough to hurt her but enough to say without words, “Snap out of it.”
In this bleak moment Nina looked to her brother Sam. “I need help,” she wired him in Nyack, New York, where he was living.
When they spoke on the phone, she asked him to get her career going again. He wanted to know why she was in so much trouble.
“Because I’ve been a bitch.”
Sam told Nina he had to think about the situation. “I didn’t want to throw myself back into that unless I had some assurances, some guarantees,” he said. Though he knew it was a leap of faith, Sam convinced himself that his sister would cooperate, and he agreed to help her. “She desperately needed me. She was sinking, lonely—very scared and she needed money. I was still close to her,” he went on. “I still had a lot of love for her. She was family. But I let Nina know I would not take any bull from her, any BS.”
WHILE SAM WORKED on a European tour for the summer, Nina returned to New York in June for a two-day stand at Swing Plaza in lower Manhattan. Before the date she took the occasion of a phone interview from Montreal with Stephen Holden of The New York Times to reframe her musical journey once again. “Though I include jazz in what I do, I am not a jazz pianist at all,” she emphasized. “African-rooted classical music is what I play. I play jazz and blues, but they are not mine. The root is classical.”
And she renewed her grievances about her compensation, now calling it “the straw that broke the camel’s back” in her decision to leave the United States nine years earlier. “I made thirty-nine albums, and they’ve pirated seventy,” she insisted, the villains unnamed and the high numbers commensurate with her depth of feeling. Hannibal Means remembered that one night Nina had screamed about her royalties “until there was no voice left, only hissing air.”
Nina made one of her more unusual entrances on opening night at Swing Plaza, walking through the audience waving a bouquet until she got to the stage. Once there she carefully separated the roses from the baby’s breath so she could pull the heads off the roses. Then she scattered the petals on the floor around her and kicked the stems offstage. This floral minuet had nothing to do with the music, but it entranced the audience with its strangeness.
The ramifications from Nina’s tax problems were evident after her four-show booking was over. Federal agents confiscated most of her pay, though they did not disturb the bucket out front for $5 contributions to the Society for the Preservation of Nina Simone.
THE EUROPEAN FESTIVAL SWING started at the Hague July 8, and given Nina’s precarious finances, Sam expected her to be on her best behavior, especially for such a good deal. She was to receive $11,500 for two shows. But Nina was in middling form, and before the first show was half over, the disappointed audience started to boo. Nina shouted back and then stormed off the stage. She told Sam and the musicians to pack up and get in their car. The promoters had no choice but to provide refunds for the second show. They were not about to let Nina get away with their money without a fight, however, and they chased her down the highway, unsuccessfully as it turned out. “There were flowers flying out the window—it looked like a wedding,” Sam recalled, describing the scene as Nina’s limousine sped away from the pursuers. “It sounds funny, but it wasn’t at the time.”
Raymond Gonzalez, willing to put the Pamplona fiasco behind him, had negotiated a $10,000 paycheck for Nina’s next date, a return to the Antibes Juanles-Pins festival July 18. Onstage Nina announced that she wouldn’t perform any covers, even “Porgy”: “I gave enough but received nothing in return. And so I sing my songs, and I’m at peace,” though for Nina such claims were both temporary and illusory at best. No one knew that better than Sam, and he was taking no chances with Nina’s performance in Pompeii July 30. The promoter put him in touch with Maria Carneglia, a young Italian woman who spoke English, and Sam paid her $100 to stay with Nina in her hotel room in Sorrento before the concert. At first Maria felt overwhelmed when Nina insisted on having a few drinks and got angry if they didn’t arrive fast enough. But she quickly relaxed, enthralled to hear Nina playing the piano in her room until Sam and Roland Grivelle, a friend from Paris and an occasional road manager, picked them up to drive to Pompeii. Maria could tell that Nina liked her, so much so that she promised to dedicate a song to her at the concert. Nina told Sam she wanted Maria to stay on, and when Sam vetoed the idea, she threatened not to perform. To placate her, Sam said Maria could stay, but they had secretly arranged for her to slip away before the evening was over, Sam willing to face the consequences. Perhaps that accounted for his loving gesture midway through Nina’s performance, when he strolled onstage and wiped her brow so gently that she barely noticed.
After the show, Sam hoped that once Nina realized Maria had left, her anger would be assuaged by a sightseeing tour Roland had arranged back in Rome. Sam’s main concern anyway was returning to Geneva. He and Nina had left so quickly that they had not paid their hotel bill. Sam made sure to wire the Hotel Intercontinental from Italy promising they would settle their account as soon as they returned from Pompeii.
This temporary glitch aside, Sam was using Nina’s contracts to help her get a loan from a Swiss bank to pay off her debts. He told the bank that he had already booked dates totaling $30,000 in American currency and expected to double that amount with later bookings. He promised Nina would make monthly payments on the loan. “The personal and business affairs are now in order, I am happy to say,” he wrote in a letter that would prove to be unduly optimistic, though he recalled later that the loan eventually came through.
Nina herself took another step to improve her financial situation. In September she signed an agreement with a New York agency, the Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation, to collect royalties on her behalf. In exchange for their work, which covered all manner of investigation, the organization, known as AREC, would keep half of any amount recovered.
HENRY YOUNG WAS SURPRISED and pleased to pick up the telephone one day in November and hear a familiar if deeper-sounding voice. “I’m Dr. Simone calling,” she said. Sam had worked out a deal to bring her to Vancouver for a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, one of the city’s better venues, and she wanted Henry to play with her. By coincidence he was working with an African percussionist with the mellifluous name of Albert St. Albert. Nina said to bring him along. Henry was scarcely prepared for the woman he saw when he arrived at the theater for their rehearsal. “She was—like, how to describe it—hunched over. You know, you watch old movies, like black slaves in the cotton fields. She looked like that. I was really, really almost in tears.”
Nina perked up when she saw him. “You look very good, very handsome like you were before,” she said, and then offered a hug. Her mood changed quickly. She told Henry she wasn’t comfortable with the promoter Sam had lined up, so Henry immediately called a black entrepreneur he knew in Vancouver, Darren St. Claire. He came right over, and Nina liked him instantly. He told her he would handle the evening and out of respect to her would take no fee. But Nina was still uneasy. She apparently had overheard a racist comment or seen some ugly graffiti—Henry wasn’t sure which. But whatever the case, she refused to perform until “Ricardo,” a muscular man with a Fu Manchu mustache whom Sam had hired as a bodyguard, arrived. Fortunately Ricardo made it to the Queen Elizabeth by five p.m., and after St. Claire assured Nina that he had her money in hand, she agreed to go onstage.
She walked out to a half-full auditorium, which Henry blamed on poor advance publicity. But those who came were die-hard fans, and they cheered her arrival, more, it would turn out, for simply being there than for her performance. The evening focused on Fodder on My Wings, the album she had made in Paris, and on a couple of songs she asked the audience to sing with her in English and French. But the effort degenerated into confusion. The concert ended abruptly when she couldn’t manage “Ne Me Quitte Pas.”
“I felt that Nina’s spirit had been broken,” Henry said later.
But she soldiered on. She had two shows a week later at the Colorado Women’s College and asked Henry to fly to Denver and join her. He was surprised that once again Nina feared someone might do her harm even though Ricardo was never more than a few feet away and plainclothes policemen stood on either side of the stage. An enthusiastic welcome from the crowd failed to boost her spirits. She gave another middling performance, and the write-up later in The Denver Post typified the kind of notices Nina could expect from those who came with high hopes but left disappointed and not inclined to make excuses for her. “She comes on like an African priestess in her own secret world owing nothing to no one—not even a smile to the people who shelled out big bucks and dared a predicted snowfall to see her,” wrote Arlynn Nellhaus. “With her unemotional persona she has evolved into the Yuri Andropov of the entertainment world,” a reference to the stolid Russian leader. “Idi Amin put on a better show.” Worse, Nellhaus wrote, Nina’s voice “was in shreds,” so much so that the best part of the evening was a duet performed by Henry and Sam. “For a few moments there was electricity in the air—and warmth everywhere.”
Nina with Roland Grivelle and Henry Young before a December 9, 1983, concert at Denver’s Colorado Women’s College
(Courtesy of Henry Young)
AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT and more sociable Nina opened an engagement January 9 at one of London’s premier jazz spots, Ronnie Scott’s, named for the tenor saxophonist. Her lightened mood might have come from relief at being out of the United States and staying at a London hotel with a swimming pool. She found the water relaxing, and though she preferred the ocean, a pool would do for daily exercise. Nina announced she was tired at the end of her first evening, January 9, but everyone was so glad to see her that even this observation elicited applause.
Except for a brief trip to New York to perform at the Blue Note, Nina spent most of the year in London, with two-week stints at Ronnie’s. On November 17, the last night of her engagement, the club allowed cameramen to film the performance. It was only Nina and Paul Robinson, a new drummer with whom she had found instant rapport. The extra lights for the filming made the club even warmer than usual with a full house, and rivulets of perspiration dripped down Nina’s face onto her chest—she was wearing a low-cut strapless gown. But the music absorbed her so completely that she paid no mind. Every now and then she wiped her brow with one hand, but quickly enough never to disrupt the song.
“Mississippi Goddam” remained a reliable gauge of Nina’s mood. Her introduction to the song, her improvisations, and how she sounded were clues to how she felt and what she thought of the world in a particular moment. She presented a spirited version on this night, but her slight shifts downward in a couple of passages and an uncertain pitch were reminders that she was not the thirty-year-old woman who first sang it in 1963 but a fifty-one-year-old with a deeper voice of more limited range.
Nina had always said she wrote the song in memory of the four black girls who were killed in Birmingham when their church was bombed. Now, she said, “Mississippi Goddam” was in memory of Dr. King “because no one really commemorated or remembered in my opinion, enough, Martin Luther King, and ‘Mississippi God-dam’ brings him back… . The youth need to know the history of America. They need to know what we did there,” she went on. “That’s my contribution.”
Nina had ended the previous year with a dismal performance in Denver. She finished 1984 embracing the limelight and her audiences anew. “Well, I love them to love me,” she said during the filming, “and if they’re going to have an idol, they should have a good one, and that’s me.”
ROUGHLY SIX MONTHS EARLIER Nina had agreed to work with Anthony Sanucci, a self-styled entrepreneur from Los Angeles, and Eddie Singleton, an associate. “Sanucci liked money,” she wrote in her book, referring to him from the beginning, in a not unfriendly way, only by his last name. “He regarded managing me as a two-way bet; if he couldn’t win commercially he was going to have fun trying.” Sanucci wanted to get Nina back to the United States, and perhaps because of his West Coast connections, he thought Los Angeles was a good place to start. He booked her into the Beverly Theatre on February 22.
By now there had been so many strange, erratic, and even awful performances that Nina’s most loyal fans didn’t know what to expect. To their pleasure she didn’t disappoint, reaching into her repertoire on this night for Brecht, the Bee Gees—her still-haunting “To Love Somebody”—and a couple of new tunes from a record she was making on this trip to California. Among the songs was one written by Sam and his friend Bill Gunn, “Saratoga,” a ballad about romantic longing with a melodic resemblance to “MacArthur Park,” the 1968 hit for the actor Richard Harris.
BY THE TIME Nina got to New York in March, this latest album was almost ready for release. Nina’s Back included remakes of “I Sing Just to Know That I’m Alive,” “Fodder on My Wings,” and “Porgy,” all of them, including the latter, in up-tempo highly orchestrated arrangements. In addition to Sam’s “Saratoga,” the new material included “For a While,” which had been written for Frank Sinatra. The album cover took the title literally. It was a photo of Nina, facing away from the camera, that had been taken on a rock in Central Park. She had no clothes on, and it showed her bare back.
Apart from heralding this latest return to the United States, the album title also marked Nina’s return to New York—and to Town Hall—where she had announced herself to the world of popular music nearly thirty years earlier. Then a shy and nervous performer had taken the stage in a white silk gown that would have been perfect for the evening of classical music she had dreamed of. Now Nina was all glitter, from her gold lamé dress to her gold eye makeup. She was in such good spirits during the March 8 concert that she improvised a line from the ballad “For a While” to say, “I’m still in love with New York.” (Two days later, at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., she changed it again to incorporate Washington into the song.) Afterward Nina greeted fans and signed autographs, even posing for a photograph standing between Sanucci and Singleton. Her career hadn’t been on such an orderly path since Andy had run the operation.
SOMETIME IN EARLY SUMMER Nina purchased a condominium in Hollywood and settled in before a mid-July week at the Vine Street Bar and Grill. Plans were in place to record a live album there. As she had done in the past, she used a long interview with a newspaper, this time Don Heckman in the Los Angeles Times, to update her story. Yes, she had berated audiences in the past, she admitted. “But I’m not doing that anymore. The country has treated me entirely different this time, and my attitude about the country is completely different. Now, there’s no question but that when I’m booked to do a show, I’m going to be out there. I’m not going to walk out on anybody, and I’m not going to curse anybody out.”
If the anger was gone, she went on, it was “replaced by a lot of nervousness. A lot of it had to do with the way I looked at things then. I think I never knew how much my audience loved me, and maybe I just never knew how to interpret that love. But I’m more accepting now. I’m ready to accept what the public has to give me. And they’re giving me a lot… . I wasn’t ready for that before, but now I want recognition in this country.”
Nina in her new apartment in Los Angeles, July 1985 (UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives, © Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library)
Nina said that she also wanted her royalties, the anger that had diminished in other areas still boiling here. She’d never been able to enjoy the fruits of her labors in the studio, she said. “Most of those albums have been pirated in this country, and I’d like to be paid for them.” She paused for a moment. “But getting angry about it hasn’t gotten me anywhere. So maybe a more reasonable approach will work.”
There had been previous reports about an autobiography, and Nina said the project was still in the works, tentatively titled “Princess Noire,” a conceptual trifecta with its allusion to royalty (though modestly one step below queen), to her love of things French, and to her pride in being black. Nina hoped the book project would take her mind off music. “I want to be happy—that’s as important as music to me. Music hasn’t made me happy. It makes life happy. I think the world would be a terrible place without music. But it has to be balanced with other things.” That prompted her to talk about Lisa, which she rarely did publicly.
“I’ve got a twenty-two-year-old who’s never forgiven me for the lack of time we’ve spent together,” Nina said. “That was the result of touring so much and giving so much of myself to music.” Not only that, she continued in a new variation, “I’ve lost five other children because of this business. I was always on my feet so much, traveling so much, that I just couldn’t keep them in my belly.”
Those closest to Nina had never heard this before. Sam interpreted the comment with a broad perspective. “Her soul was split,” he said. “She wanted very much to be a pariah. I could understand it. She already felt underappreciated. Being on the front page of all the newspapers—having all the press, all the adoration. That’s only one aspect of the outer Nina…. She felt ugly inside. And the only way the ugliness could possibly be justified is through pain. The ugliness, the non-beauty of her life, her spiritual life had to come from pain. To have five miscarriages is pain. That’s what she’s trying to say. She has pain—pain related to her work. She hated to work. She loved to work.”
In a way the miscarriages represented an updated version of Nina’s bleak reveries on Tryon, which now could be seen as her justification for a lingering private melancholy that on the surface seemed inexplicable for such a favored child.
Nina ended her interview determined, she said, “to make sure I’m not so blind from looking back at what happened to me in the past, that I fail to see what I can get by just living in the now.” But by the time Nina got to Chicago to perform in mid-November, the equanimity she professed to have in Los Angeles had dissipated. “I can’t stand it here too long,” she told the Tribune, her comments suggesting that she was becoming unmoored again. “I don’t like the mentality of black Americans at all, of black Americans in general. I mean that… . I found my roots in Africa and that’s where they belong. People in America don’t even want to think about it, because they never ask any questions about it. They just assume I’m a blues singer, and I did ‘Porgy’ and I’m their sister,” she went on. “Black America and white America has its own problems. That tends to put me in the middle. Blacks think because of my skin I’m their sister; whites think because I’m black I’m either their servant or maid, and I’m neither one.”
She had exiled some of her most recognized songs, she added. “I will avoid doing the protest songs because that era is dead in America, as far as I’m concerned. I gave ten years to the civil rights movement, and that era is dead now. Ain’t seen no movement, have you?”
NINA RETURNED TO LONDON to start the new year with another two-week engagement at Ronnie Scott’s. Because she continued to be a good draw, Sanucci, as she remembered it, signed her on for a third week to begin February 3. But Nina said he didn’t ask her first. “I was furious,” she wrote. “Never mind that I was tired out and my voice was suffering, never mind that I was the one who actually had to go out and do the work.” She and Sanucci immediately parted ways—barely six months after she had gushed to a reporter that she finally had managers “who love and take care of me.”
Nina’s performances had in fact started to disintegrate by her second week at Ronnie’s. She got into a terrible fight with Sam over money, demanding that she make more than she was getting, roughly $20,000 a week. She required that flowers and Cristal champagne, top of the line, be in her dressing room every evening, and during their argument she picked up the bottle and smacked him in the head. Fortunately for both of them, the bottle didn’t shatter and he was not injured, but he was angry. “I slapped her,” Sam said, “and that scared her.”
E. A. McGill, who had gone to Ronnie’s January 21, was so irritated by Nina’s lackluster performance that afterward she wrote Scott to tell him that she and her husband “did not feel we had had anything like our money’s worth.” Nina was an hour late, and when she finally came onstage, McGill said, “she appeared, then disappeared, reappeared again and sang ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me.’ She insisted the audience sing it for the third verse. She more or less managed to get through another couple of totally forgettable numbers then stormed off the stage.” The sidemen waited a good long while, she added, until it became clear that Nina was not coming back.
Ronnie and his partner Pete King had no choice but to cancel the third week. King told Billboard he had to refund more than $20,000 in advance bookings: “It is very sad that such a great artist, who has been responsible for some of the most enthusiastic reactions we have ever had from audiences at the club, should let herself and her fans down so badly just as she was re-establishing her career. I can never book her again after this.”
IN THE AFTERMATH of the London incidents Sam had taken Nina to Paris, a city she loved. But at their hotel she began acting more strangely than he had ever seen before. She walked the hallways half-dressed, cursed at the hotel management, and refused to pay her bills. “She was out of control,” Sam said. “She knew she needed help,” but she resisted so much that she had to be put in a straitjacket to be taken to a hospital for treatment. “You’re going to go to hell for doing this,” she screamed at Sam as a medical team took her away.
Among the diagnoses was multiple personality disorder, and anyone who was close to Nina had no trouble believing it. “She had many different personalities,” Hannibal said. “One was an army general,” he added, recalling the military garb Nina donned one day when they were together and she was deep into the part of a dictatorial soldier. And Nina often proclaimed herself to be royalty from some past millennium. Sam did his best to keep this episode from becoming public as Nina recuperated before a planned trip to the United States. Her March 16 performance at Boston’s Symphony Hall reflected the recent turmoil. It was tense, uncertain, and marked again by multiple exits from the stage. Many of her fans shared the sad wonderment of Bob Blumenthal, who wrote afterward, “It was hard to believe that the shaky, self-absorbed woman on the Symphony Hall stage once exhorted us to demand freedom now.”
Nina’s turmoil remained on display at the Playboy Jazz Festival June 15 in Los Angeles, an impatient crowd that refused to heed her demands only fueling her irritation. When they continued to chatter after she told them to quiet down, she threatened to play a Bach fugue. “I’m a classical pianist, you know.” Darlene Chan, still one of George Wein’s top associates, helped run this festival, and she knew right away that something was amiss. “It was like one hundred degrees and she came in with this coat—sort of a raggedy fur coat… She was a fantastic artist. She definitely had highs and lows. We caught her on a low.” People were yelling for her to sing, Chan added, but Nina refused. “No, you’re going to listen to me.” Chan was relieved when she left the stage. “We paid her, you know. She came. She showed up.”
Nina during a March 16, 1986, performance in Boston (John Blanding, The Boston Globe)
Nina was anything but gracious to the San Francisco Chronicles Ed Guthmann, who interviewed her before her concert July 19 at the city’s Masonic Auditorium. “Is there any money in this?” she wanted to know. There wasn’t, but Guthmann tried to smooth the way by telling her he had loved her music for years. “Love me, my ass! I need somebody to protect me,” she snarled, adding that she wanted a bodyguard. “I don’t want no chokin’ kind of love, sir. It ain’t never fed me, and it ain’t never took care of me.”
Nina talking to the audience during her performance at the June 1986 Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles (UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives, © Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library)
Nina was doing the Masonic date, she said, “just to get out of a contract, and you can print that. I dare ya to … I regret singing protest songs for ten years,” she went on, warming to the subject of her financial worries. “That’s what got me in the bind I am, and that is why my records were boycotted in this country,” though this explanation ignored the changing musical tastes that affected so many artists. “And I want my money! I am not one to mince words, and I never was. I’m known all over the world, and I have to come back here and be punished like a slave just to get my money.” She added that she expected to be suing people over her earnings “until I die. Thank God it’s makin’ me very nice and cool and crisp and direct.”
Nina at a July 1986 solo performance in San Francisco (Frederic Larsen, San Francisco Chronicle)
Guthmann reported later that the Masonic concert was poorly attended and that Nina, appearing solo, “seemed unprepared and unfocused.” The fans who showed up, though, did their best to cheer her on.
CLAUDE NOBS WAS AS LOYAL to Nina as George Wein and Art D’Lugoff. He invited her back to Montreux July 10, 1987, at what turned out to be an auspicious moment. The makers of Chanel No. 5 had just revamped their marketing, replacing Catherine Deneuve, the perfume’s representative for eight years, with a new model and a new theme song, Nina’s very first recording of “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”
“This song is popular all over France with Chanel No. 5 perfume—unfortunately of which I have none, and not the money either,” Nina said to audible chuckles from the crowd. Her performance of the song was as intense as the original was lighthearted. She started with perhaps a minute of counterpoint, evoking Bach, and then rolled out the phrases about “high toned laces” and such as if she were giving a dramatic reading. The formal presentation contrasted with her casual dress—a tight-fitting halter top tucked into a long black skirt. She was wearing no makeup, and that coupled with her stern visage kept the entire performance at a remove, which seemed to be just what she wanted.
Sometime later, Hannibal Means recalled, “she came to me in Vienna wearing the most beautiful light blue polka-dot jacket with a miniskirt and matching high heels. ‘Where did you get this outfit, Nina?’ I asked.”
“I walked into Chanel in Paris and took it and told them, ‘You people owe me millions of dollars!’”
Hannibal had no trouble believing that Nina was telling the truth.
“I WAS PROBABLY A MASOCHIST,” Raymond Gonzalez said, recalling with good humor why he agreed to work with Nina after the Pamplona disaster. “When you see someone you’ve admired in such a state, you can only do one thing and try to help them. Simple as that.” Al and Leopoldo had come back to play with Nina early in 1988 for several dates in Europe, where Nina had a loyal following. Raymond found her a couple of bookings in Brazil, too. Gerrit, her devoted Dutch fan, was now an invaluable confidant, so much so that she liked him backstage at her concerts as often as possible. When she left the piano to smoke a quick cigarette offstage, “she would ask me, ‘Gerrit, did I make you cry?’ And when I said ‘yes,’ she would kiss me and whisper things like ‘I know. I felt like crying, too.’”
With Gerrit’s steady hand, supplemented by Raymond, Nina was generally the mild-mannered performer she said she wanted to be all through the year. But money was still on her mind. In Barcelona, she got up from the piano, walked to center stage, and told the audience that “Nina’s Back” buttons were available after the concert, “and they cost two hundred pesetas, which is not too much money, and I’d appreciate it if you’d buy them.” At Hamburg’s Fabrik, a factory turned club, she wanted everything “nice and easy” and briefly admonished the drummer, “Now don’t speed up!” She did complain, midconcert, however, that the room was “hot and hateful.” At the Dominion Theatre in London, she declined to chew out the woman who chattered between verses of “Pirate Jenny.” “Be quiet, honey. I want to hear my heart beat” was all she said.
Sam left by the end of the year to return to Nyack, on the verge of a breakdown himself. But Al, Leo, and Raymond were staying, and of course she could count on Gerrit. For all her idiosyncrasies, Nina had to realize she inspired great loyalty. She was not alone.
