Despite her disparaging comments now and then about their marriage, Nina and Andy maintained a relationship beyond their common interest in Lisa. She even expressed her gratitude to him on the jacket of Emergency Ward “for encouragement and proper handling of this album.” In December Andy had taken his business interests one step further, forming Stroud Records. The first album he put out confirmed that Nina’s music was the linchpin of the enterprise, Nina Simone Sings Billie Holiday—Lady Sings the Blues. Andy was no doubt hoping to capitalize on the recent movie about Holiday starring Diana Ross. The album consisted of eight songs cobbled together from Nina’s live performances and studio sessions, though there were no dates given nor or an explanation of how Andy had gotten the tracks. The cover featured a picture of Holiday—not Nina—and the music represented a Nina of the past.
The album appeared just as Nina received good notices for her part in an all-Bertolt Brecht program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music January 14. If nothing else, the two things together reminded fans of Nina’s versatility as well as her contradictory nature. Not every singer could pull off a convincing “Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer),” which Holiday had taken from Bessie Smith, and “Pirate Jenny.”
Though Nina later waved off comparisons to Holiday, right now she accepted the notion of common musical ground between them just as she more readily talked about her interest in Smith. In fact, Nina made it known that she wanted to be considered for the lead role in a planned movie about the singer, vying publicly for the part with Roberta Flack. She hadn’t liked the Holiday movie because it put too much emphasis on the singer’s drug problems. Nina expressed hope that a Hollywood treatment of Smith’s life would do better by the singer.
The much-discussed movie never happened, but Nina was part of another project that celebrated black culture, The Majesty of the Black Woman. It was a book of photographs of one hundred thirty black women, from the ages of eight to eighty-nine, some famous, many not, taken by Arthur Tcholakian. Nina’s full-page portrait has none of the affectations one might expect from the self-proclaimed high priestess of soul. She is staring straight ahead, bare-shouldered, without any apparent makeup, her hair in a short Afro. She looks calm and serious, elegant in the simplicity of her pose.
Nina’s portrait was among those selected for the opening of a show March 2 based on the book. The hosts had selected the New Yorker Club, which was housed in the Time-Life Building on the Avenue of the Americas, and as the name on the building suggested, the epitome of mainstream America. Nina had been negotiating the worlds of black and white for decades, and in a way this was only the latest version of the concert eight-year-old Eunice Waymon performed for Tryon’s white elite at the Lanier Library. But it remained as true now as it was then that outward success could not erase the turmoil and conflict inside. Only now Nina found it harder to hide her distress, which may have been why she had so few jobs during the spring and no new recording sessions.
RCA didn’t know what to do with her. While Nina remained proud of Emergency Ward, essentially a concept album, the commercial payoff was minimal. Perhaps because Black Gold, which was taken from a live performance at Lincoln Center, did well, the label decided to record Nina again in concert at Philharmonic Hall July 28 with two musicians she had known since the beginning of her career, Al Schackman and Olatunji. Only the three of them were onstage on the twenty-eighth, and Nina’s loping “Sugar in My Bowl,” the saucy old blues, reflected her good mood. She ad-libbed, drew out phrases on the piano with the trills she liked so much, and accentuated the many double entendres to the crowd’s delight. Her mastery of the dramatic moment showed in the haunting “Dambala,” a chant-song that talks of God and Satan, slaves and “slavers” who themselves will know of bondage “and remain in your graves with the stench and the smell.” When Nina finished, no one doubted this was true. Moments later she changed the mood with “Obeah Woman.” “You know about the holy roller church—ain’t that where it started?” she exclaimed, as Olatunji tapped out a syncopated beat. “We got to take our time gettin’ this one started,” Nina added. Then she spun out a tale, half sermon, about the mystical “Obeah woman” from beneath the sea who “can eat thunder and drink the rain …kiss the moon and hug the sun.”
Variety’s reviewer found Nina’s “simple and uncluttered” performance a refreshing change, noting an absence of “the sullenness and ill-temper that has marred some of her recent appearances in the N.Y. area.” RCA eventually pulled together songs from the evening and three tracks from 1971 sessions into a new album darkly titled It Is Finished. But the company didn’t release it for nearly a year, and in fact it was Nina’s last record for the label.
NINA WAS LISTED as a performer for the August 16 Black Expo ‘73 in Philadelphia, but she didn’t show up. Max Cohen, her longtime attorney, gave no explanation except to say her refusal to perform “is complex, but it has nothing to do with Black Expo.” Cohen added that he was quitting as Nina’s attorney; he gave no further explanation for this either, though he implied that he was tired of the incessant conflict.
Nina had more serious problems than standing up a promoter or disappointing fans. The Internal Revenue Service was looking at her tax returns, and she professed to know very little about her finances. Andy had taken care of everything while they were married, and once they split up, various individuals—Sam, Max Cohen, personnel at RCA—looked after her career. She had taken an apartment in a building adjacent to Lincoln Center in Manhattan, though she still owned the Mount Vernon house. By August, however, her circumstances had changed significantly. A for-sale listing for the suburban property, advertised as “Nina Simone House,” showed up in The Wall Street Journal August 17 with the cryptic line “extended European tour.”
Nina, though, remained in the United States. On October 4, she opened at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and kept the audience waiting fifty minutes. She chided them for being indifferent, though she admitted she was rusty because she hadn’t performed in a club in quite some time. According to Dennis Hunt, who had moved from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Los Angeles Times, it showed. “She was so miffed by the noise,” Hunt wrote, “that she ended the 45-minute set after a long half-hearted rendition of her best song, ‘Porgy.’” This kind of performance was hardly a good omen for her most ambitious foreign booking yet, two weeks in Japan right after the Troubadour, followed by a week of concerts in Australia, accompanied by Al and Nadi.
Whatever her irritations in Los Angeles, Nina could hardly have asked for more to prepare a Japanese audience for her shows. Her records had been re-released there as Nina Simone Collection, Vols. 1-6, and a double album pegged to this trip, Golden Hour of Nina Simone, showed up in stores just before she arrived. But on opening night in Tokyo October 18, her Japanese fans failed to meet her expectations. Nina had planned a varied repertoire that included Bob Dylan, the Beatles, African-themed chants, and her audience participation numbers. One of these in the early going so disappointed her that she abruptly got up from the piano and headed offstage. “I’ll see you later,” she said. “Good night.” The crowd, though surprised, intuited their role and cheered loudly enough to bring her back for another thirty minutes. The Japan Times reviewer, Don Kenny, later admonished Nina for not understanding local mores. Japanese “lack of demonstrativeness does not mean coldness or lack or interest,” he wrote.
The Australian dates went so well that a reviewer in Sydney declared that “a Nina Simone cult has now been firmly established” in the country. But the appreciative crowds in both places were no barrier to the bouts of melancholy that still gripped her. During one of her London trips, Nina had poured out her feelings in a letter to Langston Hughes, but he was gone six years already. Now she found an unlikely pen pal in Warren Benbow, even though he was no longer playing with her and they had been out of touch for a year. Despite the age difference—he was eighteen years younger—they had had a brief romance, and she apparently still felt close to him. In her letters she talked about feeling lonely and in a few earthy passages left no doubt how he could make her feel better.
WITH LISA IN TOW, Nina retreated to Barbados early in 1974. The Caribbean country had become a refuge, both spiritual and physical. She loved the warm weather, the beach, and the overall surroundings, which defined relaxation. “Empty afternoons were filled by Paul, his motorbike and his undemanding loving,” she wrote in her memoir. “I thought I had all I wanted at least until I felt strong enough to go back out into the world again.”
But the romance with Paul ended after Nina met Prime Minister Errol Barrow. As she remembered it, he invited her and Lisa to stay at one of his personal estates and then began making late-night visits after his work was over but before he went home to his wife. “We had to be discreet,” she wrote, but for the moment “we both had what we wanted—an easy fun relationship with no particular future in mind, just the present to enjoy.” Nina got used to the perquisites that came with essentially being Barrow’s mistress. On occasion when she let herself want more and talked about marriage, he reminded her he was married. And Nina replied, “Well, divorce your wife,” even though she knew that would end his political career. Nonetheless she held on to the hope that she could have a permanent relationship with Barrow and a stable life in Barbados, so much so, she wrote, that despite the uncertainties, she moved her belongings from New York to set up a home there. Because she didn’t have the necessary papers as a resident, however, her personal effects were held at the airport. On top of that, Barrow ended their affair, so Nina not only had to find storage for her things but also a place to stay.
A bright spot amid this turmoil was May 11 in Washington, D.C., when the city honored Nina during the third annual “Human Kindness Day,” an event that promised to draw a largely black crowd to the National Mall for a variety of activities. This year several thousand individuals turned out for a concert on Nina’s behalf that was sandwiched between an honorary breakfast at the Kennedy Center and an evening tribute at the Smithsonian Institution. Beyond the performances, which featured Herbie Hancock, the Pointer Sisters, and Nina’s friend Dick Gregory, the boxing champion Muhammad Ali was on hand to bestow one of the many tributes Nina received. The homemade gifts from an assortment of young people moved her to tears.
Any doubt Nina may have had about her importance to black women, in particular, should have been erased by poems written for her, each of them printed on a huge honorary poster. “I’ll hold my own mirror/to reflect my dignity with my heritage wrapped around it/so that all the world can see,” wrote Roscoe Dellums, one of the hosts of the celebration, who was also the wife of U.S. Representative Ron Dellums of Berkeley. “She was our goddess,” Mrs. Dellums said, remembering how Nina had influenced her and her friends when they were teenagers, not only through her music but through her appearance. It was affirming, Mrs. Dellums said, to see a prominent black woman so proud of her heritage, making it obvious by wearing an Afro or jewelry and gowns inspired by Africa.
Touched as she was by these personal tributes, Nina was even more thrilled that her mother, now seventy-two, had come for the celebration. Nina knew that Kate had never entirely approved of her career even if she had benefited from it. Now Nina could see that Kate had a new appreciation for what her daughter had become, and the realization thrilled her. Finally, she saw that “our blood was a bond between us which rose above our differences to bind us together.”
After the celebration, Mrs. Dellums and her husband took Nina out for a final dinner. The couple had chosen the restaurant carefully—the red-carpet supper club at Pitts Motor Hotel, one of the favorite spots of Washington’s black elite. Cornelius Pitts, the owner, showered Nina with attention when they walked in. Grandly, she turned to everyone at the bar and announced, “It’s Nina. Drinks on the house!” This elicited the expected cheer, and only later, after a pleasant dinner, did confusion reign when Pitts quietly approached Nina with the very large bar tab.
“You expect me, Nina Simone, to pay?” she exclaimed. “You should be delighted I came here! You could not pay for the publicity you’ve received.” Then she turned to her escort, a friend of the Dellumses, and pointedly said, “Are you going to take this bill?” His astonished look gave her the answer.
After a few minutes of hushed conversation, the Dellumses told Pitts they would handle the tab. Mrs. Dellums never forgot how Nina took umbrage at the thought that she should be responsible: “She was thoroughly insulted.”
DURING HER WASHINGTON VISIT, Nina told the Post what had become obvious—that she was cutting way back on her performing. The entertainment arena, she declared, “is full of hypertension.” All she wanted to do, she added, referring to Barbados, was “stay near the sea,” spend time with Lisa, who was now eleven, and just “gather myselves together,” that plural invoking Nina’s divided persona.
But Nina did have one more engagement, a performance June 29 at Avery Fisher Hall, the recently renamed Philharmonic Hall, in conjunction with the Newport Jazz Festival. The auditorium was packed with her fans on this last Friday of the month, and for them Nina could do no wrong even when her performance veered away from the music and into self-indulgence. Sometimes she could harness the turmoil to give a song an entirely different shape and meaning. But sometimes, as The New York Times’s John Rockwell wrote of the evening, “the music bends and sags and threatens to snap altogether.”
Just like her mood: close to the breaking point. She was even more disillusioned with the civil rights movement, and still mourning the loss of her father and sister. Devotion to the church had sustained Kate; it was not the answer for Nina. “The truth was,” she said, “I had no home any more.”
By the end of the summer of 1974, as Nina recalled, she had left Barbados behind and was in New York at her apartment with Lisa, feeling despondent and rudderless. Her association with RCA had come to an end, and though she still technically had the house in Mount Vernon, there were mounting financial problems having to do with unpaid taxes. The city would eventually foreclose on the house December 31, 1975, putting an irrevocable end to that chapter of her life. With nothing but worry hanging over her head, she wondered what to do next. Her friend Miriam Makeba, apparently long since over the restyled mink coat, offered a solution. She insisted that Nina and Lisa join her on her upcoming trip to Africa. Makeba would be performing the third week in September in Kinshasa, Zaire, at a three-day music festival, but her first stop was in Liberia, where Nina and Lisa would stay. That suited Nina just fine. The small West African country had been founded in 1821 by free blacks and freed slaves returning to settle in the home of their ancestors. “It was a good place to start at for any Afro-American to reconcile themselves to their own history,” Nina wrote in her memoir.
In Nina’s memory, her arrival in Liberia was as thrilling as the first time she touched down in Africa thirteen years earlier for the AMSAC program in Lagos. She recalled an airport reception in Monrovia and another at the presidential palace with President William R. Tolbert and other dignitaries. It didn’t really matter if these events hadn’t taken place precisely as Nina described them (Tolbert was on a European trip when Nina, Lisa, and Makeba and her group arrived). What was more important was the opening of a new chapter in her life that had nothing to do with making music onstage or off. “I was just a mother with her child happy in school and nobody looking over my shoulder telling me what to do,” she wrote.
On one of her first nights in Monrovia, Nina got drunk at a club, dancing nonstop as night turned into morning and in the process shedding her clothes. Leopoldo, who was traveling with Makeba, recalled Nina’s escapade as the talk of the town. She didn’t mind. “I was so happy to be home, so happy to be in a place I could do this where everyone laughed and clapped rather than having me arrested,” she said. Later she wrote a song about the evening, “Liberian Calypso,” one line capturing her unbridled joy: “You brought me home to Liberia/All other places are inferior.”
Lisa loved the country, too, recalling an unimaginable freedom, not to mention the chance to stay in one place for nearly two years. “I was twelve, and I’d drive the car to parties. My mother treated me as if I was grown up,” she said, “sending me on errands with $100 bills.” But Nina made sure she knew who was in charge, especially when they were arguing—”like rams crashing into one another,” Lisa said. “My mother was the kind who would want you to heel, no matter what. Once, I wouldn’t back down in an argument and ran off. By the time I came back, my mother had changed the locks.”
NINA HAD DONE VIRTUALLY no performing while she lived in Liberia—in her memoir she wrote of this time as a period of romantic adventures with local men, one of them a high government official. But when Claude Nobs, the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival, invited her back for the 1976 event, Nina was ready to return to the public eye. She came out onstage the night of July 3 shorn of the turban, jewelry, and dramatic makeup that once helped define the high priestess of soul. On this night Nina wore only a sleeveless black dress and black high-heeled Mary Janes. She had no makeup on, and her hair was in a short Afro. The only accessory was an antique silver choker from Greece that was a pre-concert gift from Nobs. She walked purposefully to the piano and bowed deeply to acknowledge the lusty applause that greeted her. She stood up and looked straight ahead for what seemed like an eternity. Then she looked to the left and then to the right as if she was sizing up the crowd but rendering no verdict despite such a hearty welcome. She knew it must have unnerved them, and a few titters and a smattering of applause punctuated the air. Then Nina finally sat down at the piano and smiled. “I haven’t seen you for many years since—1968,” she said. “I have decided I will do no more jazz festivals. That decision has not changed. I will sing for you—or we will do and share with you a few things. After that I will graduate to a higher class I hope and hope you will come with me. We’ll start from the beginning,” which was her oblique introduction to one of the first songs she had recorded, “Little Girl Blue.” It was clear that Nina had lost none of her facility at the piano and none of her improvisational talent during her absence from the stage. The intricate phrases, the unusual rhythms, the rolling chords were all there—the things that had amazed Henry Young, the guitar player from Vancouver, when he realized that with all that going on, she was singing melody above it.
Over the next hour Nina kept the audience on tenterhooks, the joys and torment that filled her daily life on full display. She hop-scotched from the jocular to the testy, airing a grievance in one moment with enough force to startle. “I made thirty-five albums. They bootlegged seventy,” she declared with some hyperbole and mentioning no names. “Oh, everybody took a chunk of me.” That put her in mind of the previous day, she said, when she went to see a movie featuring the late Janis Joplin. “What distressed me the most—and I started to write a song about it—but I decided you weren’t worthy—because I figured most of you were here for the fes-tival—anyway …” and her voice trailed off as she began “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.”
“Everybody should be free,” she announced in another of her pointed improvisations, “‘cause if we ain’t, we’re murderous.”
Nina used Janis Ian’s “Stars,” a meditation on the vicissitudes of fame, to describe her current status in the media’s eyes: “She used to be a star—she’s gone on her way to the bottom and all kinds of crap. It doesn’t bother me,” Nina insisted. But any lack of decorum still set her off. A few bars into “Stars” she stopped, annoyed at a young woman who had gotten up. “Hey girl!” Nina yelled. “Sit down… SIT DOWN!” she yelled even louder, and then repeated it a third time, finally satisfied that she had prevailed and could finish the song.
Nina ended the show with variations on an African theme. “Let’s just give ‘em some of what it feels like to be in the bush,” she told her two drummers. “Maybe it will work, and maybe it will not. You will know where I’m trying to come from,” she continued, “where my soul has gone, and thank God it has gone there.” She sat down at the piano and played a minute of rippling chords until the drummers found the beat. Then she was off on her bush dance, returning to the keyboard for one last flourish and a final wave goodbye.
LISA WOULD TURN FOURTEEN September 12, and Nina had decided she should have a more structured school than was available in Monrovia. Nina wanted to send her to a boarding school in the Ivory Coast, “but I wasn’t feeling that at all,” Lisa recalled. This time Nina relented and instead enrolled Lisa in a school in Switzerland, launching her daughter on a new path and, as it happened, marking another turn in the road for her. She wanted to live in Switzerland herself, enamored, she told the Montreux audience, “of your terrible wonderful peacefulness. It permeates everything that is here. It attracts me and holds me, and I hope that I’m permitted to stay amongst you for a little while.”