What Happened, Miss Simone?
Liz Garbus (2015)
It’s not unusual nowadays – when, say, a celeb gets a 10 on Strictly or an Ordinary Person wins professionals’ plaudits on Masterchef – for the happily incredulous recipient to ask/exclaim, ‘Like, what happened?!’ The question that gives this Netflix documentary its title is neither rhetorical nor euphoric. Part of a quote, used by Liz Garbus as an epigraph, from a 1970 Maya Angelou essay, the question really means, ‘What went wrong?’ It’s an apt title, for two reasons. First, plenty of viewers (this one included) will start watching Garbus’s film with an idea that Nina Simone (1933-2003) belongs in the artiste maudit category but with only a vague idea as to why. Second, the generous supply of interviews with Simone featured in What Happened, Miss Simone? is enough to make viewers feel the question is being addressed to the woman herself. The several answers to it that the film supplies, come from various other talking heads but also, in no small part, from Simone’s own seeming candour in these interviews.
Born in North Carolina, the sixth of eight children, Eunice Kathleen Waymon played piano in church in her early years and showed precocious talent. At her first classical recital at the age of twelve, she refused to continue playing until her parents, who had been made to give up their seats for white people in the audience, were allowed to return to the front row. Eunice developed an ambition to be recognised as the first female African-American classical pianist, a keen awareness of racism and, related to both those things, a sense of isolation from both Black and white contemporaries. Although her family was poor, funds were raised locally to allow her to pursue her musical studies, at high school and, for a short time, at Juilliard, where she prepared for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She was always convinced that Curtis rejected her application on racist grounds and always disappointed not to fulfil her chief ambition: she was big enough to play Carnegie Hall but still regretted she wasn’t playing Bach there.
Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone when she got a job playing piano at an Atlantic City night club in the mid-1950s. Her new name – the ‘Nina’ from Spanish for ‘little girl’, the ‘Simone’ in honour of Simone Signoret – was primarily a disguise: she was playing ‘the devil’s music’ and knew her parents would disapprove. The night club management insisted that she sing, too. Thanks to her extraordinary contralto voice, her career as a jazz and blues performer soon took off: her first hit single in the US, in 1958, was her version of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’. What Happened? doesn’t make clear exactly when the Waymons learned about their daughter’s new identity or what they thought of it. There’s no mention either of her short-lived marriage to a white man called Don Ross but her second husband, an African American, is a major figure in the narrative. When Simone first met Andrew Stroud, he was an NYPD vice squad officer; soon after they married in 1961, he became her manager – a resourceful, energetic manager, to put it mildly. Stroud claims in the film that it was he who made the 1963 Carnegie Hall engagement happen; Simone claims that he overworked her. There’s no doubt that he also beat her.
The couple’s only child, Lisa, born a year after her parents married (and an executive producer on the film), recalls an incident in their car when her father smacked her mother in the face and made her head bleed. Interviewed in 2006 (he died in 2012), Stroud breezily explains that the head wound was caused by his ring; when they got home, he patched his wife up and the wound healed after a day or two – he’s rather proud of his first-aid skills. He got increasingly fed up, though, with Simone’s passionate involvement in the Civil Rights movement and its growing influence on her music, including ‘Mississippi Goddam’, the song she wrote in response to the racist murders in 1963 of Medgar Evans and of the four Black girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings in Birmingham, Alabama. Al Schackman, her long-serving, highly valued guitarist and loyal friend, recalls that Simone told Martin Luther King to his face, ‘I am not non-violent!’ Garbus leaves open the question of how much this propensity for aggression was fuelled by rage at white American racist brutality, how much a kind of compensation for Andrew Stroud’s abuse of her. What clearly emerges is that Lisa, particularly in her teenage years, was on the receiving end of verbal and physical violence from her mother.
Malcolm X and his wife Betty Shabazz were the Stroud family’s neighbours in Mount Vernon, New York (Garbus interviews two of the Shabazz daughters) and Simone, largely through her involvement in Civil Rights, rubbed shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes et al. Becoming part of this Black cultural elite was surely gratifying, given her original musical aspirations; at the same time, her uncompromising politics and some of her public behaviour turned Simone into a property too hot for the conventional entertainment world to handle. She was in effect exiled from the rewards enjoyed by soul sisters of the next generation like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, from a degree of security and a status that, according to Andrew Stroud at any rate, Simone continued to covet. Her financial situation wasn’t helped when she and he divorced in the early 1970s. She asserts in one of the interviews that, as her manager, Stroud held the purse strings and left her with nothing.
Al Schackman remembers that, from very early in her professional career, before marriage or political activism, ‘something was eating at’ Nina Simone. What that something was, is a mystery that persists for most of the film. In the mid-seventies, after leaving for good what she now called ‘the United Snakes of America’, Simone lived in Liberia; she describes her time in Africa as the realisation of a dream but it didn’t last long. From her early forties to the end of her days, she made her home in Europe – Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, France again. What Happened, Miss Simone? begins with footage of her performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976 – or on the verge of performing. She waits until the packed house is completely silent before she’s prepared to begin; as she gazes out at the audience, she seems both disengaged and disoriented. By the time Garbus reprises this sequence, at the appropriate point in her chronologically ordered narrative, Simone’s attitude on the Montreux stage is just the latest example of her bizarre behaviour or remarks. Following MLK’s assassination in April 1968, she speak-sings an elegy, in which she asserts that ‘they are killing us one by one’. The ‘us’ include, as well as King and Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry. Since both the latter died of cancer, it’s a puzzle as to who ‘they’ are.
It’s not until the early 1980s when Simone is at her lowest ebb – musically, financially and psychologically – that another loyal friend, a Dutchman called Gerrit de Bruin, takes her in hand, setting her up in a new home in Nijmegen. A doctor diagnoses bipolar disorder and prescribes Trilafon. While it’s fair enough for Liz Garbus to delay this important medical revelation, she downplays some of Simone’s other demons to the point of omission. Watching the film, I was struck that the protagonist didn’t seem to have what you think of as the usual drink-and-drugs dependencies. You don’t need to Google for long to discover that in fact she did – that booze in particular was behind some of her eccentricity as a performer: in Paris in the early 1980s, says Wikipedia, she was ‘Often … too drunk to sing or play the piano properly’. Lisa Simone’s testimony notwithstanding, Garbus also downplays what Wikipedia euphemistically terms Nina’s ‘volatility’. There’s nothing, for example, about an ‘incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she’d already worn’ or the suspended jail sentence she received in 1995, when ‘while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor’s son with an air gun after the boy’s laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults’. Even so – and even though Liz Garbus’s film-making isn’t formally imaginative – the assemblage of archive footage, photographs and music is more than enough to ensure that What Happened? is always compelling.
In 1987, Simone’s popularity unexpectedly revived, thanks to the Chanel advert accompanied by her version of ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’. With the notable exception of the air gun incident, her last years seem to have been relatively pacific even if her medication was a mixed blessing. Gerrit de Bruin and other friends who made sure she kept taking Trilafon knew it would gradually impair her motor skills and cause slurring of her speech. Two of What Happened, Miss Simone?’s highlights are her piercing, exhilarating renditions, both from the late 1960s, of ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ (Simone’s own composition, named for a collection of Lorraine Hansberry’s writings) and ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’ (which Simone devised from two numbers in Hair). It’s a shame to think that, on an emotionally more even keel, she eventually lost her startling ardency as a performer. It’s something of a relief, too, though, if Nina Simone herself felt less wretched, and less angry, as a result.
30 April 2024