1
Tremendous pleasure
and honor to welcome
the incredible, unique, and fantastic,
one and only Nina Simone.
Hello.
Hi! We're ready.
One, two, three.
I haven't seen you for many years,
since 1968.
I have decided that 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 moments,
after which I shall graduate
to a higher class, I hope,
and I hope you will come with me.
We will start from the beginning,
which was about a little girl,
and her name was Blue.
What's "free" to you, Nina?
- What's "free" to me?
- Yeah.
Same thing it is to you.
You tell me.
No, no, you tell me.
I don't know.
It's just a feeling.
It's just a feeling.
It's like, "How do you tell somebody
how it feels to be in love?"
How are you going to tell anybody
who has not been in love
how it feels to be in love?
You cannot do it to save your life.
You can describe things
but you can't tell them,
but you know it when it happens.
That's what I mean by "free."
I've had a couple of times onstage
when I really felt free,
and that's something else.
That's really something else!
Like, all... all...
Like... like...
I'll tell you what freedom
is to me, no fear.
I mean, really, no fear.
If I could have that
half of my life, no fear.
My mother was one
of the greatest entertainers of all time,
hands down...
but she paid a huge price.
People seem to think that
when she went out on stage,
that was when she became Nina Simone.
My mother was Nina Simone 24/7...
and that's where it became a problem.
When she was performing,
she was brilliant, she was loved.
She was also a revolutionary.
She found a purpose for the stage,
a place from which she could
use her voice to speak out for her people.
But when the show ended,
everybody else went home.
She was alone
and she was still fighting...
but she was fighting
her own demons...
full of anger and rage.
She couldn't live with herself...
and everything fell apart.
Good evening.
Our guest tonight is Nina Simone.
Probably the foremost blues singer,
jazz singer, singer of all songs
in the United States today.
Nina, are you happy with
the kind of work you are doing?
What makes me the happiest,
is when I'm performing
and there are people out there
who feel with me
and I know I touched them.
But to be completely honest,
the whole thing
seems so much like a dream.
I never thought I was gonna
stay in show business.
When I first got into show business,
I wasn't a blues singer
and I wasn't even a jazz singer.
I was a classical pianist.
I studied to become
the first black classical pianist
in America,
and that's all that was on my mind.
That's what I was prepared to be.
I was born Eunice Waymon,
which is my real name, by the way,
in a town called
Tryon, North Carolina.
I started to play the piano
when I was three or four.
My mother was a preacher
and she took me with her
on her revivals,
and I started to play the piano in church.
Revival meetings were
some of the most exciting times
that I've ever had.
The music was so intense,
you just sort of went out of yourself.
I felt it tremendously.
I was leading it.
When I was seven, the choir of our church
gave a program at the local theater,
and I was on that program...
And I played some song,
I don't remember what it was,
and these two women, two white women,
in the audience heard me.
One of them was the woman
that my mother worked for,
and the other one was a music teacher,
Mrs. Mazzanovich,
and they decided right then and there
to give me lessons.
And so, for five years after that,
I studied piano, classical piano,
with this teacher.
I crossed the railroad tracks
every weekend to get to Mrs. Mazzanovich.
And, you know,
railroad tracks in the South
are supposed to be dividing
the blacks from the whites.
Well, it really did.
I was so scared.
Mrs. Mazzanovich frightened me.
It was her being white,
in the sense that I had never seen.
She was alien to me.
Her white hair, the combs in it,
her pleasantness...
I loved that.
And she started me on Bach.
And this Bach, I liked him.
Mrs. Mazzanovich had it in her mind
that I was gonna be one of
the world's greatest concert pianists.
So it was all
very disciplined classical music.
Bach, Beethoven, Debussy,
Brahms, you name it.
Then Mrs. Mazzanovich got a fund together,
"Eunice Waymon Fund,"
and I gave lots of recitals,
and they would take up collection
to further my education
after I had left her.
Mommy took to all of the training
like a fish to water,
but it was a double-edged sword.
She had a very lonely life
because she was practicing
seven, eight hours a day.
When I first started to take lessons,
I became terribly aware
of how isolated I was
from the other children,
and how isolated I was
from the white community
and the negro community.
I felt it, all the time,
even when the kids used to play with me.
They always wanted me
just to play the piano for them to dance.
I wasn't asked too much
to do anything else.
That was very hard.
Part of that isolation, of course,
was the thing about color.
I was a black girl, and I knew about it,
and I lived in it.
I lived in the South for 17 years.
My mom rarely referred
to Jim Crow and segregation
and a lot of the racial issues that
were going on at that stage in her life.
But she did tell me about times
when she was told her nose was too big,
her lips were too full
and her skin was too dark.
And after she was told that,
they probably told her,
"There's only certain things
you'll be good for in your life."
What I knew, I knew.
But we weren't allowed to mention
anything racial in our house.
I wasn't consciously dealing with race.
That wasn't consciously
on my mind at all...
until years later.
After I graduated from high school,
the money that had been saved
from the Eunice Waymon Fund
sent me to New York to Juilliard
for a year and a half.
And then I applied for a scholarship to
Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
I was playing Czerny and Liszt
and Rachmaninoff and Bach.
I knew I was good enough,
but they turned me down,
and it took me about six months
to realize it was because I was black.
I never really got over
that jolt of racism at the time.
Then the money ran out
and the reality hit me
that I had to go to work.
My parents had moved the whole family
to Philadelphia to be near me,
and my family is very poor,
so I had to work.
What else was there for me to do?
So, I got myself a job
in Atlantic City for a summer.
It was a very crummy bar
and I used to go in in evening gowns.
I didn't know any better.
And I played everything
that I could think of.
Pop songs, classical,
spirituals, all kinds of things.
It was very strange.
And I had never sung before,
and the owner came in the second night
and told me if I wanted to keep the job,
I had to sing.
So, $90 was more money
than I had ever heard of in my life,
so I said, "Well, I'll sing,"
and ever since then, I've been singing.
Eunice Waymon was playing
in the bars to support her family
and to have money to continue
her classical piano training.
But since she didn't want
her mother to know that
she was playing
"the devil's music" in bars,
she changed her name.
Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone.
She named herself "Nia,"
meaning "little one,"
and she had a boyfriend
who called her "Nia,"
and "Simone" came from
the French actress Simone Signoret.
I didn't want
my mother to find out.
I knew she would hate it.
So I, kind of, kept it from her
for a long, long time.
Was it lonely for a young girl
entertaining in these strange bars?
Extremely. Extremely lonely.
Working peculiar hours, I imagine.
12:00 midnight to 7:00 in the morning.
It ruined your social life, uh...
Never had much of one.
- Why'd you keep on with it?
- Couldn't help it.
I have to play
and I needed money.
It was always a matter of necessity
from day to day what I'm going to do.
I didn't even know I was
going to stay in show business.
I never thought about a choice.
From the beginning,
I felt there was something eating at her.
You know,
"What's eating at you, Nina?"
And, um...
gradually that got stronger.
The first time I played with Nina,
it was the summer of 1957
at a restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
She didn't look at me.
Said nothing, as though I wasn't...
I wasn't even there,
and started in on a song.
She never told me
what key she was going to be in.
She just started playing, and I knew
exactly where I was going to go with it.
It was like we had
a telepathic relationship.
Before you knew it,
we were just weaving in and out.
And then she looked up.
Al Schackman
is a terribly sensitive, creative man.
He has perfect pitch,
which means that
no matter what key I'm in,
he's able to adapt himself immediately,
'cause I do that all the time.
I'll change the key
in the middle of a tune.
Nina had a wonderful way
of taking a piece of music, and...
not interpreting it, but...
but, like, metamorphosizing it.
You know, morphing it
into her experience.
What I was interested in was
conveying an emotional message,
which means using
everything you've got inside you
sometimes to barely make a note
or if you have to strain to sing,
you sing.
So sometimes
I sound like gravel,
and sometimes
I sound like coffee and cream.
When I first saw Nina
at my club in 1959,
I was impressed.
She was different.
She mixed in folk music with jazz.
She played very fine piano.
Her voice was totally different
from anybody else.
It was a woman's voice,
but it had the depth of a baritone.
That depth and that darkness carried
the insight of what was in Nina's soul...
and it reached you very quickly.
She was an artist.
She was an original artist.
So we paid attention, and in 1960,
I put her on the Newport Jazz Festival,
and she was a hit there.
Her sound is so original.
When she first appeared...
she was one of those musicians who...
Once... You don't have to
hear them a bunch.
If you hear them once,
then the next time you hear 'em, you say,
"Oh, that's that same one
I heard last week.
Nobody sounds like that except her."
At Newport,
she was sitting on a high stool
with a tambourine,
and I was in the back.
She wasn't sure
she wanted to go through with it.
If I remember right, she was a little,
you know, "What am I doing here?"
And I said, "You're here because,
you know, you belong here."
And she said,
"Okay, Al, but you better play."
And I said,
"Don't worry, I'll play."
But then, if you watch during
her performance of "Little Liza,"
she has that little smile
from time to time.
She let go,
and it was really cute.
Then I recorded
seven or eight tunes
that I had been doing all of those years,
and of course, the public
picked out "I Loves You Porgy."
It was not pushed or promoted
to be a hit at all.
- Girls! Guys! Hi.
- Hi, Hugh, nice to see you.
Real good.
Eleanor, you want to, uh,
take Don's coat here,
and maybe you can show the girls
where the powder room is and bedroom.
Hello, there.
Very nice to have you with us
this evening.
This is Playboy's Penthouse,
and I'm Hugh Hefner,
editor/publisher of Playboy magazine.
I'd like you to meet someone that
I think most of you know, Nina Simone.
She came out of nowhere
in the last year as a recording star.
Now has a very, very big record in "Porgy"
that is breaking
all kinds of sales records.
We're very happy she could join us
- tonight on Playboy's Penthouse...
- Thanks.
And she's going to play and sing
a little bit for us now with her group.
Do you want to hear "Porgy"?
- Very much!
- Right!
Good, that's what we'll do.
Nina, there's a man
named Andy Stroud.
He walked into your life
and became a permanent part.
How did you meet your husband?
He came to see me at a nightclub
and a mutual friend introduced us.
Nina came to the table and sat,
and I was eating a hamburger plate,
and there were fries,
and she dipped into them.
And she wanted to know if it was okay.
I said, "All right."
We got cute and then she gave me
that card with a note on it.
Then I went over to see her at her place
in the next day or two.
How did you know that
Andy Stroud was to be your husband
and not just another guy
out for a date or something else?
That's a hard question.
He told me that he had
wanted to meet me for a long time.
And he had come for me.
I fell in love with him.
Then later, he scared me to death.
He was so, you know...
He knew what he wanted
and he just took over.
He abandoned his own career
as a sergeant of the police department
to manage me,
and for the first time, I knew what it was
not to be just floundering out there.
I just remember meeting Andy.
Here was a tough, New York,
you know, vice squad cop,
that when he stepped out
of his car uptown, people ran.
And he had... he had a way
of just saying one word...
"Hey."
and that could put
a lot of fear in people.
But Andy and Nina married in 1961.
He retired from the police force
and became her manager,
and he did well for her.
They bought a beautiful house
in Mount Vernon, New York.
We had a 13-room house,
four acres of land, lot of trees.
And Lisa was born
nine months later.
The first three hours after Lisa was born
were the most peaceful in my life,
and I was in love with the world.
And Andrew was there.
He was sitting right there, and he said...
I said, "How's the baby?"
He says, "How's the mother?"
And I loved him for that.
I loved being a mother.
I was a good mother.
I was a goddamn good mother.
I remember our house
in Mount Vernon
like the back of my hand.
It was like a fairy tale.
I remember seeing
the paisley on the walls.
The walls were kind of like a...
They were hued in gold,
but it really wasn't gold.
It was more like a muted gold
but it felt like it was velvet.
So I'd always run my hands, like,
over the walls, because it was textured.
And my mom,
she had her cold storage
where she kept
her fur coats and her costumes.
So I was always in there.
These were the good, sweet days.
We were building and growing together.
I had an overall plan
to develop and create her as an artist.
I had set up an office
at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.
I had a publicist.
I had a guy who was a record-promotion man
that I got from Atlantic Records.
I had another fellow who did
the college radio station promotion,
and a photographer.
Dad was the original Puff Daddy.
I mean, he really had a vision,
and he was a very astute businessman.
And of course, she was burning
to get on to Carnegie Hall.
She had trained as a classical pianist
with the one thought in mind
of being the first
black female classical pianist
to appear in Carnegie Hall.
That was her prime objective.
However, none of
the New York City promoters
would undertake this project.
So, I took my own money
to promote the appearance.
She was ecstatic. I mean,
she was out of her mind with joy.
You apparently wrote
a letter to your parents saying,
"This is where you wanted me to play,
- but I should have been playing Bach."
- "Playing Bach."
So this was your glory occasion,
but you were still disappointed?
Well, I loved the audience,
but I wasn't playing classical music,
and I wanted to be,
and so I wrote,
"Yes, I'm in Carnegie Hall, finally,
but I'm not playing Bach."
After Carnegie Hall,
she was getting airplay
all over the country,
magazine pictures and stories.
She became highly successful
and recognized.
- Oh! Thank you very much!
- Meeting in Japan.
A young woman who's made
a very emphatic name for herself...
An accomplished pianist
and distinctive...
who's now become
a rather famous artist.
A remarkable blues-soul sound.
For the first time
on British television,
The High Priestess of Soul...
- Nina Simone.
- Nina Simone.
The great Nina Simone.
Miss Simone brings to her music
a kind of technique and discipline
we generally associate
with classical music.
She has introduced fugue and counterpoint
into the freewheeling spontaneity
of the jazz world.
Nina, do you think that
now that you are successful
as a popular artist
that you'd like to do any classical?
Yes, but I don't have time
to think about it too much.
But you have to realize that when
I'm most satisfied with my music,
I call upon all of the things
that I have learned in classical music.
She wanted everything
that money and success could buy.
So I promised her that
she was going to be a rich black bitch.
We had a blackboard
and he used to put on there,
"I'll be a rich black bitch
by this such-and-such date,"
and he said, "Then you could quit,"
and I always believed him,
but I never could quit
because he worked me too hard.
Andy said, "Nina, it's hard work.
You wanna make the money,
you have to work."
And she resented that.
Then Lisa was born,
and she resented being torn away,
having to go on the road.
I didn't realize
what my mom did for a living.
I just know that Mom
was always traveling.
My mother often told me that
I had 13 nannies in seven years.
So, while she was trying to maintain
some sense of a schedule for me
and normalcy for me,
she was out there doing
what she was doing.
Can I have five more minutes?
It's very frustrating...
When we were on the road,
there were times we had to be careful.
She could get angry
and start arguments with people.
Y'all pushing!
You're pushing!
Don't put nothin' in it!
Let's do it again.
If anyone were talking
in the audience, she would just sit,
and at first, she would say, "Please..."
and she said,
"I'm not continuing."
She'd get up, walk out,
and the gig was over.
I just want them
to listen to the music
like they did in the classical world.
I thought they needed teaching.
If they couldn't listen, fuck it!
She got into Carnegie Hall,
and she got the big house in the country,
but she began questioning herself.
She'd get into moods of depression
about the whole business,
the personal relationship,
cursing and smashing things,
and this worsened
as the time went by.
All I did was work, work, work.
I was always tired.
I was always tired.
I could never sleep.
You see, music always
goes through my head,
which means the more I played,
the less I could relax.
I kept thinking Andy
would let me rest.
He never did.
She felt she was being
handled like a racehorse,
and she was always
fighting, fighting, fighting it.
Andy would say,
"Nina, we've got a career here.
That's not going to continue
if you don't nurture it."
So, she came to resent Andy...
but she was afraid of Andy.
Andrew protected me
against everybody but himself.
He wrapped himself around me like a snake.
I worked like a dog,
and I was scared of him...
and Andrew beat me up.
But I've never talked to you about this.
But he beat me up.
I was deathly scared of Andrew.
One time, early in the morning,
like 4:00, 5:00 in the morning, uh...
the phone rings. It's Nina,
and she needed to hide out.
I had gone
to a discotheque with Andrew...
and a fan came up to me
and gave me a note,
and he saw me take this note
and put it in my pocket.
She thought nothing of it.
I mean, she related this to me.
And Andy came back
and grabbed her arm
and took her out from the place
and beat her up.
And when I got out on the street,
he started raining blows on me.
Bloody blows.
He beat me all the way home,
up the stairs, in the elevator,
in my room, put a gun to my head.
Then he tied me up and raped me.
She came to my place and...
and she was beat up.
And I, you know, put her to bed, and...
and she, you know,
rested for a couple of days.
He didn't find me for two weeks.
My eyes, I couldn't see.
And he said,
"Who beat you up like that?"
And I said, "You did!"
He said, "No, I didn't.
I've been looking for you for two weeks."
I said, "You're insane!"
He was brutal...
but I... I loved him
and I guess I just believed
he wouldn't do it anymore.
My mother always said,
till the day she died,
Dad was the best manager
that she ever had.
But on top of being charismatic,
he could be a bully
and he could be very mean,
and she was on
the receiving end of that...
more times than, you know,
she should have been,
which should have been never.
Mom would allude to, you know,
"He's rammed my head
into a concrete wall."
She said that
he punched her in the stomach
when she was pregnant with me.
As a child, I remember
sitting in the car between them
and they were arguing about something,
and I remember my father
reaching across me,
so it was like this,
and backhanding her.
We're going home in the car,
I'm driving, and I slapped her.
Blood spurted...
right over this eyebrow.
She had, like, a one-inch cut
from my ring, you know.
We got her home
and I clipped the skin together
and taped it...
and a week later,
there wasn't even a scar.
I think they were both nuts.
She stayed with him.
She had this love affair with fire.
That's like inviting the bull
with the red cape,
"Just come on into my kitchen
and let's see what we can do."
That's what she did.
- What do I want for her?
- Yes.
Myself. What else?
Career-wise.
My father had
a strategic plan in terms of
how Mom's career was going to go.
He wanted her to be able
to win all the awards,
and to become the huge star
that he knew that she could be...
but she wanted something more.
There was something missing in her,
some meaning.
They died in Birmingham,
the nation's most segregated big city.
Dynamite exploded on Sunday morning,
killed four little girls,
injured 20 other Negroes.
It was one of more than 40 bombings
in that Birmingham area.
Kids were murdered
in Birmingham on a Sunday
and in Sunday schools
in a Christian nation,
and nobody cares!
When the kids got killed
in that church... that did it.
First you get depressed,
and after that, you get mad.
And when these kids got bombed,
I just sat down and wrote this song.
And it's a very...
moving, violent song,
'cause that's how I feel
about the whole thing.
"Mississippi Goddam."
Phew!
Hmm?
Got my attention.
What she was doing was different.
There's something
about a woman...
if you look at all the suffering
that black folks went through...
not one black man would dare say,
"Mississippi, goddam."
And then to have someone with her stature
talking about your problem,
you know how happy they had to be?
We all wanted to say it.
She said it.
"Mississippi, goddam!"
For Mommy to write a song
called "Mississippi Goddam"
was revolutionary.
They didn't have cursing on the radio
or on television or anything.
DJ's refused to play it,
and boxes of the 45s used to be sent back
from the radio stations cracked in two.
As the civil rights movement
really swung into high gear,
she swung into high gear with it.
In '65, we played at the Selma March
in Montgomery, Alabama.
We have a legal and constitutional right
to march from Selma to Montgomery!
It was extremely dangerous.
The federal Marshals were called in,
and they were standing
on the tops of all the buildings downtown
with guns.
Seated in front of the stage
facing the audience
was Martin Luther King,
Ralph Bunche from the UN
and a lot of other worldwide dignitaries.
You had Langston Hughes,
James Baldwin, Sidney Poitier,
Bill Cosby, Leonard Bernstein,
Harry Belafonte,
and we did "Mississippi Goddam."
My mother said that
after she sang that song,
she got so angry
that her voice broke...
and from "Mississippi Goddam" on,
it never, ever returned
to its former octave.
But I think that Mom's anger
is what sustained her.
The energy and the creativity
and the passion of those days
is really what kept her going.
When she wrote
"Mississippi Goddam,"
I thought it was something else.
You know, I liked it.
They put a 45 out on it,
and I knew it had a lot of impact.
But my complaint was that
while I was always pushing
for the commercial side of the picture,
she got sidetracked with
all of these civil rights activities.
When the civil rights thing
came up, all of a sudden,
I could let myself be heard
about what I'd been feeling all the time.
When I was young,
I knew to stay alive.
As a black family,
we had to work at it.
We had to keep secrets.
We never complained about being poor,
or being taken advantage of
or not getting our share.
We had to keep our mouths shut
as I walked across
that railroad track every Saturday.
So I knew to break the silence
meant a confrontation
with the white people of that town.
And though I didn't know I knew it,
if the black man rises up and says,
"I'm just not gonna do that anymore..."
he stands to get murdered.
But no one mentioned that,
which is, indeed, quite strange.
It touched me first time
when I gave a recital at this library.
Everybody was seated
and they told me
my parents had to sit in the back,
and I said,
"If they have to sit in the back,
I won't perform."
They fixed it that time
and they brought them to the front
and they let them sit down,
but it was my first feeling
of being discriminated against,
and I recoiled in horror
at such a thing.
I choose to reflect the times
and the situations in which I find myself.
That, to me, is my duty...
and at this crucial time in our lives,
when everything is so desperate,
when every day is a matter of survival,
I don't think you can help
but be involved.
Young people, black and white, know this,
and so that's why
they're so involved in politics.
We will shape and mold this country
or it will not be molded and shaped
at all anymore.
So I don't think you have a choice...
How can you be an artist
and not reflect the times?
I've always thought that
I was shaking people up,
but now I want to go at it more
and I want to go at it more deliberately
and I want to go at it coldly.
I want...
I want to shake people up so bad
that when they leave a nightclub
where I've performed,
I just want them to be to pieces.
All right!
I want to go in that den
of those elegant people
with their old ideas, smugness,
and just drive them insane.
Rise up!
It's all right if you dance slow!
But it was very exhilarating
to be part of that movement at the time
because I was needed.
Now I could sing to help my people,
and that became the mainstay of my life.
Not classical piano, not classical music,
not even popular music,
but civil rights music.
I got to know Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X, Andrew Young,
and artists, actors,
actresses, poets, writers,
people like myself who felt compelled
to make the stand that I have.
It was very important
for her to connect with
the writers and playwrights
of that moment
because those people had
the intellectual background
of the movement
and she didn't have that.
She had music,
the musical background.
For instance, Langston Hughes,
he wrote the lyrics
for "Backlash Blues" for her.
Lorraine Hansberry, Nina took her play,
Young, Gifted, and Black,
and made a song out of it.
It's regarded as
one of the most important songs
in the civil rights movement.
I know that there are only
300 black students here
in this college of 18,000.
So this song is dedicated only to you.
Lorraine Hansberry was my best friend,
and she wrote plays, Raisin in the Sun
and Young, Gifted, and Black.
She taught me a lot about
Karl Marx, Lenin, philosophy.
The basic fabric of our society
that has Negroes
in the situation that they are in
is the thing which must
be changed, you know.
Those times were pretty amazing.
I look back now and I'm just like,
"Wow! Who's who of Black America!"
Lorraine Hansberry
was my godmother.
Malcolm X's wife,
Betty Shabazz, was my auntie.
They lived right next door
in Mount Vernon.
There are six daughters
and I was like the seventh.
So I was always riding my bike over there.
Lisa and I were the same age, and...
I think we may have
called one another twins.
It was just a great, great time.
There was music,
there were discussions.
Whether it was at our house
or Lisa's house, Nina Simone's home,
it was definitely party with a purpose.
We happened to be a fly on the wall
with some of the genius
poets and poetesses of the time, the era.
And to sit in that room and listen...
These were brilliant,
well-read, well-traveled,
charming, alluring, charismatic people
who were moved
to make a difference in the world.
I'm born of the
Young, Gifted, and Black affirmation.
For me, and those of us
in that environment,
it was daring to proclaim it...
and then share it joyously
when she sang it.
People would stand up
and engage in their African-ness
without apology...
and it's a contemporary,
hip song of the era.
It means you get to hum it in public.
She became a legend
in the activists' movement,
and through meetings
and discussions that I overheard,
she was convinced that
certain things must be done
in order to...
push the revolution.
I told them that's not the answer,
and then it began to manifest in
her attitude towards me and the business.
She'd fly off.
I remember a few nights,
you know,
you go to bed happy
and holding one another.
I wake up,
and she'd be sitting up in bed
with her arms folded,
looking at me,
thinking about killing me.
And this is how it went.
The political work became very heavy.
To me, we are the most
beautiful creatures
in the whole world, black people.
So my job is
to make them more curious
about where they came from
and their own identity
and pride in that identity.
That's why my songs...
I try to make them
as powerful as possible,
mostly just to make them
curious about themselves.
We don't know anything
about ourselves.
We don't even have
the pride and the dignity
of African people,
but we can't even talk about
where we came from.
We don't know.
It's like a lost race.
I really mean to provoke this feeling of,
like, "Who am I? Where'd I come from?"
You know, "Do I really like me?"
and, "Why do I like me?"
And, like, you know,
"If I am black and beautiful,
I really am and I know it,
and I don't care who cares or says what."
This is what compels me
to push black people
to identify with black culture.
Giving out to them that black-ness,
that black power.
Nina was a real rebel.
She didn't really fit
in the revolutionary black female role
that was offered her.
She could avoid
pretentious phoniness
and get more depth out of a song
than people are used to hearing
out of those songs.
She was a kind of patron saint
of the rebellion.
Nina started to get more aggressive.
I remember one time as she
walked right up to Dr. King and said,
"I'm not non-violent!"
And he said, "That's okay, sister.
You don't have to be."
I was never non-violent. Never.
I thought we should get our rights
by any means necessary.
And then she met Stokely Carmichael.
Miss Simone says
something very significant
in her song "Mississippi Goddam."
She says, "This country..."
She says, "This country is built on lies."
You're gonna sit in front
of your television set
and listen to LBJ tell you that,
"Violence never accomplishes anything,
my fellow Americans."
And the honky drafting you out of school
to go fight in Vietnam.
If you don't want any trouble,
keep your filthy white hands
off our beautiful black skin.
Keep them off!
I am just one of the people
who is sick of the social order,
sick of the establishment,
sick to my soul of it all.
To me, America's society
is nothing but a cancer,
and it must be exposed
before it can be cured.
I am not the doctor to cure it.
All I can do is expose the sickness.
Are you ready, black people?
Yeah!
Are you ready, black people?
Yeah!
- Are you really ready?
- Yeah!
She wanted to align herself
with the extreme terrorist militants
who were influencing her.
And after all of these meetings
with all these people,
she would come to me and,
"Let's get the guns.
Let's poison the reservoir."
All sorts of violent terrorist acts.
Are you ready to call the wrath
of black gods... black magic...
Yeah!
To do your bidding?
Black people are never
going to get their rights
unless they have
their own separate state.
And if we'd have armed revolution,
there'd be a lot of blood.
I think we'd have that separate state.
Are you ready to smash white things?
Yeah!
To burn buildings, are you ready?
Yeah!
At a certain point,
Nina started to play
only political songs and nothing else,
and that started to hurt her career.
That became a problem to book her,
because promoters
were a little bit afraid that
it might only be the political message
that you were getting.
Are you ready to kill if necessary?
Yeah!
Is your mind ready?
Yeah!
- Is your body ready?
- Yeah!
If I'd had my way,
I'd have been a killer.
I would have had guns,
and I would have gone to the South
and gave them violence for violence,
shotgun for shotgun,
but my husband told me...
I didn't know anything about guns,
and he refused to teach me,
and the only thing I had was music,
so I obeyed him.
But if I'd had my way,
I wouldn't be sitting here today.
I'd be probably dead.
Are you really, really, really ready?
Yeah!
She's putting down the white people...
I mean,
you know, like a barking dog,
but she still wanted
all the good things.
Whenever she'd see, like, Aretha Franklin
and Gladys Knight and all of these people
on the prime television shows,
she, of course, was very upset because
she wasn't able to get on to these shows
because of her reputation.
It got so that there wasn't that much work
and the expenses were high.
It was cutting the legs out
from all the work that I had done.
See you later.
I'll see you later.
I remember my dad
complaining about the fact that
she never stopped speaking out,
but that's who she was.
It was okay when you were onstage.
It's okay 'cause you let it all hang out,
and then when the show ends
and the lights go out,
"Okay, let's put the monkey
back in the cage,
and eat your banana and,
you know, just behave yourself."
It was like she was
penalized and punished
for being herself.
That's a very painful, lonely place to be.
Good evening.
Tonight my guest in the studio with me
needs almost no introduction.
She is Miss Nina Simone.
Nina, when it comes to the artists today,
we find that more of the artists
are attempting to alert America
to the need for change.
Is this really the artist's role?
Well, I think it's something
that, um, I have chosen to do
and I have felt
compelled to do it.
So it is my role...
but sometimes, I wish it wasn't.
I think that the artists
who don't get involved
in preaching messages
probably are happier,
but you see, I have to live with Nina,
and that is very difficult.
I think 19 people
depend on me for their livelihood.
That's a hell of a lot of people.
I know that if I say, "Well, look,
I'm too tired to work tonight,"
I'm gonna get it from both ends.
Nobody's going to understand
or care that I'm too tired.
I'm very aware of that.
Now, I would like some freedom,
somewhere...
where I didn't feel those pressures.
By the late '60s,
I realized that Nina was fighting
demons that could appear
at any moment and you wouldn't know it.
She could get violent,
she could get really physical,
and the change in her
would be dramatic...
boom, like a switch.
And I... I, after a while,
realized that I was...
I wasn't with my sister,
I was with "that one..."
and that one was... menacing.
She was very concerned,
in her sane moments,
about these fits of depression and anger.
We even went
to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital,
I think, signed her in
for four or five days.
They conducted every test
known to... medicine at the time
and they were unable to find anything.
And her downward spiral,
it just got worse and worse.
We did a tour with Bill Cosby,
and the last night,
she became erratic.
She had a can of shoe polish.
She was putting it in her hair.
And she began talking gibberish,
and she was totally out of it, incoherent.
It appeared she was having
a nervous breakdown.
And when it came time to go on,
I had to escort her
by holding her arm onto the stage
and sat her down at the piano,
and I immediately stood in the wings
on the opposite side
where we could see one another.
She's watching me pantomime
and she performed.
Basically, she had no control
over her emotions,
and underneath it all,
sex dominated her.
There were times, once or twice a week,
when there was a sex attack
when she goes into a maniacal rage.
There had to be sex.
I mean, this is driving her.
My attitude towards sex
was that we should have it all the time.
How did Andy act towards you?
I just wanted him to move me
sexually, and he never was able to.
Right.
He didn't know how to touch me
and he never had enough time.
He'd come to see me late at night
and be there two hours and leave.
I knew that she was
dating other people.
We agreed that we could both
have our own outside partners...
but we would work together for the sake
of the business and the child.
I can't sit here and speak about
Aunt Nina and Uncle Andy's marriage.
What I can say is that
participation and activism
during the '60s...
rendered chaos in any individual's lives.
People sacrificed sanity,
well-being, life.
Nina Simone was a free spirit
in an era that didn't really
appreciate a woman's genius.
So what does that do
to a household and a family?
Not because of income,
but because of your soul
not being able to do what you need to do.
Direct from our newsroom in Washington,
this is the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Good evening.
Dr. Martin Luther King,
the apostle of non-violence
in the civil rights movement,
has been shot to death
in Memphis, Tennessee.
Jesus!
Jesus.
There was shock
in the nation's negro communities.
Men, women and children
poured into the streets.
They appeared dazed.
Many were crying.
I think White America
made its biggest mistake
when she killed Dr. King last night.
He was the one man in our race
who was trying to teach our people
to have love, compassion, and mercy
for what white people had done.
When White America
killed Dr. King last night,
she killed all reasonable hope.
We want to do a tune written...
for today...
for this hour
for Dr. Martin Luther King.
We had yesterday to learn it, and...
so we'll see.
Last year, Lorraine Hansberry
left us, and she was a dear friend,
and then Langston Hughes left us.
Who can go on?
Do you realize
how many we have lost?
Then it really gets down
to reality, doesn't it?
Not a performance.
Not microphones and all that crap,
but really something else.
We can't afford any more losses.
Oh, no. Oh, my God.
They're shooting us down, one by one.
Don't forget that...
'cause they are...
killing us one by one.
I knew that we were lost.
I felt chased all the time,
no matter what I did or how sad I got.
I felt that there was just
no life for me in the country.
I knew I had to quit
or I had to leave Andy
or do something.
So I took my ring off,
put it on the table...
and I left the country.
According to my godsister
Attallah Shabazz...
I was staying with them,
and Mom had gone away,
and the phone would ring
and whenever it would ring,
I would go running, saying,
"Is that my mommy on the phone?"
And then I remember going back
to the house in Mount Vernon
and Dad just wasn't there.
He wasn't there.
And nobody told me anything, you know?
And, um, so...
One day you're at home
and the staff is there
and your dad's there
and the dog's there
and everything that's familiar
to you is there,
and then you come back,
I don't know, weeks later
and... nothing's there,
nobody's there.
I decided that I wanted
to go to Africa to live
and never come back to America.
I got a divorce from Andy
and I went to Liberia...
and I moved there to stay.
When I got to Africa,
I am happy, I'm beyond happy.
Liberia is a place that was founded
by the American slaves,
and it only makes sense
that I should feel at home there.
I wore... Bikinis and boots is all I wore.
Yeah.
Well, there was no loneliness.
There was no boredom.
The days flew into nights,
and you just couldn't
keep up with the times
'cause there was so much to do.
It was always fun.
I also am keenly aware
that I've entered a world
that I dreamed of all my life
and that it is a perfect world.
And I remember thinking
of the United States
as something that
I had had in a dream
sometime in my life,
but is now gone,
like it never existed!
It was a dream that I had had
and I had worked myself out of it
'cause I had toiled so long
in that place, in that prison...
and now I'm home, now I'm free,
and there is no going back.
There, it was vast and open,
and everything was natural.
Everything!
I have seen lightning in Africa
not flash, but hover,
and what it does is it electrifies you
into complete speechlessness.
I have seen it!
I have seen God.
In my seventh grade year,
Mom moved me to Liberia,
but she was always traveling,
and I never knew half the time
if I wasn't going,
that she was leaving
or when she was coming back.
So I lived with a family for a year
and I went to school there,
and I lived with them
until Mom came and decided
to buy a house on the beach,
and I went from living with them
to living with her,
and she just...
I could never do anything right.
She went from being my comfort
to the monster in my life.
Now she was the person
that was doing the beating,
and she was beating me.
One time, we were in public somewhere,
I did something, and she just...
she went off on me
in front of everybody,
and I didn't show any emotion
because when Mom...
when Mom would see you cry,
she knew she could
push your buttons.
That's what she wanted,
and I would not
give her that satisfaction.
When she would hit me,
I would look her dead in her face...
and she'd be like,
"You better cry. You better cry."
I wouldn't do it.
Times got really bad,
to the point where
I thought about committing suicide.
So, when I was 14,
I flew to New York,
and I wound up living with my dad
and I never went back.
After we broke up,
a lot of things happened.
She didn't file taxes.
She didn't take care of business.
She lost the house in Mount Vernon.
Everything went crazy.
She lived a nomadic life,
having no manager, having no husband...
but she always said living in Africa
was the happiest time in her life.
She could just be there, enjoy herself.
She didn't have to sing at all.
She wasn't playing piano
and she wasn't performing.
She said she hated the piano.
She hated it.
Think about it. She's playing since
she was four years old.
On the other hand,
she was very well aware
that in Africa, no money came in.
So she had to pick up her career again.
She didn't want to return
to what she called,
"The United Snakes of America."
So she moved to Switzerland,
which was the complete opposite of Africa,
and the first thing she did
was the Montreux concert.
You on yet?
Do you hear all those noises?
You didn't forget me, huh?
That's... That's what's so wild,
you didn't forget me.
I didn't expect you to,
but I'm tired.
You don't know what I mean.
And there are many people
in show business who said,
"Oh, she... You know,
she used to be a star.
She's gone all the way to the bottom,"
and all kinds of crap
which means nothing to me at all.
I hope that you will see me
or see the spirit
in another sphere, on another plane
very soon now.
And again, I don't wanna let you down
and I get this feeling.
So I think the only way
to tell you who I am these days...
is to sing a song by Janis Ian.
Hey, girl, sit down!
Sit down!
Sit down!
In Switzerland,
there I had no money.
I never got anything from Andy.
He just cut himself off from me
and I was left high and dry.
So I left Switzerland and I went to Paris,
thinking that I could resume my career.
I did it alone
and I landed in the wrong place.
I was working every night
in a small cafe for about $300 a night.
No, we just do "Vous Etes Seuls."
It goes like this!
I was desperate
and no one believed that I was there.
I was too big to be there.
No one came to see me.
And I had fallen from grace.
I'm sorry that I didn't become
the world's first black classic pianist.
I think I would have been happier.
I'm not very happy now.
I wouldn't change being part
of the civil rights movement.
I wouldn't change that.
But some of the songs that I sang
have hurt my career.
All of the controversial songs
the industry decided to punish me for...
and they put a boycott
on all of my records,
and it's, uh...
hard for me to incorporate
those songs anymore
because they are
not relevant to the times.
In terms of the civil rights movement,
how far have we come?
There aren't any civil rights!
What do you mean?
There is no reason to sing those songs.
Nothing is happening.
There's no civil rights movement.
Everybody's gone.
I met Nina in 1967
and I've been her friend all her life.
She called me in 1982
and she was here in Paris,
living in a very small apartment,
hardly with any money.
She did concerts of four hours long
at Trois Mailletz, that nightclub,
and she got
a few hundred dollars a night.
And that was the worst period.
I visited her in that little apartment
and it was so dirty,
so I cleaned it all up and,
"Nina, you can't live like this,"
but at that moment,
she was still uncontrollable.
This thing in the Grand Hotel
in Paris happened.
Somebody looked her
in the eyes a bit too long,
and she was already a bit nervous
and she kind of... made a movement
and I thought, "She's going to hit him."
Immediately, my arms around her,
and I dragged her out in a taxi
and I said to the taxi driver, "Drive!"
When I saw her in Paris, she was like
a street urchin dressed in rags.
I couldn't believe what was happening
and I was really, really sad.
Gerrit and I, we knew
something was very wrong,
and we were trying to figure out,
and like, "What is it?
What is it, really?"
So Gerrit found her a condo
in Nijmegen in Holland,
and Gerrit had a friend, a doctor,
that he brought to Nina's place,
and the doctor examined her
and asked her questions,
and he prescribed a medication
which was kind of new... new spectrum,
called Trilafon.
It wasn't till I was in my 20s
and I went to visit her in Nijmegen,
that's when I learned the term
"manic-depressive" and "bipolar"
and I remember asking,
"Well, what is that?
What do you mean by that?"
And her mood swings
and a lot of the things
I dealt with earlier in life
when, you know,
one minute she'd be happy
and then the next minute...
I'd be dealing with someone
that wasn't in the room five minutes ago.
It started to make sense.
She got so deep
in the shit in the end
that she realized
it's either dying or give in.
And she gave in
because we said, "Nina...
we'll get you a house,
we'll get you your musicians,
we'll make the things
all right around you,
we'll book your concerts...
but you have to do as we say.
You have to take your medicine.
You have to work.
God has given you the possibility
to be able to do what you do, so do it!
The only thing we want to hear
is either 'yes' or 'no.'"
And she said,
with tears in her eyes, "Yes."
When I saw her,
I was very concerned because
she had a... a nervous tic.
You know,
she'd be talking or sitting and this...
Her mouth would always be twitching,
and when she would walk,
it was more of a shuffle.
And I'm like,
"What's going on here?"
You know, "Why...
What's going on?
What am I missing?"
And they had her on medication.
She started taking the Trilafon
and the doctor said,
"Through the years, it's going
to have an effect on her motor skills.
Her voice is going to start to slur
and her piano abilities will decline.
You can deal with that
or you can deal with her probably
damaging herself or someone else."
But the Trilafon really helped.
I mean, there were times in Holland,
sitting on her terrace
in these lounge chairs
and just holding hands...
I mean, she was like...
She was my sister.
And not talking at all for hours,
just enjoying the day.
And I suppose that medication
enabled her to perform
and fulfill the business dealings
that were taking place
so that her career
could get back on track,
but there were times
when I questioned that,
you know,
"But what about her heart?"
Because at the end of the day,
you guys got wives and husbands and lives,
but she's alone.
My personal life is a shambles.
I've had a few love affairs
and I would love to be married,
but everything has had
to be sacrificed for the music.
We had to do, first in Holland,
eight concerts,
and the word spread
that Nina's doing the job well.
Then she was on the road again
and it was... poof.
The business was going.
She came onstage
and you had this overwhelming,
emotional feeling
coming from the audience
just because she was there.
Now listen to me.
I love you very much.
I think you know that
and I know that you love me.
I know that.
And we never knew too well
what was going to happen
and how the mood would be.
So this place is very hot
and it's very crowded
and it's very ugly.
But she opened
her heart and soul
at that moment.
That's this special kind of connection
she had with an audience.
This song is popular
all over France.
It's from our first album...
the very first album
we made in this world,
which is at least 25 years old.
I only wish I was as wise...
could have been as wise then
as I have become now.
I have suffered.
But there's a Bsendorfer here,
so we'll see what happens.
"My Baby Just Cares For Me."
She was helped by
"My Baby Just Cares For Me,"
that song that became a hit
because of the Chanel advertisement.
And when "My Baby
Just Cares For Me" came along, I said,
"I have to take this opportunity now
to go all over the world
because this is my last chance."
And so I worked very hard
to take advantage of my second coming
because it was my last time
as far as I was concerned.
And she was happiest doing music.
I think that was her salvation.
That's the one thing that
she didn't have to think about.
When she sat at the piano,
her fingers could fly.
She was an anomaly.
She was a genius.
She was brilliant,
and that brilliance shone through
no matter what she was going through.
Even into her old age,
she was brilliant.
She was genius.
She could do whatever she liked.
And when she didn't
have her medicine,
she, musically,
could get even further out.
In one of those little concerts,
and it's recorded,
she starts playing one song
and she sings another.
And this recording,
I made Miles Davis...
while we were on tour, we were
on the same jazz tour as Miles Davis,
and I made him listen to it,
and he said, "Gerrit...
let me listen to it again!
How is she doing this?"
He couldn't understand.
As I got older, I started
to look at her and I thought to myself,
"Wow, she's from another time!"
But she was not at odds with the times.
The times was at odds with her.
I think when a person moves
to their own kind of clock, spirit, flow,
if we were living in an environment
that allowed us to be exactly who we are,
you're always in congress with yourself.
The challenge is,
"How do we fit in in the world
that we're around, but we...
Are we allowed to be
exactly who we are?
Was Nina Simone allowed
to be exactly who she was?"
As fragile as she was strong,
as vulnerable as she was dynamic,
she was African royalty.
How does royalty
stomp around in the mud
and still walk with grace?
Most people are afraid
to be as honest as she lived.
Good night!