Regardless of the particulars—which schools rejected her and for what reasons—Eunice Waymon’s dream of becoming the first great black American classical pianist, the goal she had fiercely been working toward for most of her life, had now essentially collapsed. The racism she had encountered at that first recital back in Tryon had now solidified in her mind as an institutional issue in classical music and, by extension, mainstream America.
But according to Vladimir Sokoloff, the piano teacher in Philadelphia who subsequently accepted her as a student, it was not so cut-and-dried. “It had nothing to do with her color or background,” he insisted. “She wasn’t accepted because there were others that were better.”
“Whatever the truth is,” said Roger Nupie, a Nina Simone fan and collector who would become a friend and adviser, “we should realize in those days there were no black students of classical music in Curtis Institute, and certainly no black women. Was she not accepted because of her color, was there another reason? We will never know.”
With an acceptance rate of less than 5 percent, Curtis was extremely difficult for anyone to get into, much less a black applicant. In fact, Curtis had admitted African American students as far back as 1928, including the future Pulitzer Prize winner George Walker. Even as Simone sat for her audition, a young black woman named Blanche Burton-Lyles was studying in the piano department.
More important than the actual outcome, though, was how it affected Nina and shaped her future, her career, her understanding of her place in the world. “The thing is that it was a kind of trauma for Nina, and it never really disappeared,” Nupie said.
After being denied admittance to Curtis, Eunice had no real reason to remain in New York. Her Waymon Fund money was running out, and her family, still stationed in Philadelphia, needed financial support. So she moved down to Philadelphia and took a job as a photographer’s assistant, assuming that her musical days were behind her. But, of course, the piano was too much a part of her identity for her to really abandon it. Soon enough, with the encouragement of Carrol, she started lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff.
“[She was] not a genius, but she had great talent,” he said. “I accepted her on the basis of her talent, and with the understanding that I would prepare her for [another] audition at Curtis. It was during that early period that she demonstrated, at one lesson, her ability to play jazz. I remember distinctly telling her, ‘Why don’t you pursue this as your profession?’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, my first love is classical music and I want to be a pianist.’ ”
Simone would claim that Sokoloff’s instruction didn’t measure up to the instruction she had been getting from Carl Friedberg. (“Friedberg was much more gifted and much more learned than Vladimir Sokoloff,” she said. “He [Sokoloff] was a great teacher, but Carl Friedberg was from Juilliard and Juilliard was the best school, so naturally I preferred him.”) But she stayed as diligent as ever about her training, continuing to practice four or five hours a day.
She also found a job at Arlene Smith’s vocal studio working as an accompanist. It wasn’t concert work, but it did allow her to make money playing the piano—enough to cover her lessons, pay her own expenses, and have some left over to contribute to her family. “I accompanied students who studied popular singing,” she said. “I used to hear them talk about agents and things. I didn’t know what agents were, but I knew that I was gifted. I knew that I could play anything I heard.”
Eventually, Eunice was ready to move into a place of her own and also decided—in a further fit of independence—that she could increase her income by giving private lessons. The most efficient setup, she felt, would be to find a space that could double as a work studio and an apartment, a requirement that led her to a storefront at Fifty-seventh Street and Master—a big room, with a kitchen and a toilet, that looked directly out on the street. There she taught young students, ages seven to fifteen, for $2.50 an hour. Eight kids left Arlene Smith’s studio to work directly with her, leading to some tension, though Smith would continue to offer Eunice some part-time work when she was in need of some quick cash.
This period also saw her begin her first lengthy relationship since Edney Whiteside, with a man she met in church. “I was near my family. I was studying music. I had a boyfriend, and I had a storefront. So that was a pretty normal existence.”
Her day-to-day circumstances may have seemed stable, but Eunice was still in the process of recalibrating her life’s plan. She felt unsettled, troubled. She began seeing a psychiatrist named Gerry Weiss and visited his offices every Thursday afternoon for about a year. “I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere,” she said. “I did not understand the people in Philadelphia, I didn’t understand what I was doing with them. And so I went to a psychiatrist, not because anything was particularly wrong with me, but I didn’t fit anywhere.”
These feelings of alienation would stay with her, in one form or another, for much of her life. She did have a few close friends, though presumably not the sort of folks her mother would have chosen—in fact, she was drawn to women who displayed an independence and a sexuality in sharp contrast to her church upbringing. Her best girlfriend was a prostitute named Kevin Mathias, also known as Faith Jackson; after allegedly meeting at a brothel where Nina played the piano, they saw each other practically every day. There was also Faye Anderson, a blond woman who “took care of me and dressed me at that time.”
For some time, Eunice had been overhearing some of her vocal students talk about the work they were getting over the summers in seaside resorts and supper clubs. Most took jobs as waiters or bellhops, but one of them—and not, to her mind, the most talented—told her he had gotten a job as a pianist. The students bragged about the money that they could make, up to $90 a week; the success of these moderately gifted students gave Nina an idea. She thought maybe she could pick up that kind of work for the season.
She called the agent of the boy who had scored the piano job, and the agent soon got back to her with the news that she had an offer to spend the summer of 1954 as the house entertainment for the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. Eunice quickly realized, though, that pious preacher Mary Kate Waymon would never stand for her daughter playing secular music in a nightclub. In an effort to avoid discovery, Eunice came up with the solution of adopting a pseudonym—at least until she could break the news to her mother.
Recalling her first taste of freedom that summer in New York, she chose “Nina” in reference to her old boyfriend Chico’s pet name, flattening the Spanish accent. “Simone” she took from the French actress Simone Signoret, inspired by the foreign art films she had become a fan of since moving to Philadelphia. So “Nina Simone” was how her name would appear in newspaper ads and all billing at the Midtown. (Of course, in classic Nina style, competing versions of how and why she settled on this moniker abound. A press bio for the Philips record company, her label during the mid-1960s, opted for a more general, awkward explanation: “The name derived from her childhood when she sometimes had been called ‘Nina,’ meaning little one. Simone was euphonic and just happened to sound well with it.”)
She showed up at the Midtown—“a very crummy bar” a few blocks in from the beach—in an evening gown. Asked what she wanted to drink, she requested a glass of milk. She had never been in a bar before.
She played classical numbers and instrumental improvisations for her first set. “I played everything that I could think of,” she said. “Classical, spirituals, all kinds of things. It was very strange.” The cigar-chomping owner, Harry Steward, told her that her piano sounded nice but she should also be singing. She replied that she was only a piano player, that she had never sung in her life. He told her that here she was either a singer or out of a job.
So she started to sing. Early on, she still kept the focus on her piano playing—she would play for most of her set and sing a few standards, like “My Funny Valentine” or “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” to fill out the time remaining. It was a tentative shift, but after unleashing a vocal power even she was unaware of, Nina noticed a change in the Midtown’s clientele.
“It