“There were lines around the corner, the people were energetic and there was talking and laughter and glasses and stuff like that,” Al Schackman recounted, “and she belts out, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on, don’t you know how to behave yourselves?’ She said, ‘You people want equal rights’—black crowd, yuppyish, New York—‘You want civil rights? You don’t deserve civil rights, you don’t know how to behave yourself. How were you brought up? Don’t you have any manners? I’m here trying to tell you things and let you know where things are at and you’re just rude. I’m gonna tell you right now how to get civil rights. Go home, take a bath, use underarm deodorant, and that’s how you get civil rights.’ Boy, did that shut them up.”
Part of the excitement of a Nina Simone concert was seeing whether or not it was actually going to happen—if she would make it to the stage, and then, if she would be able to get through a full set without incident.
“I had my music and if you didn’t want to listen to it, go the hell home,” she said. “I wasn’t making that much money that I had to compromise. I felt that I could always go back to classics. When the students came to see me, they would tell each other, ‘You got to be quiet or I’m going to throw you out of here.’ They protected me themselves, and because they did that early, I had that same attitude when I played bigger places. I had gotten that from being a classical pianist. You’re supposed to sit down and be quiet. If you couldn’t be quiet, then leave.
“I regarded myself as one of the most gifted people out there. As far as I was concerned, I condescended to play for them. If they couldn’t listen, fuck it. I thought they needed teaching, because they didn’t know how to listen.”
In certain ways, artists—as opposed to entertainers—need to be arrogant. They have to feel confident that what they’re doing is important, that it needs to be heard, that it’s taking their form to a new place or level. So Simone’s sense of her own artistry isn’t necessarily that far from what those she considered her peers also believed. But there were a few crucial differences in Nina Simone’s relationship to her listeners.
First, she was working in the context of popular music, playing bars and nightclubs and signed to record companies who needed to see her songs embraced by radio—a far different sphere from the world of “high art,” where difficult temperaments and noncommercial work are excused in service of creative breakthroughs. And Simone may have simply lacked (or been indifferent to) the filter that defines polite, “acceptable” behavior from a performer—the displays of modesty and gratitude that we expect from our celebrities as our compensation for buying tickets and records; of course, it would also later be discovered that this impulsive, volatile style was likely something more than simple rudeness—it may have been related to Simone’s periodic chemical imbalances and the emotional turmoil that resulted from her troubled relationship with her second husband.
In August, The Amazing Nina Simone, her Colpix debut, was released. The album was a mix of standards (“Willow Weep for Me,” “It Might as Well Be Spring”) and gospel songs. An even bigger milestone came the following month, when she made her concert debut at New York’s Town Hall, a performance that would be recorded for the first of her many live albums.
Despite the show’s visibility, she had not rehearsed with, or even met, the musicians who would accompany her on that stage until the curtain rose. Fortunately, she had Wilbur Ware, a veteran who had often played with Thelonious Monk, backing her on bass. “If I had had a choice in the matter, I wouldn’t have done it that way,” she said. “Jazz musicians like Wilbur Ware are rare. Most of the youngsters don’t know beans about music, and I would never trust myself to do anything cold with them.”
Some of the material would have to be rerecorded in the studio a few weeks later. When it was released in December, though, Nina Simone at Town Hall gave a fuller sense of the range of her material, introducing several songs that would become staples of her performances and would appear on later albums—“Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” “Wild Is the Wind,” the traditional country song “Cotton Eyed Joe”—mixed with several instrumentals that showcased her piano virtuosity.
Though she was still making weekly trips to Philadelphia to continue her studies with Vladimir Sokoloff, Simone was developing her own distinct style and was fast outgrowing those lessons. She was now a critics’ darling, a marquee name, a signifier of downtown hip. She claimed, though, that this burst of success didn’t sink in immediately. Although she always believed in her talent, the way that she arrived on the scene was such a surprise that it didn’t seem real.
“It didn’t hit me that I was sensational,” she said. “Town Hall, the press was so good, I felt like it was a dream. When people came around, famous people, I wouldn’t take their names and numbers and call them. You know that song by Janis Ian called ‘Stars’—‘They come and go, they come fast, they come slow/They go like the last light of the sun, all in a blaze?’ I felt very much like that. All the men who say they love you, you never can believe they really love you. Everybody be kissing on me and asking for autographs, but I never went home with them or anything, because I didn’t believe them. I thought it was a dream.”
But she certainly didn’t question her right to look like a star in public. When she received her first big royalty check from the success of “Porgy,” the first thing she did was buy a fancy car. Al Schackman found her a gray Mercedes 200 SCE convertible with a red top and matching red leather luggage. They would drive down the West Side Highway to the Village; Nina liked to wear a long scarf, and when they had the top down it would blow in the wind and she’d turn to Schackman and dramatically say, “Grace Kelly.”
Beyond the glamorous clothes and the car, the most significant purchase she made with her new money was her first real apartment on West 103rd Street, across the street from Central Park. It was a seven-room unit on the building’s twelfth floor, complete with two furnished bedrooms, wall-to-wall carpeting, a $700 couch, and a live-in maid named Mary.
Although she was still married to Don Ross, he was more of a shadow in her life than a real presence. She described herself as “very much alone,” hanging out in Village coffeehouses, befriending the folk singer Odetta but few others. “I missed my parents first of all,” she said, “and I missed being home, the feeling of home.”
Some of these feelings of rootlessness might also have emerged from the touring Simone had undertaken for the first time. Backed by an extraordinary trio—Schackman, bass legend Ron Carter, and frequent Monk drummer Ben Riley—she played a number of the country’s leading black nightclubs in the second half of 1959, including the Showboat in Philadelphia, the Casino Royal in Washington, and the Town House in Pittsburgh. These dates culminated in five nights, including New Year’s Eve, at New York’s celebrated Copacabana.
She was on her best behavior for these shows. “It was great,” Schackman said. “In the clubs, there was never really a problem—there was noise and talking, and she would put up with it. I think a lot of it was the scene. There was so much energy, but different than a concert.”
When Simone was booked into the Blue Note in Chicago, she received an additional, surprising offer. She was invited onto Hugh Hefner’s new talk/variety television show, Playboy’s Penthouse. Hefner introduced her as “a star who came out of nowhere last year,” and Simone—in a white gown, and surrounded by tuxedo-clad Playboy wannabes and their dates—performed three songs: “The Other Woman,” “Where Do the Children Go,” and, of course, “Porgy.”
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, with all of these hip white people sitting around on sofas smoking their cigarettes,” said Schackman. “It was a riot. We left there and we’re in the car going to the hotel. And she turns, she said, quiet, ‘Do you believe where we just were? Do you believe what we just did?’ She’s grabbing my hand, ‘Do you believe what we just did?’ ”
It would be the first of several high-profile TV appearances over the next few months. She performed on the Today