DON’T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD
The door swung open and there she was: Nina Simone, alone in her dressing room, sweat cascading down her shaved head, a wig thrown to the floor and two glittering fake eyelashes mashed unceremoniously against the mirror.
It was after midnight and the compact and muscular woman radiated anger following a performance at the smoke-filled Village Gate in New York City. “She was scary, for sure,” recounts playwright Sam Shepard, who during the summer of 1964 was a twenty-one-year-old busboy tasked with delivering ice to chill Simone’s champagne.
Only moments before, her long fingers arched over a black Steinway, Simone held the audience rapt, even terrified. “Mississippi Goddam,” her first bona fide protest song, had caused ripples across the country, especially in the South, which was roiling with racial unrest. And in her version of “Pirate Jenny,” the Bertolt Brecht–Kurt Weill song about a beleaguered hotel maid who vows revenge when a pirate ship returns to liberate her, Simone added a biting pathos all her own.
“It was absolutely devastating to watch,” says Shepard. “It was a real performance as well as just being something heard.”
During the riveting and historic concerts Shepard witnessed that summer, Simone was herself devastated, descending into a terrible darkness. “Must take sleeping pills to sleep + yellow pills to go onstage,” she wrote in July 1964, referring to Valium. “Terribly tired and realize no one can help me—I am utterly miserable, completely, miserably, frighteningly alone.”
Every night after her shows that summer, Simone drove home to Mount Vernon, New York, a leafy suburb of Manhattan where prominent blacks were living at the time, including Malcolm X. There, unknown to anyone save her husband, she kept a small, leather-bound diary, inscribed, “This book belongs to Eunice Waymon,” Simone’s given name growing up in rural North Carolina. While she electrified audiences in Greenwich Village that night, a musical icon in the making, she struggled privately with mental illness, likely bipolar disorder. In the 1960s, that diagnosis didn’t exist, so Simone was left to manage her erratic moods in any way she could: psychoanalysis, hypnosis, drugs, sex, and, ultimately, writing.
“Now we have names for that shit,” says Shepard. “Back then nobody had names for it, nobody was categorizing it. It was part and parcel of what it meant to be an artist.”
By turns luridly raw and heartbreaking, Simone’s diary and letters illuminate her defining years as an artist, before she left the U.S. in 1972 for an itinerant life overseas, a single mother and divorcée, broke and wildly unstable. It’s the period when she first embraced protest music against a backdrop of crushing self-doubt and ambiguous sexual identity. For every step she took toward personal freedom, drawn to the liberation ideologies of the 1960s, her dream of wider acceptance slipped further from reach.
“I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” she wrote in an undated note to herself. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.”
Simone’s music has survived the decades precisely because of how strange and impossible to categorize it seemed forty years ago. The oddly masculine register of her voice, its raw quaver, was and is an acquired taste. Years later, it’s more obvious how, in the absorbing melancholy and pained beauty of her early songs, she was channeling the sexual and racial searching of the era, which is why she’s since become both a gay and black icon. In 2008, Barack Obama named Simone’s “Sinnerman” among the top ten tracks on his iPod, prompting Sony to quickly release the boxed set To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story. The first authoritative biography of Simone, Nadine Cohodas’s Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, appeared in 2010. And a controversial biopic entitled “Nina,” starring a gorgeous, fair-skinned black actress named Zoe Saldana in an afro wig and prosthetic teeth, was filmed in 2013.
Simone’s ex-husband Andrew Stroud, a cantankerous man of eighty-four living in the Bronx, has rarely spoken about his nine-year marriage to the famed songstress in the ’60s, and never before given access to his cache of Simone’s writings. He refused to talk to Simone’s biographer. But after a year of cajoling, Stroud [who has since died] agreed to open up for this story, if only to help sell a small catalog of CDs and DVDs he’s packaged from home movies and leftover recordings. He has kept Simone’s papers in pristine condition, though loosely organized. Many notes had to be dated from the content of the material; some could be pegged only to a general period. But what is immediately striking is how lucid and candid Nina Simone could be, how easily she could tap her emotions in writing, and how, occasionally, she seemed to take great solace in getting thoughts on paper, often in her most desperate hours. Having studied at an all-girls boarding school as a teenager, her grammar and spelling are flawless. And at her most self-aware moments, her language is informed by psychiatry, a result of time spent in therapy in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
But the tumult of her life just as often leaves her scratching for the barest clarity, entering raw fragments and ideas, drugs she consumed, the sex she had the night before. When she’s happy, her writing is in a lovely, flowing cursive; when depressed, a sloppy chicken-scratch. And when her mania has reached a critical mass, she defaults to large printed letters, virtual billboards that scream from the page.
I LOVES YOU, PORGY
“Did you come in here to hear me sing or come here to talk?” seethed Nina Simone, halting midway through a song at Abart’s Lounge, a jazz club in Washington, D.C. It was the late 1950s and the mixed-race crowd watching her on a stage behind the bar went stone silent. “I want it quiet when I sing, goddammit!’”
In the crowd was a young Vernon Jordan, future head of the National Urban League and Bill Clinton’s lawyer in the 1990s. “When she was performing, it really pissed her off if somebody was having a conversation,” he recalls. “I was a great fan. I loved it when she would say, ‘Shut the fuck up!’”
It was a shocking display of impropriety from a female entertainer, especially a black woman, but this was Simone’s reputation from the start. She was considered eccentric. A 1960 profile in Rogue magazine noted that she was “painfully fragile ... sliding back and forth between a sulkiness bordering on the moribund and frenetic, fleeting ecstasies of happiness.”
What inspired her outbursts was less overt racial anger than a desire for the decorum and dignity she associated with classical music. It had been her escape from poverty in Tryon, North Carolina, where she was born in 1933, her mother a stern country minister, her father a handyman who played guitar. At fourteen, Simone began piano lessons with a white British teacher in town whose neighbor had discovered her while Simone’s mother cleaned the neighbor’s house. Simone, who had played only church hymns to that point, immediately fell in love with Bach. Her white benefactors raised money to send her to the Juilliard School in New York in the summer of 1950. After one semester, however, Simone’s money ran out and she moved to Philadelphia, where her family had relocated, to try entering the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music for more piano studies.
To her dismay, she was rejected. For years, she would believe it was because of her skin color, though she later learned that other black students were accepted. But it was a fortuitous rejection: Forced to give music lessons to earn a living, she met college students who encouraged her to play pop music in nightclubs, starting with the Midtown Bar in Atlantic City. It was there she first tried interpreting jazz standards as “Nina Simone,” the made-up name she used to avoid her mother discovering her alternative life.
“All my life I’ve felt the terrible pressure of having to survive,” she told Rogue. “Now I’ve got to get rich ... very, very rich so I can buy my freedom from fear and know I’ll have enough to make it.”
Typical of Simone was a 1961 show at New York’s Apollo Theater, when she refused to perform to a packed house until she was paid in cash. When told the money was in an envelope on the piano, Simone walked onstage to wild cheers, only to sit down and count the money out, bill by bill. Satisfied, she got up to take it backstage but fell backward over her piano bench, eliciting roars of laughter and applause.
“Don’t applaud! Don’t applaud!” she screamed. Al Schackman, Simone’s main guitar player for forty-four years, recounts that when some in the audience replied, “We love you, Nina!” Simone shrieked, “No, you don’t! You don’t love me!” and scrambled offstage. She returned minutes later as if nothing had happened and played a full set.
Simone first gained notoriety in 1959 with her take on George Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” singing the song as if it were her own private confession. She told interviewers she meant it to be about the man she’d just married, a white beatnik named Don Ross whom she met in New York but would divorce after a year. The success of that hit led to appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and won her prominent fans like James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, the latter calling her “strange” and “far out” in a paean published in the Chicago Defender.
At age twenty-eight, when her diary begins, Simone had an apartment on Central Park West, furnished with a baby-grand Steinway, and drove a steel-gray convertible Mercedes Benz 220 SE with a red leather interior and matching suitcases in the trunk. She had her crooked teeth capped in gleaming white. (She never smiled in her early publicity shots.) On sunny afternoons she drove to Greenwich Village to go shopping with her best friend, Kevin, a black female prostitute who had educated Simone in the ways of fashion and men. Simone’s nights were now spent in clubs, especially the Village Gate, an upscale jazz and folk venue fast becoming a hub for a cultural renaissance: Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, and Woody Allen all performed there, opening for Nina Simone.
By 1961, however, with no new hits and her career sagging, Simone was having more trouble convincing club owners to book her, because of her confrontational style. What happened next would define her life and art in the 1960s: a chance meeting with an unlikely suitor named Andrew Stroud, a swaggering police detective from Harlem.
Stroud was about as powerful a black man as one could find in New York at the time. Having risen in the force after cracking a major jewel-theft case in 1954, he was notorious for taking bribes, beating up petty criminals, and consorting with the Mafia figures who ran the nightclubs. He cut a handsome, if roguish, profile. Light-skinned and barrelchested, he had a pencil-thin mustache, wore tailored suits, and carried a .38 pistol, which he was not shy about brandishing.
In March 1961, at a New York supper club called the Roundtable, a mutual friend introduced Stroud to the lanky, exotic chanteuse, who slyly pinched a french fry from his dinner plate as they talked. Stroud drove her uptown to the Lenox Lounge, a hub for Harlem’s elite, and bought her drinks. A love affair ensued. Stroud recounts the first time he sat down next to Simone at her piano, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, in her apartment. She began playing “When I Fall in Love,” a hit made famous by Nat King Cole.
“It felt like I was sitting next to a furnace,” he remembers. “There was all this energy and quivering, and [when] she sang and got into the song, all this feeling came out, the heat and whatnot—I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”
For Stroud, a frustrated musician who had played jazz trumpet in the navy, Simone was a mysterious creature, his first introduction to the Greenwich Village renaissance, where racial and sexual barriers were fast melting away. Simone took him to her regular hangout, Trude Heller’s, a jazz club frequented by women Stroud describes as having short hair, large muscles, and wearing men’s pants.
Even as she dated men, Simone had an obvious affinity for assertive women and was also greatly beloved by gay men. Coming from a traditional Southern upbringing, she was ambivalent about gay identity her whole life, even though her greatest friends, like Baldwin and Hughes, were homosexual, as was her first devoted fan in Philadelphia, Ted Axelrod, a college student and clubgoer who introduced her to Billie Holiday and “I Loves You, Porgy.” Simone’s sexuality seems to have been fluid, and some former associates, like Al Schackman, insist Simone had female lovers, pointing to her relationship with Kevin. (Stroud says Simone supported Kevin with a fifty-dollar weekly allowance.)
The strange men and women who streamed in and out of Simone’s life threatened Stroud’s ego, even while he hid from her that he himself was married and had two sons (his wife had tried to scald him with a bucket of lye when she found Simone’s lipstick on a shirt). That summer, while dancing at the Palladium, Stroud, drunk on rum, accused Simone of sneaking away for a tryst and began beating her on the drive home. The beating continued on the street after they parked uptown. When Simone ran for a passing policeman, the man saw the higher-ranking Stroud and backed off. “I can’t help you, lady,” he said. The beating continued in her apartment, where Stroud aimed his gun at Simone’s face and threatened her life. (He claims there were no bullets in it.)
Some accounts have claimed Stroud raped Simone that night, but he denies it. In any case, Simone escaped to Schackman’s apartment, her face beaten and her eye swollen shut. “He hurt me bad,” she cried. “He hurt me bad.”
When Stroud saw Simone’s face several days later, he claimed not to remember what had happened, blaming the rum. But even as he asked for forgiveness, he also demanded Simone stop consorting with people he deemed intent on manipulating her (including her psychiatrist). “I got rid of the gay crowd and the hangabouts,” he says. “I made that part of the deal: you want to be serious, you want to be steady, you’ve got to be straight.”
From her letters, it’s clear she was deeply in love with Stroud, perhaps because he brought an iron-willed order to her mercurial emotional life and drifting career. In the summer of 1961, Simone was scheduled to play club dates in Philadelphia when she came down with an unspecified illness, thought to be meningitis. Stroud proposed marriage while she lay in the hospital bed. After saying yes, Simone spent the rest of her month-long stay writing love letters. “Maybe it’s your eyes, Andy,” she wrote in July 1961. “I don’t know what it is, but I like giving to you. ... I feel like you are a bottomless well that I can pour water into endlessly and it would never be all you needed or wanted... and you’re so gentle—you’re my gentle lion, my saint Bernard and sometimes my stud bull! (And sometimes bully).”
In another letter, she wrote, “I pray we’ll be together till death.”
The door swung open and there she was: Nina Simone, alone in her dressing room, sweat cascading down her shaved head, a wig thrown to the floor and two glittering fake eyelashes mashed unceremoniously against the mirror.
It was after midnight and the compact and muscular woman radiated anger following a performance at the smoke-filled Village Gate in New York City. “She was scary, for sure,” recounts playwright Sam Shepard, who during the summer of 1964 was a twenty-one-year-old busboy tasked with delivering ice to chill Simone’s champagne.
Only moments before, her long fingers arched over a black Steinway, Simone held the audience rapt, even terrified. “Mississippi Goddam,” her first bona fide protest song, had caused ripples across the country, especially in the South, which was roiling with racial unrest. And in her version of “Pirate Jenny,” the Bertolt Brecht–Kurt Weill song about a beleaguered hotel maid who vows revenge when a pirate ship returns to liberate her, Simone added a biting pathos all her own.
“It was absolutely devastating to watch,” says Shepard. “It was a real performance as well as just being something heard.”
During the riveting and historic concerts Shepard witnessed that summer, Simone was herself devastated, descending into a terrible darkness. “Must take sleeping pills to sleep + yellow pills to go onstage,” she wrote in July 1964, referring to Valium. “Terribly tired and realize no one can help me—I am utterly miserable, completely, miserably, frighteningly alone.”
Every night after her shows that summer, Simone drove home to Mount Vernon, New York, a leafy suburb of Manhattan where prominent blacks were living at the time, including Malcolm X. There, unknown to anyone save her husband, she kept a small, leather-bound diary, inscribed, “This book belongs to Eunice Waymon,” Simone’s given name growing up in rural North Carolina. While she electrified audiences in Greenwich Village that night, a musical icon in the making, she struggled privately with mental illness, likely bipolar disorder. In the 1960s, that diagnosis didn’t exist, so Simone was left to manage her erratic moods in any way she could: psychoanalysis, hypnosis, drugs, sex, and, ultimately, writing.
“Now we have names for that shit,” says Shepard. “Back then nobody had names for it, nobody was categorizing it. It was part and parcel of what it meant to be an artist.”
By turns luridly raw and heartbreaking, Simone’s diary and letters illuminate her defining years as an artist, before she left the U.S. in 1972 for an itinerant life overseas, a single mother and divorcée, broke and wildly unstable. It’s the period when she first embraced protest music against a backdrop of crushing self-doubt and ambiguous sexual identity. For every step she took toward personal freedom, drawn to the liberation ideologies of the 1960s, her dream of wider acceptance slipped further from reach.
“I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” she wrote in an undated note to herself. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.”
Simone’s music has survived the decades precisely because of how strange and impossible to categorize it seemed forty years ago. The oddly masculine register of her voice, its raw quaver, was and is an acquired taste. Years later, it’s more obvious how, in the absorbing melancholy and pained beauty of her early songs, she was channeling the sexual and racial searching of the era, which is why she’s since become both a gay and black icon. In 2008, Barack Obama named Simone’s “Sinnerman” among the top ten tracks on his iPod, prompting Sony to quickly release the boxed set To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story. The first authoritative biography of Simone, Nadine Cohodas’s Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, appeared in 2010. And a controversial biopic entitled “Nina,” starring a gorgeous, fair-skinned black actress named Zoe Saldana in an afro wig and prosthetic teeth, was filmed in 2013.
Simone’s ex-husband Andrew Stroud, a cantankerous man of eighty-four living in the Bronx, has rarely spoken about his nine-year marriage to the famed songstress in the ’60s, and never before given access to his cache of Simone’s writings. He refused to talk to Simone’s biographer. But after a year of cajoling, Stroud [who has since died] agreed to open up for this story, if only to help sell a small catalog of CDs and DVDs he’s packaged from home movies and leftover recordings. He has kept Simone’s papers in pristine condition, though loosely organized. Many notes had to be dated from the content of the material; some could be pegged only to a general period. But what is immediately striking is how lucid and candid Nina Simone could be, how easily she could tap her emotions in writing, and how, occasionally, she seemed to take great solace in getting thoughts on paper, often in her most desperate hours. Having studied at an all-girls boarding school as a teenager, her grammar and spelling are flawless. And at her most self-aware moments, her language is informed by psychiatry, a result of time spent in therapy in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
But the tumult of her life just as often leaves her scratching for the barest clarity, entering raw fragments and ideas, drugs she consumed, the sex she had the night before. When she’s happy, her writing is in a lovely, flowing cursive; when depressed, a sloppy chicken-scratch. And when her mania has reached a critical mass, she defaults to large printed letters, virtual billboards that scream from the page.
I LOVES YOU, PORGY
“Did you come in here to hear me sing or come here to talk?” seethed Nina Simone, halting midway through a song at Abart’s Lounge, a jazz club in Washington, D.C. It was the late 1950s and the mixed-race crowd watching her on a stage behind the bar went stone silent. “I want it quiet when I sing, goddammit!’”
In the crowd was a young Vernon Jordan, future head of the National Urban League and Bill Clinton’s lawyer in the 1990s. “When she was performing, it really pissed her off if somebody was having a conversation,” he recalls. “I was a great fan. I loved it when she would say, ‘Shut the fuck up!’”
It was a shocking display of impropriety from a female entertainer, especially a black woman, but this was Simone’s reputation from the start. She was considered eccentric. A 1960 profile in Rogue magazine noted that she was “painfully fragile ... sliding back and forth between a sulkiness bordering on the moribund and frenetic, fleeting ecstasies of happiness.”
What inspired her outbursts was less overt racial anger than a desire for the decorum and dignity she associated with classical music. It had been her escape from poverty in Tryon, North Carolina, where she was born in 1933, her mother a stern country minister, her father a handyman who played guitar. At fourteen, Simone began piano lessons with a white British teacher in town whose neighbor had discovered her while Simone’s mother cleaned the neighbor’s house. Simone, who had played only church hymns to that point, immediately fell in love with Bach. Her white benefactors raised money to send her to the Juilliard School in New York in the summer of 1950. After one semester, however, Simone’s money ran out and she moved to Philadelphia, where her family had relocated, to try entering the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music for more piano studies.
To her dismay, she was rejected. For years, she would believe it was because of her skin color, though she later learned that other black students were accepted. But it was a fortuitous rejection: Forced to give music lessons to earn a living, she met college students who encouraged her to play pop music in nightclubs, starting with the Midtown Bar in Atlantic City. It was there she first tried interpreting jazz standards as “Nina Simone,” the made-up name she used to avoid her mother discovering her alternative life.
“All my life I’ve felt the terrible pressure of having to survive,” she told Rogue. “Now I’ve got to get rich ... very, very rich so I can buy my freedom from fear and know I’ll have enough to make it.”
Typical of Simone was a 1961 show at New York’s Apollo Theater, when she refused to perform to a packed house until she was paid in cash. When told the money was in an envelope on the piano, Simone walked onstage to wild cheers, only to sit down and count the money out, bill by bill. Satisfied, she got up to take it backstage but fell backward over her piano bench, eliciting roars of laughter and applause.
“Don’t applaud! Don’t applaud!” she screamed. Al Schackman, Simone’s main guitar player for forty-four years, recounts that when some in the audience replied, “We love you, Nina!” Simone shrieked, “No, you don’t! You don’t love me!” and scrambled offstage. She returned minutes later as if nothing had happened and played a full set.
Simone first gained notoriety in 1959 with her take on George Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” singing the song as if it were her own private confession. She told interviewers she meant it to be about the man she’d just married, a white beatnik named Don Ross whom she met in New York but would divorce after a year. The success of that hit led to appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and won her prominent fans like James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, the latter calling her “strange” and “far out” in a paean published in the Chicago Defender.
At age twenty-eight, when her diary begins, Simone had an apartment on Central Park West, furnished with a baby-grand Steinway, and drove a steel-gray convertible Mercedes Benz 220 SE with a red leather interior and matching suitcases in the trunk. She had her crooked teeth capped in gleaming white. (She never smiled in her early publicity shots.) On sunny afternoons she drove to Greenwich Village to go shopping with her best friend, Kevin, a black female prostitute who had educated Simone in the ways of fashion and men. Simone’s nights were now spent in clubs, especially the Village Gate, an upscale jazz and folk venue fast becoming a hub for a cultural renaissance: Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, and Woody Allen all performed there, opening for Nina Simone.
By 1961, however, with no new hits and her career sagging, Simone was having more trouble convincing club owners to book her, because of her confrontational style. What happened next would define her life and art in the 1960s: a chance meeting with an unlikely suitor named Andrew Stroud, a swaggering police detective from Harlem.
Stroud was about as powerful a black man as one could find in New York at the time. Having risen in the force after cracking a major jewel-theft case in 1954, he was notorious for taking bribes, beating up petty criminals, and consorting with the Mafia figures who ran the nightclubs. He cut a handsome, if roguish, profile. Light-skinned and barrelchested, he had a pencil-thin mustache, wore tailored suits, and carried a .38 pistol, which he was not shy about brandishing.
In March 1961, at a New York supper club called the Roundtable, a mutual friend introduced Stroud to the lanky, exotic chanteuse, who slyly pinched a french fry from his dinner plate as they talked. Stroud drove her uptown to the Lenox Lounge, a hub for Harlem’s elite, and bought her drinks. A love affair ensued. Stroud recounts the first time he sat down next to Simone at her piano, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, in her apartment. She began playing “When I Fall in Love,” a hit made famous by Nat King Cole.
“It felt like I was sitting next to a furnace,” he remembers. “There was all this energy and quivering, and [when] she sang and got into the song, all this feeling came out, the heat and whatnot—I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”
For Stroud, a frustrated musician who had played jazz trumpet in the navy, Simone was a mysterious creature, his first introduction to the Greenwich Village renaissance, where racial and sexual barriers were fast melting away. Simone took him to her regular hangout, Trude Heller’s, a jazz club frequented by women Stroud describes as having short hair, large muscles, and wearing men’s pants.
Even as she dated men, Simone had an obvious affinity for assertive women and was also greatly beloved by gay men. Coming from a traditional Southern upbringing, she was ambivalent about gay identity her whole life, even though her greatest friends, like Baldwin and Hughes, were homosexual, as was her first devoted fan in Philadelphia, Ted Axelrod, a college student and clubgoer who introduced her to Billie Holiday and “I Loves You, Porgy.” Simone’s sexuality seems to have been fluid, and some former associates, like Al Schackman, insist Simone had female lovers, pointing to her relationship with Kevin. (Stroud says Simone supported Kevin with a fifty-dollar weekly allowance.)
The strange men and women who streamed in and out of Simone’s life threatened Stroud’s ego, even while he hid from her that he himself was married and had two sons (his wife had tried to scald him with a bucket of lye when she found Simone’s lipstick on a shirt). That summer, while dancing at the Palladium, Stroud, drunk on rum, accused Simone of sneaking away for a tryst and began beating her on the drive home. The beating continued on the street after they parked uptown. When Simone ran for a passing policeman, the man saw the higher-ranking Stroud and backed off. “I can’t help you, lady,” he said. The beating continued in her apartment, where Stroud aimed his gun at Simone’s face and threatened her life. (He claims there were no bullets in it.)
Some accounts have claimed Stroud raped Simone that night, but he denies it. In any case, Simone escaped to Schackman’s apartment, her face beaten and her eye swollen shut. “He hurt me bad,” she cried. “He hurt me bad.”
When Stroud saw Simone’s face several days later, he claimed not to remember what had happened, blaming the rum. But even as he asked for forgiveness, he also demanded Simone stop consorting with people he deemed intent on manipulating her (including her psychiatrist). “I got rid of the gay crowd and the hangabouts,” he says. “I made that part of the deal: you want to be serious, you want to be steady, you’ve got to be straight.”
From her letters, it’s clear she was deeply in love with Stroud, perhaps because he brought an iron-willed order to her mercurial emotional life and drifting career. In the summer of 1961, Simone was scheduled to play club dates in Philadelphia when she came down with an unspecified illness, thought to be meningitis. Stroud proposed marriage while she lay in the hospital bed. After saying yes, Simone spent the rest of her month-long stay writing love letters. “Maybe it’s your eyes, Andy,” she wrote in July 1961. “I don’t know what it is, but I like giving to you. ... I feel like you are a bottomless well that I can pour water into endlessly and it would never be all you needed or wanted... and you’re so gentle—you’re my gentle lion, my saint Bernard and sometimes my stud bull! (And sometimes bully).”
In another letter, she wrote, “I pray we’ll be together till death.”
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