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and visibility, Bethlehem Records issued the few extra songs she had recorded for Little Girl Blue but had never released on an album titled Nina Simone and Her Friends. The label also put out “Little Girl Blue” itself as a single, followed by “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” None of these legal but unauthorized releases met with much success, but they helped solidify in Simone an intense distrust of record companies that would escalate as the years went on.

      She was equally suspicious of the club and theater owners who were booking her. Though her television performances all went well enough and upped the buzz around Simone, exposure on this kind of national platform didn’t smooth out the rough edges of her stage conduct. At her concerts, she insisted on receiving her performance fee up front, in cash, which sometimes resulted in near comic situations.

      One night at the Apollo Theater, she refused to go on until she had her money in hand. Honi Coles, the great tap dancer who served as the Apollo’s house manager, informed her that her fee was in an envelope on the piano.

      She went onto the stage and the audience began applauding. Without acknowledging them, she sat down, opened the envelope, and counted the money by carefully spreading the bills out on the piano. Satisfied that every dollar was accounted for, she put it back in the envelope and stood to take the cash backstage—but as she made her way from the piano, she tripped over the stool and wiped out. The audience laughed at the absurdity of it all, and Simone sat on the stage telling them off, insisting that none of them cheer. Someone called out, “We love you, Nina,” and she yelled back, “No, you don’t,” then they went at each other for a while.

      Finally, she got up, walked off, stashed the envelope, and came back onstage. She repositioned herself at the piano, said, “Good evening,” and started the show, as if none of the earlier slapstick had ever happened.

      Still, she continued to rise as a concert draw, and in June another prestigious booking came with the invitation to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival. “We paid attention to her, and in 1960 I put her on at Newport and she was a hit,” said George Wein. “That was a very tumultuous year, ’cause there was a riot in the town and the festival was closed down. But Nina became part of our life, part of our professional life, and remained so over the years.”

      Her Newport set was recorded for a live album. It was the first document of the trio that would be her backing group for a number of years—the ever-present Schackman, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton.

      A highlight of the show was a fired-up rendition of the traditional “southern dialect” song “Little Liza Jane,” which would become a staple of her concerts. It’s a different sort of performance for her; rather than sitting at the piano, Nina sat on a high stool, with a tambourine. Schackman said that she had second thoughts about doing the song and asked him for encouragement. “We’ll get some rhythm started here and see what happens,” she said, before starting in with an arrangement more spare and propulsive than her usual intricate piano backing. (There’s footage of the performance on YouTube, and Schackman says that when he watches it “she has that little smile from time to time, and it was really cute.”)

      Against the backdrop of this excitement and success, and despite a glowing article in Sepia magazine about her home life, Simone had finally reached the end of the line with Don Ross. The couple was divorced in late 1960. To her friends and family, it was as if the marriage had never happened—and there were even some questions among them about whether it really had. “I don’t remember very much about it,” said Carrol Waymon. “I know it was a tumultuous thing, didn’t work out too well. If she did marry Don, it was like an error and it seems to me she got out of it.”

      As Ross was exiting her life, though, there was another community that offered her companionship. The gay following that she had begun to develop during her early nights in Atlantic City, when Ted Axelrod was spreading the word, was playing a bigger role in her offstage hours, centered on the Village lesbian club Trude Heller’s. With her unconventional, stylized sound and image, Nina’s appeal to those marginalized by society—and, in turn, her own interest in such people—was solidifying.

      “When she would leave the club where we were playing, she’d be going to a gay club,” said Schackman. “They would be taking her to Trude Heller’s or another one, below the [Village] Vanguard on Seventh Avenue. And it was real dyke stuff. They were all white. They would dress like men, and some of them wore jackets. They wore loose kind of dress shirts with ties, and pants and men’s shoes. They were all tough. They were formidable.”

      Simone later recounted that she felt uncomfortable with her popularity in the gay community. “I attracted a lot of gays, a lot of them,” she said. “They always thought I was gay, so it was very difficult being with them.”

      Speaking to Stephen Cleary in 1989, she said, “Have I been approached by women? Yes, I have. Trude Heller, who owned a discotheque in New York City. She used to say she went with Sarah Vaughan, and she tried to make me for about five years. I never would do anything with her.

      “I’ve started liking gay people when so many of them were attracted to my music,” she continued, “and there’s so many still attracted to my music, so I had to change my view of them.”

      Her relationship to the gay community, reaching back to her high school days, was even more complicated than her often contradictory statements indicate. People close to Simone claimed that in the early days in New York Simone had several physical relationships with women. Schackman and others said that her close friendship with the prostitute Kevin Mathias had developed a sexual component. Mathias was a downtown “party girl,” and she and Simone spent much of their time together. Simone apparently helped Mathias financially, telling her, “You’re costing me $50 a week”—not an insignificant amount at the time.

      “Kevin was a very light-skinned black woman, long black hair,” said Schackman. “She had her schedules in different cities, different towns—she had a route. Nina was going with her. They’d go shopping, sometimes she’d have this scarf and she’d drive this thing and she was gorgeous. Sometimes she’d stay down there, whatever she was doing.”

      It’s hard to know how much credence to put in these accounts. Was a friendship with a highly sexual woman like Kevin definitely the basis for a physical relationship? Were close friends at an all-girls school necessarily sexual partners (as some speculated), and if so, would that be explained as adolescent experimentation? Was her own stated “difficulty” being around gay people an example of homophobia or bad experiences or overcompensating?

      She did, however, express her admiration for the independence that someone like Kevin represented. “I have envied other women and their freedom,” she said. “For example, the whore that was my close friend. Kevin Mathias, I always wanted to be like her. She was free, and she could get men all the time. She was pretty and she had beautiful clothes and beautiful shoes. And she never had to worry about men, and I envied that. She would whip them—she would actually come to my house, make them fix Christmas dinner, and take a whip to them when they wouldn’t do it.”

      Yet all of Nina Simone’s relationships would change in March of 1961 when, while playing a midtown supper club, she was introduced to a larger-than-life New York City police officer.

      CHAPTER 5

      She had her own mind. She didn’t give a fuck about anybody or anything. She said at one point that I represented strength, and that this is what she liked. And this was her MO. She always looked for security. She was looking for protection.

      —ANDREW STROUD

      My dad was the fifth son of a fifth son,” said Lisa Simone Kelly, née Lisa Stroud. “He was born in Virginia. His father was Dutch, his mother was dark as night. A mulatto child in Virginia, and the youngest son—so that sets our stage right there.

      “I believe something happened to my dad early in his life that made him so hard that he swore he would never be a victim again.”

      When he met Nina Simone, Andrew Stroud was a thirty-five-year-old Harlem-based detective who had served in the

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