What Happened, Miss Simone? Review
By David Kempler
Simone Says
The only thing I really knew about Nina Simone was that she was a singer who was popular fifty or so years ago. I had almost no idea about the details of her singing career and knew zero about her personal life. Liz Garbus' documentary "What Happened, Miss Simone?" brings Simone's biography to life and it's not a surprise that it has earned Garbus an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary.
Ms. Simone was born in North Carolina in 1933. She was the sixth child of a preacher, so naturally she was immersed in her church, where she immediately took to the piano. It soon became apparent that she was uniquely talented and her desire was to be a classical concert pianist.
With monetary assistance from her friends and supporters, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York but was unable to continue because of the high fees. Her attempt to get into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia through a scholarship was rejected. She believed that the rejection was based on her race.
Faced with no great prospects, she was forced to go out and make a living with her talents. She ended up in Atlantic City, playing piano in a cocktail lounge. Her boss said he would fire her if she didn't sing as well. Never having been a singer, she was not thrilled about it, but she needed the job. She didn't know that singing while playing would launch a fabulous career as a jazz artist and later as a mainstay of the Civil Rights movement.
With all the greatness she attained, there were still major issues that tortured Ms. Simone's life. One of the great plusses and minuses of her life was Andrew Stroud. Stroud was a retired New York City cop and he not only married her, he became her manager. He was a very good manager and equally as bad as a husband. He abused her physically and mentally, but she had her own problems, especially her erratic and sometimes abusive personality. Years later, a diagnosis of manic depression explained a lot of what made little sense earlier in her life.
Garbus uses conversations with friends and associates of Ms. Simone, archived interviews, previously unseen footage, and especially her personal letters and diary entries to get a clear view of what was going on in her mind. It's these narrated notes that hit the audience with a punch in the gut. Her pain oozes off those pages. A great and important talent who is yet another example of fame not necessarily meaning happiness. But there is still an awful lot to celebrate in Garbus's production and now we know what happened to her.
