The show that gave Nina Simone a nervous breakdown: “She became erratic”
Nina Simone was a force to reckon with, but even the greats have their Achilles heels.
Simone’s commitment to Civil Rights Activism can be charted through her words, as well as her actions: she wrote 1964’s ‘Mississippi Goddam’ in under an hour, venting out of her innermost fury at the tragic, ubiquitous murders of Black Americans as the United States became a melting pot of racist ideologies and white supremacists.
She also frequently used her star power to perform for civil rights organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. Beyond this, she was an active participant and well-regarded speaker at historic marches in Alabama alongside other civil rights leaders.
Undoubtedly, this was the right thing to do, but while white contemporaries of her time could still reap the advantages of always identifying with the in-group, Simone’s commitment to calling out the vile status quo eventually alienated her; she was heavily monitored by authorities, threatened tenfold from every direction, and blacklisted by major record labels.
Plus, when you’re trying to wrestle with an insidious societal perception, often the dominant societal group will take it as a personal offence, so many of her records were boycotted and, in a pseudo-Fahrenheit 451-esque move, physically destroyed in the American South, where racist thinking had bubbled to the surface.
Though her vocal resistance undoubtedly swayed many followers of her work toward the right path, Simone became more and more disillusioned with the amount of energy it required from her: “I think that the artists who don’t get involved in preaching messages probably are happier, but you see, I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult,” she revealed in the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone.
Her husband and manager for a tumultuous 11 years, Andrew Stroud, saw this better than anybody else, recalling a time she had a nervous breakdown in the company of Bill Cosby on their short-lived joint tour in February 1967. “On the last night [of the tour] she became erratic,” he shared in the same documentary.
Their juxtaposed performance styles heightened the emotionality of Simone’s set, and the expectation was set painfully high, with Stroud explaining, “She had a can of shoe polish, she was putting it in her hair, and she began talking gibberish. She was totally out of it; incoherent”. This state of babbling delusion represented the height of her activism burnout, as well as her emotional and internal isolation. It was well-known that the star was swallowing whatever drugs she might find just to make it through her sets, most probably to stave off the constant anxiety the never-ending death threats imbued her with.
This might’ve been her first nervous breakdown, but Simone would continue to suffer from mental anguish for more than another decade before finally being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1988. From there, hiding from the otherwise unyielding daggers at her face in the Netherlands, she was able to sink into a happier, healthier lifestyle.
The breakdown was wild and worrisome, but it wasn’t enough to scare off the ever-fascinated Cosby, who celebrated her legacy in 2011 with a torrent of high praise written in his own personal blog post: “Nina Simone was and still is able to weave a story like a folk singer. Elicit the core feeling of the song like a blues singer and articulate the brilliant timing of a superior jazz musician.” You can say that again.
