BOOK REVIEW: 'Princess Noire'

PRINCESS NOIRE: THE TUMULTUOUS REIGN OF NINA SIMONE

By Nadine Cohodas

Pantheon Books, $30

449 pages, illustrated

REVIEWED BY WILLIAM F. GAVIN

It is no criticism of author Nadine Cohodas to say that as I read "Princess Noire" there were times I wanted to close the book and go for a long walk. Ms. Cohodas is in fact the very model of a good biographer: sympathetic to her subject without being hagiographic, possessed of a clear, clean prose style that keeps the story moving and knowledgeable about the times in which singer-pianist Nina Simone lived. The problem with the book is Nina Simone herself. To put it in the mildest terms, while she was an original, gifted, sometimes magical performer and an outspoken champion of civil rights, she was also a maddening, egomaniacal, deeply disturbed, rude, abusive, colossal pain in the, er, neck.

She was born Eunice Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in Tryon, a small North Carolina town. Her childhood, while not idyllic (racial segregation was a fact of life), was comparatively happy. Her mother, a part-time preacher, and her father, a handyman, were upstanding, hardworking people. Tryon had a reputation for racial enlightenment. When Eunice showed early promise as a pianist, her favorite piano teacher was a white woman, Muriel Mazzanovich. "Miss Mazzy" introduced her to the music of Bach, which turned out to be a lifelong passion.

When she was 17, Eunice, having dedicated her life to playing classical music, spent a summer studying at the Juilliard School of Music. She then took an entrance examination, playing Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She did not pass the test and was told by a relative that she had been rejected because she was black. Ms. Cohodas suggests that this probably was not the case because Curtis accepted only one in five applicants. But the pain of that failure remained with Simone. Even when she was the most talked about singer in jazz, she reminded people that she was definitely not a jazz pianist or singer - she was a classically trained pianist.

Convinced she could pass the Curtis test the next year, she played pop/jazz piano at an Atlantic City bar to make enough money to pay tuition. She began singing, developed a following, attracted critical attention, found an agent, got better gigs and, by 1956, signed a contract with Bethlehem Records. By this time, she had chosen the name Nina Simone. She said her shows at the time consisted of "popular songs in a classic style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz," quite a mixture. The special quality of her deep voice, and her insistence that she be treated with respect by nightclub audiences, made her stand out from other acts.

In the early 1960s, she became friends with prominent black intellectuals, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who directed Simone's attention to the civil rights struggle. It was this newfound militancy that shaped her public image for the rest of her life. She composed songs - "Mississippi Goddam," "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" - that spoke directly about the civil rights struggles, and she turned her act into a theater of the absurd in which she played the role of dominatrix to guilt-ridden white liberals in need of ritual humiliation.

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