Is it raining? Good. Then maybe I can rest.” It has been a sunless, airless morning in Carry le Rouet, an unassuming village west of Marseille. The sky, which has been suggesting rain since dawn, has finally formalised its intentions and the water is pooling on the pink stone patio. Dr Nina Simone (honorific courtesy of the universities of Michigan and Malcolm X) is sitting in the coolest, darkest part of her reception room, a magnificent pyramid of flesh, but ringed by a swelling slick of displeasure.
Did she not sleep well last night? “What does it matter?” She pauses between each word to intensify the admonishment. “I’m tired.” She returned to France, her home for the best part of the past decade, two days ago.
“We did nine concerts all over the States and that was extremely hard,” she concludes, setting her face at me in the weary knowledge that I am unlikely to have the capacity even to begin conceptualising the exhaustion from which she is suffering. Her skin is brown, as she sings in Four Women, and her manner is tough.
Simone once said that an interview for her is as hard as a performance. Which does not inspire confidence, given that she has been known to leave the stage mid-concert “because the audience weren’t ready to hear me”, and cancelled her last London show without notice because she was “distressed” about an injured dog.
She is, of course, a diva. Which is, of course, polite shorthand for a royal pain in the ass.
And so it is this morning. Her hair is top-knotted, her wide frame shrouded in a light kaftan. Her regal features are crowned by a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses. She looks mean. Clifton, her manager, smiles wanly from the corner as I rattle through the sweeteners he has briefed me with.
“If you give something positive, you get something positive back,” he explains on the drive to Simone’s villa and, indeed, fair exchange is no robbery. Were it so. Instead, it is like coaxing a furious walrus.
I hear she got great reviews. “Well, of course I did,” she snaps. “I have a lot of willpower.”
So what makes a good concert? Silence. A deadly stare.
What sort of audience do you require? “I require them to respond to me,” she says haughtily. “We had three, four, five thousand, and when they respond to me it’s like a family.”
And now she’s planning to work with Lauryn Hill on a new CD? Silence. Another deadly stare. Does she like Hill’s music? “No, I like her. I don’t like rap.” She spits the word out like a sour pip.
Why do you like her? “She’s young, she likes me and she is inspired by me. Of course I’m impressed by that.”
She almost allows a smile, then a highly offensive iced coffee appears — provided by Sandra, Simone’s live-in assistant — and the ire erupts.
“What is she giving me? No, I want some cigarettes and they’re upstairs.” Exit Clifton, like a puppy after a stick. Meanwhile, the good doctor hollers at Sandra, the ceiling, whoever cares to listen: “Waaaaaash the things! I ate the salmon; get rid of it.”
On the far wall Little Richard, George Benson and Nat King Cole smile down upon her. Clifton reappears with a fresh pack of Kool filters. He lights one for her. She doesn’t say thank you. The squall passes.
Simone has always contrived to be nobody’s darling. She is a self-contained phenomenon, though arguably it is circumstance that made her so. Her voice is probably the closest we have to the sound that blood would make were it to sing. It’s the kind of sound that, once heard, makes everything else seem flimsy.
Now, at the age of between 64 and 69 (depending upon one’s relationship with the truth and proximity to the lady in question), Simone is at last free to define her own terms. She sings “black classical music”, she tells me, not “jazz”, which is simply a lazy catch-all for black performers.
She was born Eunice Waymon, the sixth child of a Methodist preacher mother and an invalid father in Tryon, North Carolina. Classical music was her first love. She was a precocious talent, winning a scholarship to New York’s Juilliard School of Music, and dreamed of becoming the first black concert pianist, until — “everybody knows” — she was turned down by the elite Curtis Institute in Philadelphia because of her colour, and turned to showbusiness instead.
Performing in Atlantic City dives to raise money for further tuition, she changed her name to Nina (a Hispanic boyfriend’s endearment) and Simone (after the French actress Simone Signoret) partly to deflect her mother’s disapproval.
From the start of her career she enjoyed an uneven relationship with finance, failing to examine the small print on her first record deal and signing away the royalties to many of her best-loved songs for $3 000.
When My Baby Just Cares for Me was re-released in 1987 after appearing on a television advertisement, and became a mammoth hit, she was offered only token royalties, and her work continues to be bootlegged globally.
It is evident that she feels rather sullied by the process of entertainment. Fame has never been important to her, she says. Talking about her fans, she is both dismissive and genuinely discomfited: “I don’t want them close to me. They are to be in the audience, and that way when I sing I’m close to them. But when I’m off that stage, get away, leave me alone.”
She bellows about working too hard, but doesn’t whine. Unusually, her bitterness is not ugly to behold, perhaps because it is tempered by the vivid fury that defined her glory days at the centre of the civil rights movement and blazes in her still.
It was in response to the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, that left four schoolgirls dead, that Simone wrote Mississippi Goddam, and later the black pride anthem, Young, Gifted and Black.
She became the movement’s protest singer, counting Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael and Paul Robeson within her circle.
She is thrilled to hear about the British High Court’s decision last week to lift the exclusion order on Louis Farrakhan: “Oh really? Thank you! Louis was my friend for a long time and he’s a great man. He’s the only leader they have now [in the United States].”
But her tour of the US has left her frustrated. “The racism is just as bad, and the sexism, though it’s subtler in the north. I sang against [President George W] Bush in all of my concerts, and the people applauded and applauded.”
Politically, as well as musically, she expresses supreme derision at the younger generation. “They are retar-ded. They don’t know the importance of unity! And there’s nobody to teach them because they’ve all been killed!”
Meanwhile, her own white heat smoulders, ready to flare. As it did a few years ago, when her neighbour’s children shouted racist abuse over the fence and she shot at them. She avoided jail by paying a £2 000 fine. Was she shocked at herself? Simone smirks. “I was shocked that I did it, but not sorry.”
She is soon to travel to South Africa for a vacation, and recalls her last visit when she met Nelson Mandela. “It was awesome, to meet a man who’s been in jail 27 years, and comes out without bitterness. That’s incredible! But he had faith in the people and he had the knowledge that they were behind him.
“I used to sing a song with Miriam Makeba, what was it …” And Simone starts to sing to me: “Bring back Nelson Mandela, bring him back home to Soweto, I wanna see him walking down the street with Winnie Mandela, tomorrow …” Wow. It’s impossible to stop smiling.
Of course Simone’s oeuvre has dealt just as much with sexual politics. Two marriages notwithstanding, her own romantic exploits are legendary, in particular her attempted seduction of Farrakhan, allegedly to stop him preaching at her.
Is there an assumption that as women get older they lose interest in sex? “I don’t, but I think other women do because I’m told it’s harder to get a man [as you age]. I flirt all the time. I like men! I don’t think we can do without them. And I miss them in my bed.”
“Yes,” she says, delighting in her theme, “I miss men in my bed. But I have a friend now. I’m not at liberty to tell you his name, but he’s Chinese. I’ve known him for six weeks, and he has promised to come here in September.” That’s exciting. “Yes, it’s very exciting,” she rushes, suddenly all giggles.
Would she describe herself as contented? “If I can get my rest,” she says pointedly, reprising her earlier grizzle. “I am in this house, I am in this garden, I am in the pool. When I look at my walls” — she gestures to the concert posters and promotional portraits that dominate the room — “and the things I have done, and the films — yes, I’m content.”
How often does she watch herself on video? “Not too often. But when I get lonely, and there’s no man in my bed then I want to see myself, to keep up the energy.”
The death of her mother in November has left her feeling very responsible, she says. “I am a matriarch for my family, and I miss her terribly.” Her own daughter Lisa is currently singing in a touring production of Aida in the US. Lisa herself has two children, but Simone hasn’t seen them for a year.
Is her relationship with her daughter different from that which she misses with her own mother? “My daughter is in more competition with me,” she says. “I never wanted to be bigger than my mother, or to challenge her.”
Does she feel threatened by Lisa? “No, not as long as I keep moving faster than her,” she laughs, shockingly triumphant. “And I have a beautiful home, which she doesn’t.”