A Look At Nina Simone's Troubled Marriage

Simone was married twice first (and only briefly) to a white man described by the New Yorker as a "hanger-on" in the Atlantic City nightclub scene but later, infamously, to Andrew (Andy) Stroud, a one-time Harlem police detective who later became Simone's longtime manager. From their first meeting in March of 1961, marriage (later

Simone was married twice — first (and only briefly) to a white man described by the New Yorker as a "hanger-on" in the Atlantic City nightclub scene but later, infamously, to Andrew (Andy) Stroud, a one-time Harlem police detective who later became Simone's longtime manager. From their first meeting in March of 1961, marriage (later that year) and a child (daughter, Lisa, in September of 1962) came quickly for the pair. It was around this time, Simone began experiencing her greatest artistic successes, and it wasn't long before the young family moved to the leafy New York City suburb of Mount Vernon. Sadly, however, exhaustion from constant touring and Simone's mental illness struggles (which would go unknown by the public until after her death in 2003) meant life was not as picturesque as it may have seemed to the outsider.

Even worse, Simone's heartbreaking diary entries from this period, published in The Believer in 2010, recount regular beatings at the hands of her husband. "Those I can't take," she wrote. "For some reason they destroy everything within me — my confidence, my warmth and my spirit! And when that happens I just feel that I must kill or be killed — you know how I just about lost my mind the last time."

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