written review of her first record stated that she had spent two years at Juilliard ; the reality was very much shorter than that , just two months . The family then moved to Philadelphia in order that a talented daughter might follow her dream , despite some resistance and resentment on the part of her mother , who regarded the city as den of sin . In the event , she was not accepted , a blow that Nina and others have always claimed was motivated by racial prejudice . In fact , only a tiny number of applicants were taken in , as researcher Peter Dobrin has confirmed in a 2017 article called “ Curtis Institute and the Case of Nina Simone ”. Could it be that Eunice was not accepted because she was , quite simply , not good enough ? A later teacher said that he saw signs of talent in her , but not genius . However , self-belief sometimes goes outside the bounds of the actual and realistic and where music was concerned her self-belief and drive were limitless . Eunice and most of her family remained convinced of her gifts . Only her mother Mary Kate , who lived on obdurately and enigmatically till the age of 99 – her dates 1901-2001 – seemed to have doubts about the daughter ’ s prospects and personality . It ’ s a striking fact of Nina Simone ’ s life that her mother should have lived on until two years before Nina ’ s own passing , a permanent reminder of one of the many great fault lines that ran athwart her life . Mary Kate doesn ’ t radiate warmth in any of the versions of Nina ’ s youth , giving off instead a strange mixture of disapproval , envy and simple lack of understanding . It isn ’ t unusual in such relationships . The American poet Adrienne Rich said that while father-son relationships were exhaustively covered in world literature , the “ cathexis between mother and daughter : essential , distorted misused , is the great unwritten story ”. It was a mystery that Nina would reproduce with her own daughter in later years .
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