Yet the Nica I knew, who seemed grounded and determined, was not some crazy harpy. She did lose custody of her young children but she never abandoned them: indeed, her eldest daughter Janka came with her to New York when she was sixteen. Nica never wanted to leave the people she loved, but she wanted to escape from a life she described as a “jewel-encrusted cage.”
“Do you realise what you’re doing? A lot of people aren’t going to like this,” advised Nica’s old friend, the trombonist Curtis Fuller, when he heard I was investigating Nica’s life. “You’re going to catch some serious shit.”
Naively, I had not realised that many people, particularly those in the family, wanted Nica to remain a mere footnote in other people’s stories.
I should not have been surprised: obsessive secrecy is a family trait and secrets have, on many occasions, served us well. Secrets kept us alive in the Frankfurt Ghetto in the eighteenth century, through various pogroms and, with a few exceptions, during the Holocaust. Secrets were the source of our fortune on Wellington’s battlefields, in the oil wells of Baku and, latterly, they saw us through the mire of volatile financial markets.
Many Rothschild women, including those I knew well, stonewalled my questions or refused to take my calls. I received two unpleasant, threatening letters. This, I found out, had happened before, to Nica’s sister Miriam, when she wrote a biography of her uncle, Dear Lord Rothschild. It contained stories of family suicides. Although one had already been reported in the national press, Miriam’s “crime” was to break ranks and speak about it publicly. She was castigated by a female relation: “However salacious you think it necessary to capture the attention of the public, I never could imagine that you could soil your own nest in this way by making a story out of it.”
Nica’s children were initially enthusiastic about my research but changed their minds, arguing that their mother would have hated any form of biography. I cared about what they thought and, mindful of their feelings, I dropped the project for a few years. Later they published a biographical essay together with a collection of her private photographs and interviews, titled The Musicians and Their Three Wishes, which offered a unique insight into her life. Every musician Nica met was asked to tell her three things they really wanted. Their answers are brief but revelatory. Monk says, “To have a wonderful friend like you.” Miles Davis says, “To be white.” Louis Armstrong, “That I live for a hundred years.” Nica had tried to publish this book during her lifetime as a tribute to her friends, but every publisher turned it down. Then her children added their mother’s photographs to the manuscript, and the images brought the text alive. Few of the pictures are composed, the lighting is haphazard and their condition is variable, but none of that matters: together they offer an extraordinarily evocative glimpse into a lost world.
I met the great saxophonist Sonny Rollins, Nica’s friend, and told him about my abandoned project. “You have to carry on,” he insisted. “Her story is our story. It has to be told.” I started work again and continued my research. Wherever my job or holidays took me, I went armed with a video camera and notebook just in case there was someone who remembered something. I’ve conducted scores of interviews, collected piles of news clippings, album sleeves, documentaries, photographs, letters, emails, tapes and assorted memoirs. It was an adventure that started at one of the Rothschild family homes in Ashton Wold, Peterborough, with Miriam, and criss-crossed the globe from Harlem to Holland, from Mexico to Manhattan and from Spain to San Francisco.
I made a radio programme and then a documentary feature film about her, both called The Jazz Baroness. The latter was shown on the BBC and HBO, and it still tours festivals worldwide. Storytelling on film is one form of biography; the written portrait offers other possibilities. I was keen to explore them all, to mine every seam. Why? Mainly because hers is such an extraordinary story, a musical odyssey spanning both a century and the globe with all the ingredients of a melodrama: the heiress and the suffering artist; the butterfly and the blues; love, madness, war and death.
But there are other, personal reasons. Though we were born half a century apart, in different circumstances, with dissimilar characters, investigating Nica’s life has helped me to understand my own. She has taught me to look for the similarities rather than the differences, to value choice over convention and, above all, to be more courageous. Why has this project taken me nearly twenty-five years to complete? There is part of me that wonders if I could make it last a little longer. Again and again I asked, who are you, Nica? Heroine or lush? Freedom fighter or dilettante? Rebel or victim?
2 • Queen of the Fleas
Why are you doing this, Hannah? Is it just about self-publicity?” Miriam demanded.
“There are many easier ways to get publicity,” I answered defensively.
“Can’t you think of anything else to do? Why does it have to be about the family?”
“You wrote a whole biography of your uncle Walter,” I countered.
“But that was different.”
“Why?”
“Because it was about science. Science matters.”
“Music matters to many.”
But Miriam was not entertaining that thought.
“Shall I stop coming?” I asked.
“Oh, I suppose you’d better not,” she said.
Invariably if I did not go and see her for a while, my telephone would ring. “When are you coming? I’ll be dead soon.” Then she would hang up.
To the outside world, my great-aunt Miriam was a distinguished entomologist but to her relations she was a formidable, exacting and inspirational matriarch who extended her benevolent if capricious hand to those in need. Until her death in 2005, she spent most of her ninety-six years at the Rothschild family house, Ashton Wold. The place was always a safe haven for family and friends, including, at times, Nica, her children and me. Miriam was an expert on family history, an endless source of information about and analysis of our forebears. She was the quintessence of her generation and utterly indispensable to my project. What’s more, she knew it.
Many times over the next few years, I went to see Miriam, driving up the A1, through north London and out into the heartland of middle England. It is a beautiful part of the country if one likes flat landscape and vast agricultural tracts. Personally, I found it a relief to turn off a busy road, leave behind the gentle orange glow of the town of Oundle and enter Miriam’s natural wonderland.
Nica and Miriam’s father Charles, an amateur entomologist, fell in love with the estate when he realised it would make an ideal conservation ground for butterflies and dragonflies. He tried to buy the land, but the local estate agent told him the owners would never agree to sell—they did not need to. By coincidence, it turned out that Charles’s father Nathan Rothschild already owned it. In 1900, work started on building a large three-storey house and laying the foundations for formal gardens, greenhouses, ponds and a park.
Miriam Rothschild in her wildlife garden at Ashton Wold (Photographic Credit 2.1)
Although Nica’s brother Victor, as the son and heir, inherited the bulk of the family’s possessions and all the estates, in 1937 he gave Ashton to his sister Miriam. In an attempt to save money on heating, Miriam sliced off the whole top floor, lowering the once imposing three-storey façade. Then, declining to prune any plant, she let nature take its course. Soon every wall and many windows were covered with climbers and creepers, while a riot of ivies, roses, honeysuckles, wisteria and other species were allowed to grow unchecked. In the height of summer Ashton Wold looked more like a buzzing, rustling mound of greenery than a house. Surrounded by a 190-acre park teeming with deer that Miriam flatly refused to cull, the land is ringed with the wild-flower meadows that she became so famous for promoting.
Visiting Miriam was always an adventure. My spirits would quicken with excitement as I drove through her local village with its pub, the Chequered Skipper, named, of course, after a butterfly. A gatehouse heralded the start of the long dilap
idated drive that wound through arable fields and meadows. After a mile, one would pass the long, high, brick-walled kitchen garden that once contained several acres of plant beds and greenhouses that in the 1920s were capable of producing flowers all year round for the house, and vegetables for the entire estate. In Miriam’s time, the structures collapsed, leaving only their foundations and shards of window glass. A few were kept up to house a pet owl, as a butterfly house and to grow exotic crops.
In the garden, the vestiges of formal ponds, clipped yew hedges, summerhouses and beds were still visible but only just. Forty years of laissez-faire gardening had allowed weeds to choke waterways, paths to close up and trees to fight for space. Nature thrived in those conditions. In early summer the undergrowth teemed with grass snakes. Wild buddleia and flower meadows encouraged a huge variety of insects and butterflies.
“Welcome to Liberty Hall!” Miriam would shout out to arriving guests. “Do whatever you like here.”
At any one time you might sit down with visiting professors, relations, the odd duchess, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the academic John Sparrow plus an assortment of the (mainly male) acquaintances that Miriam met on her various travels. Tea was set out permanently on a long table in the drawing room so that anyone, including the house’s enormous population of mice, could help themselves at random. I once pointed out that there were a couple of four-legged “visitors” scuttling around near the Victoria sponge. “Well, just be glad they are mice as it means there aren’t rats near by. Mice and rats don’t cohabit, you know,” said Miriam in her matter-of-fact way.
The greenhouses at Ashton Wold, Peterborough, in 2004 (Photographic Credit 2.2)
Lunch was always served with a minor Rothschild wine and the table was laid for at least ten lest any unexpected visitors appeared. Like Nica, Miriam loved the company of animals; Nica loved cats, while Miriam preferred dogs and even had, for a time, a pet fox. Both Miriam and Victor kept owls. When Miriam’s died, it was stuffed and put back on the bookshelf where it had liked to perch. The long entrance hall at Ashton Wold was lined with box files containing Miriam’s scientific experiments, and the walls of the downstairs loo were covered in the rosettes won by her champion cows. The room where I slept was so overrun by mice that the floor was often covered in their excrement. There was no point in complaining, as Miriam would never have understood the fuss.
Towards the end of her life Miriam moved her bedroom to a large room on the ground floor, mainly taken up with a workbench, microscopes, papers and family photographs. “I keep the fleas there in plastic bags by my bed,” she was fond of saying. “It was a habit that started when the children were small to stop them from disturbing the insects.”
The whole family was mad about insects. I found out that Nica was actually named after one. One day an American friend sent me a bootleg version of the song “Pannonica” that Monk had written for Nica. Recorded at the Five Spot Café, it is accompanied throughout by the chatter of the crowd and the clinking of glasses. Nica was in the audience, and had made the recording, as she so often did. Monk, who rarely spoke, cleared his throat to get attention. “Hello, everybody,” he said in his gentle way. “I’d like to play a little tune I composed not so long ago dedicated to this beautiful lady here. I think her father gave her that name after a butterfly he tried to catch. Don’t think he ever caught the butterfly but here’s the tune I composed for her, ‘Pannonica.’ ”
I asked Miriam about the butterfly Nica was named after.
“Butterfly!” Miriam roared dismissively and then zoomed out of the room in her high-speed electric wheelchair. My heart sank—what had I done to upset her?
Yet Monk’s dedication did seem to provide various clues about Nica and her own mythology. She presented herself as an exotic, elusive creature. It was an intriguing analogy: trying to capture Nica was not unlike glimpsing a butterfly as it flits, dances, bobs and soars over a garden, buffeted by uncertain breezes, drawn by delicate aromas, with the sun momentarily catching its luminescent colours. Suddenly the butterfly will disappear into the neck of a plant or close its wings and, thus camouflaged, become a leaf or a petal.
I decided to find out whether the butterfly pannonica was to be found in the entomological collections of either her father Charles or her uncle Walter. Both men had amassed enormous holdings during their lifetimes and after their deaths most of them were given to the nation; more than six million were left to London’s Natural History Museum, forming the bulk of its entire collection of bugs and butterflies. I did not set my hopes high: surely there was little chance of finding one butterfly among so many others. I wrote with low expectations and was astonished to receive an invitation to visit the museum’s vaults to view the species pannonica. Our ancestors were not only great collectors but obsessive documentarians; everything was so carefully catalogued and cross-referenced that little got lost.
Walter Rothschild riding on a giant tortoise (Photographic Credit 2.3)
One dreary November morning in 2007, I went to the Natural History Museum to see the entomologist Gaden Robinson. We met under the enormous dinosaur skeleton in the main hall and walked down tiled passages, past weird and wonderful creatures, to the storerooms. Robinson led me through huge metal stacks. There I saw the now stuffed giant tortoise that Charles and his daughters used to ride on in the great park at Tring. That poor animal had died of unrequited sexual desire (not for Nica or her, Miriam assured me). The vaults are enormous: long rows of cabinets, filled with beautifully made mahogany specimen trays. “We’re in roughly the right area,” Robinson said, striding down the middle. How did he know what to look for? “Butterflies on the right, moths on the left. Here’s the subgenus, Eublemma.”
To my astonishment he turned left, not right, and strode down an aisle.
“But this is the moth section,” I said.
“Pannonica is a moth.”
“A moth. Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. Here we are.” And he started to pull open the glass-backed drawers.
“But she told everyone she was a butterfly,” I said to Robinson. “There is even a song written for her called ‘My Little Butterfly,’ and endless references to the derivation of her name.”
Robinson turned to me and said quite crossly, “Butterflies are just moths with go-faster stripes. People think they are terribly, terribly different but butterflies are just three out of many dozens of families of moths that have adopted a high-flying lifestyle; because they are flying in the daylight they tend to exhibit brighter colours than moths. With all due respect to people who find butterflies incredibly sexy, they are just suit-cut moths.”
“Why are butterflies less interesting?” I asked.
“I am not saying they are less interesting, but I am putting them in their proper place. People tend to consider butterflies to be nice but see moths as nasty, which is just public perception. It is erroneous; butterflies are moths with better public relations.”
Once located, pannonica turned out to be a humble little insect, the size of a small fingernail and hardly a head turner. We carried the tray of pannonicas back to Robinson’s office. Each specimen had been carefully mounted on a pin and individually labelled by hand in beautiful Victorian lettering. Using a magnifying glass, we could make out the words. First came “NC Rothschild” (Nica’s father Charles), then the date, August 1913, and finally the place where it was found: Nagyvárad, Bihor, the place where Nica’s mother was born. It was in this village that Charles met Rozsika and it was here that the family would return every summer to see their relations until the war intervened.
There were about ten little pannonicas caught between 1910 and 1914. I looked at the final one, aware of the poignancy of the date; it was the last time Charles would go moth hunting as by then his health had begun to deteriorate. Holding this specimen up to the light, I saw that, far from being a dowdy little moth, it was rather beautiful, its lemon-yellow wings with tips the colour of a fine Château Lafite wine. I laugh
ed, realising that being named after a creature of the night was entirely appropriate: Nica came alive after dark.
“Did Nica know she was actually named after a moth?” I asked Miriam a few weeks later.
“Of course,” she said as if I were a total simpleton. “Pannonica means ‘of Hungary’ and it’s also a name given to a mollusc and a vetch. If only you bothered to look in the Lepidoptera catalogues, you’d have seen it: Eublemma pannonica. It was identified first by Freyer in 1840.”
“Why did Nica say that she was named after a butterfly?”
Miriam rolled her eyes, harrumphed and left the room. I should have run after her to ask what that harrumph meant, but I did not really need to. Miriam—the eldest sister, the one who stayed behind, who took care of business, who carried on her father’s work, who looked after her extended family—was clearly exasperated by aspects of her youngest sister’s behaviour.
As the daughter and sister of entomologists, Nica would have known exactly what kind of creature she was named after. I wondered why she preferred mythology to the truth. Did it suit her to stay in the shadows, not to tell the whole story, not to give the complete picture?
Though proud of her heritage and dependent on her inheritance, she remained aloof, preferring to live on another continent, pursuing different interests and deciding to jettison her maiden name even after her divorce. What, I wondered, had made Nica so different from Miriam and Victor who remained steeped in Rothschild life? As my research continued, I realised that Nica felt ambivalent about both her name and her family of origin. She knew that, to the Rothschilds, her birth had been a disappointment. They had wanted a boy.
3 • The Rose of Hungary
In 1913, the year of Nica’s birth, the Rothschild family were facing two crises. One was entirely of their own making; the other was beyond their control. They had, over the previous century, built a massive global empire but the world in which it operated was crumbling. The inexorable decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with the expansionist policies of her neighbours Germany, France and Great Britain, meant the balance of power in Europe was in flux.
The Baroness Page 2