Without Miriam’s involvement, encouragement and memories, this book could not have been written, yet her achievements and her forceful character also threatened to derail the project. Miriam was so strong and her recollections so vivid that her voice at moments seemed to overpower Nica’s. Sometimes when I asked Miriam about Nica, she would talk instead about herself or Liberty. I would question other people about Nica and they would only want to talk about Miriam. Why aren’t you writing about her? they would say. She was the really distinguished, high-achieving one.
I wondered whether Nica resented living in the shadow of her highly successful sister and brother. Was her later decision to live abroad an attempt to establish herself elsewhere, away from their spotlight? A by-product of coming from a highly successful family, as I know, is being treated as someone’s daughter, sister, cousin, niece or mother rather than a person in one’s own right. I stuck up for Nica and for this project. Perhaps Nica achieved something that cannot be measured in honorary degrees and paper qualifications, I would remonstrate, something less public but nonetheless valid. Minor characters, I argued, are still important.
Victor and his first wife, Barbara (née Hutchinson) (Photographic Credit 8.2)
As the youngest child, Nica never felt obliged to continue any tradition, so she did what pleased her, when it pleased her. Liberty, however, could never make the most of her huge potential, and would remain incapacitated by psychological fragility for the rest of her life.
Victor had no intention of letting a career in banking get in the way of his real passions. From an early age, as the longed-for son and heir, he had been over-indulged and brought up to believe that his will was omnipotent. When as a tiny child he found fire amusing, his mother instructed a servant to walk backwards in front of his pram, lighting matches. At school when he was bored by lessons he was allowed to skip classes to concentrate on cricket. He went on to play at county level for Northamptonshire. Miriam became his manager and, in the absence of a father or an interested mother, she attended all his matches.
At Cambridge, Victor read Natural Sciences, hardly a surprising choice for a boy whose first memory was being asked by his father to catch a gynandromorph Orange-tip. At university, a whole world opened up to him; Victor realised his intellectual potential and found his peer group. Though he was known at university for being a playboy who drove an open-top Bugatti and collected rare first editions, for the rest of his life Victor valued academic prowess over possessions. The people he really admired were scientists, dons, thinkers and intellectuals. His forebears had used assets and wealth to create a sense of identity; Victor relied on being clever and being surrounded by clever people. His other great passion was jazz and he considered becoming a professional musician. Hearing that the great jazz pianist Teddy Wilson was giving lessons in London, Victor signed up and took his little sister Nica to watch. Years later Teddy Wilson was Nica’s entrée to the New York club scene.
Victor’s first group of university friends included two young men, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, who persuaded him to join their discussion group, the Apostles. Victor saw them as allies who shared a love of literature and learning, and a hatred of fascism. In the period from 1927 to 1937, twenty out of twenty-six of the group’s new members were socialists, Marxists, Marxist sympathisers or communists. For a young Jew watching the rise of Nazism in Germany, becoming a left-wing sympathiser was not unexpected.
Graduating from Cambridge, Victor was awarded a triple first and was elected a Fellow of Trinity. During the war he worked at MI6 and was awarded a George Medal for bomb disposal, claiming that years of copying Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum’s chords was an ideal preparation for such a tricky task.
Yet for all this loyal service, when it emerged after the war that his two great friends Burgess and Blunt were Soviet spies and that two other members of the Apostles were also double agents, the finger of suspicion came to hover over Victor and would continue to do so for most of his life. One book claimed that he was the “Fifth Man” and although this turned out to be John Cairncross, innuendoes still haunted Victor. On December 3, 1986, he took the unusual step of publishing a letter in the British press stating, “I am not, and have never been, a Soviet agent.” Even when he was cleared by Mrs. Thatcher, the whispers went on. Later he told his biographer Kenneth Rose that discovering Blunt was a double agent had been “devastating and crushing beyond belief.”
Nica, the debutante, presented at court in 1932 (Photographic Credit 8.3)
Victor continued to work in the field of science and, in particular, on the reproductive system of sea urchins. Later he and Miriam became the only brother and sister to have both been made Fellows of the Royal Society. As Miriam put it, “Of course my brother got into the Royal Society long before I did. Chiefly, I think, it was due to prejudice against women. Except for the fact that I hadn’t been to a public school like my brother—I was educated, or uneducated, at home—I think I was always a rather better zoologist than he was.”
Despite their apparent differences, Victor always looked after his little sister Nica, and they shared a love for music and socialising. Nica was extremely pretty, not at all serious like her two sisters, and Victor liked to show her off. It was Victor who introduced her to the latest movements in modern jazz and encouraged her to learn to fly. A great lover of fast cars, Victor taught Nica to drive and bought her a racy sports car for her eighteenth birthday. Even when he became exasperated by her chosen lifestyle, Victor continued to take care of her, indulging her with random acts of kindness, although my father Jacob attests to the fact that Victor found it hard to show similar affection or generosity to any of his six children.
Nica was expected to marry a Jew but eligible suitors were in short supply. Having put her through finishing school and sent her on a grand European tour, Rozsika next decided to launch her daughter in society.
This annual British tradition, known as the Season, was open to well-connected young women and men. Following a custom that endured until 1958, Nica wore white and curtsied to a huge white cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. For the next three months she took part in a merry race known to some as the marriage market. Given that only a handful of Jews attended, it was unlikely that Nica would meet any “Mr. Rights” among the hundreds of young debutantes and “debs’ delights” being presented to the King and Queen.
In June 1932, Nica was formally presented to King George V and Queen Mary and thrown into a swirl of debutante balls and coming-out parties. “I burst forth on an astonished world and did my curtsies without falling down,” she told Nat Hentoff. Having already put two elder daughters through the Season, Rozsika could not face chaperoning Nica to a third. The task of seeing the young Miss Rothschild home to bed fell instead to Grandmother Emma’s hapless chauffeur. Her cousin Rosemary remembers that Nica rarely came home at the appointed time.
The family lived in Kensington Palace Gardens, a gated road. While it was easy to give the chauffeur the slip, it was much harder to climb over high railings in the dark, wearing a floor-length ball gown. There were approximately four balls a week while the Houses of Parliament were in session between November and May. Wanting to get a flavour of what it was like, I interviewed Nica’s near contemporary, Debo, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (née Mitford). Like the Rothschilds, the Mitford girls were rather eccentric. Unity used to bring a pet rat to dances and Diana expounded her radical political views to her partners during the foxtrot. Debo explained that girls took the whole thing in their stride. “It was rather like going to the office,” she said. “It’s just what one did but it was such fun.”
It is easy to trace Nica’s progress through the London Season. Every dance was listed in The Times, often accompanied by a detailed description of what the debutante was wearing and which designer had made her dress. Daywear was prescriptive; there were many designers but few variations. In the year of Nica’s coming-out it was de rigueur to wear short fur cuffs that could be slipped off and
turned into muffs. Dresses were often floral and trimmed with silk motifs. Skirts were to the knee and made from soft tweed or crêpe, occasionally adorned with velvet belts of two colours twisted and tied in sharp knots. Nica’s clothes were made in Paris by leading couturiers Worth and Chanel. The Rothschild jewels, including emeralds the size of pigeons’ eggs and strings of the finest white diamonds, belonged to Victor but were loaned out to his wife or sisters for special occasions.
Rozsika announced in The Times Court Circular that her daughter’s coming-out ball would be held on June 22, 1932, at 148 Piccadilly, her mother-in-law Emma’s house. My father’s mother Barbara, who was being courted by Victor at the time, described the evening in her personal diary:
At dinner there were three tables, the big middle one for all the old people—headed by the matriarch looking superb and matriarchal—the younger matriarch [Rozsika] next to Winston [Churchill]—the other table headed by the future matriarch Miriam and lastly Victor’s table for Nica. The dance after was quite marvelous [sic], the great rooms with gilt and chandeliers, plush gold chairs and huge looking glasses, masses of champagne and people streaming up the stairs from the hall in all their jewels and grandest dresses. The park was open behind the house. Nica was pure prewar perfection. Some of us went to the Café de Madrid. Nica was chased in Piccadilly and rescued by Victor.*
My father’s sister Miranda was one of the few Rothschilds who often visited her aunt Nica in New York. She understood the nuances of English Rothschild life, as well as being sympathetic to what Nica was seeking in New York. “The problem with putting all that ‘society stuff’ in your book,” said Miranda during a recent conversation, “is that it makes Nica and Victor sound conventional. They were completely, totally eccentric. They were not like anyone else. My father [Victor] used to water-ski in a Schiaparelli silk dressing gown and he stripped naked whenever, wherever, he felt like it. Nica and her siblings only went to parties because it pleased their mother.”
The children were not, Miranda told me, remotely interested in being accepted in high society. Victor was a “crashing intellectual snob,” Nica something of a musical snob; but neither ever took the slightest notice of a person’s social standing or background. What was really important to them? I asked. “Music!” she replied. “Victor and Nica were mad about music. Victor, who was a gifted pianist, toyed with a career as a jazz musician.” For Nica, the Season was nirvana, but not because of the young men: what she really loved was the music and musicians.
Nica’s first love was the American bandleader Jack Harris. In film footage of Harris shot at the Café de Paris, London, in 1934, he shimmies across the dance floor, violin in hand. Swinging slightly from foot to foot, Harris sometimes draws a bow across his fiddle or sings a little, but more often than not he is caught returning the appreciative glances of fawning debutantes. Although fifty-five years had passed since their last meeting, Nica told me that she could remember every detail including his phone number, his favourite drink—brandy—and that he liked his eggs sunny side up. Whether or not he took her virginity is unclear, but Nica seized every opportunity to see him. I asked Debo Devonshire whether she was shocked by Nica’s infatuation. “Shocked! Of course not. Everyone was in love with the bandleader. They were by far the most attractive men in the room. My particular favourite was a man called Snakehips Johnson. He was killed in the war. A tragedy.”
Big bands visited regularly from America. Some played at the debutantes’ balls, others at London venues. Victor took his little sister to Streatham Town Hall to see Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Since the première of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913, the year of Nica’s birth, music had changed beyond all recognition. It was no longer something to be appreciated when perched on a gilt chair, or the accompaniment to executing perfectly co-ordinated steps: music had exploded out of the cradle of convention. It poured from radio sets and roared around the dance floors. The emancipation of music freed the younger generation. Finally they had something that their parents despised and couldn’t understand that was exclusively, gloriously theirs.
The Café de Paris, London’s most fashionable party venue during the 1930s, where Nica met her first love, bandleader Jack Harris (Photographic Credit 8.4)
In Europe and America, musicians responded to social and political change by throwing out the long-established rule books of how pieces should be constructed. On the dance floors none of the young cared for an allegro or a scherzo; they wanted rhythm, something they could dance and sing to, something that reflected new-found opportunities and freedom. It was called swing. On opposite sides of the Atlantic, separated by a vast ocean, Nica and a young African-American high-school drop-out by the name of Thelonious Monk were listening to the same music, at the same time. Their backgrounds were disparate, their circumstances could not have been more different, but the soundtrack to their lives was exactly the same.
* * *
* Unfortunately no further details exist.
9 • The Commander-in-Chief
In the summer of 1935, three years after Nica came out, her brother Victor took her to Le Touquet in France. This fashionable extension of British life advertised itself as “a new atmosphere in a familiar setting.” Since Noël Coward and his friends had begun to use it as a weekend destination in the 1920s, bright young things had flocked to the coastal resort to enjoy racing, gambling and parties.
At a lunch given there by a Rothschild cousin, Nica met her future husband. To a young fatherless girl brought up in a household dominated by women, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter seemed wonderfully assured and glamorous. A handsome Jewish widower, ten years Nica’s senior and father to a small boy, Jules was employed at the Banque de Paris as a mining expert. Originally from Austria, the de Koenigswarter family had lived in France for more than a century and were part of the cosmopolitan group that moved effortlessly from country to country in their common pursuits of business, hunting and dancing. Rozsika knew them from her younger days. Although the family had some money, Jules had to work to support himself.
Nica was literally swept off her feet. Before lunch ended, Jules took her straight from the restaurant to the airport and whisked her away in his Leopard Moth plane. There were clues in this first meeting that foreshadowed the pattern of their life together. For Jules, whom Nica later christened the Commander-in-Chief, accurate navigation, safety checks, maintenance procedures and the scheduling of flights were just as important as the sensation of being in the air. Nica later admitted that she was bored by his insistence on meticulous safety checks before their departure. Jules should also have spotted potential incompatibilities: Nica had been taught to fly by a saxophonist, Bob Wise, whom she met while dancing at the Savoy Hotel. Jules was appalled to discover that she didn’t even have a license or know how to map-read. Nica navigated using railway lines or main roads. “It wasn’t a problem unless it was foggy,” she told me.
Nica met her future husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, at the fashionable French resort of Le Touquet in 1935. (Photographic Credit 9.1)
Nica and Jules in Edinburgh (Photographic Credit 9.2)
For many years I struggled to find out more about Jules. The couple had separated long before I was born and after their break-up the Rothschild family lost touch with the baron. Nica described her former husband in disparaging terms: as an obsessive timekeeper, authoritarian and rather humourless. Clearly she had fallen in love with something, but what was it?
Hearing that Jules had published a memoir, I managed to track it down in a second-hand bookshop in Málaga. The title was Savoir dire non (or Learning to Say No). In it Jules presents himself as a Jack the lad and tells tales of being arrested by his regiment for defying rules such as illegally entertaining a girl overnight in his room or cheating on his military homework. On three separate occasions, acting against the advice of friends, he recalls proudly how he flew and landed his plane in thick fog—exactly the kind of recklessness that he criticised his wife for.
If Jules had been an Englishman, he would have been an upper-class toff who liked to portray himself as madly amusing and always at the heart of semi-daring exploits. In the early throes of romance, Nica chose to see a wild and dashing suitor. Unfortunately, the fog of early passion obfuscated Jules’s more enduring character traits.
Over the next three months Jules was in determined pursuit of the young heiress around Europe, conducting their courtship like a military campaign. His first decision was to ask his mother to extend an invitation to Nica to stay with his family at their summer house in Deauville. Luckily for Jules, Rozsika approved of the de Koenigswarters and gave her daughter permission, so long as her chauffeur and a maid went as chaperones. It was Nica’s first solo trip abroad and represented another exciting break from her restrictive youth.
Nica drove the servants to Deauville in her low-slung sports car and for two days she and Jules kept their feet on the ground. Then on a whim they decided to fly to Salzburg in Jules’s plane, and on to Vienna in a clear breach of etiquette. Their horrified mothers instructed the lady’s maid and chauffeur to follow them. Each time the servants caught up with the courting couple, the lovebirds got back into the Leopard Moth and hopped on to the next capital. Having negotiated every pothole from Deauville to Salzburg, and from Vienna to Venice, the chauffeur and maid were finally reunited with Nica several weeks later in Monte Carlo.
Nica told her brother that Jules instructed, rather than asked, her to marry him. She had misgivings even at this early stage about their compatibility and asked him for time to reflect, since she was in no hurry to settle down into married life. But being young, naive and impressionable, with no father figure to advise her, Nica supposed that she must be madly in love.
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