In September 1935 Nica pretended that she needed to visit New York to seek the advice of her sister Liberty. What Nica really wanted was to go to America to hear, live, the extraordinary music being broadcast from her wireless. In Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom she would hear Chick Webb, Teddy Hill and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. She could not wait to catch the two new recording stars, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, who performed with Victor’s tutor Teddy Wilson. Boundaries were being stretched across the whole spectrum of American arts. The same year, 1935, saw the première of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, which scandalised polite society by focusing on the lives of poor African Americans. The Museum of Modern Art in New York caused controversy and some bewilderment among the chattering classes by mounting a show called “African Negro Art.” In literature, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald had won acclaim, while a new wave of painters—Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock—were establishing themselves on the East Coast. Europe, by contrast, felt anachronistic and tired. England was celebrating King George V’s Silver Jubilee and the Royal Academy was mounting an exhibition of French paintings.
(Photographic Credit 9.3)
This visit to New York was the young heiress’s first experience of being alone. She soon discovered that she had underestimated Jules’s determination. Even on the SS Normandie, bobbing between the two coasts, Jules bombarded her with flowers and telegrams. Only twenty-one, Nica was unable to withstand this romantic onslaught. Before arriving in New York, she was engaged. Jules took the next passage to America, determined that his fiancée should not escape.
Their marriage took place at the chapel of the Manhattan Municipal Building on October 15, 1935. Liberty acted as the sole family representative and chief bridesmaid. Nica was already newsworthy. The event was reported in the New York Times under the headline “Miss Rothschild is married here.” Four paragraphs were devoted to the history of the Rothschild family with one short final one on Nica’s new husband, who is described as a mining engineer, an aviation enthusiast and a member of several noted French clubs. Victor gave her an aeroplane as a wedding gift, but for the next few years Nica rarely had time to fly it.
Rozsika was pleased that at least one daughter was now married off but she faced another more serious problem. The family hoped that sending Liberty to New York would act as a tonic, giving her a chance to get away from familiar problems. As Liberty’s passion was painting, Rozsika arranged for her to be taught by a gifted artist, Maria de Kammerer, a Hungarian known to Rozsika’s family. Both Liberty and Victor sat for de Kammerer and their portraits were shown at an exhibition in New York in 1936. For many years I have tried unsuccessfully to track down this portrait of Liberty; frustratingly, few images of her survive beyond childhood.
Unfortunately for Liberty, the move to New York was just a geographical relocation; her mental state became even worse. Liberty, the sickly child, had grown into a painfully nervous adult whose equilibrium could be shaken by every tiny event. Miriam was adamant that, like their father Charles, Liberty had inherited the family “blues.” There is scarce information about Liberty’s illness: a Hippocratic oath bound her doctors and Miriam burned all her medical records.
Shortly after Nica left on her honeymoon, Liberty suffered a major nervous breakdown. Attending a grand New York dinner party, she shocked fellow guests by eating the table decorations—some roses—rather than the food on offer. After that, Liberty was sent home to Tring and then placed in residential care at a private hospital under the guidance of a family friend, the psychiatrist Dr. Freudenberger.
Nica had emerged from the chrysalis of nursery life at Tring, unfurled her damp, powdery wings and taken flight. But it was a limited form of independence. She was released from the close confines of her family to her husband’s control. Physically, her tiny waist was nipped into shape by a fearsome corset. Society dictated the length of her skirts and the cut of her jacket. Her behaviour was kept in check by a myriad of do’s and don’ts, shoulds and should nots, necessary for a young married woman in the 1930s.
The first clue that there were problems in the marriage appears in Jules’s memoir, published privately in 1976. Nica is never mentioned by name, even during their honeymoon, and is merely referred to twice as “my wife.”
The couple went from New York to Los Angeles via Panama. From there they took the OSK line to the Far East. When Nica became sick on the long voyage, the ship’s Japanese doctor was so overcome with nerves at being asked to treat a grand, titled woman that he spent most of the consultation bowing and forgot to prescribe any medicine.
In Peking they smoked opium, lying on hard pillows, while a beautiful geisha girl rolled out tiny balls of the narcotic to place in their pipes. They hired a plane and flew over the areas devastated by the Yellow River floods, where they could clearly see but were unable to help stranded families who waved desperately at them, hoping for rescue. Continuing their journey, Jules and Nica narrowly avoided death when their plane crash-landed in a remote area. They eventually got a lift in a cattle truck to a nearby village with a run-down hotel infested with giant cockroaches. They survived on a diet of chocolate and whisky. Making it back to civilisation, they moved on to Japan, where Jules won a sake-drinking contest against a newspaper magnate and bought a gun at a market. In Kobe they visited a sex shop and bought musical sex toys to send to friends and family back home. Outraged customs officials unfortunately confiscated these. When asked to account for his own package, Victor Rothschild denied knowing anyone called de Koenigswarter and could not, he said, imagine why he had been sent such shocking items.
Despite all the adventures on their honeymoon, Nica was ill at ease. Her husband was a compulsive planner and left nothing to chance. Their world tour, which had lasted for months, was a disappointment for Nica because, she told Nat Hentoff, “My husband always did everything according to a schedule, and to do that with me is no easy feat. We had each hour planned from the time we arrived in the morning until we left for the next place, and, as a result, we never saw anything.” Nica began to realise that she had stepped out of one cage and into another.
10 • You’re the Top
Following their return from honeymoon, Jules and Nica settled in Paris while they looked for a house in the surrounding countryside. For any jazz lover, the city was a slice of heaven known as “Harlem in Montmartre.” Following the First World War a platoon of African-American soldiers, known by some as the Harlem Hell Fighters, had been so enamoured of France’s practice of liberty, equality and fraternity that they remained there. As a fighting unit, the so-called Hell Fighters was the most highly decorated American combat unit in the Great War. In peacetime they met the high demand for black musicians to fill the bandstands of the small nightclubs of Montmartre. An African-American community soon formed on the right bank of the Seine, made up mainly of itinerant musicians, all of them young unmarried males. An important milestone was the creation of the Hot Club of France, a quintet formed by a chance meeting of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Although the founders of that group were white, similar Hot Clubs sprang up, made up of every nationality, colour and creed.
Paris became the “must stop” place on every well-known musician’s tour, giving Nica the chance to hear Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, among others. One of the few people whom she would not have seen was Thelonious Monk, who preferred to stick close to his neighbourhood in New York City and was, at the time, trying to find a band to play with.
Daily Express, August 31, 1936 (Photographic Credit 10.1)
Nica became close to her French cousins and caught up with them on the racecourses at Deauville or Longchamp where they loved to mix style and sport. There was considerable competition between both branches of the family; Edouard de Rothschild won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1934 and 1938, and her cousin Hannah de Rothschild’s inheritance helped her husband Lord Rosebery win the Derby no less
than four times between 1894 and 1944.
Then, in late 1935, Nica became pregnant. She was twenty-two and fulfilling her family’s wishes. Neither of her sisters was married and it looked to all as if the wayward Nica had been tamed. Like many mothers, she wanted to give birth at home so the couple returned to London. Patrick was born in July and in August the Express newspaper photographed the couple at a private airstrip in south London. The caption reads: “Indications point to their month-old son Patrick developing an air-sense early. He left Croydon yesterday, with his mother, for the Continent.”
While some of Nica’s options were curtailed by marriage and impending motherhood, their earlier way of life was brought to an end by her brother Victor. Following the death of Uncle Walter in 1937, Victor decided to sell off the enormous family collection that he had inherited. This included Tring Park, its contents and his grandmother Emma’s house at 147 Piccadilly. His wife Barbara was a Strachey and a leading light in the Bloomsbury set; her mother Mary was a friend of Matisse and T. S. Eliot. With no particular liking for French eighteenth-century treasures or hoards of silver and Sèvres, Barbara steered her husband instead towards book collecting and contemporary art.
Members of the family were puzzled and distraught by the brutal disposal of his inheritance. How could he cast off collections that had taken so many years to create, that had meant so much to earlier generations? One explanation is that Victor preferred cash to the responsibility of ownership. Another was Victor’s ambivalence about being a Rothschild: he wanted to be recognised as a scientist and an intellectual but his surname and heritage got in the way. “When people meet me,” he told Bernard Levin in a BBC interview, “they assume I live in a house where gold runs out of the taps.” After Cambridge he had been a socialist and he later sat on the Labour benches in the House of Lords. By disposing of his ostentatious possessions, Victor hoped to be regarded as normal. He and Barbara rented Merton Hall, in Cambridge, close to the university where he worked as a research Fellow. Barbara employed the English decorator Syrie Maugham to paint the interiors in the neutral white that was then fashionable. Merton Hall was a temple of modernism compared to the glitzy, gilded palaces of Victor’s youth.
The Rothschild auction made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic and the BBC broadcast the event live. The main sale lasted four days while a further three were devoted to Nica’s grandmother’s extraordinary silver collection, inherited from the Frankfurt Rothschilds. On the first day, seventeen great paintings went for the knock-down price of £41,252. The Courtyard by Pieter de Hooch was brought for £17,500 by the legendary picture dealer Lord Duveen. The contents of the house eventually fetched £125,000, the equivalent today of many tens of millions if one accounts for the rise in the value of the art market.
The international fascination with the auction was partly due to the fabulousness of the contents but also because of what it represented: surely the mass dispersal of property marked the end of the hegemony of the Rothschild family over British financial life.
Following Rozsika’s death, Victor gave the farm at Ashton to his sister Miriam. It was as if he were trying to expunge his family’s past and start anew. Having denuded the family of notable Dutch masters, as well as paintings by Reynolds and Gainsborough, Victor chose to hang on his walls pictures of different animals’ sperm, blown up beyond recognition. As a child and then as an adult visiting Victor’s home, I saw hardly a trace of that former family life; Nica was not the only member seeking a massive break with the past.
The sales of the Rothschild houses deprived Nica of her childhood homes as well as a British base. She had to put aside any disquiet about her marriage since there was now no escape: her home and her life were with her new husband in his native country, France. The couple set about house-hunting in earnest. To the outside world, it appeared as if the couple were having fun. They travelled widely and, in 1937, leaving their baby behind, they went on an expedition in search of the treasure of Lima, supposedly sunk off the Cocos Islands, three hundred miles off the coast of Panama. They returned empty-handed but once again Nica was pregnant.
When she arrived in London to give birth to their second child Janka in 1938, Nica rented a house in Hyde Park Square. Their return to France was, once again, logged in the national press; on November 26, 1938, The Times Court Circular announced that “the Baron and Baroness de Koenigswarter have left for the Continent.” This time it would be to their new home in Normandy.
Château d’Abondant, south of Paris, was Nica and Jules’s home from 1937 to 1940. (Photographic Credit 10.2)
The Château d’Abondant was every bit as palatial and vast as many Rothschild homes. It had belonged to an American family of bankers, the Harjes, who kept their own pack of hounds and had introduced polo to France. While her sister Miriam and brother Victor had chosen ascetic, academic lives, Nica looked as if she was reverting to type. The New York Times reported the purchase as “one of the most interesting realty deals from abroad in the last months.” My hunch is that Nica spent a large proportion of her inherited capital on acquiring the place; in addition to the money her father left her, she had also been given a small bequest in the wills of her grandmother Emma and her uncle Walter.
Nica became mistress of a vast red and yellow mansion set in two hundred acres of landscaped driveways and woodlands. As one of the finest examples of Louis XIII architecture in France, it was classified as a “monument historique.” The whole first floor consisted of a series of highly decorated salons with windows twelve feet high. On the second and third floors there were seventeen grand bedrooms with dressing rooms and, unusually, fourteen modernised bathrooms. The entire top floor housed the servants’ quarters, while the outbuildings included a garage for eight large cars and stabling for thirty horses. The property had its own dairy, and kennels for a private pack of staghounds.
It also had an intriguing earlier history: a previous occupant, “Marie de la Noue,” had owned the chateau in the seventeenth century. Described as “fascinating and beautiful,” the much-married Marie—a talented musician and music lover—had built a theatre there that still stands, in which concerts and plays were performed nightly. Marie’s daughter-in-law was employed by Marie Antoinette as governess to the royal household and was credited with disguising the Dauphin as a girl, thus saving his life, on the disastrous flight to Varennes.
Life at Château d’Abondant was similar to that at Tring but haute society in France was even more rule-bound and claustrophobic than in England. From the outset it must have been living torture for someone of Nica’s disposition. Here was a young woman who loathed rules and timetables being put in charge of an establishment whose smooth running depended on order and hierarchy. She knew what to do, having been brought up to observe little else, but it was nevertheless exactly the life that she and her siblings most wanted to avoid. In the morning Nica would discuss menus with the chef and table placement with the head housekeeper. Large house parties meant guests coming from every corner of Europe. Tables would be set for forty and conversation might flit from French to English, to Italian, to Spanish. Rooms had to be inspected and allocated. In the winter, guests would ride to hounds or shoot wild boar. In the summer there were walks and huge picnics in the park. But there was little time for children, who, according to the custom of the day, spent most of their time in the nursery being cared for by nannies, just as Nica had been.
Jules was in his element: his memoir reveals a highly social and hospitable man who loved huge gatherings. He invented gadgets to improve the efficiency of their new home, ensuring that everything happened on time and in the right order. One such invention was a train with two carriages, one for hot food, one for cold, that circulated continuously on a sixty-metre track between the kitchen and the dining room. All through dinner the train chuffed backwards and forwards, bringing different drinks and dishes. He also fitted telephones in every bedroom so that guests could phone their breakfast orders through to the kitchen.
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Whatever her doubts, Nica seemed to make the best of being a chatelaine. Cousins who stayed at Château d’Abondant were amazed by the ease with which she had adapted: the wild child had morphed into a typical Rothschild matriarch.
11 • Stormy Weather
In 1936, Victor wanted to take his new wife out to a restaurant in fashionable Mayfair. The maître d’ recognised him and asked, “You are Victor Rothschild?”
“Yes,” my grandfather replied.
The manager looked him up and down slowly. “We don’t serve Jews here.”
This kind of treatment was not unusual for Victor or his sisters but, as the decade progressed, it became harder to ignore.
The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe meant that no Jew could remain apolitical; in Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, Hitler had set out his beliefs in black and white. In his opinion, the two great evils besetting the world were communism and Judaism. During the 1930s few Jews in mainland Europe felt safe as stories began to emerge from Germany of the persecution of innocent Jewish men, women and children. With Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933, and his consolidation of power following the Night of the Long Knives the following year, many fears were being realised.
On the death of his uncle Walter, Victor inherited the title of Lord Rothschild and became the de facto head of British Jewry. Although he longed for a life in academia, he was forced into the political spotlight. The dilemma for the British family, and Victor in particular, was that, in deciding to pursue an independent career away from the powerbase of the bank, he lost both financial muscle and political leverage. In the past the Rothschilds, as bankers to royalty and governments, were consulted on foreign policy, often being asked to underwrite the cost of a war or a campaign. Yet all Victor’s generation could do was protest publicly.
The Baroness Page 9