The Baroness

by Hannah Rothschild

  “I was in Mexico, when I was in the throes of diplomatic life and all the bullshit, and I had a friend who was from the musical circle. He used to get hold of records for me and I would go to his pad to hear them. I couldn’t have listened to them in my own house with that atmosphere.”

  Then I heard Nica describe how this friend had got hold of a 78-rpm recording of Duke Ellington’s symphony Black, Brown and Beige, first performed in New York in 1943. Ellington introduced the piece as a “parallel to the history of the Negro in America.”

  To some, this music became a political statement, to others it was simply a wonderful jazz symphony, but for Nica it meant something completely different.

  “I got the message that I belonged where that music was. There was something I was supposed to do. I was supposed to be involved in it in some way. I got a really clear message. It wasn’t long afterwards that it happened, that I cut out from there. It was a real calling. Very strange.”

  I wondered about her statement in the light of what I knew about the family. Earlier Rothschild generations had had a calling to finance: they had united to create a behemoth of a bank. Some claimed they helped create the “worship of materialism.” Nica’s brother Victor and sister Miriam had also had a calling, although theirs was to science. Would Liberty’s life have turned out differently, I wondered, if she had found a great passion? Would Charles’s life have ended more happily if he’d been allowed to follow his? Perhaps Nica’s calling was another way of describing an inherited obsessive-compulsive trait: I have noticed that the Rothschilds—down to the present generation—often fix on a subject with absolute, single-minded determination.

  Nica with her brother Victor in Mexico, 1947 (Photographic Credit 14.1)

  Nica did not immediately know how to act on her calling. She stayed on in Mexico, where Jules was working, but as the atmosphere grew worse, Nica found more excuses to stay away from home and more reasons to visit New York. On one particular trip, the chance hearing of a piece of music would change her life for ever.

  “I was on my way back to Mexico where we were living at the time—I think it was 1948 or 1949,” Nica said, “and I stopped off to see Teddy Wilson on my way to the airport to say goodbye.”

  Teddy was one of the people who sent her records, and on this occasion he asked if she had heard of a young artist, Thelonious Monk, who had just cut his first record. “I’d never even heard of Thelonious. So Teddy galloped off to find it somewhere and when he came back he played it. Well, I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d never heard anything remotely like it. I must have played it twenty times in a row. Missed my plane. In fact I never went home.” (Though she did not move permanently to New York until 1951.)

  Over the years, this story has become a well-honed piece of jazz folklore: “Did you hear the one about the crazy baroness who was bewitched by a song?” It was, for example, one of the first things that the writer Stanley Crouch told me as we sat in New York on a hot May afternoon in a one-sided conversation that lasted for four and a half hours. Crouch occasionally stopped to mop his brow with a large white handkerchief, taking a momentary pause from his seemingly inexhaustible reserves of knowledge.

  “She told me that the musician Teddy Wilson had this recording and he wanted to play it for her.” Crouch shook his head in amazement as he recalled the details. “He said he wanted her to hear something unique. It was ‘ ’Round Midnight’ and she said she’d never heard anything like the sound of it, just the sound and the feeling of it, and she just kept asking him to play it over and over, and she led one to imagine that this was like the vinyl version of a spell being cast on someone, except that it is not a spell that arrives by itself, it is a spell that is assisted by you. You. Just you. She kept getting deeper and deeper into it as she heard it. You can’t explain music, we do not know where she went or where that song took her, but from that point on, she had concluded that she was going to have to meet the guy who played this music.”

  Suddenly it was light outside my hotel room. The garbage trucks were grinding up the street, clanking and banging the waste bins. A lone police car made its way downtown, its siren as nagging and persistent as a mosquito’s whine. Ignoring the outside world, I replayed this section of the CD over and over again, trying to decide what was more surprising: the simplicity of Nica’s account, as if it were perfectly normal to miss planes, let alone leave a marriage and a life as a result of merely hearing a tune, or the entirely insouciant way in which she delivered the story, like a person giving directions to a local landmark.

  I put “ ’Round Midnight” on my iPod and listened to it, really listened to it, as if for the first time. It cannot be described as a typical Monk composition, but then nothing is typical about the man or his music. It is a mournful, lazy, sexy-sounding ballad shot through with a little blues and even a dash of stride. A grand trumpet solo introduces the melody, then the piano nudges in and plays with the horn for a while, batting the tune around between wind and percussion, before dismissing the trumpet into the background where it stays on the touchline for the rest of the session, along with the strings and the drums. While the rest of the quartet languishes, repeating a background harmony, the pianist takes off, letting his fingers dance around the notes, sometimes hitting two or three at a time, sometimes shooting to the top of a scale, playing around with a high arpeggio and then landing at random elsewhere on the keys, at another point in the tune, breaking out, confounding and thrilling. The lyrics were added later to some versions but when Nica heard it she grafted her own feelings onto the tune.

  Monk never said what event or person inspired it. He was only nineteen when he composed it but did not have the chance to record it until 1947. Since then “ ’Round Midnight” has become one of the most recorded jazz standards of all time, appearing on no fewer than 1,165 albums. One critic has called it the “National Anthem of Jazz” and others see it as a lucky song. When Nica heard it, “ ’Round Midnight” had not even made it into the jazz charts.

  Nica heard the melody but she also heard something intangible. Her friend, the photographer and writer Val Wilmer, explained: “For the fan the music becomes deeply personal, as if the player is talking to you alone. The musicians are reaching out and telling you their own life history, their experiences. They are testifying on their instruments.”

  Jazz and Nica grew up together. It was the soundtrack to her life. Her father had played the great early recordings of Scott Joplin, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong. As a young woman she had danced on a wave of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Those who didn’t actually perform in London’s grandest ballrooms called to her over the wireless.

  Even in deepest Africa, on daring Free French missions, the radio was Nica’s constant companion, the Circe beckoning her towards another world, another life. While she was enduring an unfulfilling marriage, living in a disoriented society that, after the war, was trying to rebuild itself, bebop burst across the airwaves. Its discordant, anarchic and explosive phrases seemed to match her mood exactly. Those musicians were throwing out the rule book, playing the notes out of sequence, ignoring structure with great speed and dexterity. Bebop was music you couldn’t dance or sing to. For many, it was as tuneful as a hundred cats scratching on a blackboard, as comprehensible as a buckling freight train. It was music that said, “I really don’t give a shit about convention or what anyone thinks, I am going to be uncompromisingly myself and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” It was the exact antidote Nica had been looking for.

  “It was the music that drew me first,” she said. “I didn’t know any musicians then. In time, I grew to feel that if the music is beautiful, the musicians must be beautiful too in some way. Now I know that it’s not possible to play with Bird [Charlie Parker], Monk, Sir Charles Thompson and Teddy Wilson and not be very much worth digging yourself. They’re all rather like their music.”

  Nica’s friend, the musician and producer Quincy Jones, told me: “Jazz has a way
of transforming darkness into light through comedy or taking the pain away from a bad love relationship or whatever and then make it either funny or express it in order to release it … That is why it was so strong and that is why it has permeated the planet and almost every country in the world.” For all the awards Jones has won, the multimillion-selling albums, he can still remember the thrill of arriving in New York in the late 1940s with nothing but his trumpet. “It was like walking into Wonderland.” Through his eyes, I could imagine the city.

  At that time, Monk, Quincy Jones and other jazz musicians were just a bunch of unknowns: a collection of diverse individuals drawn to the same place. “She had no idea they would some day become famous. No one could have imagined it. They were virtually social pariahs,” her son Patrick observed in a newspaper interview. Nica’s friend and contemporary Phoebe Jacobs pointed out, “Nice girls like the Baroness didn’t associate with jazz musicians because everyone knows that jazz had just come out of the whorehouses and crack dens and, anyway, jazz musicians were junkies. Heroin addicts.” Nica, however, never cared much what people thought.

  The more I researched, the more I realised that jazz has a symbolic value and a cultural significance beyond its arrangements, and an emotional impact beyond the tunes. It became linked with the struggle of African Americans to achieve freedom and equality. It gave a voice to a generation and hope to thousands. For slaves who had been stripped of their culture, belongings, heritage—even their language – music was one of the few imports they could bring to their new homeland. Traders could take away their possessions but not their voice.* Blues and jazz evolved from the music of the cotton fields where workers’ songs soared above the crops: optimism and despair set to music, uniting disparate people in desolate places.

  Music first gave black people hope; later it gave them a livelihood. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries opportunities for most African Americans were limited and popular music provided employment for many. Some of the instruments they played bear a striking resemblance to models found in West Coast Africa. In 1895 the first ragtime sheet music appeared, followed in 1899 by the international hit “Maple Leaf Rag,” written by a young, classically trained African-American pianist called Scott Joplin. Since then jazz has been celebrated and dismissed, loved and hated, studied and overlooked by generation after generation. Defying simple definition, jazz encompasses diverse rhythms, scales, syncopations and styles ranging from early New Orleans Dixie and ragtime waltzes to fusion.

  Nica detected the passion and heartbreak underlying the music. It resonated too with her that many women and black musicians had fought in a bitter and bloody war on the principle of freedom, yet both groups returned to a society that refused, by and large, to entertain change. Robert Kraft, a musician and record producer who knew Nica, put it very succinctly: “America had just fought a war of freedom and soldiers, black and white, had gone to liberate whole populations in fascistic, Neolithic, incredibly difficult times in Europe and Asia. Yet black soldiers were returning to America and could not enter the front door of the restaurants they were performing in. They couldn’t sleep in white hotels when they performed on the bandstands of those hotels. They had to sleep in other hotels. There had to have been a phenomenal amount of conflict, rage, dissonance and of course it’s the artist’s role to call attention to that.”

  Artists took their role seriously, as the great jazz legend, Nica’s friend Sonny Rollins, explained to me. “People who played bebop wanted to be accepted as fully fledged human beings, not just as talented artists. Charlie Parker was a very dignified person and he wanted to present the music in a very dignified manner. When Charlie Parker used to play he wouldn’t move. He would just stand up straight and he would play. There would be no clowning around and no entertaining.” These thoughts are echoed by Quincy Jones: “Musicians were saying, I don’t want to have to entertain an audience, I want to be an artist like Stravinsky or whoever, that pure art without dancing and rolling eyes and dancing to minstrel stuff.”

  “Music, as you and I know, transcends social policy and patriotism,” Rollins continued. “It draws together a lot of people from all ethnic backgrounds.” For Nica, who had grown up in a rule-bound, class-obsessed society, this defiance was intoxicating and inspirational. “It was rebellious, it was sexy, and it was exciting. The Baroness liked that,” Monk’s former manager Harry Colomby explained.

  Most importantly, perhaps, jazz helped Nica feel less alone, more connected. As Proust discovered, music “helped me to descend into myself, to discover new things: the variety that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, but a longing for which was none the less renewed in me by this sonorous tide whose sunlit waves now came to expire at my feet.” For Proust, and for Nica perhaps, music provided the “means of communication between souls.” Music soothed and harmonised. It was wildly mood-altering: uplifting one moment, heartrending the next. Music linked and transported her away from the life she had led before.

  Fifty-second Street, the oasis of jazz in the 1940s and 1950s (Photographic Credit 14.2)

  I took the subway up to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, where Teddy Wilson had lived, and found a corner table in a coffee shop. Daft as it sounds, I ordered a Coke, played “ ’Round Midnight” on my iPod and imagined I was Nica some sixty years earlier. In a few hours she had to leave New York, a city that represented freedom and escape. Suddenly she could not return to a marriage that for fifteen years had felt increasingly like a prison. Perhaps in that room overlooking Roosevelt Avenue she heard in “ ’Round Midnight” something that made sense of her life. Nica had never met or even heard of Monk at that moment. He could have been a hundred years old or a teenager: she had no idea then how much they would come to share and how extraordinarily important he would be to her. Perhaps I have to suspend my disbelief and accept that in that one tune, which lasts only three minutes and eleven seconds, Nica’s life changed.

  Once the decision not to go back to Mexico was made, Nica was determined to meet the man who played this music.

  * * *

  *There are many irrefutable factors linking jazz to Africa. Fundamental to the nature of the music is the call-and-response pattern common in the African tradition, reflecting African speech patterns and the African use of pentatonic scales.

  15 • A Blast

  Nica left home in style. She did not take a discreet apartment in London, or a cottage on one of the family’s estates. Instead she moved into a suite at the Stanhope Hotel, a grand establishment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the edge of New York’s Central Park. Built in 1927, it was, like many Rothschild houses, a faux version of a European chateau. Guests passed through a neo-Italianate entrance into an opulent eighteenth-century French-style lobby with antiques, marble floors and hand-carved wall mouldings burnished with 24-carat gold leaf. Male guests were expected to wear suits and ties, and women rarely left the premises without hats and gloves. Like many hotels, the Stanhope rigorously maintained a policy of segregation: blacks were allowed in only through the service entrance, and would certainly not have been permitted to rent a room or to frequent public areas or guests’ bedrooms.

  The hotel wasn’t a stranger to controversy. In 1946, the American socialite Kiki Preston jumped to her death out of a high window. The alleged mother of one of HRH Prince George’s illegitimate children, a member of the Happy Valley set and a niece of Gloria Vanderbilt, she had been given the nickname “the girl with the silver syringe” on account of her penchant for narcotics. Ms. Preston’s unfortunate leap raised many questions about life behind the heavy, ruched curtains at the Stanhope Hotel. The last thing the management needed was another scandal, yet the ink was hardly dry on Nica’s registration form when she began to cause trouble.

  Nica’s first home in New York, a suite at the Stanhope Hotel, overlooking Central Park (Photographic Credit 15.1)

  “One of the stories that I used to hear about her,” my father Jacob told me, “was that s
he liked to practise her pistol shooting on the light bulbs. She had to keep her ‘eye in’ following the war. From time to time my grandfather [Nica’s brother Victor] had to go over to New York to persuade the management to allow her to stay.” Nica confirmed the story to me but added, “The manager said, ‘We don’t mind if you shoot our staff but please leave our chandeliers alone.’ ”

  Nica’s first major purchase was a new Rolls-Royce that she would park in front of the Stanhope, leaving the engine running in case she needed to depart in a hurry. Later she would switch her allegiance to Bentleys, although all her cars were treated with gay abandon. “She always drove as if she were competing at Le Mans, and she paid very little attention to traffic rules,” her son Patrick told a journalist. “In my parents’ divorce settlement there’s a clause my father insisted upon: under no conditions were any of us children to ride in a car driven by Nica. A condition that was largely ignored.”

  Nica’s first New York car, a 1953 Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn (Photographic Credit 15.2)

  One late night in Manhattan, at a red light, a shiny sports car pulled up next to her Bentley Continental Convertible. The elegant gentleman driving the sports car signalled her to roll down her window.

  “Madam, you should be ashamed of yourself. You have a rare and beautiful car, but you treat it in a disgraceful manner.”

  She looked at the gentleman concerned and replied, “Fuck you!” Then she sped off.

  He caught up with her at the next red light and, once again, asked her to roll down her window. Despite their previous encounter, she did so. The gentleman said, “Madam, with all due respect, the same to you!”