He was, she declared, “a lovely man.”
Although these stories made me laugh, they also made me uncomfortable. Nica’s newly chosen lifestyle of grand hotels and fast cars seemed like pure hedonism rather than a spiritual “calling.” I saw an analogy between the way Nica drove the Bentley and the manner in which she discarded her former life; both were, in many respects, rare and beautiful, and she treated both with a careless disdain. I wondered, too, whether there were parallels between Victor disposing so readily of his inheritance to pursue his own passions and Nica walking away from her responsibilities.
Jules’s behaviour might have been controlling and authoritarian, but I felt nothing but sympathy with his desire to protect his children. Wanting to believe that Nica had put up a great fight to keep custody of all her children, I tried to find out details of the couple’s divorce settlement. I combed contemporary newspapers, looking for any mention of custody battles, and searched family letters for references. I found nothing. My respect for Nica wavered. Perhaps she was nothing more than a wealthy, irresponsible gadfly after all.
A civil war of opinion raged in my head. Was she good or bad? Naive or callous? I wasted hours in pointless speculation and then called a mental truce. It was time to stop judging Nica and attempt instead to understand her actions through the prism of her own experiences and the conventions of that time. What of her own childhood? She had never been parented; her father had died abruptly and violently. Rozsika was a ghostly figure who left the business of mothering to the servants. In turn, the children learned to avoid intimacy. Victor used cruelty to keep others at arm’s length and he tormented and bullied many of his five children as well as his two wives. Liberty could not cope with relationships of any kind. Miriam worked obsessively. Nica dodged getting close to anyone by scattering her love widely. Her photograph albums show a woman permanently surrounded—either by cats, children or adults.
Nica’s marriage and her subsequent peripatetic lifestyle meant that she could, when she chose, easily lose contact with people. One Rothschild cousin described her feelings about Nica with both sadness and mystification. The two women were contemporaries and lived in neighbouring houses. As children, they played, hunted hounds and husbands together. Their close friendship endured even when Nica and Jules went to live in France. However, once Nica left Jules she never contacted her cousin nor returned her calls or letters, as if “she simply didn’t want to know me any more.”
One of Nica’s favourite expressions came from the hunting field. “If you throw your heart over the fence, your head will follow,” she told me. Perhaps she should have added, “And do not look back.” She moved to America confident that everything would work out; others would provide and her children would be well cared for by Jules. Her eldest son Patrick said of her financial affairs, “My mother was comfortable, she had a trust fund, but she always had money worries.” Nica spent money she did not have, assuming correctly that her family would bail her out of difficulties. Our cousin Evelyn de Rothschild remembers that a senior bank manager, Mr. Hobbs, was regularly sent to New York to keep tabs on Nica’s spending and encourage a more cautious existence. I imagined Mr. Hobbs as a suburban chap with a bowler hat, being unprepared for travel to America in pursuit of a wayward Rothschild. “No! You’ve got it all wrong,” another cousin corrected me. “Hobbs was a ladies’ man. He looked after all the Rothschild women and he loved it.”
R. W. C. Hobbs, Esq. (Photographic Credit 15.3)
There was another practical explanation for the terms of Nica’s separation. Prior to an Act of Parliament passed in 1969, many years after Nica’s marriage ended, wives were rarely granted alimony or gained custody of their children. Although it was an unusual case, when Frances Shand Kydd, the mother of Diana, the Princess of Wales, left her husband for another man in 1967, she lost custody of her children and received no financial support. Until Princess Margaret got divorced in 1969, only two groups of people were banned from the royal enclosure at racecourses: convicted felons and divorcees. Perhaps Nica did not fight harder for custody of her younger children because she knew she could not win. Perhaps she was honest enough to admit that her younger children would have a more stable life with their father.
Nica’s eldest daughter Janka joined her mother in New York. In her letters, Nica treats her like a younger sister rather than a child, taking pride in Janka’s knowledge of jazz and their shared love of music and musicians. Later Patrick tried living with Nica but complained that the all-night jam sessions made studying impossible. The three younger children, Berit, Shaun and Kari, lived with their father in New York from 1953 until 1957 while Jules held the position of French Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States and Canada. Later they moved with him to Peru where Jules was made Ambassador.
For those in search of a new life, post-war New York was the crucible of creative innovation and a locus of tremendous energy. The economy was booming. It was also a place where being a foreigner was normal. A cacophony of different languages could be heard on any block. Within a few miles of each other, Chinese neighbourhoods bordered Italians, Koreans, Africans, West Indians, Russians, Poles, Jews, Muslims and Hispanics. Most of them lived happily cheek by jowl. What better destination, then, for Nica, a woman of Hungarian-British-German-Jewish extraction, married to a Frenchman of Austrian lineage, who had lived in Europe, Africa and North America?
As the cost of living was relatively cheap, New York became a magnet for leading protagonists in the worlds of art, literature, dance, poetry, music, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Ideas, images and thoughts were incubated in cafés, bars and jazz clubs. Nica’s friend Phoebe Jacobs sums up the city’s attraction: “She came here because we had a freedom that didn’t exist elsewhere. We said to hell with manners or good taste. It was so exciting and she wanted to be one of the crowd, one of the boys.”
Like Nica, Sal Paradise, the hero of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, ends up in New York in the 1950s.
Suddenly I found myself on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic furore of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land—the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born.
The jazz clubs on 52nd Street were tiny and the same clientele went night after night. Nica sat with Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Frank Stella, listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. They were joined by an emerging generation of American novelists including Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer who were also transfixed by the jazz scene. The music bled into other art forms, inspiring the Black Mountain poets to reject control and structure. Painters like Robert Rauschenberg used the cut-up technique on canvas, while William Burroughs clipped phrases from newspapers to create a collage of words and meaning.
John Dankworth, Nica’s British saxophone-playing friend, was in New York at that time, listening to the same music. “It was a fantasy world especially if you had just come from war-torn Europe where everything was still rationed and we were suffering the worst weather we had had for half a century. New York was the nearest thing to heaven I could ever remember. I can well understand Nica wanting to be part of it.”
Since the Cotton Club had opened its doors in the 1920s, many white people frequented jazz clubs. What set Nica apart, though, was that she didn’t want to go home when the joints closed. Clint Eastwood, the film director, who got to know Nica when he was making the film Bird about Charlie Parker, told me, “Society people would slum it and go down to hear swing or jazz bands. Nica embraced the whole culture of jazz and bebop and loved the rebelliousness of it.”
Robin Kelley, Monk’s biographer, add
ed another dimension to Nica’s behaviour. “From everything I have heard, she lived a very protected life as a child. She almost died when she caught measles as an adult. I think that kind of seclusion, that kind of protection, is enough to make you go wild when you become an adult.”
For the next thirty years Nica’s lifestyle barely changed. She did not just listen to jazz; she lived it. She got up as darkness fell. She wasted daylight, treating it with utter contempt.
Within months of settling in America, Nica replaced the internecine web of cousins with an equally complicated maze of musicians. The aristocracy that she knew so well in England was now replaced by a “jazzocracy.” She learned who had influenced, betrayed, loved, nurtured and copied whom. Adopting the patois, the hours and habits, Nica became a jazz native.
When Nica arrived on the scene with her gleaming white Rolls-Royce, her chequebook and her unbounded enthusiasm for their music, the musicians could not believe their luck. She took them seriously and was happy to pay for a night out, offering both cash and cachet. “I remember one night we had dinner at her place,” Horace Silver wrote in his autobiography. “We decided to go to Birdland.* We got in her Rolls-Royce, with her driving, and proceeded down Broadway. I remember all the white people staring at us as if to say, ‘What are those niggers doing in a Rolls-Royce with a white lady?’ ”
Nica was not worried about spending what money she had. What she wanted was an entrée to a different life and the musicians gave it to her. Her grandson Steven told me: “To her that music was the ultimate expression of freedom and that was something that she had never experienced until she went to New York.”
Nica’s words, as told to Nat Hentoff for the piece in Esquire, confirm her grandson’s hunch. “The music is what moves me. It has something I also hear in the playing of the Hungarian gypsies, something very sad and beautiful. It’s everything that really matters, everything worth digging. It’s a desire for freedom. And in all my life, I’ve never known any people who warmed me as much by their friendship as the Jazz musicians I’ve come to know.”
Many assumed that Nica’s relationship with the musicians was physical. “Black man, white woman, it had to be all about sex didn’t it? That’s the normal, offensive, old prejudice coming out,” her friend, the trombonist Curtis Fuller, said sadly. Curtis spent a lot of time with Nica from the late 1940s. “I never saw any touchy-feely stuff. Besides, if you had had five kids, wouldn’t you just want a bit of a rest from all that?”
Nica with Teddy Wilson at London’s Stork Club in 1954 (Photographic Credit 15.4)
The drummer and ladies’ man Art Blakey was the first musician with whom Nica was romantically linked. She bought him a Cadillac and fitted out his band with suits. Many thought Blakey used Nica but to her he was an amusing, talented guide to the jazz world, introducing her to musicians and clubs, and teaching her about music. Another musician with whom she was supposed to have had an affair was Al Timothy, a Trinidadian saxophonist who had arrived in Britain in 1948 and met Nica through their mutual friend Teddy Wilson. Apparently, Nica loved Timothy or his music or both, and when she returned briefly to live in London in 1954, she reopened the club Studio 51 and made him resident bandleader. Later Timothy came to visit Nica in New York, where she photographed him with Monk and Sonny Rollins.
Gossip and speculation stalked Nica but there is no evidence that any of these relationships were consummated. One of her closest friends was her brother’s old piano teacher Teddy Wilson. When he went on tour in Scotland in 1953, Nica drove him from London to Edinburgh. Again the newspapers had a field day. “Blues Man Gets Rolls Royce” was one headline. For Wilson, seeing the United Kingdom “in a four-door sedan, with the sun roof open, at highway speeds” was seeing the country at its best. For Nica, with time on her hands and a car at her disposal, it was “a blast.”
The irony was that she still could not find the man who wrote “ ’Round Midnight.” Nica combed the clubs, looking for the High Priest of Jazz, but Thelonious Monk had been in prison, and now he was broke, living as a virtual prisoner in his own apartment.
* * *
*Birdland, the landmark jazz club on Broadway, was established in 1949, named after Charlie Parker, whose nickname was “Bird.”
16 • Loneliest Monk
A mere twenty blocks southwest of the Stanhope Hotel, in a tiny two-bed walk-up in the San Juan district, on the opposite side of Central Park, Thelonious Sphere Monk was struggling. Busted for possession of heroin in 1951, he had lost his cabaret card for seven years and with it the right to play in most Manhattan clubs. While his contemporaries were graduating from slipstream to mainstream, Monk was becalmed. Occasionally he was booked to play in Brooklyn or some other place out of town, but mostly Monk played alone on an upright piano in his kitchen. His only audience was his wife Nellie and their two children, Toot and Barbara. At night, if he could bear it, Monk listened to his contemporaries on the radio. More often than not, during what he called the “unyears” (his nickname for these unproductive times), Monk lay on his back in silence looking at a picture of Billie Holiday tacked to the ceiling above his bed.
The family lived on Nellie’s meagre wages. Over the years she found work as a lift operator, in an ice-cream bar and as a seamstress, but ill health often kept her at home, forcing the couple to rely on their families for handouts. Even in better times, on their world tours Nellie collected empty Coca-Cola bottles in order to get the refund on the glass back home. The fear of arrest never left Monk either; when he had it, he carried $1,000 in cash in case he needed bail money. While many would have tried to get a job, Monk could not manage regular work, and employers couldn’t hack his scant regard for authority or timekeeping. A person with less self-belief might have buckled.
At first glance, the differences between Monk and Nica—their backgrounds, their experiences and their characters—seemed vast; the only thing they might have shared was a love of his music. Even if Nica did find him, it was unlikely that the two would have anything in common. Their friend, the writer Stanley Crouch, was equally sceptical. “Monk was a country Negro, he wasn’t even brought up in New York, he was from North Carolina. Monk and the Baroness came from very, very different places socially and economically.”
I realised that one of the questions at the heart of my quest was: what attracts two people to each other? Monk was black, she was white; he was poor, she was rich; he was a Christian, she was Jewish: the list is endless and rather fatuous. Was it possible, I wondered, to strip away the surface and find other connections between them? Were people wrong to claim that their friendship was built on the attraction of opposites?
Thelonious was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1917, four years after Nica. His great-grandfather came from West Africa on a slave ship in the mid-nineteenth century and was given the name of his plantation owner, Archibald Monk. Thelonious and his father, Thelonious Senior, were named after a Benedictine missionary saint of the seventh century. The pianist later added a middle name, “Sphere,” as a variation, a riff on his mother’s family name Speer.
Like Charles Rothschild, Monk’s father was in poor health, physically and mentally. Both men suffered from bouts of erratic behaviour and depression. Monk’s mother Barbara had to cope with her husband’s terrible temper, wild drinking, mood swings and, eventually, his withdrawal from family life and society. Perhaps to escape her marriage or to search for a better life, in 1921 Barbara took four-year-old Thelonious, his brother Thomas and his sister Marion to New York. It was a brave and highly unusual act then for a woman to leave her husband and her extended family. Barbara was determined: there were few opportunities for black people in the South. The Jim Crow system was still operating, practically if not legally.
By the time Monk Senior caught up with his family some three or four years later, Barbara had settled their children in the San Juan Hill district, a neighbourhood that had become home to thousands of émigrés from the Southern states and the Caribbean. For a
brief period the Monks lived together as a family but their small tenement flat was a damp and sunless place that set off Monk Senior’s asthma attacks as well as his mental problems.
I wondered if their respective fathers’ afflictions offered a potential bond between Nica and Thelonious. Both had grown up with a parent who was stricken with mental illness exacerbated by random conditions. Charles’s depression became worse after he fell sick with Spanish flu; Monk Senior’s worsened when he had bronchial problems. Despite their vastly different financial circumstances, there was an atmosphere in Monk’s and Nica’s homes that shaped the childhoods of both and altered their way of looking at the world. The children could never predict which mood or persona their parents would adopt at any given time. Monk Senior would disappear to bars; Charles Rothschild would shut himself in his room.
After a few years, Monk Senior returned south to live with his brother. Overwhelmed by his illness, the family committed him to a mental asylum where he spent the remainder of his life. There was a huge difference between Charles Rothschild’s comfortable Swiss sanatorium, where he was allowed to take a companion and his work, and the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where Thelonious Senior was incarcerated. The latter was a miserable place with few facilities and little hope of discharge.
Nica and Thelonious had extremely strong mothers who kept their families together, but while Rozsika Rothschild enjoyed the ministrations of more than forty staff members, Barbara Monk worked as a cleaner at Children’s Court on 137 East 22nd Street. Young Thelonious was enrolled at the prestigious Peter Stuyvesant School where he had access to a broader education than Nica. After an initial flurry of academic promise, he turned into an undistinguished middle-grade student. Although he did not join the school orchestra, music played a key part in the young man’s life. Like Nica, he was brought up listening to a mixture of classical music and jazz. Nica could hear the best classical orchestras in her family’s ballrooms and then dance to the leading big bands at society parties. Barbara took her children to Central Park to listen to the Goldman series of classical concerts where top orchestras played. Monk’s son Toot told me, “If you had come to my father’s home you would have seen stacks of Chopin, Liszt, Haydn, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner. His music didn’t come out of a vacuum.”
The Baroness Page 14