Nica flew to Paris with her new friend, the pianist Mary Lou Williams, whom she had recently met with Teddy Wilson. Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia, Mary Lou was self-taught and by the age of six was helping to support her ten half-brothers and sisters by playing at parties. In 1925, aged only fifteen, she was part of Duke Ellington’s Big Band. Nicknamed “the little piano girl of East Liberty,” Mary Lou wrote arrangements and compositions for many jazz greats and recorded over one hundred albums. One of the few women jazz artists to make it in a male-dominated world, Mary Lou became Nica’s lifelong friend. Her archive, now at Rutgers University in New Jersey, contains many of Nica’s letters, paintings and diary entries. A devout Catholic, Mary Lou never shied away from acting as a moral compass and confidante to her European friend. She saw no harm in introducing Nica to her friend Thelonious Monk.
By the time Monk made it onto the stage in Paris, he had smoked a lot of dope chased down with cognac. The audience had come to hear Claude Luter’s Dixieland jazz and music of that ilk. They were not expecting a grunting pianist whose makeshift, under-rehearsed percussion section was out of time with Monk’s wild playing. Halfway through the set Monk walked offstage to have another drink before returning to play another tune in his inimitable, discordant, dissonant style. The critics, both French and English, hated it, calling it “startling and banal” and describing Monk as a “kind of court jester to modern Jazz.”
Nica remembered the evening quite differently. She was enthralled. Monk surpassed all her expectations. In her opinion, the audience was bowled over. “He played two tunes—that’s all—and walked off and the audience were really grasped by it,” she said on tape. “In fact they were yelling, ‘Monk, Monk,’ and he didn’t come back but Gerry Mulligan was waiting to play so that was that.”
From that moment, Nica’s life changed. The touchpaper lit when she heard the record “ ’Round Midnight” burst into flames upon meeting its composer. She had heard her calling with a Duke Ellington composition and now found her mission with a Monk tune. For the next twenty-eight years she would devote her life to Thelonious Monk, laying her time and love at the musician’s feet like a cloth of devotion.
After their first encounter, Nica admitted, “I needed an interpreter to understand what he was saying at the beginning. He wasn’t easy. I didn’t know Thelonious’s English. We hit it off and hung out for the rest of the time he was in Paris. We had a ball.” No one knows exactly what kind of ball Monk and Nica enjoyed. For her, Monk was “the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He was a very large man, but his presence was much larger still. Any time he walked into a room he dominated it. In fact he could be sitting in a chair or lying on a bed, speaking or silent, and he still dominated any room he was in.”
Thelonious’s son Toot was convinced that Nica was smitten, telling me: “I know that your aunt fell in love with my dad, I have no doubt about that. She followed him here. She didn’t know anything about him, but she was profoundly moved by his music and his personality.” Was it really that simple? Toot smiled and then added, “He was a good-looking cat, she was a hotty.”
Stanley Crouch thought that the attraction was musical. “There is a certain kind of aristocracy in Monk’s music and [the] United States is 3,000 miles away [from Paris] so it actually is possible for somebody from almost as different a background as Monk’s to become entranced by his music. You see, there’s always a kind of a human magic that can transcend what we know about society and relations and all that. They had that for each other.”
A week after their meeting, Monk returned to New York with a suitcase weighing twenty pounds that contained innumerable French berets, and with a bottle of cognac stuffed in each pocket. He went home to his family and a familiar existence, while Nica travelled to London. Determined to introduce Monk to a wider audience, she hired the Royal Albert Hall, the capital’s premier and, at the time, largest concert hall. Holding over five thousand people, it was built as a memorial to Prince Albert specifically for the purpose of enlightening the public. Having taken over the entire venue for six Sundays in a row, Nica planned to fly Monk and his chosen backing group from New York to London. “They were going to be called the Jazz Promenade concerts,” Nica explained nearly twenty years later, and “they were going to be [so] people could walk around, lie down, sit down, whatever.”
Unfortunately, Nica’s enthusiasm ran ahead of her. Monk might have had a cabaret card for London but he and his colleagues still needed permits. Nica begged the immigration authorities to waive their usual restrictions, ringing every person she knew in government and in high places, but no exception was made. Without the right papers, Monk could not work in Great Britain. The authorities were prepared to consider his case but in the specified time and according to procedure. “I had to pay for all these services and for nothing! Thelonious was very disappointed too,” Nica said phlegmatically.
Nica left London and returned to New York. She would never live in England again. It’s not known whether Monk mentioned this new friend to his wife. But shortly afterwards, the residents of the San Juan district were astonished to look out of their windows and see a huge Rolls-Royce cruise into their midst, driven by a white woman in a fur coat. Toot, then aged five, has never forgotten the day.
This was not an elegant neighbourhood so when she came rolling up into the block, it was certainly a sight to see—the whole neighbourhood knew that she was there. She acted like the car was the norm. But it wasn’t normal for America at all. Everyone else’s car was full of all kinds of plastic. This car was all full of wood and leather that you could really smell. She had on this crazy leopard coat. I’ll bet you it was ocelot because she wouldn’t wear just a leopard, it would have to be something special, something very hip.
What on earth did Nellie Monk make of this vision in a Rolls-Royce? Did she feel threatened or at least bemused? When asked, Nellie said, “She was a good friend to us and we needed friends.” Toot Monk elaborated on his mother’s explanation: “Somewhere along the way Nellie and Nica had some kind of meeting of the minds. I don’t know whether they had words over it or not, but they decided that they were going to take care of him. They shared the load equally. From the time I was about eight or nine my family was me, my mother, my father and my sister and Nica.”
Lorraine Lion Gordon, who ran the Village Vanguard, remembered, “Nellie would be on his left and on his right the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter with her cigarette holder, blowing smoke into his face. They truly were a ménage à trois. I always marvelled at that.”
Fellow musician and close friend Hampton Hawes describes driving with Monk, Nica and Nellie in the Bentley down Seventh Avenue: “Monk feeling good, turning round to me to say, ‘Look at me, man, I’ve got a black bitch and a white bitch,’ and then Miles pulling alongside in the Mercedes, calling through the window in his little hoarse voice cut down [by] a throat operation, ‘Want to race?’ Nica nodding, then turning to tell us in her prim British tones: ‘This time I believe I am going to beat the motherfucker.’ ”
Nica had a piano installed in her suite at the Stanhope and Monk spent most days there, practising and working on tunes. She loved watching him compose: “His concentration was awesome. What was strange was that the melodies seemed to come to him in a flash, but he would spend hour after hour on the bridges, sometimes for days at a time. The inner Thelonious, the true Thelonious, where that incredible music came from, was [on] an altogether different plane to the rest of us.”
While Monk composed, Nica painted and made collages, mainly abstract works, using naptha pens or paint mixed with anything to hand. Monk told her to enter the annual art contest held at the ACA Gallery in New York. “I only entered … because Thelonious dared me. They took my work absolutely seriously. When they asked me how I obtained my rather unique colours, I told them it was a secret formula, but the truth is that I used somewhat weird ingredients, anything from Scotch to milk to perfume. Anything liquid that happens
to be around.” Her canvases sold out quickly but, according to her son Patrick, she spent the next few years trying to buy back her work.
Once darkness fell, Nica and Monk climbed into the Rolls and hit the town, often attending many gigs in a single night. Monk acted as her companion and teacher, introducing Nica to his friends, helping her understand the music. The jazz scene was intimate, and most clubs were on 52nd Street. On any night it was possible to see Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday, Art Tatum, Monk, Gillespie and Ellington playing within yards of each other. The trombonist Curtis Fuller remembers looking out from the stand at Nica:
There were many big limos and big stars—Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra and so forth. They would send notes and try and get you to join their table. But when the Baroness came in and sat at her table, everything stopped. She was way above all of them. When Nica came in the place there is like a big gong going off, boom, and the word would go out that the Baroness is here. Play well, the Baroness is out front. She played the part so well. She could sit there with this thousand-foot cigarette holder and the fur coat with such elegance and you could tell at some part of her life she must have been an all-star beauty.
Late at night, after the concerts had finished, Nica invited musicians back to the Stanhope for dinner. “We would go there once the clubs had closed,” a musician reminisced. “We could order anything we wanted. It was steak and champagne all the way.” For Nica, the club was simply the beginning, and the main event often happened later. According to Curtis Fuller, Nica was a “free spirit” and would lie naked in the bath, smoking and listening to the music while the musicians played and hung out in the next room. Monk might have been banned from the clubs but at Nica’s he was the centre of an ever-changing supergroup of talent. “All the cats came up,” Nica recalled, citing a list of legends such as Sonny Rollins, Oscar Pettiford, Art Blakey, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker.
The musician Hampton Hawes remembered dropping in on Nica one day and noting that her suite had “a lot of paintings on funny drapes, a chandelier like an old movie palace, a Steinway concert grand in the corner. I thought, this is where you live if you own Grant’s Tomb or Chase Manhattan Bank.” Hawes heard a terrible sound coming from the bedroom. Popping his head around the door, he saw the extraordinary sight of “a body laid out on a gold bedspread, mud-stained boots sticking out from a ten-thousand-dollar mink coat.” It was only when Nica, finger to her lips, implored him to be quiet that he realised it was Thelonious, taking his afternoon nap.
What mattered most to Monk was that Nica loved his music. As his son Toot said, “Nica was there when the critics didn’t get it and half the musicians didn’t get it but she got it and that was very important for her and very important for him. He loved her for that.” Monk, commenting on his new friend, said, “She is not judgemental, she is there, she has some money which is sometimes needed. She might be helpful there, but that is not a primary thing. She’s got a nice place to stay in. She can drive me places in that Bentley, which I enjoy driving, and she is a funky, nice lady.” Later he added, “She’s a Rothschild, which makes me pretty proud.”
Nica expressed her admiration for Monk in equally simple terms. She told the film producer Bruce Ricker:
He was not only unique as a musician, he was also unique as a man. A strange word comes to mind when I think of him. Purity. That word seems to fit him like a glove. He was uncompromisingly honest. He abhorred liars and never lied himself. If the answer to a question meant hurting somebody’s feelings, he would remain silent and his capacity for silence was such that many people think he never spoke. But when he was in the mood he could talk non-stop for days on end. His mind was as sharp as a razor and he was interested in everything from the flight of a butterfly to politics and higher mathematics. He was the greatest fun in the world. He would keep one laughing till one cried.
In many ways, Nica was following in the tradition of Rothschild women who were used to playing supportive roles to powerful men. “Thelonious was a performer and it required dedication, sacrifice and sometimes a little genius to get him to function,” Harry Colomby explained. “Every fight has corners, and we were the corner people. I was the official manager, Nellie was his wife, and Nica was his friend.”
The trombonist Curtis Fuller, who spent a lot of time with Nica and Monk in the 1950s and 1960s, told me, “There were no signs of affection other than, you know, your kiss on the cheek.” When another musician asked Monk whether he was sleeping with the Baroness, Monk replied incredulously, “Man, why would I do that to my best friend?” The saxophonist Sonny Rollins told me that, while Nica and Monk were rarely apart, they were also seldom alone. “We used to hang out. Monk and Nica would come to my house and we would go out some place together and drive around after hours until it was light.”
In the documentary footage shot by Michael and Christian Blackwood, the roles of Monk’s two women were captured on celluloid. Nellie, small, birdlike and as neat as a pin, fusses around Monk while he seems, if not out of it, certainly not that rooted in the present. In one scene he lies in bed with his hat on while Nellie hovers, getting his clothes ready. A waiter comes and asks him what he wants to eat and Monk, lying there naked, wearing a hat, hardly reacts. When Monk does get up he moves slowly around the room while his wife tries to help him put on his jacket. Nellie is so tiny that she has to jump up to get the coat on straight. Monk does nothing to help her. In another scene Nellie is trying to sort out tickets at the airport while Monk goofs around behind her, leaning on her shoulder, making faces at the crowd. Later he stands in the middle of the concourse and spins in a circle. Nellie puts up with his antics but her annoyance is palpable. Perhaps the most revealing moment is when Monk is dancing in a room and for no reason suddenly sweeps the ashtray off a side table on to the floor. Almost immediately Nellie’s anxious face pokes through the door and looks around. What now, her expression seems to say. What is it this time?
Nica and Monk, stills from Straight, No Chaser (Photographic Credit 17.1)
Footage of Nica with Monk reveals a more relaxed relationship. There are scenes where the two chat and hang out in the basement of a club, talking about history, about what he played that night. All the time Nica looks at him with great tenderness, never taking her eyes off him. “He was original in his way of life,” Nica said of Monk’s habits. “He would often go for days without sleeping and he was pretty tough to keep up with that way and he just did things the way he liked doing them. Sometimes he would walk backwards instead of forwards or stop for no particular reason and twirl in the street.” Nica, however, respected the Monks’ marriage and said that he and Nellie “adored” each other.
Nellie was relieved that Monk now had somewhere else to go. For three years the family had been cooped up in their tiny apartment. Monk had also begun to display increasingly worrying behavioural traits. He would, as Nica said, stay awake for days at a time and then promptly fall asleep, or fixate on an idea. A cocktail of different drugs exacerbated these highs and lows, some prescribed, some illegal. Nellie—frequently ill, tired, worried about money and anxious for her children—was relieved that her husband had found a new friend who was prepared to drive him around and encourage him to work. Nica recalled several occasions when Nellie rang her, asking for help: “Come immediately, Thelonious is drinking up the place, I have sent for the police.” By the time Nica reached 63rd Street, Thelonious would be calm. However, as soon as she got all the way back home, Nellie would ring again: “Thelonious is breaking up a tree outside the Lincoln Towers. He is in his pyjamas.”
Far from being upset or irritated while recounting these stories, Nica, on tape, laughed at the memory. “I have been in more nuthouses than you would believe. [Laughter] When you got there he would always be the centre of calm. Then he’d say, ‘I am nuts but every time they check me out they have to let me go so I can’t be nuts, can I?’ ” Nica believed the doctors caused more harm than good. “You know what they were doing? They
were slugging him full of drugs and you can imagine how that would have helped.” At that time no one assumed there was much wrong with Monk: he was simply an eccentric who indulged in substance abuse.
Occasionally when Monk had a gig out of town, Nica and Nellie went too, even sharing a joke over some of his more outlandish behaviour.
One time on a flight to San Francisco, he walked from one end of the plane to the other during the entire trip. And when they started showing the film, he cast a huge shadow on it and then had to duck to get under the screen. Nellie and I were trying to pretend we didn’t know him! But about an hour before we were due to arrive he came up to us and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
And Nellie, horrified, said, “But, Thelonious, we haven’t landed yet!”
“Right, shut my mouth!” said Thelonious, and carried on walking.
The concert promoter George Wein, who went on tours with the Monks and Nica, and who knew all three well, is in no doubt about how the relationship worked and where Monk’s priorities lay.
Thelonious loved Nellie. One day we were sitting in the tearoom on the way from London to Bristol about three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was coming in the window and picked up Nellie’s face. Thelonious turned and looked at her and said, “You look like an angel.” It was one of the most beautiful things I saw in my life. Nellie was not a beautiful woman but she did everything for Thelonious. She put up with every single thing and he appreciated that.
The Baroness Page 16