How, I asked Wein, did Nica fit into this ménage?
Thelonious respected quality. He liked the Rolls-Royce. He had the finest suits he could afford. He would put on a show. Hey, this woman was a Rothschild. A baroness, this was a great compliment to Thelonious, and particularly since she loved him and was respectful of Nellie. Nellie loved the Baroness, I mean, Nellie allowed the Baroness to do whatever she wanted to do with Thelonious and they were overwhelmed by the status of baroness. They were very keen on status.
Harry Colomby knew that Nica’s life was hugely enriched by this new friendship. “Thelonious gave her validation. Thelonious really respected who she was and what she had done, where she had come from and her understanding of the art. When Thelonious said, ‘Hey, she is hip,’ that would make cats deal with her in a very different way. Cats could not just treat her like a groupie, you know. I think the association with jazz emotionally nourished her.”
Having failed to organise the Royal Albert Hall concerts, Nica focused her efforts on the return of Monk’s New York cabaret card. Introduced by New York’s Mayor LaGuardia, the card was enforced from Prohibition until 1967 as a way of punishing drug users. “It was a stone-cold rip-off used by the police to exact bribes,” the drummer Chico Hamilton said. The loss of the card spelled disaster for many careers. Billie Holiday, like Monk, lost her card for much of her career and so there were few opportunities for her to earn money or nurture an audience. Sometimes, with the help of a good lawyer and a decent bribe, cabaret cards could be reinstated earlier than the ban prescribed. Nica tried in 1954, 1955 and 1956 but still failed.
“I didn’t set out to be a freedom fighter,” she told me, “but when I got there [New York] I did see that an awful lot of help was needed.” Her visit to the tiny Monk apartment had been a revelation: Nellie Monk could not offer Nica hospitality as she had trouble putting food on her own family’s table. Nica might not have been trained as a lawyer, or as a manager. She might not have been cut out for marriage or motherhood, but finally she had found a purpose and a place where she could be useful.
18 • Bird
For a few months, from the end of 1954 until early 1955, the disparate elements of Nica’s life united in relative harmony. Jules had been appointed France’s plenipotentiary to North America and moved from Mexico to New York with their children. Although Berit, Shaun and Kari lived with their father, the whole family was, at least, in the same city.
As long as Nica was discreet, the Stanhope Hotel tolerated her chosen lifestyle. But Nica, according to the legendary producer Orrin Keepnews, “was a pretty damn flamboyant woman who didn’t give a damn what people thought. She was doing what she wanted to do and she was obviously damned aware of the power and influence that her good financial position gave her and she behaved accordingly.”
The Stanhope was a segregated hotel: black people were allowed in as servants, but not as guests. Nica had no intention of smuggling her friends up to her suite in a service elevator. She insisted that the musicians accompany her openly and that they order whatever they fancied from the bar or on room service. “The hotel tried to get me out by doubling and tripling the rent and then moving me to smaller apartments,” Nica said. She refused to go.
An added problem for the hotel management was that many of these musicians were also drug addicts. The use of narcotics had become an endemic part of the jazz lifestyle. Some historians blame the plantation owners, who distributed free cocaine to their slaves to make them eat less and work harder. Others allude to the mob’s involvement in the drug trade. From the late 1940s the mafia started dumping illegal substances in black communities. “If you grew up in Harlem in the 1950s and were coming out of high school at three in the afternoon, there is no way you could walk two blocks without somebody offering you drugs,” the jazz historian Gary Giddins told me. In interviews with musicians, including Monk’s and older generations, the lament was always the same: nobody knew then that it killed you.
The most notorious drug user was Charlie “Bird” Parker. He and Nica were acquaintances rather than close friends but, due to a series of unfortunate coincidences, his death was to become inextricably linked to Nica’s life.
Parker was born in 1920 and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. His absentee father had been a promising pianist and dancer until alcoholism put an end to his career. Parker’s father ended up working as a waiter on the railways while Parker’s mother worked nights at the local Western Union office. Young Charlie learned to play saxophone on a rented school instrument but he was thrown out of the school band due to his lack of obvious talent. Spurred on by this rejection, Parker spent three or four years practising fifteen hours a day to ensure that he was never evicted from another band. Handsome, charismatic, enigmatic and thrillingly gifted, Parker inspired a generation of jazz musicians. British saxophonist John Dankworth explained his genius: “What Charlie Parker did was take popular songs, analyse each chord and create a whole new set of chords around it. It was almost mathematical and yet he touched the heart and the brain at the same time.”
At the age of eighteen, Parker was badly hurt in a car accident and was given morphine as pain relief. From then on, his life was marred by an addiction that blighted his health, his relationships and his music. Tragically, many younger musicians assumed that Parker’s heroin use was the secret of his profound ability. Sonny Rollins admitted, “Charlie Parker was our idol and one of the reasons that we got involved with the type of drug use that we were into.”
Quincy Jones was a teenager when he met his hero Charlie Parker. “Bird said, let’s go buy some weed. I said, great. Anything with Bird. I mean, anything. He was the man,” Jones told me, shaking his head in disbelief at his own naivety. “We went up to Harlem in a cab and he asked how much money I had on me. I handed over everything. He said, wait here on this corner—I’ll be back. I am standing in the rain for half an hour, forty-five minutes, two hours, until I realised what had happened. It was a painful thing to happen at that age with your idol. I had to walk from 138th street all the way down to 44th Street.” There are many similar stories. Nica knew Parker was a genius but she had also heard that he could charm money out of pockets, spirit rings off fingers and watches from wrists.
Unlike many of his friends and colleagues, Nica, always compassionate, saw the loneliness and torment that plagued Charlie Parker. Many years later she wrote a piece for Ross Russell’s book Bird Lives!, a collection of essays and memories penned by Parker’s friends and colleagues. “For all the adulation heaped upon him by fans and musicians, Bird was lonely,” she wrote. “I saw him standing in front of Birdland in the pouring rain and I was horrified and asked him why? And he said he had no place to go. When this happened he’d ride the subways all night. He’d ride a train to the end of the line and when he was ordered out, he would go to another train and ride back.”
When Parker knocked on her door on the night of March 12, 1955, Nica welcomed him in. It was a decision that would launch a hundred conspiracy theories and make Nica a figure of public notoriety and speculation. That evening Parker was supposed to go to Boston for a concert, but he was in a shocking state. He had recently attempted to kill himself by drinking iodine following the death of his daughter Pree and the departure of his wife Chan.
Nica’s friend Ira Gitler had seen him earlier that evening at Birdland. “I got there very early and I noticed he was taking some little white pills, which, I guessed, were codeine. He was wearing bedroom slippers because he had swollen feet.” Parker stopped off at the Stanhope on his way to the station, knowing that Nica would offer him food, drink and possibly money. Unusually, Nica was at home in the Stanhope that night with her daughter Janka.*
A young Charlie Parker (Photographic Credit 18.1)
Charlie Parker shortly before his death (Photographic Credit 18.2)
Some believe that Parker had finally stopped using. However, his friend, the drummer Freddie Gruber, whom I tracked down in a suburb of Los Angeles, stron
gly refutes this claim. “Three to four days prior to Bird’s demise I ran into him on Sheridan Square. I was standing there by that cigar store and I was waiting for a ‘friend’ of George Wallington who we both knew. Now, I was waiting for the same reason that he apparently was there.” Wanting to be absolutely clear what Gruber was saying, I asked whether this was a euphemism for meeting a drug dealer and whether they both scored heroin. Gruber confirmed that this was the case.
In Clint Eastwood’s film Bird, based on Nica’s version of the events, Parker appears at the door to Nica’s suite, rain-soaked and docile. He lies on her sofa watching television and is sweetly co-operative with the visiting doctor. Common sense suggests the reality was rather different. If Parker was a using addict, he would, over the next three hours, have gone through the unpleasant cycles of withdrawal, including cold turkey. With advanced cirrhosis of the liver and stomach ulcers, Parker must also have been in considerable pain.
Nica was in a difficult situation. The hotel already wanted to evict her. She was in the middle of negotiating the terms of her separation from Jules and access to her children. Her family tolerated her chosen lifestyle but insisted on discretion. A particularly intrusive investigative journalist, Walter Winchell, had begun to feature “The Baroness” in his columns; his pen was poised, waiting for a proper scandal to break. Nica knew the dangers of harbouring a sick, drug-addicted musician. Trying to keep Parker’s presence a secret, Nica bypassed the hotel’s medical team and arranged for her personal physician, Dr. Freymann, to examine her friend. The doctor decided Parker must be about sixty (he was actually thirty-four) and asked him whether he liked to drink. “An occasional sherry before dinner,” Parker replied, proving that even if his health had deserted him, his sense of humour had not. It is not known what treatment or drugs the doctor prescribed.
On that Saturday night, Nica and Janka propped Parker up in front of the television. Mother and daughter were giving him large amounts of water to try to quench his thirst. The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show came on and during the juggling act Parker started to laugh, then choked and suddenly died. “It was one in the morning before the ambulance came to carry the body away. One can imagine all sorts of things alone with death. It’s dramatic enough without special effects,” Nica said later. “Yet I did think I heard a clap of thunder as Bird passed away. I convinced myself finally that I hadn’t until I talked it over with my daughter, and she had heard it too.” The clap of thunder has now passed into jazz folklore.
Nica was catapulted into notoriety, her name becoming linked for all time to the death of a brilliant, troubled saxophonist who was not even a particularly close friend. Reflecting on the event, Toot said, “Charlie Parker was lucky that Nica was loving enough to open up her door so he had some place to die or he would have died in the street because there wasn’t anybody else who was going to open their door to Charlie Parker.”
Charlie Parker’s death was not reported for forty-eight hours. Nica claims that she kept it secret while she tried to find and warn his estranged wife Chan. Others claim that those two days were needed for darker and more sinister reasons. Was she hiding evidence? Clearing the apartment of drugs? Giving others time to sort out an alibi? The sceptics ask, for example, why the medical examiner came, unusually, to the hotel room; why the body was shipped to the morgue where it lay, mislabelled, on a slab; why Parker’s age was given as fifty-three. “That’s what Charlie told me,” Nica said. “There was no indication that he was putting me on … He seemed quite serious about it.”
Another theory claimed that the delay was to protect her “lover,” Art Blakey, who had got into a fight with Parker over Nica and had shot or punched his rival in the stomach. Even today the rumour mills keep on churning. Recently I received an email from a distinguished American academic whose female friend claimed to be present shortly after Bird’s death and, according to her, Nica shot Parker. Why, I asked, had it taken so long for this key witness to come forward and what was Nica’s motive? The answer to the first part of my question was left hanging. The answer to the second question was that “Nica disliked addicts.” More than half a century after the event, the death of Charlie Parker and the involvement of the Baroness are still generating outlandish theories.
Ira Gitler saw Nica and Art Blakey in a club the night after Parker died but before the news had broken. “The Baroness and Art Blakey walked in and I distinctly remember she had a kind of a little leather container with a strap over her shoulder and inside were two plastic bottles. I think one was gin and one was whisky.” Nica and Blakey did not stay long. The following morning Gitler woke up to the headline, “Charlie Parker Dies in Baroness’s Apartment in the Hotel Stanhope.” “I thought, wow, she carried herself with a lot of calm for someone who had just gone through this.”
A reporter who regularly scoured the city’s morgues broke the news of Parker’s death. Once the mislabelled body was correctly identified and the pieces of the jigsaw had been fitted together, the tabloids had a field day. “The Bird in the Baroness’s Boudoir” screamed one headline, another, “Bop King Dies in Heiress’ Flat.” The New York Times’s subheading ran: “A Be-Bop Founder and Top Saxophonist Is Stricken in Suite of Baroness.” Most reports painted Nica as the evil vamp: “Blinded and bedazzled by this luscious, slinky, black haired, jet eyed, Circe of high society, the Yardbird was a fallen sparrow.”
Walter Winchell finally had Nica in his sights: “We columned about the married Baroness and her old fashioned Rolls Royce weeks ago—parked in front of midtown places starring Negro stars. A married jazz star died in her hotel apartment.” From that moment on, Nica became Winchell’s obsession. Harry Colomby told me, “Walter Winchell actually pursued her. He persecuted her in his column as a dealer of drugs. Oh, he made her out to be this harlot. He was the guy who literally made or broke people.”
Toot Monk explained, “Her life became absolute hell. The black cops would stop her, saying, that’s the white girl who killed Charlie Parker. The white cops would accuse her of being the woman who hung with black men. She could not win. New York was a very small community fifty years ago. There was not very much chance of the Baroness driving round in a Rolls-Royce not being noticed and people not knowing who she was. Nica paid a very dear price for her kindness.”
One of the most intriguing characters in the Parker affair was the shadowy Dr. Robert Freymann. Perhaps the best first-hand account of him came from another of my great-aunts, this time on my mother’s side, the painter Ann Dunn. She spent a lot of time in New York in the 1950s and often visited Dr. Freymann’s surgery on the Upper East Side.
(Photographic Credit 18.3)
Following Parker’s death in Nica’s hotel room, the newspapers went to town. (Photographic Credit 18.4)
“You’d have all the grand Park Avenue ladies sitting on one side of the waiting room and the musicians on the other, all waiting for that little injection. We used to call them ‘happy shots.’ ”
What was in the injection?
“Officially they were vitamin B shots but they cost a fortune and made one feel like a million dollars, so use your imagination!” Did the shots contain heroin? “That and other narcotics.”
Did she ever see Nica and Monk in the doctor’s waiting room? “Frequently.”
Lorraine Lion Gordon also spotted Nica and Monk entering Freymann’s office.
In Nica’s correspondence with Mary Lou Williams, she said she had contracted hepatitis from one of Dr. Freymann’s dirty needles.
Following his arrest in 1958, the police asked Monk why his veins were scarred with track marks. Nica explained that these were the result of Dr. Freymann’s vitamin shots.
Dr. Freymann eventually lost his license for supplying heroin to addicts.
Was my great-aunt Nica a drug addict? Did she enable her friends to use? These questions haunted my research.
Arriving in New York in the early 1950s, Nica was, at first, unaware of the consequences of addiction. The death of
Parker was a terrible wake-up call and after that she tried to come to the aid of her afflicted friends. “I used to think I could help,” she said later. “But no one person can. They have to do it alone.”
The months following Parker’s death were hard. “I was thoroughly investigated then by the homicide and narcotics squads,” Nica said with typical insouciance. “That was the one short period that was rather full.”
Jules, mortified and furious, started divorce proceedings, winning custody of their children. Victor Rothschild flew to New York in an attempt to persuade the Stanhope to let his sister stay on, but failed. “After Bird died there, they chucked me out,” she said. For Thelonious, Parker’s death was an inconvenience that brought the jam sessions to an abrupt end. For Nica, however, a moment of impulsive generosity had left her husbandless and hounded.
* * *
*Janka has never spoken publicly about that evening and has been written out of its history. She does not, for example, appear in Straight, No Chaser.
19 • Pannonica
After Nica moved to the Bolivar Hotel, she and Monk chose a magnificent Steinway piano for her new suite. “That’s where he wrote ‘Brilliant Corners,’ ‘Bolivar Blues’ and ‘Pannonica.’ And he would be up there all day long,” she reminisced.
The album Brilliant Corners was Monk’s musical tribute to his new friend and contained the song “Pannonica.” Only a few women received the honour of a special Monk dedication: “Ruby My Dear” was dedicated to his first love, Ruby Richardson; “Crepuscule with Nellie” was a love song composed for his wife; “Booboo” was written for his daughter Barbara.
The Baroness Page 17