NICA: I returned to my car but by that time there were already other troop cars arriving and lots of troopers got out.
Q: After the other troopers arrived would you describe what took place in connection with them and Monk at your car.
NICA: Three or four of them started trying to drag Monk out of the car and he resisted, and they began to hit him with coshes and blackjacks, and I asked them not to do it and be very careful of his hands because he was a pianist.
Rouse later said that at first Nica did ask the troopers to be careful with Monk’s hands, but when they ignored her and thunked the leather-covered lead down on to his fingers, she begged them to stop. “Soon she was screaming and begging, ‘Protect his hands, please protect his hands.’ ”
NICA: They didn’t take any notice and they finally dragged him out of the car, and they were on top of him on the ground, beating him, and they handcuffed him with his hands behind his back and dragged him to Officer Littel’s car and tried to get him in the back … I went over to a detective and said, please, I don’t want him to get hurt any more. Then I went over to my car but Officer Littel approached me and said, “You are under arrest too.”
Monk lost consciousness, probably following a trooper’s use of a beavertail sap with a flat profile. Once his body crumpled the troopers lifted Monk’s legs over his head and just closed the door on him. Detective Eckrich agreed to let Nica drive the Bentley to the local courthouse. Rouse was also arrested and transferred to another trooper’s car.
Not long after the Baroness and the musicians arrived at the local courthouse, news of the arrest had spread. The troopers told their families to come and see that day’s catch. Snotty-nosed kids pressed their faces against the window to get a better look at Monk, who was now conscious but in serious pain. There was nothing the Baroness could do apart from ask repeatedly to use a phone to call her lawyer. Rouse, also handcuffed for good measure, was held in another room.
“What is the charge?” Nica kept asking.
“Can we look in your pocketbook?”
“If you mean, can you search my handbag, then here it is. But can we please get a doctor for Mr. Monk. He’s sick. Surely you can see he’s sick? We’ll plead guilty. Let us pay the fine and let us go.”
“We need to search your car.”
“Go ahead.”
Things were about to get significantly worse.
Nica followed the officers outside and sat on the bank, watching. She took out her sketchbook and began to doodle.
Q: How did you happen to have a pad with you?
NICA: I always have a pad with me, and when I am under stress and strain I usually start doodling. That’s what I was doing.
Q: At the time the officers took your luggage out of the car, you knew, did you not, that the Indian hemp was in the suitcase.
NICA: Yes.
Q: (continuing) Why, Baroness, did you not refuse, if you had any choice, to let them make these searches?
NICA: I was surrounded by police officers and troopers and detectives, and I was rather frightened. I had asked for my attorney and had been told I couldn’t telephone and I was really rather frightened and confused at this time and I just didn’t think there was any alternative to allowing them to search.
Q: Did you believe that you had a choice as to whether you could allow them to search or not search?
NICA: No.
Q: No choice?
NICA: No.
Q: (continuing) After you arrived at Judge Hatton’s, when, if at all, did you ask to use the telephone other than to call your lawyer?
NICA: I asked several times. When they found the needle marks on Monk, I wanted to call the doctor because I knew the doctor could explain the vitamin injections Monk was getting.
Monk was not only sweating but had track marks on his arms. It needed little more to convince the police that they had another junkie on their hands.
Nica, seconds after being charged, October 1958 (Photographic Credit 20.1)
Then they found marijuana in the car, which in those days was classified as a narcotic; those found in possession faced imprisonment. Fully aware of what she was doing, Nica claimed that the dope was hers.
Harry Colomby was teaching a class when he was summoned to the telephone. “Normally I wouldn’t take it but on that occasion …” He still remembers the phone call, the absolute despair that he felt and his lingering incredulity at the injustice of the system. “They even impounded the car. The car became a witness.”
Colomby described having to go back to his classroom and hear the students discuss literature but only being able to think that Monk would once again forfeit his cabaret card and his livelihood. Since getting back his licence to perform, Monk had had about fifteen months to build up an audience. “The response was staggering, it was great,” Colomby remembered. “The word was out. It was like a conversion, yes, that’s the word. Because for all those years he’d been an artist who had never had his due in terms of recognition and that was changing. Thelonious was vindicated. Then this happened.”
“But Nica said that the drugs were hers so surely Monk got off?” I asked.
“Yeah, she took the rap, but that didn’t mean anything.”
It meant everything to Nica. The consequences for her were appalling. She faced a long prison sentence of up to ten years, a large fine and then, on her release, immediate deportation. Her family had tolerated the death of an infamous, married, drug-addicted musician in her suite, but how would they treat her imprisonment for drugs? Would they cut her off finally and ostracise her? Jules had custody of their children but, up to now, he had allowed Nica limited access. If his former wife was found guilty, would Jules allow her to see their children at all? How many friends and relations would trek to a jail to visit her? If Nica lost the case, her life with Monk was finished. She was suspended between two worlds, the one that she had rejected and the other that she had come to love. Her future lay in the hands of lawyers and judges, and this time there was nothing that her influential family could do to help.
I wondered why Nica risked so much. Was the explanation simply that she loved Monk and was prepared to give up everything to spare him going to jail? One of her oldest friends, the historian Dan Morgenstern, told me: “She was prepared to sacrifice herself for him. She did not think twice about it. That was what she was like, the way she looked at things. That was the way she was.”
21 • Blood, Sweat and Tears
Nica was found guilty as charged on April 21, 1959. She was sentenced to three years in prison and fined $3,000. On the day of her release, two policemen would accompany her to the airport and put her on a plane to England. She would be forbidden from returning to America.
Although the Rothschild family could not protect Nica from prison or ignominy, they did engage a top criminal attorney to represent her appeal. Moments after the sentence was passed, her defence lawyer Arthur J. Clark argued passionately for a deferment and retrial. The judge reluctantly agreed to send Nica’s case to the Delaware Superior Court, and she was released pending retrial. Victor put up bail of $10,000. Nica was temporarily free but for the next two years the prospect of a prison sentence hung over her.
“Such a bore, I can’t be bothered to talk about it,” was Nica’s reaction, twenty years later, to a question about the Delaware incident. I didn’t, for one second, believe her. “Such a bore” was exactly the phrase her sister Miriam used when age robbed her of her eyesight. “Such a bore” was what my grandmother said to describe her diagnosis with cancer. “Such a bore” is merely a figure of speech used by a generation who were never given the language or permission to express their feelings adequately. I had heard “such a bore” enough to know that it was a metaphor for fear.
The New York Times reports the outcome of Nica’s trial. (Photographic Credit 21.1)
Rather than reject Nica, the Rothschilds made a renewed effort to understand her. “Everyone got the message … they all got to realise what was going on and [that] T
helonious was something important to my life,” Nica said. One of her first visitors was her sister Miriam, who came to New York with her son Charlie, claiming they were “dying to meet” Thelonious. Nica admitted the visit did not go smoothly. “I went to get Thelonious from 63rd Street and he was as high as a kite. He got high because he was worried about meeting Miriam and nothing on earth would make him sit down. He never came down to earth the whole time.”
Miriam, Nica said, was “frankly cool about it and said, ‘Don’t worry, I understand, he is a genius’ and all that stuff.” Miriam rarely went back to “Catville,” although the sisters kept in regular contact. Nica and her children would visit Ashton several times over the next twenty years.
Nica with her children: Janka, Shaun, Berit and Kari in 1957 (Photographic Credit 21.2)
Victor tried to impress his sister by making a musical connection with Thelonious, recording his own attempt to play a Monk composition. Victor was delighted with his effort. Monk thought it appallingly amateur and responded by sending back a spoof of Victor’s tribute. Nica later said that her brother “never recovered from Thelonious’s impersonation. He almost gave up the ghost. It was hilariously funny, his imitation. I have got that on tape somewhere.”
For the next two years, while the case was waiting to be heard, Nica’s family and friends begged her to flee the country to avoid the trial. To be certain of keeping out of jail, she simply had to go back to England and start again. Nica had not fought for freedom in the Second World War to run away now. For her, the case was not really about a few dollars’ worth of marijuana. It was what happened when white and black people became friends.
I found one of Nica’s paintings in Mary Lou Williams’s archive at Rutgers University. Although abstract, it depicts two figures hanging from trees in a sea of blood-red gloom. The composition was based on a well-known photograph of the lynching of two young black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. The same image prompted the Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol to write the song “Strange Fruit.” Nica’s painting was her pictorial protest against racism and against her arrest in Delaware. In the corner she scribbled the words “Strange Fruit” and the date, October 1958.
I wondered whether there were parallels between the Jewish and the African-American experience of prejudice. Was it possible that Nica understood, through family and even through personal experience, something of what her new-found friends had to endure? I put this question to Miriam.
“It’s all the same really. That’s how the human race works. The office boy has got to kick the cat. Everybody has got to have something below them that they can either bully or torment or kick. It is just unlucky if you are Jewish because you are one of the easiest things to boot downstairs. The next day it will be the Negroes and the next day it will be something else. The human race always needs something on which to vent its anger at what life is like.”
I asked Quincy Jones whether he could explain the roots of racism and whether there were parallels between the experiences of those two groups. He echoed Miriam’s words: “Yes. It’s all part of the same psychological disease. Make yourself feel like a giant by making other people midgets.” Did he think that Nica understood what he and his friends were going through? “Of course she did.”
Following her arrest in 1958, Nica increased her efforts to help the jazz community. Driving her Bentley into the rougher neighbourhoods, she would park and, leaving the engine running, go in search of a “cat in trouble.” Wearing her fur coat and pearls, she cut an eccentric figure striding through the drug dens and tenements. Once she spent several days looking for the pianist Bud Powell, who had drunk all her Rothschild wine before heading for the city to score heroin. Nica found him destitute on a street corner but Powell, despite his friends’ best efforts, was beyond help. She gave him a bed and food but the musician died from a lethal combination of TB and liver failure due to alcoholism and malnutrition. Nica paid for his funeral in Harlem, where a thousand mourners followed a band playing “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “ ’Round Midnight.” Thanks to her inheritance, she was able to dignify the deaths of other musician friends such as the pianist Sonny Clark and the tenor player Coleman Hawkins by arranging proper funerals and burial grounds. Sometimes her charity was more practical: Lionel Hampton was one of the musicians she taught to read.
She showed no qualms about using the cachet of her name and title to defend those in need. Her headed notepaper bore a crest and the name “The Baroness de Koenigswarter” in bold blue ink. If she was writing to a close friend she sometimes printed cat’s paws on the paper; for fellow jazz lovers she drew piano keys. When a jazz critic announced that Coleman Hawkins had displayed an alcoholic death wish, she rang her friend Dan Morgenstern who worked at Downbeat magazine to insist that he print her rebuttal. Her letter appeared in the next issue: “On the contrary … like his music, it’s the kind of sound to make the dead rise up from their graves and begin dancing! It makes you dig that you, yourself, were less alive before you heard it.”
Perhaps wanting attention, or recognition, or just to have some positive press attention, she co-operated fully with Nat Hentoff for the article in Esquire in 1960. “She used to post little notes through my letter box, asking if I had considered this or that,” Hentoff told me. Published between her arrest in 1958 and before her case went to the Supreme Court in 1962, Hentoff’s article is full of personal insights into Nica’s background, the end of her marriage and her relationship with Monk and other musicians. Although it contained a few barbed comments, the article served Nica well, showing another side to her, portraying her as naive and “goofy” but well meaning.
However, many reviled Nica’s behaviour and chosen lifestyle: “They shouted at her, ‘nigger lover,’ ” her friend the trombonist Curtis Fuller recalled. “The Baroness went through quite a bit and we could appreciate what it was like. We would have fought to the death for her if someone insulted or hurt her. She was our pride and she was our light. She gave us a light because she had status.”
Nica with Charles Mingus in a record store (Photographic Credit 21.3)
Although race relations became easier during the 1960s when love was supposed to be “free,” mixed-race relationships and mixed-race children were unusual. Until the Civil Rights Act in 1968 laws criminalising interracial marriage and allowing racial segregation were enforced in some Southern American states. Nica’s daughter Janka and the drummer Clifford Jarvis had a mixed-race son, Steven, in 1964. The couple never lived together and Steven grew up with his mother and grandmother in “Catville.” Attending a school in New York, Steven was, he told me, bullied and victimised because of his mixed-race heritage. On one occasion a black female singer called his grandmother “an aristocratic misogynistic slut.” Steven was appalled and deeply upset. “I was so dumbfounded. [It was as if] she sliced me open with a knife. Ever since then I have become sensitive to that, you know, reputation of my grandmother’s and I felt really injured by it. I found out that this is not an uncommonly held view.”
I asked the British photographer Val Wilmer, who spent a lot of time in New York in the 1960s, what her experience as a white woman in the jazz world had been. “When I first went to New York in 1962 there were many bars where women would not be served on their own, because the implication was that you were a prostitute. White women who mixed with black men were in a very difficult situation because although the jazz world was more liberal, more progressive than other sectors of society, there was still enormous racism and sexism.”
The black journal The Liberator published a piece accusing money-hungry agents, club owners and women like the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter of making ruthless demands of hapless musicians. Nica served as a “bitter insinuation that a rich white woman is the black man’s salvation.” Amiri Baraka, the poet and activist formerly known as LeRoi Jones, was equally dismissive. “She was a wealthy dilettante and a groupie. That is the kindest thing I could say, that she was somebody who had the wherewi
thal to be where she wanted to be and do what she wanted to do.” A Rothschild relation, hearing that I was writing a book about Nica, wrote, “She was not even interesting. She just lay in bed and listened to music.”
Nica was pilloried in fiction. The South American writer Julio Cortázar published a collection of short stories including “The Pursuer,” about a doomed saxophone player by the name of Johnny (Charlie Parker) and a group of hangers-on led by a particularly creepy Marquesa Tica (Baroness Nica) who settles among jazz musicians to boost her own rather vapid life as another groupie. The narrator explains, “We’re a bunch of egotists. Under the pretext of watching out for Johnny what we’re doing is protecting our idea of him, getting ourselves ready for the pleasure Johnny’s going to give us, to reflect the brilliance from the statue we’ve erected among us all and defend it till the last gasp.” Johnny’s girlfriend, a woman called Deedee, singles out the Marquesa character in particular: “Tica’s doing very well,” Deedee said bitterly. “Of course it’s easy for her. She always arrives at the last minute and all she has to do is open her handbag and it’s all fixed up.”
Her friend Mary Lou offered Nica the following advice:
People will say unpleasant things through jealousy etc but you must remember that a star is made and everyone wants to meet you as much as they do Duke Ellington or Monk … So what are you gonna do about it? You cannot change it … so learn to live with it and laugh, the way you do. You are one of the Rothschilds, this makes you a target. The Duponts, Fords, Rocks [Rockefellers] … smile and all the greedy rich folks are at each other’s necks to keep all the loot in their pockets. You may seem notorious to them but look at them, they are murderers of men’s souls. You are very kind to those you love.
The Baroness Page 20