The Baroness

by Hannah Rothschild

  Even for a younger, healthier man these tours were punishing, but Monk was in poor shape, in his fifties and ill suited temperamentally to life on the road. He hated being out of New York and it was hard for his protectors to manage his routine away from home. Once, when staying alone in a San Francisco motel, Monk ripped up his room. The manager would not let him leave until Nica had flown to the West Coast and paid for the damage. Another time a club owner refused to pay up as Monk had played the whole set using only his elbows. When asked why, Monk said his choice of style had reflected his appalling plane ride to get there.

  According to Nica, one incident above all others had a disastrous effect on Monk’s mental condition. He was playing in a club in Minneapolis in 1965 when a young fan slipped him a tab of acid. “Even though Monk had strange ways, he was not in the habit of vanishing,” Nica told her old friend Dan Morgenstern. “He disappeared and then he turned up in Detroit [some 694 miles away] almost a week later.” It was one of many factors that contributed to Monk’s final decline.

  A random series of events further knocked the pianist’s constitution: the death from an overdose of his beloved nephew Ronnie; the deaths of friends like Coleman Hawkins, Elmo Hope and Bud Powell; Columbia cancelling his recording contract; trusted collaborators Ben Riley and Charlie Rouse quitting the band; a second fire in the Monk apartment. He also suffered increasingly from an enlarged prostate that affected every aspect of his life, including performing.

  One evening in May 1968, on the eve of a trip to San Francisco, Monk slipped into a coma, the result of stress, exhaustion and a mixture of drugs. After several days he came round and announced in Monkish style, “Y’all thought I kicked the bucket. Thought I was going to split. Thought I was gonna cut out. Ain’t that a bitch.”

  Nica and Nellie embarked on finding some form of treatment for Monk. Both women were determined to succeed but had completely different strategies. It was in the battle for Monk’s health, rather than his love, that the two women finally fell out.

  Nellie’s answer was to substitute all Monk’s food with fruit and vegetable juices. Paul Jeffrey explained how it worked: “She bought this juicer, believing that if Monk just had juices, that would cure him. I used to go to the Bronx market with Nellie in the morning and haul these big crates of carrots and celery and put them in the back of my car, drive to the apartment and unload these things and, you know. So she could make this juice.” Monk stayed on her cure for months, not getting any better, yet becoming terribly thin. Nica, horrified by his weight loss, used to smuggle food into the couple’s apartment. Waiting until Nellie went out, she would appear with plates of steak and potatoes, which a grateful Monk would wolf down.

  Nellie’s obsession with juicing nearly got the family evicted: neighbours complained bitterly that the noise of the whirring machine kept them up all night. Convinced that she was on the right track, Nellie even hoped to start a juicing business to cure ailing musicians. Desperate to find a way of providing a regular income for her family, she was angry with Monk because of his drug consumption. “She felt he did himself in as a young man. And might have lived to be ninety-five if he hadn’t taken ten million tons of drugs,” Toot Monk told Leslie Gourse.

  Again I wondered about Nica and drugs. Was she an enabler or a user? A dabbler or a devotee? My hunch is that although she enjoyed the odd “happy shot” or joint, she did not display any of the tell-tale signs of addiction. Many of her friends were destroyed by opiates. Monk was almost certainly dependent on drugs. Nica showed the classic signs of co-dependency: obsessively placing Monk’s needs and welfare before her own and her family’s; putting his freedom and security before her own responsibilities and welfare. If Monk was an addict, Nica was a Monk addict.

  Another disastrous trip to San Francisco led to Monk being admitted to the Langley Porter Hospital. Nellie, at her wits’ end, signed the papers agreeing to a new medical treatment: electric shock therapy. Nica was passionately against invasive procedures but Nellie was persuaded that this latest cure would help her husband. I tracked down the trainee psychiatrist, Eddie Henderson, who was assigned to Monk’s case. In his spare time Henderson was a trumpet player who went on to tour with Miles Davis.

  Henderson no longer practises medicine but he still plays music. His detailed descriptions of his childhood and his life on the road with Miles Davis convinced me that his recall was close to perfect.

  “In late 1969 I became a resident trainee psychiatrist at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, which is part of the University of California in San Francisco,” he explained. “It was late at night when I was awakened and called downstairs to do an intake.” He immediately recognised Monk, although no one else did, and on the admission form he wrote that the musician was committed by Nellie following a long period of silence and odd behaviour.

  The following day, Dr. Young, the senior psychologist, asked Monk to take the Rorschach test, which measures patients’ reactions to different-shaped inkblots. Some practitioners believe that this gives an insight into personality traits and emotional responses. Monk, according to Henderson, refused to comment, played with his rings and looked steadfastly at the floor. The doctor showed him another blot and suggested that it looked like a little boy playing the violin in front of his parents. Monk shook his head in wonder as if it was the doctor who was crazy. “It don’t mean nothing, it’s an inkblot,” he said. The doctor kept showing Monk various patterns and pressing for different interpretations. Eventually Monk, winking at Henderson, turned to the doctor. “The little boy is really drunk.”

  “Oh really, Mr. Monk, why?” Dr. Young said.

  “Because his mother won’t give him no more pussy.” When Dr. Young dropped the clipboard, Monk added, “Just swizzle that.”

  Henderson remembered that Monk’s speech was often humorous and lucid but suddenly he would become “uncontactable, absent, as if the bottom had dropped out of the elevator shaft. He was somewhere else.” Tests were run on Monk, using an electroencephalography scan or EEG, to record his brain’s spontaneous electrical activity over a short period of twenty to forty minutes. An EEG shows, among other things, the cumulative effect of drugs taken during a patient’s lifetime. “Mr. Monk’s results spiked to the top.” According to Henderson, this meant his brain had been damaged.

  Monk in 1968, filming Straight, No Chaser (Photographic Credit 22.3)

  Monk was diagnosed as “Schizophrenic, unclassified” and prescribed the strong anti-psychotic drug thorazine, which he had, in fact, been prescribed on previous occasions. Eddie Henderson explained that a small amount, 100 milligrams, would make the average person drowsy, while the highest dose they had ever given a patient was 3,500 milligrams. Within a week, Monk was on the highest dose but it was having little impact. As electric shock treatment doubles the effect of the drug, Monk was put in a straitjacket and strapped to a table. A probe was put into his mouth, he closed his eyes while electrodes were held to his temples and bolts of electricity were blasted through his brain. It is not exactly understood how the treatment works but in some cases it seems to alleviate depression. Even today, ECT (or electroconvulsive therapy, as it is now known) is a controversial treatment, and certainly was then. Little was known then about precisely how it affected neurological balance. Henderson told me it “scrambles the brain cells” and that afterwards, in many cases, the patients were “not really the same any more.”

  While Monk was a patient at Langley he was allowed out to play a gig under Henderson’s supervision. The trainee psychiatrist implored Monk not to drink, let alone take any other mood-altering substances, as he was already on heavy medication. The moment Monk arrived at the club, he ordered a triple Jack Daniel’s, chased down with three beers. Then he managed to score a gram of coke. Splitting the packet in half, he snorted the whole lot up each nostril. “By this time he is sweating and his suit looks like he has jumped in a pool. Perspiration is just dropping all over him,” Henderson recalled. “He gets on the bandsta
nd. He is dancing, playing with the ring. He sits down and pushes the keys far enough down not to make a sound. He did not make one sound the whole night.” Later, when Henderson took Monk back to the hospital, the pianist said, “That was a good set.”

  Following his release from Langley Porter, Nellie and Harry Colomby decided that a spell on the sunny West Coast would be good for the family and tried to set Monk up with a contract to record some advertising jingles. Monk insisted on returning to his beloved New York. Unfortunately Nellie had put their furniture into storage following the last fire. Their apartment was not yet restored. With Nica’s help the Monks rented an apartment in Lincoln Towers, a place Monk never liked. Wanting his old place and his old table back, Monk went to his friend Charlie Rouse’s apartment, pushed past Charlie’s wife and demanded, “Where is my furniture, do you have my furniture?”

  I found glimpses of my great-aunt in the footage shot by Michael and Christian Blackwood in 1968. In one scene she and Monk are driving through the streets of New York to catch a set at a club by their friend Lionel Hampton. Nica drives in her normal reckless way, turning to talk to the cameraman in the back seat or sideways to address Monk.

  Later, presumably the same night, the couple hang out backstage at another venue. I replay the footage again and again, spooling backwards and forwards, trying to figure out what Nica is thinking. She is fifty-four now and looks it. Her face is puffy and those exquisite features are lost. Her hair has grown long and is badly cut. She wears a black skirt and an unflattering striped top. By the end of the evening she’s quite drunk and has to bite down hard on her long cigarette holder to keep it from falling. Again and again, she asks Monk what tracks he will play. Again and again, he grunts and looks elsewhere, having a little dance, exchanging a half-sentence here and there with a friend. Nica sits down heavily on the stairs and looks adoringly at him. She always looks adoringly at him.

  Nica tells Monk that she has bought him a present.

  “A million dollars?” he says hopefully.

  “No, a marker pen for you to sign autographs.”

  “I don’t like to carry a pen, you know that,” Monk says, taking off the top. She can’t find a blank piece of paper so he tries out his new pen on a paper napkin. The material tears. Nica laughs.

  “Is it silver?” Monk asks, examining the pen.

  “Yes. Here is a piece of paper.” Nica points to a pad on the table. Monk leans over and scribbles something.

  “Do you know what that says?” he asks. “If you can get someone to sign that, you will flip out. Flip for good.”

  They talk about Nica’s family and how rich they are, although she claims to be a poor relation. She is not wealthy compared to most Rothschilds, but was rich, of course, compared to most of the people in the room.

  Monk turns to the camera. “I don’t want to be without money no more. That’s over,” he says earnestly, taking some folded bills out of his pocket and waving them around. One of his entourage gestures to Monk’s heavy rings, saying he would prefer the jewellery to the cash. Monk agrees, pointing to a black opal, his birthstone, that is worth at least $1,000, set between cut diamonds. Leaning forward, Nica gently touches his forehead, his brain.

  “All you need is this,” she says lovingly.

  “Ha,” Monk grunts, as if unconvinced.

  Nica brings out some pictures of her cats, saying that she has lost count of how many she has after reaching 106. Monk rolls his eyes at the camera. He at least is not the mad one in this scene.

  23 • Luvya

  Monk’s mental health deteriorated rapidly during the 1970s. In 1971 he fell into a catatonic depression and was admitted to the Beth Israel Hospital. Following his release, he joined George Wein’s Giants of Jazz tour in 1972. It was a gruelling schedule: two concerts per night in sixteen cities over a period of twenty-two days. Rare bootleg concert footage, shot in Berlin at that time, shows Monk—thin, sweaty, his goatee beard greying and wispy—bent over a piano, knocking out a tune with little enthusiasm. His body seems to have shrunk inside his suit. His large gold rings slip around on his fingers and perspiration drips steadily from his temples on to the piano keys.

  One of the debilitating side effects of Monk’s prostate problem was incontinence. “He had a problem of containment that brought lack of control and that was too bad, because he was very embarrassed,” George Wein said, remembering an incident from the tour. “He was a very proud man, Thelonious. He always dressed impeccably. He bought fine suits and he never looked shabby in any way.” While Thelonious was at home the incontinence was easier to manage but, on the road, never knowing where the tour bus would stop or what the facilities would be like made a difficult situation almost intolerable.

  When he arrived back in New York, his friend Paul Jeffrey had to help Monk off the plane. “He could hardly walk, he was that weak.” Monk took most of December 1971 and January 1972 off before returning to work. He told friends he had to get out: he was driven mad by the constant whirring of Nellie’s juicer.

  The severity of Monk’s situation was made clear to Nica in 1972. “We were driving home from New York when he suddenly said to me, ‘I am seriously ill.’ ” Monk’s admission spurred Nica into action. “That is when I started looking for doctors and trying to get the thing worked out.” She devoted the next ten years to trying to find a cure. Listening now to a tape of Nica describing Monk’s illnesses, I can hear the quiet desperation in her voice. She consulted doctors across Europe and America but still failed to find an effective treatment or a convincing diagnosis. “I wish I could tell you what [it was],” she said in low tones; Monk had “a terrible illness. He was desperately tired. He may have been in pain [but] he would never have said. That is the terrible thing about him. I am sure he was in pain,” Nica’s voice broke slightly through the stiff-upper-lip British delivery. “He had convulsions. He had cirrhosis of the liver … high blood pressure … borderline diabetes: I have papers up to the ceiling about what was wrong [with him].”

  In January 1972, Nica placed Monk under the supervision of a new group of doctors at the Gracie Square Hospital. This led to a significant change in the direction of his treatment. Taking charge of the process, Nica was determined that Monk should not undergo the newfangled “talking cure,” which she thought “ridiculous: all that happened was the psychiatrist had to go to their psychiatrist. You know, he tore them out.” She was equally adamant that the doctors avoid electric shock treatment and heavy tranquillisers, insisting on a gentler, more holistic approach.

  Miriam, who was trying, at the same time, to find a cure for their sister Liberty, influenced Nica here. Like their father Charles and Monk himself, Liberty had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The early lives of both Nica and Miriam had been dominated by the constant presence of someone affected by extreme mood disorders. Now the two sisters found themselves, once again, in the orbit of mental illness. Perhaps this time they could make a difference. Their brother Victor, loathing any display of vulnerability and instability, turned his back on the problem. Miriam went on to set up the Schizophrenia Research Fund, still in operation today, which tries to identify the biological causes of the disease.

  Miriam commissioned a series of microcellular tests on Liberty that showed she also had coeliac disease and could be helped if she followed a special diet that did not contain plant proteins. Acting on Miriam’s advice, Nica ordered a comprehensive profile of Monk’s biochemical imbalances at a minute cellular level, testing the quantities and variances in the body’s store of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fatty acids. The results, she hoped, could pinpoint a treatment aimed at alleviating his symptoms. The new doctors’ first recommendation was that Monk be taken off thorazine and placed on lithium. Getting the right dose was crucial: his liver couldn’t cope with too much salt. It was also strongly advised that he stay away from narcotics and alcohol, but, according to his friend and sideman Paul Jeffrey, Monk was never able to resist the odd line of cocaine c
hased down by a stiff scotch.

  Tests showed that Monk’s system was overloaded with copper and lacked zinc. The doctors tried to counteract this by giving him megavitamins and extra zinc, but the levels never returned to normal. Other tests revealed that Monk had mould in his urine. Miriam advised her sister to explore Far Eastern medicine, which takes dampness in the body’s chi or energy seriously. Nica hired Chinese acupuncturists and acupressurists to help treat Monk.

  Above all, the Rothschild sisters believed that a sufferer should be cared for at home, free from the pressures of work and allowed to follow their own idiosyncratic routine. Although Liberty’s behaviour was often unpredictable, Miriam insisted that she should be allowed to come and go as she pleased. Liberty spent her last years at Ashton and would sometimes wander around the house, sit down at the piano or interrupt a conversation. She was never made to feel uncomfortable or unwanted.

  Towards the end of her life, Nica was asked if she had any regrets. I expected her to reflect on being separated from her children. “Regrets? Yes!” Nica replied. “A real strong one: that I somehow didn’t find the right doctor for Thelonious. That is my regret, my only regret.”

  Monk was engaged to do a series of concerts at the Village Gate. The saxophone player Paul Jeffrey became Monk’s helper. “I used to go to Monk’s house and get him ready for the job and bring him down to the club. After the job was over I would bring Monk home. It was a bitterly cold evening in January 1972 and Nica, who sat at her usual table watching Monk, offered to drop Monk home and then take me to the train station.”