Jeffrey remembers driving back to Monk’s apartment in Nica’s Bentley as snow fell on the streets of New York, blanketing the city in white-muffled silence. “We reached his apartment block, but Monk would not get out of the car. Nica kept turning the heat on and then she got to turn the heat off so the car would not overheat. This went on to about six o’clock in the morning. At that time I lived in Coney Island, which was the last stop on the subway, so eventually I said, well, I am going home, and left them there.”
Monk finally got out of Nica’s car and went into his apartment. The next day he rang Nica to ask her to collect him and his stuff. When Nica arrived, Nellie started to shout at them both, unable to believe that her husband intended to go and live with another woman. Eventually Nica took charge. Taking Monk by the arm, she said, “Come on, Thelonious, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Nica called Paul Jeffrey the next afternoon. “The Baroness said, ‘You don’t have to worry about getting Monk from Nellie’s apartment any more because he is with me and I will bring him.’ And that was the last time that Monk stayed at Nellie’s apartment.”
For the first few years after Monk moved out of the family home, Nellie went to Weehawken to cook for her husband and spend time with him, but as the years went by her visits began to tail off. When in 1976 Mary Lou Williams requested some publicity photographs of Monk, Nica wrote back, saying that she’d ask “when or if I see Nellie (she has no telephone). Her visits are few and far between.” Nica had never learned to cook. A Miss D did her basic housekeeping and she had a cleaner, Gracie, but there was never much apart from cat food in the kitchen, so Nica ate at the clubs. Monk was given the upstairs bedroom and for a time it seemed as if his life might continue in a state of easy semi-retirement.
Monk played at a reunion concert at Newport in New York in July 1975 and did two gigs in 1976, the first at Carnegie Hall in March and his swan-song at Bradley’s on July 4. Nica says that from 1972 onwards he hardly touched the piano but he would play ping-pong or Peggity with her grandson Steven. The last published recording, “Newport in New York,” was made on July 3, 1975, at the Philharmonic Hall and the last ever recording made by Nica on her reel-to-reel tape recorder was “ ’Round Midnight.”
One of the mysteries of jazz history is why Monk stopped playing and retired to his bed. Nica described Monk’s final years as “very frustrating. It was like he was not here when he was here. Imagine someone lying in the bed like that. It was like he knew he was going to die almost in this position that people are put in their coffins. And there would be days on end where he wouldn’t speak at all. And I would take in his food, get him to take his pills. I could usually get some reaction from him but almost nobody else could.”
Paul Jeffrey, who remained close to Monk right up until his death in 1982, said: “When you asked Monk [about his inactivity], Monk said, ‘I have retired.’ That makes perfect sense to me. Baseball players retire, you know. People always feel that musicians have to continue to play when maybe their prowess has diminished. In other words, you never retire in music. Well, some musicians live long enough so that they are not able to play at the level. He just decided he didn’t want to play any more.”
Monk’s son Toot offered a medical explanation: “My father had had a prostate operation and had his prostate gland removed in, about, I don’t know, it must have been about 1973 or ’74 and, as a result of that, eliminating was a hassle. Now everybody thought he stopped playing because he lost the fire, or he stopped playing because he became uninterested, or he stopped playing because he was too spaced out from too many stints in the loony bin. It was none of those things. It was simply that he was uncomfortable, you see.”
Hearing these theories made Nica uncharacteristically angry. “Thelonious only stopped playing when it became a physical impossibility for him: nothing else could ever have stopped him. There was a wrong biochemical imbalance [in his blood] and he was desperately ill during the last years. He wanted more than anything to get well and that [was why] he cooperated with the doctors a hundred per cent and they tried everything but nothing worked.”
Nica never gave up hope of finding a cure. Writing to Mary Lou Williams in 1977, she expressed great excitement: “I have a line on a new doctor for T … he is just about the greatest expert there is on biochemical imbalances (which is precisely what T is suffering from). I am not telling ANYONE (including T) about this at the moment but I want YOU to PLEASE say a prayer for us that WILL be able to help. Luvya!” Two years later she writes to Mary Lou about another expert from Princeton and someone who gives Thelonious shiatsu: “T is being as good as gold, keeping strictly to his diet, taking all the pills prescribed for him every day.” In a letter to a cousin in 1981, Nica is still talking with enthusiasm about finding yet another practitioner who might be able to help.
Nica and Monk captured for Time, published in February 1964 (Photographic Credit 23.1)
Once she and Paul Jeffrey tried to pique his interest by asking young musicians to come and play outside Monk’s window. This got no response. On another occasion she asked pianist Joel Forrester to play outside Monk’s room. This time, Monk slammed his bedroom door shut.
Monk’s old producer and friend Orrin Keepnews visited the pianist at Weehawken in the late 1970s. “Monk, are you touching the piano at all these days?” Keepnews asked. “He said, ‘No I’m not.’ And I said, ‘Do you want to get back to playing?’ and Monk said, ‘No I don’t.’ And I said, ‘Would you be interested in my coming out and visiting you and talking about the old days?’ And he said, ‘No I wouldn’t.’ ”
Barry Harris, the pianist, who also lived with Nica and Monk, commented that Orrin was lucky to get “complete sentences out of Monk. To most people he just says ‘No’ or nothing.”
When my uncle Amschel went to spend an afternoon with Nica in New York, he described Monk lying as if dead on his bed, his hands in the prayer position, not saying a word and not moving as the world went on around him. Sometimes Nica’s family might come to help but often she was alone with Monk and the cats. “I used to play him records a lot, he liked that,” she recalled, remembering one particular autumn afternoon. “I saw him get up. I was in the big room playing records and I saw him go from his bed to the bathroom [and I] heard this terrible crash and so I rushed in and he had fallen inside the bathroom and the door opens in, it is very small. His feet were against the door and I couldn’t open the door. There was no way to get in to him. So I got the ambulance people and they had to get him out of there.”
Eddie Henderson also went to visit Monk and Nica at that time.
The Baroness was sitting in the living room with a cigarette holder surrounded by seventy-five cats. She said, “Oh hello, doctor, Mr. Monk is upstairs.” Mr. Monk was sitting in that big room with the piano, looking at the skyline of New York City, fully dressed with a little thin tie and stingy-brim hat. He didn’t look at me but he said, “Hey, doc, how you doing?” I said, “What you doing, Mr. Monk?” He said, “I’m waiting for a phone call.” He was just looking up at the ceiling and ironically, about ten seconds later, the phone rang. He picked it up. Now he listened, didn’t say hello. He just listened. About twenty or twenty-five seconds later, that’s a long time, he hung up and said, “That wasn’t it.”
His old friend Amiri Baraka also visited Monk at home. Like Nica, he was convinced that Monk was still fully cognisant. When Baraka asked the pianist what was going on, Monk replied, “Everything, man. Every googleplex of a second.” Nica said Monk’s favourite pastime was standing in front of the huge glass window, looking out at the Manhattan skyline. Sometimes, she said, Monk would conduct the weather. “He could make the clouds change direction, I don’t know if you knew that? People up the road here keep pigeons. Thelonious would stand at the window and make them change direction; I have seen him actually do it. He could make a cloud turn back.”
Beginning in 1972 and for the next eight years Nica refused to leave Monk’s side. Then in 198
0 an old friend of the family turned ninety and she decided to go to Europe for his birthday. Describing the moment she went to say goodbye to Monk, Nica admitted,
I am not a crier. I can count the times in my life when I have cried. When I went to say goodbye to Thelonious he was so upset that I could not stop crying. I remember Thelonious saying, it is all right, I will be here when you get back. I am not going anywhere, I will be here. It was my first trip on Concorde and I cried the whole way to England. I must have soaked hundreds of hankies. It was almost like I knew and I said my farewell to him then.
Thelonious was right: he was there when Nica returned and he lived for nearly two more years. Then, on February 5, 1982, he suffered a massive heart attack at Weehawken. Nica called an ambulance and went with him to Englewood Hospital where he lay in a coma for twelve days. Nica, Nellie and her family took it in turns to sit with him. Thelonious died aged sixty-four on February 17, in Nellie’s arms. Nica was at home across the river.
At Monk’s funeral, Nica and Nellie sat side by side in the front row of the church. Musicians, friends and family filed past to pay their last respects to the two matriarchs and then to Thelonious who lay in an open casket lined with white silk. As usual, he was immaculately dressed in a grey three-piece suit with a stripy tie and matching handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. His large hands were clasped together and his face, slightly puffy and waxy in death, looked composed and peaceful. Unusually he was hatless. Nica, wearing her pearls, a heavy fur coat and crimson lipstick, looked straight ahead, her face expressionless.
Any sang-froid evaporated when Nica found out that her Bentley would not lead the funeral cortège. Having looked after the pianist for so long, she did not want, at this vital public moment, to be marginalised. Nica kicked up such a fuss that Nellie, Toot and Boo-Boo (Barbara) Monk climbed out of the family limo and into the Bebop Bentley. The procession made its way past Monk’s favourite haunts before heading out to Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, some twenty-five miles away.
Less than a mile from Hartsdale, Nica’s car broke down. The Monk family got back into the hired limousine and Nica was left with the car on the side of the road, while the procession continued without her. It was an ignominious, humiliating and sad end to that chapter of her life.
24 • ’Round Midnight
Nica was sixty-nine, soon to be a great-grandmother, and her life, free from caring for Monk, was at another crossroads. She could have gone home to a cottage on the estate at Ashton and lived with her sisters, or joined her daughter Janka, who had emigrated to Israel. Instead she stayed on in Weehawken, sharing the house with the pianist Barry Harris and all those cats.
Her routine hardly changed. Nica spent most of the day in bed surrounded by paperwork, books and magazines and cats. Her daily mission was to complete The Times crossword. She remained a night bird and seemed happier as dusk fell. One evening she and I arranged to meet. “Let’s meet at twelve,” she suggested.
“Just before lunch?” I asked: after all she was my great-aunt and already rather an old lady.
“No! Twelve midnight!” she roared.
I asked her grandson Steven if he called her Granny or another nickname. Without hesitating, he said, “Bye-Bye.”
Why?
“Because I would run into her room and make a noise and soon she would laugh and say, bye-bye.”
During 1984, Nica had radiation treatment for cancer but said music was the best therapy. It must have worked, for she kicked cancer as well as the hepatitis caught, as claimed by Nica, from her doctor’s dirty needles. The Nica I came to know a few years later lived much the same as she had thirty years earlier: it was Monkless but she was still an avid music follower. When I called her up on arriving in New York, she would laugh, say hello and then immediately fill me in on the news. It was never anything personal or revelatory, just unbridled excitement about what was happening musically: so-and-so is playing at this or that club. “It’ll be a hoot. Let’s meet there.” Then, typical of many Rothschilds, she would hang up without bothering to say goodbye.
Nica in a New York jazz club in 1988 (Photographic Credit 23.2)
Nica continued to keep in touch with her British family. In England there were family reunions in 1968, 1969 and 1973, as well as others when family members passed through New York. In the archives at Waddesdon I found many references to Nica in family letters. I remember one large meeting at Ashton on May 6, 1986, when Miriam invited Nica, her children, Rabbi Julia Neuberger and myself to lunch. There were no introductions: everyone just piled in, disparate characters united by their not so disparate genes.
In a letter written to a Rothschild cousin on June 21, 1986, Miriam apologises for bringing Nica to a family function. “I hope that the idea of adding Nica to your dinner with my brother did not prove disastrous. Nica was keen to see you and since Thelonious died she has been very lonely and ill and very much wanted to see every member of the family before going back.” Following the event, Nica wrote to the cousin, apologising for arriving on “all fours”: she had recently fallen down and hurt herself. Soon afterwards she returned to New York on the QE2 with her daughter Berit, only to crack a rib once she got home: she had been trying to climb onto her roof to get a better view of the Tall Ships Race.
In 1986 Nica appeared in two films. Clint Eastwood’s Bird was a fictional account of the life of Charlie Parker based partly on Nica’s memories. Straight, No Chaser was a documentary that mixed archival footage of Monk and Nica with recent shots of Kingswood Road and Monk’s funeral. Nica took her children to meet Clint Eastwood at Nica’s Bar in the Stanhope Hotel. She loved the irony that the place that had once thrown her onto the streets was now honouring her memory. After the encounter Nica wrote to her friend Victor Metz in Paris: “Clint Eastwood seems to be REMARKABLY cool but I doubt I will like the way my ‘role’ is played. He sent me a picture of the actress and I thought she looked like a constipated horse!!!”
Quincy Jones saw Nica at the première: “She was with Barry Harris and we had a nice dinner after we saw the film. Barbra Streisand was my date that night. When we came out we had a limousine and twenty guys in two cars chasing us up Madison Avenue. Crazy.” What did Nica make of all this? “She was hip, she was cool.”
In November 1988, Nica was admitted to hospital for heart surgery. It was a straightforward procedure and she was expected to remain there for a few days. One of her last visitors was the pianist Joel Forrester. “Nica looked parchment white lying in her bed. She was covered up and was all by herself. She explained to me that she was incapable of reading and she couldn’t see me very well and yet she was fully conscious. There was no television for her to look at, you know, had she wanted to. I said, ‘Nica, what are you doing all day?’ She answered, ‘Picking over a lifetime of memories.’ ”
Nica was expected to make a full recovery, but her body, weakened by age, hard living, hepatitis, a few bad car crashes and a bout of cancer, gave up. At 5:03 p.m. on November 30, 1988, Nica died. She was seventy-four. The cause of death was given as heart failure during a triple aorta coronary bypass.
In her will, Nica left $750,000. She had complained of penury but it turned out to be relative. I thought about her tired old clothes, the frayed carpets, the lack of food and decent wine in the house, and realised that these were choices. The only luxuries Nica had wanted were her car, her Steinway piano and her Ping-Pong table. Everything else was functional. Only the Bentley was a crowd stopper. I wondered whether it was a coincidence that the one thing that cost a lot of money, a flash car, was an escape vehicle. Once she offered to sell her car to Thelonious for $19,000.
“Nineteen thousand dollars!” screamed Monk. “For that I can buy a home with four bedrooms, living room, kitchen and garage.”
“Of course you can,” Nica replied, “but where would it take you?”
Nica left one last request: that her family cremate her body, hire a boat and scatter her ashes on the Hudson River near “Catville.�
�� The timing was very important: it had to be done ’round midnight.
Epilogue
In 2008, twenty years after Nica died, I went back to Tring Park, the family’s former home. The train from Euston was packed with commuters, their noses in newspapers, briefcases wedged on laps: a far cry from Nica’s childhood experience of taking this journey on a private train in Pullman coaches. Although the family lived at Tring from 1872 to 1935, this period occupies a brief episode in the town’s long history, but the family left its mark. Walking up the High Street, I spotted tell-tale signs of the Rothschilds: their Five-Arrow crest stamped on some buildings, a Rothschild Dining Room in the local inn. Walter’s gentle spirit lives on in the museum. During the war, Rothschild’s Bank used the house as its headquarters, but since 1945 it has been home to a school for the performing arts.
Only the park itself remains in family hands. Although it has been sliced in two by the busy A41, a huge swathe is preserved as part of Charles Rothschild’s wildlife scheme. A passionate advocate of preserving areas of natural habitat for wild flowers, animals and insects, Nica’s father left a legacy that would found the British conservation movement.
These days, the kangaroos, zebras, emus and cassowaries have gone, replaced by walkers, their dogs and their children. The oddest wild animals are roe deer or muntjac. When Nica was little, local children swarmed around the gates, hoping to catch one of the gold sovereigns that her grandfather Natty Rothschild liked to throw from his carriage window. Only a handful of Tring inhabitants today remember those days or the family. Even Walter’s museum has been rebranded as an offshoot of the Natural History Museum.
The once-formal main hall at Tring is almost unrecognisable. The grand furniture was sold, the potted palms and paintings removed. A barre is fixed to the wall and the room is now a practice area for ballet dancers. I wish that Nica could have seen the place transformed by a swirling mass of white tutus. In the former smoking room, younger dancers practise the English National Ballet’s Christmas performance of The Nutcracker. Dressed up as mice, presents and toy soldiers, they career into each other, shrieking with laughter. The old grass courts are now covered by a marquee and I watched a class of modern jazz: teenage girls in leotards doing a routine to music written years after Nica’s and Monk’s deaths.
The Baroness Page 23