The "Bebop Baroness" Who Took a Pot Rap for Thelonious Monk

Baroness Pannonica "Nica" Rothschild was born in 1913 into one of the wealthiest families in the world. In 1935 she married a French diplomat/Baron Jules de Koenigswarter with whom she had five children. An aviation enthusiast and an accomplished pilot, Nica worked for Charles de Gaulle's Free French Army during WWII, serving in various functions such as ambulance driver and ending the war as a decorated lieutenant. Her husband’s extended family, as well as her Hungarian-born mother’s, were nearly all killed in the Holocaust.

Nica and her husband separated in 1951, and she left him to move to New York City, causing her to be disinherited by her family. In the 2009 BBC documentary "The Jazz Baroness," produced by her grandniece Hannah Rothschild and narrated by Helen Mirren, Nica is quoted saying, "My husband liked military drum music; he hated jazz. He used to break my records when I was late for dinner. I was frequently late for dinner." 

In New York, Nica became a serious jazz aficionado, befriending and patronizing leading musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, to whom she was introduced by Tokin' Woman Mary Lou Williams in 1954. "I never sorted out the role of 'freedom fighter,'" she said. "But once I got here, I did see that an awful lot of help was needed. I couldn't just stand by and watch."

When Parker died in Nica's hotel room after a heroin-related illness that she and her daughter nursed him through, the salacious headlines screamed, "The Bird and the Baronesses's Boudoir" and one paper wrote, "Blinded and bedazzled by this luscious, slinky, black-haired, jet-eyed Circe of high society, the Yardbird was a fallen sparrow." Walter Winchell, the powerful columnist who inspired Burt Lancaster's character in Sweet Smell of Success, pursued and persecuted her in his column as a dealer of drugs.

Nica and Thelonious

She and Monk became inseparable, despite the fact that he was a married man. She enthused, "If there were seven wonders of the world, then I think Thelonious was the eighth. He helped you see the music inside the music. And his music itself made me see possibilities in life and ways of living that I never dreamed of." In 1957, she bought a new piano for the famous Five Spot club because she thought the existing one was not good enough for Monk's performances there. He wrote songs like "Pannonica" for her.

In October 1958, Monk was experiencing "periods of mania and psychological withdrawal" when Nica drove him and fellow musician Charlie Rouse to a Delaware gig in her Bentley. According to Nica's Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness by David Kastin, accounts vary as to what happened after Monk entered the segregated Park Plaza Motel in New Castle along the way looking for a bar, but the police were called and he was escorted to Nica's car in the parking lot. The threesome was permitted to drive away, but soon afterwards the Bentley was pulled over and Monk, who refused to leave the car, was forcibly removed and thrown to the ground, with one cop beating on his hands with a billy club while Nica screamed for them to stop. When he was handcuffed and driven away in a patrol car, "I feared they would take him off and kill him," she said. 

After filing charges against Monk for breach of the peace and assault and battery, the authorities turned their attention to the Baroness, described in the New York Post account as a "devotee of the 'cool' sound often seen in jazz spots 'draped in ermine.'" Nica naively agreed to let to the police search her car and when a small quantity of marijuana ("enough for a stick," she said) turned up in the trunk, she, Monk and Rouse were charged with possession of narcotics. After a hearing at which Monk picked up another assault charge for attacking his jailers, Nica arranged to post bail and the three returned to New York. 

The consequences for Monk were immediate: the New York State Liquor Board stripped him of his cabaret card, which had enabled him to perform in clubs where alcohol was served (every jazz club in New York). The incident sent the musician into a spiraling depression and he was taken to Long Island City Hospital for treatment. Nica and Rouse headed to court in Delaware to face their charges, where she "posed gracefully for pictures inside and out of the courtroom" despite the fact that her new $19,000 car was impounded. 

"Monk had long been an enthusiastic consumer of reefer (he had been busted in New York for possession a decade earlier), but the Baroness, whose intoxicant of choice was Chivas Regal, willingly took the rap for the small quantity of marijuana found in the trunk of her Bentley," writes Kastin. "A few weeks later, therefore, Monk pled guilty solely to the charges of assault and breach of the peace, paid of fine of $123.50, and walked out a free, if severely traumatized, man."

Nica, meanwhile, was forced to hire a team of high-priced lawyers and endure a series of trials that could have ended in her imprisonment and deportation. In the spring of 1960, she was tried without a jury, found guilty, sentenced to three years in prison, and fined $200 for having $10 worth of marijuana in her car. The New York Times reported that the 46-year-old who had "served five years with the Free French forces in Africa, Italy and France" and would be released on $10,000 bail while she appealed the conviction.

In a letter written the day the verdict was due, Nica said that her greatest concern was for Thelonious and his wife Nellie, and that she took comfort in the fact that Williams, a devout Christian, was praying for her. She herself lit a candle to St. Martin, a native of Pannonia and the patron saint of beggars. An appeal finally overturned her conviction in 1962, with the judge ruling that the search happened without due process, since her permission was granted under duress after she had "seen her companion twice beaten in the presence of several police officers for passively resisting arrest in connection with a minor charge."

Nica became a licensed musicians' manager in the 1950s and wrote liner notes for Monk's 1962 album Criss-Cross. After he ended his public performances in the mid-1970s, he retired to her house in Weehawken, New Jersey, where he died in 1982. She used her wealth to pay for the funerals and burial grounds for several jazz musician friends, including Bud Powell, Sonny Clark, and Coleman Hawkins. (Source.) 

Just before dying in 1988, Nica said she she felt the presence of her deceased sister, Liberty, and that of Thelonious. She asked for her ashes to be scattered in the Hudson River some night around midnight. ("Yes, I said 'Round Midnight. You can guess why.")

A book titled Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats containing photographs she took of musicians along with a compilation of their responses to a favorite question, “What are your three wishes?" was published in 2008, and an exhibition of her original notebooks collecting the snapshots and wish lists was exhibited at the Gallery at Hermès in New York. 

Nica's paintings and correspondence in Williams's archive at Rutgers University were discovered by Hannah when she was researching her documentary. She writes in her book, The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild and Jazz's Secret Muse about one of the paintings she found. "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."