Pannonica Rothschild, the Baroness of Jazz Cats and Actual Cats

When Ige Ramos was designing one of my Twisted books, he said I needed to have a proper photograph taken. He suggested Patrick de Koenigswarter, whom I knew only as a society photographer. That's how I met Patrick, an erudite man who got pricklier and pricklier with time. We had long conversations about his mother, the subject of this piece. After I showed him he draft he refused to speak to me. This piece was published in The National (Abu Dhabi) in 2008.

The scene is a dark, smoky club in Greenwich Village, New York in 1958. Onstage a quartet is performing. Everyone is smoking and drinking; it's the Fifties and cigarettes and alcohol are de rigueur. It's the music that’s not quite acceptable—that Jazz and the men who play it. They are Black musicians at the start of the civil rights movement. Many of them are known drug users.

A murmur goes through the crowd, and the musicians acknowledge the new arrival. "Hi, Nica," they call out, "Hey, Baroness." The woman they're addressing is wearing a leopard-skin coat and a patrician air. She carries the name Baroness Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter. She's aristocratic and white, and she is the jazz musicians' patron and protector.

Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild, of the British banking dynasty, was born in London in 1913. Her father Charles was an early proponent of nature conservation; he named her after a moth he'd discovered. Her mother Rozsika von Wertheimstein was known as "The Rose of Hungary"—she was a tennis champion, and the first woman to serve overhead. "Nica was raised in the lap of luxury; she wasn't allowed to do anything for herself," notes her eldest son Patrick. "She couldn't even go shopping alone.”

Nica had grown up listening to her father's jazz records, and her brother Victor was a huge fan of Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. She befriended a tenor saxophonist named Bob Wise, who was also an amateur pilot; before long she was flying a plane.

It was at Le Touquet airfield that the 21-year-old Nica met her future husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, 31. Jules, a French widower with a young son, was a mining engineer, Jewish, and a pilot. Three months later he proposed marriage, and she took off for New York to think it over. He followed her, and they were married in October 1935.

The Koenigswarters spent their honeymoon travelling around the world. At one point, a mechanical failure forced Jules to crash-land a small rented plane in the vicinity of  Qingdao;  they made their way to the nearest railway station on an oxcart. In Yokohama they bought a suitcase full of bizarre sex toys, and as a prank sent it to Nica's brother, Lord Victor Rothschild. When Baron Rothschild was summoned to
appear at H.M.'s Customs to explain the strange items, he simply disavowed any knowledge of the shipment, and of his sister and brother-in-law.

The Koenigswarters settled in a 17th century chateau in Eure and Loire. Nica soon became pregnant with the first of their five children. When the baby was due, she insisted on giving birth in the London house where she herself had been born, at 4 Palace Green, Kensington, which is now the Romanian Embassy. Jules, who had a passion for firearms, found a particularly desirable pistol in London which could not be imported without extensive paperwork. He smuggled it into France in the baby's diaper.

When World War II broke out, Jules, a lieutenant in the reserves, was called up. "Before joining his regiment, he left my mother a map, with instructions: If the Germans get to this point, take the children and escape any way you can to your family in England," Patrick says. Nica, her two children, stepson, nanny and maid left Paris on May 25 and arrived in London three days later. On June 14, the Nazis occupied Paris. On June 18, 1940, in a famous BBC radio address, General Charles De Gaulle called on all freedom-loving Frenchmen to join him in England to continue the fight. Jules, who had made it to the still-unoccupied south of France, recruited 111 men for the Free French. They were accepted aboard the S.S. Sobieski, a Polish passenger cruise ship transformed into a troop carrier. Approximately 2,000 Polish troops were also on board.

Jules feared for his family's safety, and advised Nica to take the kids to Canada
or the United States. His own mother had refused his entreaties to leave France. She was arrested by the French Police and interned at Auschwitz, where she died.

"Due to wartime currency restrictions, my mother, my sister and I arrived in New York with a total of ten pounds sterling, or about fifty dollars," Patrick says. They had no relatives in New York, but they were introduced to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, herself an aviatrix and scion of an American publishing family. Mrs Patterson would later found Newsday. She wanted to adopt some refugee children but her husband, the industrialist Harry F. Guggenheim, was against the idea. He said it wouldn't be right for poor kids to get used to a life of privilege, only to be sent back to their homes after the war. Alicia replied, 'But what if I find some rich kids?'"

Nica deposited Patrick and his younger sister, Janka, at the Guggenheim estate on Long Island. Then loaded with supplies for the Free French, she rejoined her husband in Brazzaville. She became a private in the French Army, and was put to work as a decoder. In Brazzaville she worked as a broadcaster. With his engineering background Jules was initially assigned to modify tank turrets; later he commanded a Marine batallion which saw action in North Africa , Italy and France. For his services to his country he received a number of medals, including the Liberation Cross, the highest French military decoration awarded in WWII. Nica went to work as an ambulance
driver. She contracted malaria repeatedly during her missions in Africa. Jules ended the war as a lieutenant-colonel, Nica as a decorated lieutenant.

When the war ended Jules joined the French diplomatic service and moved his family to Norway, then to Mexico. Without the romance and adrenaline of war to sustain them, the Koenigswarters' marriage fell apart.

Nica had always been a jazz fan, and on her increasingly frequent trips to New York her brother introduced her to his musician friends. One night she heard the pianist Teddy Wilson play Thelonious Monk's composition, "Round Midnight". "She was absolutely floored,” Patrick says. “She missed her flight, and in fact never returned to Mexico."

Nica and Jules separated in 1952 and divorced in 1956. She moved into the Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue, where she kept open house for impoverished jazz musicians. "At the time, she had no idea they would someday become famous. They
were virtually social pariahs." Despite the dirty looks and murmured insults from so-called polite society, Nica gave these struggling artists friendship and hospitality, and whenever necessary, food, shelter, and pocket money. She paid their medical bills and drove them to and from their gigs, in her Rolls Royce, and then in the convertible that came to be known as the "Bebop Bentley". She also had an arrangement with a taxi company, so that if any of her musician friends were in trouble, they would be picked up and driven to her place.

The Baroness was a supporter and friend of Coleman Hawkins, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and many others now enshrined in the pantheon of jazz. She gave sanctuary to these struggling artists in the 1950s and 60s, when the mere sight of a white woman in the company of black musicians was cause for scandal. They paid her tribute in music: "Pannonica" by Monk, "Thelonica" by Tommy Flanagan
and "Nica's Dream" by Horace Silver are among the two dozen pieces dedicated to her.

In 1955 the ailing, broke, and desperate Charlie “Bird” Parker took refuge in Nica's suite at the Stanhope. Nica tried to help him, but years of drug abuse and alcoholism finally took their toll. The doctor who pronounced him dead put his age at "around 54" when he was actually 34. This was of little importance to the tabloids, whose
headlines shrieked "The Bird in the Baroness's Boudoir" and "Bop King Dies in Heiress's Flat".

Nica's closest relationship was with the jazz innovator Thelonious Monk. They were a familiar sight at New York jazz clubs: the big, imposing black man with his cryptic mumbling and odd behavior, and the white women with the furs, the flask full of Chivas Regal, and the cut-glass accent. When Monk was arrested for possession of marijuana, Nica took the rap for him so he wouldn't lose his cabaret card, his
license to play. After Monk's death she wrote that "He could make you see the music inside the music," and that without saying a word, he made her laugh more than anyone she'd ever known. It was Monk who convinced her to give up hotel life and get a house.

Nica bought a two-storey house in Weehawken, New Jersey that was originally built for the film director Josef von Sternberg. The house had a fabulous view of midtown Manhattan directly across the Hudson River; Monk would often stand at the large plate glass window, playing conductor to some invisible orchestra. If anyone asked what he was doing, he would say that he was "conducting the clouds".

The place was soon dubbed The Cathouse—for the cool cats of jazz who stayed in it, and the 120 or so actual felines who roamed at will. "It wasn't a mansion," says Patrick, who lived there from 1960 to 1962, until the 4am jam sessions and the feline depredations on his graduate school papers eventually drove him to seek quieter
surroundings. "My mother was comfortable, she had a trust fund, but she always had money worries. She had so many expenses—her catfood and veterinarian bills were astronomical, and you can imagine the smell." With typical humor, Nica described the place as "the only house on the block without a For Sale sign." As devoted to her cats as she was to her musicians, she would sometimes be seen walking in a blizzard in
her nightgown, holding a flashlight, searching for a missing cat. She lived in that house until her death in 1988.

It was at The Cathouse that Nica took her photographs—hundreds of Polaroids of the men, and a few women, now recognized as jazz greats. The pictures reveal her subjects in their unguarded moments, relaxing, playing, or lost in thought. Along with the photos she asked them to make three  wishes. Most of them wished for good health, wealth, and social equality. Horace Silver wished for immortality, Wes Montgomery wished for "no discrimination whatsoever", and Miles Davis wished "to be white". Her book, Les Musiciens de Jazz et leurs Troix Voeux, was published in France in 2006.

Not everyone was enamored of the "Angel of Jazz". The gossip magazines bristled with innuendo, and she was described as opinionated and arrogant. The Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar wrote a novel called El Perseguidor, which was inspired by the life of Bird. In it, the protagonist falls prey to an evil woman named Marquesa Tica.

Nica was particularly upset at how she was portrayed in Clint Eastwood's Charlie Parker biopic, Bird. "She's Hollywood's idea of a baroness, not at all like me," she told friends. "She looks like a constipated horse." She made her displeasure known to Eastwood, who had consulted her in the course of filming. They became friends and Eastwood himself merited her highest compliment: "He's a lovely man".

"She had unbelievable charm—she could talk her way out of practically anything," Patrick recalls. "She always drove as if she were competing at Le Mans, and she paid very little attention to traffic rules. In my parents' divorce settlement there's a clause my father insisted upon: under no conditions were any of us children to ride in a car driven by Nica. A condition that was largely ignored.”

One late night in Manhattan, at a red light, a shiny sportscar pulled up next to her beat-up Bentley Continental convertible. The elegant gentleman driving the sportscar signalled her to roll down her window. Then he said, "Madam, you should be ashamed of yourself. You have a rare and beautiful car, but you treat it in a disgraceful manner." She looked at the concerned gentleman and replied, "Fuck you!" Then she sped off.

He caught up with her at the next red light, and once again, asked her to roll down her window. Despite their previous encounter, she did so. The gentleman said, "Madam, with all due respect, the same to you!"

He was, she declared, "A lovely man."