Photo of Monk by Pannonica De Koenigswarter (aka The Baroness of Jazz)
One little-known wartime detail lends a different sense to her later arrival in the New York jazz world. Her husband’s extended family, as well as her Hungarian-born mother’s, were nearly all killed in the Holocaust. The baroness’s adoption of New York’s predominantly black jazz family in the war’s aftermath thus seems less the act of a louche dilettante than of a survivor bent on resurrection and rebirth.
“I believe that she could no longer live in any ivory tower after what she saw in the war,” Hannah Rothschild said in a telephone interview. “Privilege offered no protection. The fate of her own mother-in-law proved that. She had experienced the very depths of prejudice herself firsthand.” …
It is well known in jazz circles that the great project of the baroness’s life was the torturously unstable Monk, whom she served as a surrogate wife right alongside Monk’s equally devoted actual wife, Nellie. The baroness paid Monk’s bills, dragged him to an endless array of doctors, put him and his family up in her own home and, when necessary, helped Nellie institutionalize him. In 1958 Monk and the baroness were stopped by the police in Delaware. When a small amount of marijuana was discovered, she took the rap for her friend and even served a few nights in jail.
People have always asked why. What drew her to him so intensely? Was it sex, drugs or groupie-esque infatuation? Clearly her steadfast devotion to Monk’s music propelled their relationship, which both maintained was platonic. In light of her father’s history, though, it seems possible that the underlying bond was love and childhood loss. In Monk, she may have been drawn to the same anguished brilliance that had consumed her father, whom she could not save.
