The baroness of the cool
Pannonica de Koenigswarter is known to jazz fans as “The Jazz Baroness.” The British aristocrat was patron and protector to scores of jazz musicians including Thelonious Monk, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Bud Powell. Music lore has it that Bird died in her arms; she certainly took the rap for Monk when he was arrested for possession of marijuana. She gave sanctuary to these struggling artists in the 1950s and 1960s, when the sight of a white woman in the company of African-American musicians was cause for scandal. The giants of jazz paid her tribute through their music: “Pannonica” by Monk, “Thelonica” by Tommy Flanagan and “Nica’s Dream” by Horace Silver are some of the two dozen or so pieces dedicated to her.
Even before Pannonica — Nica, she was called — entered the jazz scene, she was already bent on flouting the conventions of her time. It helped that she could afford to ignore what other people thought of her. 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 rare moth he’d discovered. Her mother Rozsika von Wertheimstein was known as “The Rose of Hungary” — among other things she was a tennis champion, and the first woman to serve overhead. Charles contracted a form of encephalitis on one of his insect-gathering expeditions. Plagued by migraines, he committed suicide in 1923. “Nica was raised in the lap of luxury; she wasn’t allowed to do anything for herself,” notes her eldest son Patrick, a longtime resident of Manila. “She couldn’t even go shopping alone; a valet always followed her, carrying a checkbook.”
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. As a teenager she re-encountered jazz at the series of London debutante balls that followed her presentation at Court. She befriended a tenor saxophonist named Bob Wise, who was also an amateur pilot; before long she was a certified aviatrix.
It was at Le Touquet airport that the 19-year-old Nica met her future husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, 30. Jules, a French widower with a young son, was a mining engineer and banker, Jewish, and a pilot. The courtship began immediately. Three months later he proposed marriage, and she took off for New York to think it over. He followed her, and they were married at City Hall in October 1935.
They spent their honeymoon flying around the world. At one point, a mechanical failure forced Jules to crash-land a small rented plane in the Gobi Desert; they made their way back in a camel. 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 an 18th century castle in Normandy. Nica soon became pregnant with the first of their five children. When the baby was due, she insisted on giving birth in the ancestral house in London where she herself had been born. Her first child, Patrick, came into the world at 4 Palace Green, Kensington, the building that now houses the Romanian Embassy. Jules, who had a passion for firearms, found a particularly desirable pistol in London which could not legally 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. Soon after that the Germans breached the Maginot Line, an advance party of German paratroopers landed near their castle, and Nica, her two children, stepson, nanny and maid fled posthaste. They managed to get on the last train departing for the coast. They reached Liverpool, then London, shortly before 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 over 100 men for the Free French. They hijacked a small Polish cargo ship and made it to England. Jules was subsequently assigned to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), to liaise with the British forces there. (Nica’s brother, Victor Rothschild became Winston Churchill’s personal envoy to President Roosevelt. He also served as a bomb disposal expert in the British Army. Nica’s elder sister, the scientist Miriam, later Dame Miriam Rothschild, worked as a decoder at Bletchley Park.)
Jules still 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 Nazis and perished at Auschwitz.
“Due to wartime currency restrictions, my mother, my sister and I arrived in New York with ten pounds sterling, which was about fifty dollars,” Patrick says. They had no relatives in New York but as luck would have it, they met the socialite Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, who wanted to adopt some refugee children. “Her husband, 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 home after the war. Alicia replied, ‘But what if I find some rich kids?’”
Nica deposited her two young kids at “Falaise”, the Guggenheim estate on Long Island.Then loaded with supplies for the Free French, she rejoined her husband in Accra. She became a private in the French Army, and was put to work as a decoder. In Brazzaville she worked as a broadcaster. Jules ended the war as a colonel, Nica as a decorated lieutenant.
Her great adventure as the Baroness of Jazz was about to begin.
