The Rebel Rothschild

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

THE BARONESS: THE SEARCH FOR NICA, THE REBELLIOUS ROTHSCHILD
BY HANNAH ROTHSCHILD

Lovestruck: Nica Rothschild and Thelonious Monk

Hannah Rothschild first met her notorious Great Aunt Nica in a seedy New York basement dive. There she sat, a ravaged version of her former beauty, smoking a cigarette in a long black filter, her priceless fur coat draped beside her. ‘Sssh, listen to the music,’ she told Hannah.

It was the name that had first caught the young Hannah’s attention. Pannonica - what kind of great-aunt had a name like that? Someone thought it was the name of a butterfly - and the obvious person to ask was her other great-aunt, the world-famous entymologist, Miriam Rothschild. But she wasn’t telling.

Nica, as Baroness Rothschild called herself, was the black sheep of the family. Rumours and mysteries shimmered around her like ancestral treasure. Embarrassing gossip followed her across two continents: how she left her husband and five children and shacked up with a black jazz pianist, Thelonious Monk; how junkie saxophonist Charlie Parker died mysteriously in her apartment; how she took the rap after a drug bust and faced jail; how she surrounded herself in her rickety household with 306 cats.

No wonder Hannah wanted to write about her

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2145859/Sex-drugs-JAZZ-How-rebel-Rothschild-baroness-fell-drug-fuelled-music-genius-THE-BARONESS-THE-SEARCH-FOR-NICA-THE-REBELLIOUS-ROTHSCHILD-BY-HANNAH-ROTHSCHILD.html#ixzz1vFPbVRLW