This woman is Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter (maiden name Rothschild; 10 December 1913 – 30 November 1988) also known as “Nica.” Nica was best known for fighting with the Free French Army in World War II and her patronage of jazz music.
Nica was born youngest daughter to Charles Rothschild and his wife, Hungarian baroness Rózsika Edle von Wertheimstein. This was the wealthiest family in the world at that time. She studied art history and became interested in photography.
While learning to pilot an airplane she met French diplomat Baron Jules de Koenigswarter. They married in 1935 and had 5 children. When World War II broke out Jules joined the Free French Army. Nica, still in France assisting refugees, took Jules advice to escape. She sent the children to the United States and joined her husband, and the Free French, in North Africa. She served as a decoder, a radio hostess for Radio Brazzaville and as an ambulance driver during the Battle for North Africa.
The couple separated in 1951 and divorced in 1956. Nica moved to New York and became a patron of Jazz musicians.
In New York, de Koenigswarter became a friend and patron of leading jazz musicians, hosting jam sessions in her hotel suite, often driving them in her Bentley when they needed a lift to gigs, as well as sometimes helping them to pay rent, buy groceries, and making hospital visits. Although not a musician herself, she is sometimes referred to as the “bebop baroness” or “jazz baroness” because of her patronage of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker among others. Following Parker’s death in her Stanhope rooms in 1955, de Koenigswarter was asked to leave by the hotel management; she re-located to the Bolivar Hotel at 230 Central Park West, a building commemorated in Thelonious Monk’s 1956 composition “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are Wikipedia
She took criminal responsibility when she and Thelonious Monk were charged with marijuana possession by Delaware police in 1958, spending a few nights in jail. De Koenigswarter was sentenced to three years in prison. After a two-year legal battle that was financed by her family, the case was dismissed in a court of appeals on a technicality
After Monk ended his public performances in the mid-1970s, he retired to de Koenigswarter’s house in Weehawken, New Jersey, where he died in 1982.
There are many compositions dedicated to her: Thelonious Monk’s “Pannonica”, Gigi Gryce‘s “Nica’s Tempo“, Sonny Clark‘s “Nica”, Horace Silver‘s “Nica’s Dream“, Kenny Dorham‘s “Tonica”, Kenny Drew‘s “Blues for Nica”, Doug Watkins‘ “Panonica”, Freddie Redd‘s “Nica Steps Out”, Barry Harris‘s “Inca”, Tommy Flanagan’s “Thelonica”, Frank Turner‘s “Nica” were all named after her.
She died in New York City of heart failure in 1988 at the age of 74.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad
This is Lindsay Clancy (11 Aug 1990). Lindsay was a nurse and mother of three young children. She reported depression, anxiety and having “bad thoughts” after the birth of her third child. She sought mental health counseling was prescribed several medications in the months after she had her third child, Callan, in May 2022 (The Sun).
Clancy now stands accused of strangling her two children and fatally wounding her newborn baby before launching herself out of the window of her home on 24 January 2023. Whatever possessed her? By the time of the alleged murder she was on a dozen medications and her husband believed she was almost a zombie.
- Thelonious Monk Wikipedia
- The Story Is Told Thelonious and Nica Sandybrownjazz
- DARK DESCENT Lindsay Clancy full story The Sun
- Case Study 38 4dforum
- Case Study 39 4dforum