Monk’s mental health deteriorated rapidly during the 1970s. In 1971 he fell into a catatonic depression and was admitted to the Beth Israel Hospital. Following his release, he joined George Wein’s Giants of Jazz tour in 1972. It was a gruelling schedule: two concerts per night in sixteen cities over a period of twenty-two days. Rare bootleg concert footage, shot in Berlin at that time, shows Monk—thin, sweaty, his goatee beard greying and wispy—bent over a piano, knocking out a tune with little enthusiasm. His body seems to have shrunk inside his suit. His large gold rings slip around on his fingers and perspiration drips steadily from his temples on to the piano keys.
One of the debilitating side effects of Monk’s prostate problem was incontinence. “He had a problem of containment that brought lack of control and that was too bad, because he was very embarrassed,” George Wein said, remembering an incident from the tour. “He was a very proud man, Thelonious. He always dressed impeccably. He bought fine suits and he never looked shabby in any way.” While Thelonious was at home the incontinence was easier to manage but, on the road, never knowing where the tour bus would stop or what the facilities would be like made a difficult situation almost intolerable.
When he arrived back in New York, his friend Paul Jeffrey had to help Monk off the plane. “He could hardly walk, he was that weak.” Monk took most of December 1971 and January 1972 off before returning to work. He told friends he had to get out: he was driven mad by the constant whirring of Nellie’s juicer.
The severity of Monk’s situation was made clear to Nica in 1972. “We were driving home from New York when he suddenly said to me, ‘I am seriously ill.’ ” Monk’s admission spurred Nica into action. “That is when I started looking for doctors and trying to get the thing worked out.” She devoted the next ten years to trying to find a cure. Listening now to a tape of Nica describing Monk’s illnesses, I can hear the quiet desperation in her voice. She consulted doctors across Europe and America but still failed to find an effective treatment or a convincing diagnosis. “I wish I could tell you what [it was],” she said in low tones; Monk had “a terrible illness. He was desperately tired. He may have been in pain [but] he would never have said. That is the terrible thing about him. I am sure he was in pain,” Nica’s voice broke slightly through the stiff-upper-lip British delivery. “He had convulsions. He had cirrhosis of the liver … high blood pressure … borderline diabetes: I have papers up to the ceiling about what was wrong [with him].”
In January 1972, Nica placed Monk under the supervision of a new group of doctors at the Gracie Square Hospital. This led to a significant change in the direction of his treatment. Taking charge of the process, Nica was determined that Monk should not undergo the newfangled “talking cure,” which she thought “ridiculous: all that happened was the psychiatrist had to go to their psychiatrist. You know, he tore them out.” She was equally adamant that the doctors avoid electric shock treatment and heavy tranquillisers, insisting on a gentler, more holistic approach.
Miriam, who was trying, at the same time, to find a cure for their sister Liberty, influenced Nica here. Like their father Charles and Monk himself, Liberty had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The early lives of both Nica and Miriam had been dominated by the constant presence of someone affected by extreme mood disorders. Now the two sisters found themselves, once again, in the orbit of mental illness. Perhaps this time they could make a difference. Their brother Victor, loathing any display of vulnerability and instability, turned his back on the problem. Miriam went on to set up the Schizophrenia Research Fund, still in operation today, which tries to identify the biological causes of the disease.
Miriam commissioned a series of microcellular tests on Liberty that showed she also had coeliac disease and could be helped if she followed a special diet that did not contain plant proteins. Acting on Miriam’s advice, Nica ordered a comprehensive profile of Monk’s biochemical imbalances at a minute cellular level, testing the quantities and variances in the body’s store of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fatty acids. The results, she hoped, could pinpoint a treatment aimed at alleviating his symptoms. The new doctors’ first recommendation was that Monk be taken off thorazine and placed on lithium. Getting the right dose was crucial: his liver couldn’t cope with too much salt. It was also strongly advised that he stay away from narcotics and alcohol, but, according to his friend and sideman Paul Jeffrey, Monk was never able to resist the odd line of cocaine chased down by a stiff scotch.
Tests showed that Monk’s system was overloaded with copper and lacked zinc. The doctors tried to counteract this by giving him megavitamins and extra zinc, but the levels never returned to normal. Other tests revealed that Monk had mould in his urine. Miriam advised her sister to explore Far Eastern medicine, which takes dampness in the body’s chi or energy seriously. Nica hired Chinese acupuncturists and acupressurists to help treat Monk.
Above all, the Rothschild sisters believed that a sufferer should be cared for at home, free from the pressures of work and allowed to follow their own idiosyncratic routine. Although Liberty’s behaviour was often unpredictable, Miriam insisted that she should be allowed to come and go as she pleased. Liberty spent her last years at Ashton and would sometimes wander around the house, sit down at the piano or interrupt a conversation. She was never made to feel uncomfortable or unwanted.
Towards the end of her life, Nica was asked if she had any regrets. I expected her to reflect on being separated from her children. “Regrets? Yes!” Nica replied. “A real strong one: that I somehow didn’t find the right doctor for Thelonious. That is my regret, my only regret.”
Monk was engaged to do a series of concerts at the Village Gate. The saxophone player Paul Jeffrey became Monk’s helper. “I used to go to Monk’s house and get him ready for the job and bring him down to the club. After the job was over I would bring Monk home. It was a bitterly cold evening in January 1972 and Nica, who sat at her usual table watching Monk, offered to drop Monk home and then take me to the train station.”
Jeffrey remembers driving back to Monk’s apartment in Nica’s Bentley as snow fell on the streets of New York, blanketing the city in white-muffled silence. “We reached his apartment block, but Monk would not get out of the car. Nica kept turning the heat on and then she got to turn the heat off so the car would not overheat. This went on to about six o’clock in the morning. At that time I lived in Coney Island, which was the last stop on the subway, so eventually I said, well, I am going home, and left them there.”
Monk finally got out of Nica’s car and went into his apartment. The next day he rang Nica to ask her to collect him and his stuff. When Nica arrived, Nellie started to shout at them both, unable to believe that her husband intended to go and live with another woman. Eventually Nica took charge. Taking Monk by the arm, she said, “Come on, Thelonious, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Nica called Paul Jeffrey the next afternoon. “The Baroness said, ‘You don’t have to worry about getting Monk from Nellie’s apartment any more because he is with me and I will bring him.’ And that was the last time that Monk stayed at Nellie’s apartment.”
For the first few years after Monk moved out of the family home, Nellie went to Weehawken to cook for her husband and spend time with him, but as the years went by her visits began to tail off. When in 1976 Mary Lou Williams requested some publicity photographs of Monk, Nica wrote back, saying that she’d ask “when or if I see Nellie (she has no telephone). Her visits are few and far between.” Nica had never learned to cook. A Miss D did her basic housekeeping and she had a cleaner, Gracie, but there was never much apart from cat food in the kitchen, so Nica ate at the clubs. Monk was given the upstairs bedroom and for a time it seemed as if his life might continue in a state of easy semi-retirement.
Monk played at a reunion concert at Newport in New York in July 1975 and did two gigs in 1976, the first at Carnegie Hall in March and his swan-song at Bradley’s on July 4. Nica says that from 1972 onwards he hardly touched the piano but he would play ping-pong or Peggity with her grandson Steven. The last published recording, “Newport in New York,” was made on July 3, 1975, at the Philharmonic Hall and the last ever recording made by Nica on her reel-to-reel tape recorder was “ ’Round Midnight.”
One of the mysteries of jazz history is why Monk stopped playing and retired to his bed. Nica described Monk’s final years as “very frustrating. It was like he was not here when he was here. Imagine someone lying in the bed like that. It was like he knew he was going to die almost in this position that people are put in their coffins. And there would be days on end where he wouldn’t speak at all. And I would take in his food, get him to take his pills. I could usually get some reaction from him but almost nobody else could.”
Paul Jeffrey, who remained close to Monk right up until his death in 1982, said: “When you asked Monk [about his inactivity], Monk said, ‘I have retired.’ That makes perfect sense to me. Baseball players retire, you know. People always feel that musicians have to continue to play when maybe their prowess has diminished. In other words, you never retire in music. Well, some musicians live long enough so that they are not able to play at the level. He just decided he didn’t want to play any more.”
Monk’s son Toot offered a medical explanation: “My father had had a prostate operation and had his prostate gland removed in, about, I don’t know, it must have been about 1973 or ’74 and, as a result of that, eliminating was a hassle. Now everybody thought he stopped playing because he lost the fire, or he stopped playing because he became uninterested, or he stopped playing because he was too spaced out from too many stints in the loony bin. It was none of those things. It was simply that he was uncomfortable, you see.”
Hearing these theories made Nica uncharacteristically angry. “Thelonious only stopped playing when it became a physical impossibility for him: nothing else could ever have stopped him. There was a wrong biochemical imbalance [in his blood] and he was desperately ill during the last years. He wanted more than anything to get well and that [was why] he cooperated with the doctors a hundred per cent and they tried everything but nothing worked.”
Nica never gave up hope of finding a cure. Writing to Mary Lou Williams in 1977, she expressed great excitement: “I have a line on a new doctor for T … he is just about the greatest expert there is on biochemical imbalances (which is precisely what T is suffering from). I am not telling ANYONE (including T) about this at the moment but I want YOU to PLEASE say a prayer for us that WILL be able to help. Luvya!” Two years later she writes to Mary Lou about another expert from Princeton and someone who gives Thelonious shiatsu: “T is being as good as gold, keeping strictly to his diet, taking all the pills prescribed for him every day.” In a letter to a cousin in 1981, Nica is still talking with enthusiasm about finding yet another practitioner who might be able to help.
Nica and Monk captured for Time, published in February 1964 (Photographic Credit 23.1)
Once she and Paul Jeffrey tried to pique his interest by asking young musicians to come and play outside Monk’s window. This got no response. On another occasion she asked pianist Joel Forrester to play outside Monk’s room. This time, Monk slammed his bedroom door shut.
Monk’s old producer and friend Orrin Keepnews visited the pianist at Weehawken in the late 1970s. “Monk, are you touching the piano at all these days?” Keepnews asked. “He said, ‘No I’m not.’ And I said, ‘Do you want to get back to playing?’ and Monk said, ‘No I don’t.’ And I said, ‘Would you be interested in my coming out and visiting you and talking about the old days?’ And he said, ‘No I wouldn’t.’ ”
Barry Harris, the pianist, who also lived with Nica and Monk, commented that Orrin was lucky to get “complete sentences out of Monk. To most people he just says ‘No’ or nothing.”
When my uncle Amschel went to spend an afternoon with Nica in New York, he described Monk lying as if dead on his bed, his hands in the prayer position, not saying a word and not moving as the world went on around him. Sometimes Nica’s family might come to help but often she was alone with Monk and the cats. “I used to play him records a lot, he liked that,” she recalled, remembering one particular autumn afternoon. “I saw him get up. I was in the big room playing records and I saw him go from his bed to the bathroom [and I] heard this terrible crash and so I rushed in and he had fallen inside the bathroom and the door opens in, it is very small. His feet were against the door and I couldn’t open the door. There was no way to get in to him. So I got the ambulance people and they had to get him out of there.”
Eddie Henderson also went to visit Monk and Nica at that time.
The Baroness was sitting in the living room with a cigarette holder surrounded by seventy-five cats. She said, “Oh hello, doctor, Mr. Monk is upstairs.” Mr. Monk was sitting in that big room with the piano, looking at the skyline of New York City, fully dressed with a little thin tie and stingy-brim hat. He didn’t look at me but he said, “Hey, doc, how you doing?” I said, “What you doing, Mr. Monk?” He said, “I’m waiting for a phone call.” He was just looking up at the ceiling and ironically, about ten seconds later, the phone rang. He picked it up. Now he listened, didn’t say hello. He just listened. About twenty or twenty-five seconds later, that’s a long time, he hung up and said, “That wasn’t it.”
His old friend Amiri Baraka also visited Monk at home. Like Nica, he was convinced that Monk was still fully cognisant. When Baraka asked the pianist what was going on, Monk replied, “Everything, man. Every googleplex of a second.” Nica said Monk’s favourite pastime was standing in front of the huge glass window, looking out at the Manhattan skyline. Sometimes, she said, Monk would conduct the weather. “He could make the clouds change direction, I don’t know if you knew that? People up the road here keep pigeons. Thelonious would stand at the window and make them change direction; I have seen him actually do it. He could make a cloud turn back.”
Beginning in 1972 and for the next eight years Nica refused to leave Monk’s side. Then in 1980 an old friend of the family turned ninety and she decided to go to Europe for his birthday. Describing the moment she went to say goodbye to Monk, Nica admitted,
I am not a crier. I can count the times in my life when I have cried. When I went to say goodbye to Thelonious he was so upset that I could not stop crying. I remember Thelonious saying, it is all right, I will be here when you get back. I am not going anywhere, I will be here. It was my first trip on Concorde and I cried the whole way to England. I must have soaked hundreds of hankies. It was almost like I knew and I said my farewell to him then.
Thelonious was right: he was there when Nica returned and he lived for nearly two more years. Then, on February 5, 1982, he suffered a massive heart attack at Weehawken. Nica called an ambulance and went with him to Englewood Hospital where he lay in a coma for twelve days. Nica, Nellie and her family took it in turns to sit with him. Thelonious died aged sixty-four on February 17, in Nellie’s arms. Nica was at home across the river.
At Monk’s funeral, Nica and Nellie sat side by side in the front row of the church. Musicians, friends and family filed past to pay their last respects to the two matriarchs and then to Thelonious who lay in an open casket lined with white silk. As usual, he was immaculately dressed in a grey three-piece suit with a stripy tie and matching handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket. His large hands were clasped together and his face, slightly puffy and waxy in death, looked composed and peaceful. Unusually he was hatless. Nica, wearing her pearls, a heavy fur coat and crimson lipstick, looked straight ahead, her face expressionless.
Any sang-froid evaporated when Nica found out that her Bentley would not lead the funeral cortège. Having looked after the pianist for so long, she did not want, at this vital public moment, to be marginalised. Nica kicked up such a fuss that Nellie, Toot and Boo-Boo (Barbara) Monk climbed out of the family limo and into the Bebop Bentley. The procession made its way past Monk’s favourite haunts before heading out to Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, some twenty-five miles away.
Less than a mile from Hartsdale, Nica’s car broke down. The Monk family got back into the hired limousine and Nica was left with the car on the side of the road, while the procession continued without her. It was an ignominious, humiliating and sad end to that chapter of her life.