My book on aunt who loved Thelonius Monk: Hannah Rothschild (Interview)

NEW DELHI - Acclaimed British writer-filmmaker Hannah Rothschild has a new assignment. She is putting the life story of her feisty grand aunt, Pannonica de Koenigswarter, in a book after making a docu-feature on the same woman who left her family behind in pursuit of jazz legend Thelonious Monk.

“Writing about her is difficult. You can get away with images in a movie, but with words you can’t cut corners,” Rothschild, who was in Kerala for the Week Hay Festival, told IANS.

While the book will be titled “The Jazz Baroness” and will be published by Little Brown next year, her film by the same name was co-produced by the BBC in 2009.

Pannonica was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild to the illustrious Rothschild family in Britain. She patronised jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker. Monk, a jazz legend, died at Pannonica’s home in New Jersey in 1982.

“One cold wet English morning, I was looking through family records and came across Pannonica. I couldn’t believe it. It turned out that she was my great aunt. She was rarely mentioned in family records because people were very shocked,” said Hannah Rothschild.

“At the age of 41, when she was married with five children (the youngest not even one), Pannonica went to see a friend in New York, who played a jazz record, ‘Round Midnight’ by Thelonious Monk,” Rothschild said.

The record changed her life. Pannonica went home, “left her five children and husband- and eventually divorced”.

“She went to New York never to come back - she went to find Thelonius Monk. It took her two years to find him - and after that they were hardly ever apart,” Rothschild said.

“Monk was married. My belief is that Monk never had a love affair. But my great aunt was madly in love with him. He was very thrilled and flattered by her love. In the early 1950s - he had no money, no recording contract and a very small audience. And this beautiful white woman from nowhere with quite a lot of money and passionate belief in his genius was like an angel,” Rothschild said.

Pannonica had grown up loving jazz.

“There were very few records available. She knew about Duke Ellington and Louis Amstrong but Thelonious Monk’s music was a departure from traditional jazz. It was discordant,” Rothschild said.

Such was Pannonica’s love for Monk that she “went to jail when a tiny piece of hashish, a grade A narcotic like cocaine or heroin, was found in their car”.

“If Thelonius was found guilty, he would have been jailed for 20 years. Pannonica was sentenced for three years. But my great-aunt was a remarkable woman. One of the earliest woman aviators in the world, she had flown Lancaster Bombers in Africa as a Free French Army cadet during World War II,” Rothschild said, walking down the family lane.

Rothschild has a busy schedule ahead. Her new documentary on the senior Labour Party strategist Peter Mandelson will be aired on BBC Nov 23.

But the project she holds close to her heart is an original screenplay of a movie optioned by Ridley Scott and Working Titles.

“The movie is yet to be named. I was absolutely fascinated by the story. In the 1980s, I was in love with a man and was about to marry him. One night when we was dining, he said to me that there is something I should know. He said he had supported himself by donating sperms as a student. And I thought this was the man - I was going to have children with. I looked at him and wondered how many millions of children he had fathered?” Rothschild said.

The affair broke up and Rothschild “did not think much about it”.

“But five years ago, America relaxed the sperm donors law allowing children born of donated sperms to find their fathers. I told the story to Ridley Scott and he said, ‘write me the story’,” Rothschild said.

Rothschild, born in 1962, has made several documentaries for leading BBC series like the Storyville, Relative Values, Omnibus and Arena.

Her short film, “Eddie Loves Mary (2002)” was screened in all major world festivals.