By BARRY SINGER

If the mysterious Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter is at all remembered today, it is for her proximity to the deaths of two legendary jazz musicians. In 1955 Charlie Parker died on a sofa in her Manhattan home; in 1982 The lonious Monk died after secluding himself for years in her New Jersey house.
Both deaths made the baroness a subject of tabloid headlines and scurrilous gossip. Almost no one, though, beyond the insular jazz world, could possibly know her whole story: how, until her death in 1988, she championed jazz as both a friend and a generous, if unlikely, benefactor.
A Rothschild heiress, she offered her home to countless jazzmen as a place to work and even live, while quietly paying their bills when they couldn’t find work. She chauffeured them to gigs around New York and was known to confront anyone she felt was taking advantage of her friends because they were black.
“I always likened her to the great royal patrons of Mozart or Wagner’s day,” the saxophonist Sonny Rollins said. “Yet she never put the spotlight on herself. I try not to talk publicly about people I knew in jazz. But I have to say something about the baroness. She really loved our music.”
She first materialized in New York jazz clubs in the early 1950s. She seduced the music’s greatest figures with her friendship, the revolutionists of the bebop era: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and many others.
Her illustrious family has long refused to discuss her. But now a new book, “Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats,” offers a window into her personal life.
The book is primarily a collection of candid photographs of the musicians taken by the baroness, and a compilation of their varied responses to a favorite question: “What are your three wishes-” On October 30 an exhibition of these snapshots and wish lists will open at the Gallery at Hermes in New York.
The book offers more concrete information about the baroness than has ever before been published. But the source of her extraordinarily deep bond with jazz musicians remains elusive. She always credited her brother, Victor, a jazz fan and amateur pianist, with introducing her to jazz. Shortly before her death, though, she revealed in a rare interview for a Monk documentary the moment when her interest in jazz escalated into something more.
“I was in the throes of the diplomatic life in Mexico,” she said, recalling the years 1949 to 1952, when her husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, was in the French diplomatic service, “and I had a friend who got hold of records for me. I used to go to his pad to hear them. I couldn’t have listened to them in my own house, with that atmosphere. I heard them and really got the message. I belonged where that music was.”
The great project of the baroness’s life was the torturously unstable Monk, whom she served as a surrogate wife right alongside Monk’s equally devoted actual wife, Nellie. The baroness paid Monk’s bills, dragged him to an endless array of doctors, put him and his family up in her own home and, when necessary, helped Nellie institutionalize him.
The introduction to “Three Wishes” still leaves unanswered many questions that pursued the baroness throughout her life. Did she enable addiction in the musicians she loved- Did she buy them drugs- Did she use drugs herself?
Her husband divorced her in 1956 after the scandalous publicity surrounding Charlie Parker’s death in her home. Shaun de Koenigswarter, the couple’s youngest son, recently confirmed that the baron also got custody of the three younger children, Berit (born in 1946), Kari (1950) and himself (1948).
That the baroness in fact lost custody of her three youngest children as a consequence of her love of jazz further illuminates the maternal quality of her presence on the scene. Is it any wonder that she clung to her musicians like family?
“She realized that jazz needed any kind of help it could get,” Mr. Rollins said, “especially the musicians. She was monetarily helpful to a lot who were struggling. But more than that, she was with us. By being with the baroness, we could go places and feel like human beings. It certainly made us feel good. I don’t know how you could measure it. But it was a palpable thing. I think she was a heroic woman.”