Monk surveys these sad facts with some bitterness, "I don't have any musician friends," he says, "I was friends to a lot of musicians, but looks like they weren't friends to me." He sometimes makes quiet and kindly gestures - such as sending money to Bud Powell, caged in a tuberculosis sanitorium outside Paris - but his words are hard. "All you're supposed to do is lay down the sounds and let people pick up on them." he says, "If you ain't doing that, you just ain't a musician. Nothing more to it than that."

Now that his turn has come, Monk cuts a fine figure on the scene. Nellie spends a hysterical half-hour every evening getting him into his ensemble, and when he steps out the door he looks faintly like an Oriental garden - subtle colors echoing back and forth, prim suits and silk shirts glimmering discreetly. He spends hours standing around with his band, talking in his unpenetrable, oracular mode. "All ways know, always night, all ways know - and dig the way I say 'all ways'" he says, smiling mysteriously. When he is playing anywhere near New York, the baroness comes to drive him home, and they fly off in the Bentley, content in the knowledge that there is no one remotely like either one of them under the sun. They race against the lights for the hell of it, and when the car pulls up in Monk's block, he skips out and disappears into his old $39-a-month apartment. The baroness then drives home to Weehawken, where she lives in a luxurious bedroom oasis, surrounded by the reeking squalor her 32 cats have created in the other rooms.

Monk spends lazy days at home with Nellie - "layin dead." he calls it. Their two children Thelonious, 14, and Barbara, 10, are off in boarding schools, and Monk's slumbers go undisturbed. Nellie flies around through the narrow paths left between great piles of possessions, tending to his wants. Clothes are in the sink, boxes and packages are on the chairs; Monk's grand piano stands in the kitchen, the foundation for a tower of forgotten souvenirs, phone books, a typewriter, old magazines and groceries. From his bed Monk announces his wishes ("Nellie! Ice cream!"), and Nellie races to serve, she retaliates gently by calling him "Melodious Thunk" in quiet mutters over the sink.

Nellie and the few other people who have ever known Monk in the slightest all see a great inner logic to his life that dignifies everything he says and does. He never lies. He never shouts. He has no greed. He has no envy. His message, as Nellie interprets it to their children is noble and strong, "Be yourself," she tells them "Don't bother about what other people say, because you are you. The thing to be is just yourself." She also tells them that Monk is no one special, but the children have seen him asleep with his Japanese skullcap on his head, or with a cabbage leaf drooping from his lapel, and they know better. "I try to tell them different," Nellie says, "but of course I can't. After all, if Thelonious isn't special, then what is?"

© TIME magazine - 1964