The music supervisor for the film, Marcel Romano, eventually had to travel to New York to chase him down, with a strict deadline to procure the soundtrack: July 31. Plagued by insomnia and erratic behavior, Monk spent a week in a Massachusetts insane asylum. Worse, after being hired to score the adaptation of Les Liaisons, his legal problems made it impossible for him to travel to France, where the adaptation was being filmed in 1959. Monk lost his cabaret card, which meant he couldn't play in clubs. In late 1958, the musician fell into a deep depression after an arrest on drug charges that included a vicious beating by cops. It was a troubled, exhausting time for Monk-a wonder, in fact, that he made it to the recording session at all. His music, off-kilter and dissonant, helped set the seductive, scandalous mood of the film. Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the only film Monk would ever soundtrack. Monk wore many hats in the figurative sense, too: composer, pianist, bandleader, eccentric style icon-and, for a brief moment, film scorer.
Monk was still wearing it, photos reveal, when he sat down at the piano that day to record music for the soundtrack to the French film Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a racy adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel directed by Roger Vadim. But this headpiece, a gift from Ghanaian Afro-jazz pioneer Guy Warren, was particularly distinctive: large and round, like "some weird modernistic lampshade," as the trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton described it. This was often the case the enigmatic jazz pianist was known for his bobble hats, trilbies, fur hats, even skullcaps. On July 27, 1959, Thelonious Monk entered Nola Penthouse Studios on Manhattan's 57th Street for a recording session.