The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I was playing the part of Nico’
From Jim Morrison to Andy Warhol, men went wild for the German singer. But did her looks obscure her talent – and her turmoil?
When Andy Warhol saw Nico, in a Mexican restaurant in New York in 1965, “She was sitting at a table with a pitcher in front of her, dipping her long beautiful fingers into the sangría, lifting out slices of wine-soaked oranges”, he wrote in POPism. On spotting Warhol, who came in with the director Paul Morrissey, Nico “tilted her head to the side and brushed her hair back with her other hand and said very slowly, ‘I only like the fooood that flooooats in the wiiine.’ ”
By the time dinner was finished, Morrissey was raving to Warhol that she was “the most beautiful creature that ever lived” and “that we should use Nico in the movies and find a rock group to play for her”. Warhol agreed – he thought she looked “like she could have made the trip over right at the front of a Viking ship”. But it was her voice that completed the package for him: “She had this very strange way of speaking. People described her voice as everything from eerie, to bland and smooth, to slow and hollow, to a ‘wind in a drainpipe’, to an ‘IBM computer with a Garbo accent.’ ”
Both Warhol and Morrissey saw Nico as the missing element to the Velvet Underground, a newly formed band still working out their kinks. “To counteract the kind of screeching ugliness they were trying to sell… a really beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed,” said Morrissey. Nico, then 27, had been modelling for over a decade, and was tired of it. In 1960, she had scored an unforgettable cameo in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita; now she “only wanted to be with the underground people”. Warhol crowned her Miss Pop 1966, and proclaimed her a “Superstar” – simply for being “Nico”.
But who was “Nico”? The Warhol days boast ample photographs and stories, but the later, perhaps more authentic version of Nico – the two decades she spent as a solo artist, struggling with heroin addiction, until her death in a bizarre bicycle accident in Ibiza in 1988 – has virtually been lost. Yet her six ballsy, deeply personal solo albums reveal a true bohemian who created a template for modern punk and goth – “the very high priestess of Weird”, as one critic called her.
Though Nico owed her break to her other-worldly beauty, it also stopped her from being taken seriously. People rarely acknowledged that she spoke seven languages fluently, read classic literature voraciously and could finish the New York Times crossword in near-record time. As Marianne Faithfull said: “What I have in common with Nico is the understanding of her furious frustration at not being recognised.”
While her fellow Velvets, Lou Reed and John Cale, are called “American masters”, “poets” and “legends”, Nico has been cast as a racist junkie who slept with myriad famous men – Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Brian Jones, Iggy Pop, Alain Delon and so on. As Una Baines, the keyboardist for the Blue Orchids, who played with Nico during the 1980s, puts it: “All the men around her at the same time were doing exactly the same thing. They were all taking drugs, all sleeping with loads of people, but that doesn’t matter if it’s Lou Reed or John Cale. Because they’re blokes... I think that must have been the frustration, really. She knew that she would never be treated on the same footing.”
And so it is the demise of her legendary appearance, not the music, that is often remembered. “In the end, she wanted to be as ugly as a witch,” her aunt Helma asserted. “She wanted to destroy herself.”
Before Nico was Nico, she was Christa Päffgen. “That’s no name for a model,” the German fashion photographer Tobias told his teenage protégée in 1956. “I’ll name you after a man I once loved in Paris. His name was Nico. That’s a nice name for you.” She came to hate the name Christa: “No! It’s too... it’s so German!” she would say.
All her life, Nico carried with her the guilt and unease of being raised in Germany during the Second World War. “That was not me, that was another girl,” she said in 1969, when asked about the war. She was born Christa Schulz, on October 16 1938 in Cologne to parents of Spanish and Yugoslavian descent. Her mother, Margarete Schulz, or “Grete”, married the clerk Hermann Wilhelm Päffgen, or “Willi”, two months later, and the baby Nico was legitimised. By May 21 1941, Grete and Willi were divorced. Less than a month after Nico’s birth, the Nazis instigated Kristallnacht. One hundred yards from where the infant Nico and her mother were living, the Cologne Synagogue was burnt to the ground, along with 267 others. Willi was drafted into the Wehrmacht; Nico never saw him again.
With her mother in financial straits, Nico found herself in Kinderheim Sülz, the biggest orphanage in Europe. Its director, Friedrich Tillmann, also served as office manager for the Zentraldienststelle T4 in Berlin – a Nazi cover organisation that organised the systematic killing of those “unworthy of life”: “degenerates”, dissidents, the disabled. His duties included inspecting the gas chambers used in the concentration camps.
After nine months in Tillmann’s orphanage, Nico was reunited with her mother, hiding in the bathtub as explosives rained down around their small Cologne apartment. They soon fled to Grete’s father, a railway switchman who lived an hour’s drive from Berlin in the Spree forest. Later in life, Nico wrote in her diary: “In 1942, the trains passed our house to take the Jews to Auschwitz, I was only four years old, but my family and neighbours waited by the railroad fences to give them food and water, but the guards whipped them away from our reach. I remember very clearly how many hungry people I saw when the trains came to a halt. Freight trains and barbwire windows, the rail line to the camp has lost its tracks… The ribbon of death. I was sighing to my cousin Ulli and refused to wash with soap made from human bones, the material for clothing had been made from human hair, lampshades from human tattooed skin.”
Ulli remembered Nico as “funny, foolish and silly… She was a very giggly girl, but not in a relaxed way.” Her favourite place to play was in the Gothic graveyard next to the house. According to Helma, Nico was 12 when she came up with her deep, strange pronunciation: “Aunt Helma, is Uuuulliiii aaaalsooooo theeeeere?” Helma tried to get her to “talk reasonably, say the words short”, but “Christa was a very strange girl. From childhood. She once had a certain pride. She walked very upright. And she was either shy or conceited. Or both.”
The invention of “Nico” allowed the teenage Christa to shed her past. “You don’t have to be you to be you,” as she put it. When asked how she had dealt with the idiosyncrasies of modelling, she responded, “I was an alien… I did not take it seriously. I could laugh… because I was playing the part of Nico.” By 1957, she had found her signature look of fair hair and long fringe, which she kept for a decade: “Whether it was quite the fashion I didn’t care,” she said. “It gave me a security.”
But she struggled with the pressure on models, then as now, to stay ultra-thin: “You are hungry but you are frightened you will lose your figure. For a time I took some pills that suppressed the appetite, but they were not correct for the complexion. In the end… I would eat normally or eat nothing. But when I ate, I ate like sparrow – a big, German sparrow. Sometimes I felt this was the hardest part of my work, either to eat, or not to eat.”
According to James Young, a British musician who toured with Nico, she began taking diet pills “like you take vitamin pills… It didn’t have the stigma that getting into heroin would have, but nevertheless it’s an addictive thing.” Looking back, Nico saw this as the start of her descent: “I really got into drugs then. I got into drugs without realising I was getting into drugs.”
In 1960, while staying with friends in Rome, Nico met Fellini, and offered to advise him on how to shoot an orgy scene for La Dolce Vita. His response was ecstatic: “I have dreamt of you. I recognise your face. You will look wonderful with candlelight. You must be a star in La Dolce Vita.” The line she delivers on screen seemed to echo her frustrations: “I finished modelling a year ago. Enough’s enough.”
And so she pursued acting, shooting her next film on the Italian island of Ischia, where she encountered “the most dangerous man I ever met”: Alain Delon. “He was like a gypsy,” she claimed, “with strong eyes and dark hair, and I wanted him for myself.” Nico’s friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock recalled her enthralment: “Nico came round, very happy and excited: ‘I’ve just slept with Alain Delon!’ It was like Snow White had met her prince. She was obsessed with this ghastly man.” Eight weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant. Her mother suggested an abortion. “I won’t let it drift away. This child should be my own. I also want to have a person for me,” said Nico. Delon, however, did not share her joy. He has denied paternity all his life, and ignored her correspondence.
Nico called her infant son Ari, and left him in Ibiza, where she had settled her mother, while she travelled for work. But her mother was suffering doubly from “Parkinson’s disease and solitude”, as Ari later put it. The toddler was left to look after himself for hours on end, in a house rancid with faeces and vomit. Delon’s family, even though he wanted nothing to do with the child, came to adopt Ari. “I arrived and I was shocked,” recalled Delon’s half-sister, Pauledith Soubrier. “The boy was kept in a room, quite dark, and he was afraid, crouching like an animal.” Eventually, they succeeded in what Delon’s mother described as “kidnapping, lawful kidnapping!”
On the streets of Paris, meanwhile, Nico, had – literally – bumped into Bob Dylan who was, she said, “magnetic… [with] heavenly blue eyes! He should not wear sunglasses.” It was a turnstile moment in her life. She had always thought of following in the footsteps of Marlene Dietrich, and performing jazzy swing songs. Dylan, for all his bloated gravitas and arrogance – he was “a little annoyed that I could
Warhol admired her odd way of speaking, like ‘an IBM computer with a Garbo accent’
sing properly” – “changed the idea that I had that I should only sing torch songs, you know, love songs”.
Then the Rolling Stones came to Paris, and Nico fell for Brian Jones, the guitarist, already the father of four children by four different women at the tender age of 22. “He was charming, until he locked the door,” she said. It was then that Jones’s sadistic tendencies came to the surface. “It was fascinating and frightening… But Brian gave the best sex, when he could.” She made a record with the Rolling Stones’s manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, I’m Just Sayin’, which Oldham described as “f---ing awful”, but had a backing band that included Brian Jones and Led Zeppelin’s future guitarist, Jimmy Page.
“Everybody loved her because… she was funny, and she enjoyed herself,” said Oldham. “She was one of a new breed of woman, like Anita Pallenberg and Yoko Ono, who could have been a man. She was no doormat. Far better that than the silly little English teacups around at that time. When the single didn’t go, I don’t think I saw her again. The next thing you knew she turned up in New York with Warhol.” That trip, with little Ari in tow, changed the entire trajectory of Nico’s life. “I have always been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she later said. “But when I was with Andy Warhol, I seemed to have got it right.”
Nico was an entirely different kind of person to previous Warhol intimates. “Most people at the Factory were very loquacious and verbose and would easily talk or tell you something. Nico… rarely spoke. And only when someone spoke to her,” remembered Billy Name, Warhol’s archivist. “She was totally nonflamboyant, nonpretentious, but absolutely magnetically controlling… a real Nordic beauty.”
Many people thought there was nothing beneath that surface. “No love, no interests, no cares,” wrote one journalist. David Croland, another Factory insider, disagrees. “She was observant, and people don’t get this! She was at heart a poetess.” But, he conceded, “She’s not the best news for any woman if she walks into a room, the way she looked.” As Mary Woronov, one of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable troupe, put it, Nico “was so beautiful she expected everyone to want to f--- her, even the furniture, which groaned out loud when she walked into the room. I had seen chairs creep across the carpet in the hopes that she might sit down on them. Naturally I treated her like the plague.”
Nico seemed completely alien to the Velvet Underground, too, from the start an appendage to the fourpiece rather than an addition. “They all thought that she was a little bit of a fly in the ointment,” said Cale. “Here was this formidable woman, the world’s first supermodel. She was quintessentially the person that Andy used to make us aware of another dimension to music: publicity and image making.” Reed “almost gagged” at the imposition of this chanteuse, but Morrissey insisted: “Nico was somebody, they were nobody.”
Reed quickly changed his mind. He found himself falling in love with her, confiding to his friend Richard Miskin, “Nico’s the kind of person that you meet and you’re not quite the same afterwards. She has an amazing mind.” (Miskin also claimed that “Lou loved the fact that Nico was big.”) Nico described Reed, almost unrecognisably, as “very sweet and lovely. Not offensive at all. You could just cuddle him like a sweet person when I first met him, and he always stayed that way.” Cale, however, labelled the duo’s affair as “both consummated and constipated”. Nico later said: “Lou liked to manipulate women, you know, like program them. He wanted to do that with me. He told me so. Like computerise me.” Their break-up was very public, at a band rehearsal in the Factory. “I cannot make love to Jews anymore,” Nico said.
Was Nico a racist? To Cale, such “revisionist speculation” is “ridiculous”. Edgy quips were de rigueur in the catty Factory crowd: “She told a joke, at least partially at the expense of her own national stereotype, and people chuckled and got on with their chores.” Harder to laugh off was an incident in 1971 – about which eyewitnesses still cannot agree – when Nico smashed a wineglass in the face of a black girl called Emmaretta Marks, who was talking about racial inequality. “Because of it, Nico said she had a contract out on her from the Black Panthers,” says Morrissey.
Nico called it “a fit of madness”: “I was high on angel dust... then I had to leave the country.” She spent the next decade hiding in Europe with her new lover, the French filmmaker Philippe Garrel, who looked, according to Morrissey, like “Laurence Olivier doing Richard the Third... terribly quiet and slightly pretentious – just the sort of person Nico would fall for then, of course”. They made seven films together, but by then – with Garrel, a fellow addict – heroin had become the most important thing in Nico’s life.
According to the biographer Victor Bockris, Nico’s slide into heroin must have begun when she was “with Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and all those people that she would have hung out with at the Castle in Los Angeles in ’67”. Meeting Morrison had been another watershed in her life: “He was the first man I was in love with, because he was affectionate to my looks and my mind,” said Nico. “He said to me one day, ‘I give you permission to write your poems and compose your songs!’ My soul brother believed I could do it.”
Later, she rationalised to a journalist: “You could say that Jim took drugs because he wanted visions for his poetry. It is like people in the office who drink coffee to help them work. It is really the same.” But, she said, “we took too much drink and too many drugs to make it, that was our difficulty.”
Morrison suggested that Nico write down her dreams, and read his favourite classics, by Céline, Blake and Coleridge. Not long after, she composed her first song, Lawns of Dawns. When they drifted apart, she moved in with Warhol’s new Superstar, Viva: “She would practise [the harmonium] for hours, simple things, chords – really annoying stuff,” Viva said. “She was very serious about it, dreadfully serious, like a Nazi organist. She’d pull the curtains across and light candles around her and do this funereal singing all day long. It was like I was living in a funeral parlour.”
Nico’s switch of musical modes, from folky Chelsea Girl to songwriter, came with an equally dramatic shift in her appearance. Her blonde mane was replaced by red locks (Morrison had a fetish for redheads) which progressed to flowing brown hair. Floaty black – always black – capes and robes in weighty fabrics replaced tailored white suits. In 1969, she brought out her album The Marble Index. “I can’t make out a single real word,” said the reviewer in the NME. Its icy, gloomy lyrics and musicality were just too weird for most consumers. “It’s an artefact, not a commercial commodity. You can’t sell suicide,” explained Cale in 1977.
Nico spent most of the 1970s in Paris, in Garrel’s apartment on the rue de Richelieu, which they coated with two thick layers of black enamel paint. A large overcoat doubled as both mattress and bedding. Sometimes the child Ari came to stay with them. By the end of the decade, when Ari was 17, he was on heroin, too. “Now she was contaminated beyond belief,” said her friend De Maldonado-Bostock, on seeing her after heroin had taken hold. “I simply couldn’t speak. It was as though some terrible tragedy had befallen her. I was appalled.”
It was the manager Alan Wise, according to Young, who “really saved Nico. He saved her life... He was absolutely besotted with her. It was like a husband and wife, but with no sex!” It was 1981, and Nico was playing the Rafters nightclub in Manchester. “She had no money… She was a 40-year-old woman who was at the end of her career and at the end of her tether,” said Phil Rainford, who would become Nico’s sound engineer. Phil Jones, a booking agent who was there with Wise, recalls being blown away once Nico began to perform. “Everybody went, ‘Bloody hell!’ Her singing The End by the Doors was unbelievable, high drama. Then she did the flipping German national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, alone at the harmonium. We thought, “F---ing hell, what’s she going to do next?”’ Wise was enthralled. “We can’t just let her go,” he said.
Nico went on to live in Manchester for over seven years. The city was a perfect fit for “one of the last Left Bank Bohemians”, as Wise styled her. “I think she was aware that there was a scene – Joy Division, dark music – or maybe she just liked the cheap heroin,” said Martin Bramah, the guitarist for Blue Orchids. “But she didn’t see the grubby, industrial city I grew up in. She’d gaze at the Victorian architecture and say: ‘This is so romantic.’”
In Manchester, Nico found “people that did care about her and were friends with her. I don’t know if she actually ever had friends before,” said Rainford. Settled and fortified, in 1986, she finally quit heroin. The final pages of her diary show how she is noticing the world around her anew: “the sun is shining a perfect October day in these Northern Regions of the Globe. Some trees have real gold leaves…” Jones and Wise had also sorted out Nico’s tangled past album sales, culminating in an unprecedented cash flow. “We finally got her royalties for her – a lot of money. So she was able to come off drugs, decamp to Ibiza and live a normal life with her son,” Jones recalled.
On Ibiza, on July 17 1988, the hottest day of the year, Nico decided to bicycle down into town to buy some hash, to relieve a bad headache. She wrapped a large piece of black fabric around her head, to protect her from the sun. “See you later, darling,” she said to Ari. “I saw her go down the dirt and rock road and disappear behind the pine trees,” he recalled.
No one knows exactly what happened next. One story has her falling off her bike and rolling down an embankment, with passers-by calling for an ambulance. According to another, a taxi driver found her slumped on the side of the steep road. In the morning, a doctor finally examined her and realised that she had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. But after over a decade of drug abuse, there wasn’t one viable vein to administer the medication, leaving Nico to suffer a slow death alone in a hospital room.
For Viva, sharing a flat with Nico was ‘like living in a funeral parlour’
Who, in the end, was “the real Nico”? “In her photographs, she looks glacially beautiful but unapproachable,” says the music executive Danny Fields. “She was really very shy, which can frequently be mistaken for disdain, arrogance, lack of interest or inhumanity. There was Nico, the persona, and then there was Christa Päffgen – easily hurt, easily wounded, very sensitive.”
“The thing about myths and about mythologising people is that actually you don’t get the real person behind it,” says Rainford. “You don’t get that very sad, broken, lonely woman that we first met. We did grow to really love her and feel protective of her. She was just a human like anybody else. People forget that.”