Chapter 11 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Upon meeting Danny Fields, it is obvious how he has charmed some of the most important culture shapers of the twentieth cen­tury. On a walk around London, his enthusiasm for everything – from random street graffiti to a pigeon in flight – is contagious and addictive. Though completely humble and unassuming, he is one of the most influential figures in punk rock, signing and man­aging Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the MC5 and the Ramones, as well as working with Jim Morrison, the Velvet Underground and the Modern Lovers. However, in 1963, the eventually legendary rock manager and record-label executive was a journalist, going between attending classes at Harvard Law School and running with the emer­ging underground circle that frequented Andy Warhol’s Factory and Max’s Kansas City.

Fields and his friends were listening to the radio in New York on 22 November when they heard the news: President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. ‘I was paralyzed,’ Fields recalls. Though shaken by the events, he decided to go ahead with a party that he had already planned for Thanksgiving, to be held at his loft, located at 7 West 20th Street, where future Warhol Superstar Edie Sedgwick crashed for a few weeks in 1963. He recalls, ‘Everyone was down from Harvard. Then I thought of calling it off, then I thought I really should have it, because everybody needs a party when something so horrible happens. There were people there from the Warhol Factory, there were people that I only knew from the Village. People were dancing to the Ronettes and sitting around.’ The beverage served still sticks in Fields’s mind almost fifty years later. ‘The only thing we had to drink was vodka and grapefruit juice, which is just wonderful, ’cause it’s cheap and it’s potent and no one knows what the propor­tions are. You can turn them up or turn them down. No one on earth can tell, until you see the effects. It’s like silent, tasteless poison,’ Fields laughs, remembering the gigantic booze-heavy punch bowl.

Then the door opened. ‘In the middle of the evening, Nico came in, dressed in tattered Levi’s and a tattered Levi’s jacket. She came in with two men, one of whom was a Chilean count [really just a playboy from Chile], and the other who was an English dandy [Dennis Deegan]. And the room of beautiful people just turned,’ he recalls. ‘And, of course, I knew her at once. “My God, this is the person from La Dolce Vita. Oh my God. That’s the woman walking up the staircase!”’ he exclaims. Not bothering to get a cup, the actress walked over to the table, ‘threw her head back’ and ‘poured a per­fect vodka-fall into her lips. And that was amazing. Showstopper. I wanted to go “Bravo!”, but she seemed terrifying,’ says Fields. Even in a room of fabulous, smart attendees, a ripple of interest started immediately. ‘People stood back. They made this ten-foot circle and asked, “Who is this woman?” Then it started to get around that she was the person in La Dolce Vita. She was very scary.’

Though intimidated, Fields struck up an instant rapport with the new arrival, bonding over a shared interest: cute guys. Almost immediately, Nico had her eye on a friend of Fields, ‘a lovely, beauti­ful, nineteen-­year-old Jewish twink from Brooklyn named Seymour Avigdor, who went on to play Divine’s lawyer in Female Trouble’. Undeterred, Nico ‘shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “So what?”’ says Fields. He told Avigdor, ‘Now Nico there wants to fuck you,’ to which the frightened man replied, ‘“I don’t know how to do it with a girl. What am I gonna do?” I said, “I don’t know, but she looks unstop­pable. She’s a movie star.” She got him. The first night I met her, she took my boyfriend. Hello?! So what am I supposed to say? Yeah, she really had good taste,’ Fields laughs. Throughout their friendship, he remembers men being scared off by Nico’s appearance. ‘She was so impressive to look at that boys feared her, mainly. Men, boys,’ says Fields. ‘But, of course, she liked cute boys too. So while they were being afraid of her not liking them, she was probably getting a crush on them. We’ve seen this happen so many times: “Oh, no, I can’t talk to her.” And then a few weeks later, they’d be, you know, lovers.’

A letter from Fields’s personal archive, written on 6 December 1963, reveals the impact she had on the young writer (as well as his secret ‘punch’ recipe). Though surrounded by fabulous people, it is Nico (or ‘Nikko’, as he types here) that is the standout personality from the party:

Our party was held in due course one week ago tonight. The apartment looked lovely; the kitchen finally was painted Euripides; much furniture was thrown out or left in my car, we set up a big table with a huge crystal punch bowl and punch cups, into which, before the thing was over, went 24 quarts of vodka and 24 quarts of grapefruit juice. We had been contemplating the most elaborate recipes, and were to have had a bartender, but he didn’t show up at the last minute, and I was not ready to spend the evening measuring out herbs and spices. There were about 100 people, including many girls, many marvellous girls, I should say. My celebrity was something called Nikko, a very tall, very beautiful German girl who played the fiancée of one of the sons of the manor in the ghost hunting scene in LA DV [La Dolce Vita]. Do you remember her? Also she’s the mother of Alain Delon’s son. She’s now hung up on Seymour, do you believe it, and is trying to seduce him or something – they spend a great deal of time together.

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Not long after attending what would later be referred to as Fields’s ‘Assassination Party’, Nico scored her first public performance as a singer. The Blue Angel, located in midtown Manhattan at 152 East 55th Street, made the actress audition for the gig. She later told people that she fainted with nerves right after the trial, waking up to find that she had been booked. An invitation card clearly states that Thursday 19 December 1963 was the opening night, featuring ‘the intimate songs of Nico during cocktail hour from 5–8pm and all drinks 85 cents; no minimum, no cover’.

At the start of 1964, Nico was still shuttling baby Ari around, either taking him with her to the various locations that modelling demanded or leaving him with an ever-worsening Grete in Ibiza. The added pressure of being a surrogate mother to her grandchild was taking a toll on the elder Päffgen. Years later, Ari recognized the layers of guilt, love, illness and isolation experienced by himself, his mother and his grandmother: ‘Parkinson’s disease and solitude seized [Grete’s] reason. The terrible situation was doubly desperate for my mother, but she had no choice but to leave me in [Grete’s] company to pursue her career.’ Nico needed to earn money for both Ari’s and Grete’s care, even though the situation was far from ideal for all. Grete was in no state to be on her own, without help, let alone looking after a baby. Nico would come back to Ibiza to find that Ari had been left to look after himself for hours on end, while Grete rattled with Parkinson’s disease, the house rancid with the stench of faeces and vomit. In his memoir, Ari describes in detail the perilous times he lived through in Ibiza with the severely ill Grete, whom he called ‘Omi’: ‘We were alone, Omi and me. I had to suffer the mental degradation, the aberrations and the paranoid phobias of my dear Omi, who became famous on the island for the scandals she provoked in front of the Montesol Hotel – she thought that everyone wanted to kill her … One day she shut me up in a room and threw away the key … I was terrorized.’

During one of Nico’s stints away from the island for work, Willy Maywald had been given the message from the island doc­tor that Grete needed to be admitted to a hospital immediately for treatment. Nico despaired as to who would look after her son while she earned money for the family. Maywald encouraged Nico to con­tact Alain Delon’s family and see if they would be willing to help with the child. From here it is unclear how exactly Ari’s paternal family members got involved in his life.

Delon’s mother, Edith Boulogne – she remarried after her hus­band, Alain’s father, passed away – has said in several interviews that she first found out about Ari’s existence through the media. In his book, Ari shares a letter that Edith wrote to her lawyers ‘eighteen years later’, in regard to what he calls ‘paternity proceedings’:

I learned of Ari’s existence through the press. At that time, he was two years old and lived in Ibiza with his maternal grandmother … [Nico] went to get Ari from Ibiza and took him back to Paris to one of her friends, Monsieur Maywald, where I had to meet him. I went with my husband, Paul Boulogne, and Ari immediately snuggled in his arms. By instinct and by his physical resemblance to my son, even in his tics, his expressions and his very little child’s morphology, I always felt that Ari was my grandson. I wrote it in the many letters that I sent to my son. He never answered unless it was through a lawyer, telling me not to take the child. This child was unbalanced, his mother had no life, and most of the time he lived with his maternal grandmother who had an incurable disease.

Another version of how the initial connection was forged between Ari and the Delon family is that Maywald rang Boulogne and arranged for the parties to meet up. Maywald always wanted to protect and help the Päffgens and was one of the few sources of consistency and support for both Nico and Ari. ‘At Maywald’s, we were with my family, my mother and I, for he was, for us both, to different degrees, a father,’ Ari writes. ‘After protecting and advis­ing my mother at the age of sixteen, he did the same for me from birth to death.’ In yet another take on the story, it is Pauledith Soubrier – Delon’s half-sister, whom Ari refers to as ‘Aunt Didi’ – who is tasked with retrieving Ari from the ill Grete in Ibiza: ‘I arrived and I was shocked,’ Soubrier recalled. ‘The boy was kept in a room, quite dark, and he was afraid, crouching like an animal. That’s what I remember most, that he was more like a little fright­ened animal than an eighteen-­month child. Nico’s mother would not let him go. She wouldn’t give me his entry papers, so I couldn’t take him. I had eventually to fly back to Paris empty-handed. My mother decided she must go there and take charge. I have to add that this was not easy for us, because we had to pay for our own travel. Nico never paid a penny.’

Though her son was one of the top actors in France, Edith had not received any of the spoils of his success. Maywald, upon first reaching out to Edith, was shocked that she ‘still worked for a liv­ing, at a little souvenir shop in the staid southern suburb of Bourg-la-Reine, near the Château de Sceaux’. While her finances may not have been in the best of health, Boulogne was determined to pro­vide Ari with a stable home. Perturbed at Didi’s aborted attempt to pick up Ari, she got in touch with Nico directly, somehow getting her to send the appropriate paperwork regarding Ari over to her:

With these papers, I went to the French Consul in Ibiza to explain what I was doing. Then I saw the doctor, to get a note that the grandmother [Grete] was not a fit guardian, as she was in hospital with Parkinson’s disease. I got another letter to enter France with Ari. What I did was kidnapping, lawful kidnapping!

My grandchild was so wonderful. Suddenly Nico turned up and asked to ‘borrow’ Ari so she could take him to London. Well, she was the mother. They flew to London. But three days later Nico phoned me, ‘Please come and take Ari back.’ Now I had to go to London to collect him. She never asked me if I had enough money for these journeys. I went to London, stayed a couple of days and brought him back to Paris – for the last time, I hoped. But there’s never a last time where Nico’s concerned.

Ari recalls a different scenario: having a German passport, he had to hide in the air-dock toilets to avoid detection by customs offi­cials. ‘The adventure was all about a kidnapping,’ Ari writes. He never saw Grete, his Omi, again.32

So began the back and forth Ari would experience between Nico and Edith Boulogne. Nico would come and take Ari on work assignments with her, then drop him back off for long periods in Paris with the Boulognes. Even his name was in flux, Aunt Helma noting that ‘He was christened Ari, but later Delon’s mother had that changed. She said, “What is that name – Ari?” Then his name was Christian Aaron.’

‘Before we took him, she [Nico] dragged him around everywhere. He ate nothing but French fries, in train stations, hotels, airports … they lived like bohemians,’ Edith recalled. In the interview with Twen, it seemed that Nico had finally put Ari’s well-being above her own desire to have him when it was convenient for her, accepting that a home with Edith may be best for her son.

Edith ‘truly believed’ that her son would accept Ari. ‘She took over the kid. She wanted to adopt him. She believed it was her son, Alain Delon, that it’s his kid,’ Crocker recounts. Aunt Helma confirmed this but added that if Nico allowed the adoption to go through, she would not be able to see Ari: ‘She [Edith] said to Christa, “I will adopt your son and you will not have access to your child.”’ Delon wanted nothing to do with Ari or, in fact, his own mother, if she continued to be involved with the young child’s life. ‘When he heard about it, two years after we had taken the baby, he had his agent tell me by telephone that I had to choose between the baby and my son,’ Boulogne said. ‘My husband said, “Your son can feed himself, but Ari can’t raise himself.” So we kept him. Think about it, he was so little.’