Chapter 15 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

On 6 February 1966, the Delmonico Hotel was hosting the annual dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. In an attempt to add a hipness factor to the proceedings, Dr Robert Campbell, the chairman of the dinner and director of the psychi­atric unit at St Vincent’s Hospital, invited Andy Warhol to speak after the meal. In POPism, Warhol explained how the historic event came to fruition: ‘I told him I’d be glad to “speak,” if I could do it through movies, that I’d show Harlot7 and Henry Geldzahler,8 and he said fine. Then when I met the Velvets I decided that I wanted to “speak” with them instead, and he said fine to that, too.’

The dinner was not meant to be a serious undertaking or prem­iere. It was more a dry run, to see how far the freaky Factory entou­rage could push the proverbial envelope before an audience of ‘straights’. ‘The psych convention started out as a con,’ remembered Billy Name. ‘We were mingling with them as they arrived, but it was more as if Edie Sedgwick’s aunt had thrown a big party. We would naturally talk to everybody, but not like they were guests, more like they were Edie’s relatives.’ Little did the attendees antici­pate the mayhem that broke out the second their main course was set in front of them: this was the Factory entourage’s signal to begin the real entertainment.

Like most things in her life, Nico’s live debut with the Velvets was unusual. As soon as the dinner plates had been set down, ‘The Velvets started to blast, and Nico started to wail … Over roast beef,’ reported Superstar Ultra Violet, going on to say that ‘the doctors are bombarded by the decibels of three fire engines and blinded by stun-gun lights … Four Freudians and one Jungian walk out needing first aid for their eyes and ears. One Fifth Avenue practi­tioner regurgitates his roast beef, and several analysts are hard mak­ing appointments with each other for the next day.’ Not to be left out, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick joined in the cacophony, jumping up on the stage, Malanga swinging his whip and Sedgwick shaking her butt. Behind the band, a film was being shown – a high-contrast black-and-white movie of a man tied to a chair being tortured. Just as the bewildered doctors were coming to their senses, Factory member Barbara Rubin and director Jonas Mekas crashed through the banquet doors. Armed with bright lights and cam­eras, the two young cinematographers rushed over to the startled psychiatrists, screaming in their faces, ‘What does her vagina feel like?’ ‘Is his penis big enough?’ ‘Do you eat her out? Why are you getting embarrassed? You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed!’9 The unsuspecting audience had mixed reactions to the stunning exhibition. Maureen Tucker remembered, ‘Those people were flabbergasted. I just sort of sat back and said, “What the hell are we doing here?” Then I realized that maybe the shrinks thought they’d take notes or something … two hundred psychiatrists and us, these freaks from the Factory.’

If the objective for the event was to create more publicity for the Factory, Warhol and the new group, it was a success. ‘The press played it like it was ironic confrontation, which it wasn’t at all,’ Billy Name later claimed. ‘We didn’t shock anybody. Psychiatrists may be stiff, but they all have a sense of humor, and they’re all intelligent.’ The following day, there were long write-ups about the banquet in both the Herald Tribune and the New York Times, the headlines declaring, ‘Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists’ and ‘Syndromes Pop at Delmonico’s’.

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The Delmonico gig marked not only a coming-out for Nico as the new focal point of the Velvet Underground, but the ejection of for­mer Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick from the Factory’s inner sanctum. At the psychiatrists’ convention, Sedgwick’s attempt to sing along to the Velvets was less than exceptional. ‘It was obvious she didn’t have a voice,’ Malanga later told Warhol. Though Warhol claimed that ‘Gerard had noticed how lost Edie looked at that psychiatrists’ ban­quet,’ he himself did not, later commenting, ‘I can’t really say that I noticed.’ In his mind, Edie was the old. The Velvets – in particular, Nico – were the new.

In Nico, Warhol saw possibility. He immediately christened her his latest Superstar and placed upon her the title of Miss Pop 1966. She was quickly positioned as the front person of the group, becoming, according to Warhol, the ‘Mick Jagger of the Velvet Underground, while Lou took the humbler Keith Richards role’, though the German obviously displayed a reserved restraint not familiar to the Rolling Stones’ singer. These accolades were well deserved, Warhol believed, for Nico represented the next era of not only the Factory, but culture in general. ‘She was a new type of female superstar,’ said the artist. ‘Edie [was] outgoing, American, social, bright, excited, chatty – whereas Nico was weird and untalk­ative. You’d ask her something and she’d maybe answer you five minutes later. When people described her, they used words like memento mori and macabre. She wasn’t the type to get up on a table and dance, the way Edie might; in fact, she’d rather hide under the table than dance on top of it. She was mysterious and European, a real moon goddess type.’

There was a certain kind of person who seemed to be attracted to the Warhol dazzle. And no matter how fast one ascended into his inner circle, the descent was almost always as instant and as devas­tating, because, as biographer Steve Watson wrote, ‘in Warhol’s ver­sion of stardom, beauty and glamour were inextricably linked with its demise’. The year before, former Superstar Ondine had summed up the Warhol phenomenon perfectly, commenting, ‘Divinity, star, what’s the next category? After a star is what. Has-been.’

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Performance artist and film-maker Barbara Rubin had originally come up with the concept and name of Andy Warhol, Up-Tight, the idea being that the actions of the Factory crew at events made people feel incredibly uncomfortable – or uptight. Soon after being christened with the updated name, the Warhol group was on the lookout for a space to showcase the venture. Mekas’s Cinematheque was a small movie house, specializing in experimental films, making it an ideal venue for Andy Warhol, Up-Tight’s public debut.

The evening kicked off with a screening of Lupe, the second-to-last project that Warhol and Sedgwick worked on together.10 The Velvet Underground and Nico followed, walking onto the stage and tuning their instruments in the dark. Behind them, Lupe was replaced with Vinyl, Warhol’s version of A Clockwork Orange. Close-ups of Nico singing her Bob Dylan track, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’, were superimposed over the top. Her own image flickering behind her, Nico picked up the song from her screen image, and the rest of the group joined in. She was dressed in a white pantsuit, which contrasted with the head-to-toe black attire of the other musicians on stage. As the band launched into ‘Venus in Furs’, Malanga and Sedgwick hopped onto the stage and began free-form dancing. The Nico movies were replaced by reels shot the previous month at the Factory, titled The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound. With the two films – Vinyl and A Symphony of Sound – playing side by side as a visual backdrop for the stage, photographer Nat Finkelstein roamed through the audience, snapping images of unsuspecting people. Meanwhile, Rubin repeated her abrasive con­frontations with the gathered fans, rushing up to them as she had at the psychiatrists’ convention, screaming into startled faces. As the band’s set progressed, the dancing, the unsettling visuals and other jarring elements continued. It came to a crescendo when Malanga, using a lead pencil, mimed injecting heroin.

The next day, Warhol and the Velvets were featured in a segment on the New York public television station WNET, in which they invited the public at large to come and experience the spectacle. Announcing his new venture, the artist proclaimed, ‘We’re sponsor­ing a new band. It’s called the Velvet Underground … since I don’t really believe in painting anymore. We have this chance to combine music and art and films all together. We’re sort of working on that. The whole thing’s being auditioned tomorrow at nine o’clock. If it works out, it might be very glamorous.’

Andy Warhol, Up-Tight ran from 8 to 13 February 1966 at the Cinematheque. Everyone involved was pleased with it, except Nico. Given only two songs to sing, she was relegated to simply standing on stage, shaking a tambourine and looking off into a distant hori­zon. This turn of events did not sit well with her. Hoping to at last be fronting a group, she felt like she had barely changed roles from the fashion world she wanted to leave behind. In some ways, the part of chanteuse was just another modelling job, her contributions valued only for their visual, not creative, content, her performance as posed and inorganic as any fashion spread.

Further insult was heaped on an already distraught Nico when she saw the advertisement for the gigs. Hoping to be at the top of the listing, instead she found herself near the bottom of what was essentially a Factory roll call, lower down even than the band she believed she was to be fronting:

ANDY WARHOL, UP-TIGHT presents live THE VELVET UNDERGROUND EDIE SEDGWICK GERARD MALANGA DONALD LYONS BARBARA RUBIN BOB NEUWIRTH PAUL MORRISSEY NICO DANIEL WILLIAMS BILLY LINICH

‘My name was somewhere near the bottom, I remember, and I cried,’ Nico said. This was not helped by the continued stick­ing point of her wanting to include the Dylan song in the set, an idea the other band members found abhorrent. They wanted no possibility of any comparison between themselves and the folk star. ‘When Nico kept insisting that we work up “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” for a long time we simply refused,’ remembered Sterling Morrison. ‘Then we took a long time to learn it (as long as we could take). After that, even though we knew the song, we insisted that we were unable to play it. When we finally did have a go at it on stage, it was performed poorly. We never got any better at it either, for some reason.’ Instead of the Velvets performing the song with her, Nico was forced to use the vinyl copy of the cut as her backing track. ‘They played the record of Bob Dylan’s song “I’ll Keep It with Mine” because I didn’t have enough to sing other­wise,’ she said. ‘Lou wanted to sing everything. I had to stand there and sing along with it. I had to do this every night for a week.’ Feeling deflated, she called the shows ‘the most stupid concert[s] I have ever done’.

Attempting to placate his newest Superstar, Andy instructed Nico ‘not to care’ about the perceived shortcomings of the new situ­ation as it was ‘only a rehearsal’. He told the singer that there were bigger things coming up in the near future, an opportunity at last for Nico’s vocal abilities to be showcased without her looks distracting from the music.

However, another member of the Factory inner sanctum was also disgruntled by the Cinematheque run. Thinking that the week was going to be a celebration of her film collaborations with Warhol, Edie Sedgwick was sorely disappointed to be just one small portion of a larger exhibition. Contributing musically to the Velvets was unsuccessful for her, with Nico noting that ‘Edie Sedgwick tried to sing along, but she couldn’t do it.’ Edie, like Nico, was also disappointed and unclear as to how she fitted into the Velvet Underground’s actual stage show. ‘Edie began asking Andy, “What’s my place with the Velvets? I’m broke. I have no money. Why am I not getting paid?”’ said Malanga. ‘And he said, “You gotta be patient.” Edie said, “I can’t be patient. I just have nothing to live on.”’

Edie’s displeasure at her demoted status was immediately evi­dent. After the mention of working with Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, and what she felt was a slight at the Cinematheque shows, Edie began to distance herself further from Warhol. ‘She told Andy that she had signed a contract with Bob Dylan’s11 manager Albert Grossman and he’d said she shouldn’t see Andy so much because the publicity that came out of it wasn’t good and she didn’t want him to show her films anymore,’ Malanga remembered. However, Edie’s hopes in Grossman for professional advancement and the folk star for romantic stability were quickly crushed. The same day that she revealed her plans to him, Warhol heard that Dylan had been secretly married for months to Sara Lownds. ‘Andy couldn’t resist asking, “Did you know, Edie, that Bob Dylan has gotten married?”’ remembered Malanga. Edie’s reaction was immediate. ‘She was trembling. They realized that she really thought of her­self as entering a relationship with Dylan, that maybe he hadn’t been truthful,’ concluded Malanga. After receiving this devastating news, Sedgwick excused herself and made a call – most likely to Dylan. Upon returning to the group, she announced that she was leaving the Factory for good. ‘She left and everybody was kind of quiet. It was stormy and dramatic. Edie disappeared and that was the end of it. She never came back,’ said Malanga.12 Nico, reflect­ing on the shows, added, ‘It was Edie’s farewell and my premiere at the same time.’