Chapter 21 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

There are two different versions of the circumstances that brought Nico and Jim Morrison together. Morrison had already seen the chanteuse perform with the Velvets at their 1966 show at the Trip, though they did not connect properly until the following year. Morrison’s Doors bandmate, drummer John Densmore, thought that it was in March 1967 when the duo first met. The band was in New York and, like Jackson Browne, could not help but notice the twenty-foot-high Nico posters pasted up all over Manhattan. Densmore’s memory of the first time he observed the German beauty in the company of Morrison is very clear. He recalled, ‘We were staying at the dumpy Great Northern Hotel on 57th Street. Convenient location, but the place smelled of old people. I was rooming right next to Jim, which turned out to be better than TV. Not that I was the drinking-glass-to-the-wall type, but the racket that was coming from next door one night was hard to miss. Jim brought Nico, the Velvet Underground’s famous German vamp, back to his hotel room, and I’d never heard such crashing around. It sounded as if they were beating the shit out of each other. I was worried but never dared to ask what happened. Nico looked okay the next day, so I let it slide.’

A similar tale about Nico and Morrison’s amour came from Aaron Sixx, who would go on to put out Nico’s much-disputed Drama of Exile LP in 1981: ‘I once heard a story from Bill Siddons, the Doors’ manager. He told me that Nico went back to Jim’s place, and they spent the entire night drinking and drugging and probably having sex, and the next morning Jim was just totally flat out, basic­ally dead to the world – and Nico was ready for more … The story this guy told was that the only person who could outdo Morrison was Nico!’32

Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboard player, gave an incredibly salacious account of his memories of his band’s lead singer and the German blonde. He described the relationship between the two icons as Nico going ‘gaga’ for Morrison and knowing how to ‘push his [Morrison’s] buttons’, which he claimed she did ‘at every oppor­tunity, in a deep and Germanic-accented voice’. In his memoir, Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors, he recounts a very graphic encounter between Morrison and Nico. He portrays Nico as equal­ling Morrison in excess, egging him on to keep up with her: ‘“I’m going to take another von. Vhat’s the matter, Jeem, are you afraid?” the Valkyrie would say to the California Dionysus, who would always respond to the challenge. “Afraid? Shit, I’ll take two!” “Jeem, you are crazy. That’s why I loff you.” And they would retire to a silver-foiled room for more. More of everything. More drink, more pills, more sex.’

The ‘silver-foiled room’ he refers to is Warhol’s Factory. Danny Fields, a frequent visitor there, was stunned by the assertion that any kind of sex would have taken place in this space, as described by Manzarek. ‘It just wasn’t that sort of vibe,’ he told me. Regardless, Manzarek provided a detailed narrative of Nico pleasuring Morrison: ‘Evidently, she gave great head, understanding the proper use of the tongue on the underside of the penis, especially that supersensitive area at the base of the head where that small crease attaches to the shaft, that crease that when lightly licked and flicked with a moist, soft tongue produces shudders of ecstasy in the male of the species. And she wasn’t ashamed to do it. To bring her man to climax and not remove his penis from her mouth. To hold it close and take it in even deeper at his moment of consummation. To not deny him the warmth and moisture of her mouth as he ejaculated. To swallow his semen and wait for his member to soften and recede back into itself. Only then would she take her lips away, look up at Jim, and smile … “Did that please you, Jeem?” Jim could only nod in pleasure, being speechless at the intensity of his ejaculation.’

Besides framing Nico firmly as a sexual object, Manzarek’s account (if true) illustrates not only her desire to please, but, by 1967, her desire for obliteration, which became more apparent as the year went on.

The more well-known account of how the two icons first met places the timeline as June or July 1967. The Monterey Pop Festival over, Nico decided to go back to a former haunt: the Castle in Los Angeles. It was here that Danny Fields decided to play cupid. Fields was working at Elektra Records at the time and had been charged with looking after the hot new band on the label’s roster: the Doors. The band had released their breakthrough hit, ‘Light My Fire’, in June, and had already been no. 1 on the charts for three weeks, making the band’s lead singer, Morrison, an immediate heart-throb. His chiselled cheekbones, tangled mane of brown curls and  sinewy body, perfectly showcased in leather pants (perhaps inspired by Gerard Malanga the year before), made him lust-worthy far and wide. He was not averse to taking full advantage of his exalted pos­ition, and soon became well known for his voracious sexual appe­tite. However, it appeared that quantity may have been of more value than quality, as Fields was not impressed with the women he saw flocking around the frontman: ‘I saw them [the Doors] perform in San Francisco, it was very jolly. I went backstage – I was horri­fied! There were all these groupie things … dirty girls. Just rags and dirt and things falling off them, and too much eye make-up and a dopey, glazed look. I was concerned that this was bad for his image. What if a photographer got this? They’re [rock stars] always supposed to be alone. Alone is sexy. You’re never supposed to see them with a girl … I had a little electric light bulb in my head. I said, “Say, Jim, I’m staying with Edie Sedgwick and Nico, up in the hills.” I thought I would bring him up there, and then he would fall in love with Nico, and then he would see the error of his ways in let­ting all these slimy little groupies … and he would never settle for a woman less beautiful or mystical or exotic as Nico. And since there were not too many, then he would never have too many girlfriends, and my plot would be on its way.’

Fields did not hold Morrison in the highest esteem, however. ‘Jim Morrison was a callous asshole, an abusive, mean person … I think Morrison’s magic and power went beyond the quality of his versifying. He was bigger than that. He was sexier than his poetry – more mysterious … more difficult, more charismatic as a per­former. There has got to be a reason why women like Nico … fell so deeply in love with him, because he was essentially an abusive man to women. But it sure wasn’t his poetry. I’ve got to tell you, it wasn’t his poetry. He had a big dick. That was probably it. The ultimate rock star is a child. How can you not be spoiled by everything’s that’s going to come along? For most rock stars, what’s in store for them, realistically, is a lot of spoilage, denting and banging around exploitation, being used up, and ruination.’

Fields had also taken up residence at the Castle, the ‘strange haunted house in the Hollywood Hills, all overgrown, with a mossy pool high on a hilltop … It was this two-story house, owned by some old Hollywood queen who rented it out to rock bands. Everyone had stayed there – Dylan, the Jefferson Airplane, the Velvets. The owner would rent it out to rock & roll bands because it was in such a state of ruin that it didn’t really matter what happened to it,’ he further described in Please Kill Me.

Fields recalled what happened when he and Morrison arrived at the Castle: ‘We finally got up to the house and Nico was standing in the doorway. He just looked at her, and she looked at him, and then they both cast their glances downward. They stared at some imagin­ary spot on the floor in between them.

‘I tried to start a little chataroonie, I saw this was going nowhere. This was some kind of thing they were acting out. I came back about an hour later; they were still in the exact same positions, they hadn’t moved … they hadn’t said anything. This was their way of acknowledging, “You’re a beautiful, special person,” I suppose.’

Finally, after an indeterminate amount of time, as Fields recounted, ‘Nico and Edie fled to their bedrooms to hide, giggling and taking drugs. He [Morrison] started taking drugs as well and just downing quarts of vodka. Nico had stolen all my stash of pills, downers and amphetamines, but somehow I had managed to save the pot, the hash and the acid, so Jim and I sat up and he took all that. I thought, “Uh-oh, he’s going to get so drunk he’s going to get in that car and drive off the cliff and I’m going to get fired,” so I snuck down to his car and hid the keys and he kept trying to search me. He didn’t find them.’

The evening wore on, with Morrison imbibing heavily of Fields’s remaining supplies. ‘We started smoking a lot of hash. I started making a major speech to him about “I have these things in mind for you, and life is a roller coaster, and stardom is a trip and …” I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just sounding like every movie I had ever seen about what’s in store and how to play the game,’ Fields recalled. ‘He would just open his palm about every five min­utes and ask for another drug. Incredible amount of hash. About six hits of orange sunshine … I was scared! I thought he was going to die! I had never seen …! I mean, this was enough drugs for me and everybody I met in two weeks in California! I kept giving stuff to him. He wouldn’t answer … “What do you think about that flight of brilliance, Jim?” He would say, “Got any more acid, man?”’

Fields eventually fell asleep, only to be awoken by the sound of Nico sobbing. Rushing to his window, he saw ‘Jim and Nico standing there under the full moon in the courtyard. Jim was pull­ing Nico’s hair and she was screaming. He never said anything. He just kept pulling her hair. Suddenly he ran into the house and left Nico weeping in her deep voice. Next thing I know, Morrison is completely naked, walking along the edge of the crenelated roof. Nico came flying into my room crying, “He’s going to kill me!” I said, “He’s not going to kill anyone. Leave me alone, I’m trying to sleep.” The view of the courtyard was like the cover of some Gothic bodice-ripper.’

Unlike her former beaus, Morrison encouraged Nico to pursue writing her own music, for the first time giving her confidence that she could create her own material. ‘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. I had his authority,’ Nico con­fided. She must have been shocked that at last she had found a man who valued her intellect as much as her appearance. ‘He was the first man I was in love with, because he was affectionate to my looks and my mind,’ Nico later remarked of the frontman. ‘He told me to write songs. I never thought that I could, because when you come out of the fashion business – I did flimsy sort of writing, not systematical … He really inspired me a lot … It was like looking in a mirror.’ Nico worried that she was not capable of composing anything with structure. To alleviate this concern, Morrison sug­gested that Nico begin writing down her dreams and start reading some of his favourite classic works, by the likes of Céline, Blake and Coleridge. Not long after, Nico composed her first song, ‘Lawns of Dawns’, inspired by that initial night with Morrison at the Castle.33 ‘That’s what I think started her on the road to writing,’ John Cale asserted. ‘Jim Morrison … showed her that poetry and music and all that could really dominate your life. She became single-minded about it … I got the sense that she decided she was going to do it.’

Morrison unleashed in Nico a self-possession that allowed her to step into a role that previously she may have been too afraid to even dream of: that of writer and musician. He also introduced her to his own ideals of artistic creativity, cobbled together from his personal obsessions with classic literature, Native American cul­ture and the spiritual abyss. He and Nico would drive, alone, from Los Angeles into the outlying desert. Part of this ritual included gathering peyote buttons from cacti. ‘Peyote was a spiritual drug,’ said Nico. ‘We were in the middle of the desert and everything was natural, you know, in the open air, nature all around, not a hotel room or a bar. And the cactus was natural. You did not buy it from somebody on a street corner.’

The two ingested the harvested buttons, allowing Nico to experi­ence at first hand visions that Morrison argued were similar to those encountered by some of the literary heroes he had intro­duced Nico to. ‘We had visions in the desert,’ she remembered. ‘It is like William Blake; he would see visions like Blake did, angels in trees, he would see these, and so would I. And Jim showed me that this is what a poet does. A poet sees visions and records them. He said that there were more poets in Comanches than there were in bookstores. The Comanches took the cactus, too. We were like the Indians who lived in this way for thousands of years, before the Christians and as long as the Jews.’ It was this, the near democ­ratization of writing and poetry, and the man who was opening this realm of possibility to her – not the actual peyote trip – that allowed Nico to fully embrace her own potential as a writer, making writing something that even those lacking a ‘traditional’ education could pursue and excel at. ‘Everything was open to us; there were no rules,’ Nico later remarked in an interview. However, this caused inherent problems within the union. ‘We had a too-big appetite. But we took too much drink and too many drugs to make it, that was our difficulty.’ After years of diet pills and spending time in the amphetamine-fuelled Factory, Nico was already familiar with drugs, but Morrison used them differently, letting them inform and guide much of his creative process. ‘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,’ she rationalized to a journalist.

There was unquestionably a physical as well as a mental connection between Morrison and Nico; however, the intellectual reciprocity made the relationship different, more impactful and unique than any others Nico had had. During their desert adventures, they cut their thumbs with a knife, intermingling the blood. For Nico, this symbolized a different, more lasting bond than any before, and was surely a sign that Morrison felt similarly about her. In a 1985 art­icle quoted in the Witts biography, Nico described her time with Morrison in unprecedented detail, saying, ‘I like my relations to be physical and of the psyche. We hit each other because we were drunk and we enjoyed the sensation. We made love in a gentle way, do you know? I thought of Jim Morrison as my brother, so we would grow together. We still do, because he is my soul brother. We exchanged blood. I carry his blood inside me. We had spiritual journeys together.’ Of the intimate moments she shared with her famous lovers, Nico coyly told a writer in the 1980s: ‘Jim Morrison had the best sex I ever had inside me … Jim was more involved in his dreams. He liked to sleep and to find visions, because there were private things he showed me. I think Brian [Jones] was more of a musician than a composer, and Jim was more of a poet.’

The two continued their affair throughout the summer of 1967, but though Nico had finally met her match, they slowly drifted apart as the autumn months rolled on, with Morrison eventually returning to his long-time partner, Pamela Courson. Their romantic relationship may have been short-lived, but her time with Morrison had an indelible impact on Nico. Through the frontman, she finally found the courage to write and not be dependent on other people for her lyrics.

Though their torrid romance had ended, the Doors singer’s influ­ence over Nico was profound and long-lasting. Warhol Superstar Viva recalled how months, even years later, ‘She [Nico] was obsessed with Jim Morrison … Carrying around this photograph of Jim Morrison, with a vigil light … A little candle she’d light in front of it, at night before she went to bed. She practically did prayers to Jim Morrison [even though] he was still alive then.’ She dyed her hair red, as he had a fetish for redheads, and told writers that she wanted to record the Doors’ song ‘You’re Lost Little Girl’. For the rest of her life, she would credit Morrison as being the one person who truly knew and understood her.