Chapter 23 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Nico was no stranger to drugs before joining the Velvet Underground. As a model, she had often used diet pills to curb her appetite and help maintain a svelte figure. ‘She used to say how there used to be lots of speed, lots of amphetamine to keep them [the models] thin; they were always handing that out,’ says biog­rapher and musical collaborator James Young.

I met Young in Oxford, where he greeted me at the train station. With his trim frame and sparkling eyes, it was easy to see why Nico wrote in her diary that he ‘looked good’. ‘They’d pretend, these agencies, that they don’t do such things,’ he tells me. ‘But she said, “I really got into drugs then. I got into drugs without realising I was getting into drugs.” You just thought that’s part of what you did. Like you take vitamin pills – that’s what keeps you thin. It didn’t have the stigma that getting into heroin would have, but neverthe­less it’s an addictive thing.’

Lou Reed knew of this affinity and, according to some, used it to gain power over a singer whom he felt threatened by. ‘Nico was into drugs way back into the 1960s,’ Victor Bockris tells me. ‘Lou knew that she really liked amphetamine, so he would just play with her. It was his way of controlling and reducing her.’

Drugs allowed for a sense of release, and in the 1960s the long-term impact of using them was not well known by many. ‘Most people self-medicate,’ Vincent Fremont says. ‘Lou was on drugs at one point and cleaned up. John Cale was taking a lot of coke; it was considered a recreational drug until we saw what damage it did.’ Nico’s friend and co-star Tina Aumont stresses this in Nico: Icon, saying, ‘Show me one person who doesn’t have problems with alcohol or with drugs and is happy and creative. That’s very rare.’

Legions of examples illustrate the unquestionable mythology of drugs and art, one that goes well beyond Nico. ‘I guess artists have always had an affinity for substances which could alter the way they thought or responded. I suppose it has a valid creative context. Some drugs provide energy when it is needed to people who are working extremely hard and long hours,’ said Danny Fields in a 1974 inter­view. ‘Some drugs provide a sedative effect on people who are in the public eye, constantly nervous and may or may not be insecure in the first place.’ Yet Fields also points out that the music industry is really a reflection of culture as a whole, noting, ‘As there is in our society, there is in this industry.’

‘Some of the most well-known jazz musicians were well known to be heroin addicts. At the time, there was a certain romanticizing of heroin use and the whole ritual of scoring, going and buying the heroin, injecting it and so forth. It was almost like a religious ritual among these people who did that,’ Bockris told me. ‘Nico’s use of junk was the way many musicians also used it, as a way to keep working through the pain that comes about by being in that profession, which either rewards you ridiculously or punishes you ridiculously if you don’t succeed.’

Yet the shadow of addiction has been cast over Nico in a manner not often experienced by her contemporaries. The double standard applied by popular culture to male and female drug users cannot be overstated. For many male addicts, substance abuse is simply part of the expected artistic package and can even lend them a level of cred­ibility. A lot of the men Nico surrounded herself with all, at one time or another, either dabbled or were hooked on opiates, yet their music and artistry, not their substance abuse issues, are in the foreground of their mythology. For women, such issues become part and parcel of their overall public persona, in a way not often experienced by their male counterparts. The label of ‘junkie’ sticks to women, whereas it often seems to bounce off men. This may be simple societal mis­ogyny; as Una Baines says, ‘She [Nico] just fits into those fears that men have of women who are outside of the norm.’

Musician and performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, best known for her time in the avant-garde group Throbbing Gristle, calls atten­tion to this idea when we connect on the phone. ‘People tend to look at male musicians or artists when they’re drug addicts [and think] that’s part of their creative streak, putting them on a bloody pedestal, no matter how shit they are to everyone else,’ she says. ‘I don’t think they offer that to women in that situation. I think with Nico being a woman amongst all those people back then, there’s a tendency to think of her as piggybacking. You know, that old “Oh, the girlfriend of …” And she’s sort of dressing the scenes for Warhol, which she did! He took her in on that. I think she was probably aware of that to some extent, but as a model that’s your job. You’re decorative. You do as you’re told. You join the thing and you are part of it. That would have been just a natural thing for her anyway – a scene that she fitted in completely, rather than the modelling scene.’

‘Nico’s slide into heroin would have come through hanging out with Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and all those people that she would have hung out with at the Castle in Los Angeles in ’67. She def­initely was not into heroin at the Factory,’ Bockris asserts. Her past lover Robert King disagrees, saying ‘it was the Velvet Underground’ that introduced her to the drug. However it happened, Nico’s fall from recreational user into addiction was a ‘quick turn’, according to her long-time friend Clive Crocker. ‘I remember she used to come back to Europe. She had started on heavy drugs, and I had nothing to do with it. I tried to dissuade her, but she was into heroin … I know who put her onto it. She came back and told me who was the first person, but I can’t tell you that name because he’s still alive.’ Many of the criticisms lobbed at Nico post-Velvets, while she was in the throes of addiction, are directly linked to common behavioural changes exhibited in users, not to traits unique to Nico.39 Yet this is never considered in articles about her. Similarly, it is rare to see such behaviours held against male addicts.

Nico’s son Ari thinks there is a correlation between him going to live permanently with the Delon family and his mother’s depend­ency. ‘She started to take more drugs because of this adoption thing,’ he says. ‘That made her very sad. “Child’s thief” – that’s how she called my grandmother. It’s like her soul had been stabbed.’

Nico’s contributions to twentieth-century music have often been ignored and overlooked, ‘obscured for years by the blanket of drug accusations’, though ‘she was a major figure’, says Bockris. ‘Nico was a very generous person,’ he continues. ‘It’s important to under­stand that “junkies” are not necessarily bad people, they are not necessarily fucked-up. People say, “Oh, she was a junkie,” and that takes care of that. That doesn’t take care of that! The fact she is a junkie is secondary. It is not the number-one thing to describe her as. She’s an artist, from the time she first emerges.’

Heroin may have offered Nico a temporary escape from the expectations of others as well as relief from yet another persona she had created in an attempt to dramatically overhaul her image. Her switch of musical styles, from folky Chelsea Girl to creator of her own music, came with an equally dramatic shift in her appearance. Gone were the eyebrow-skimming bangs and the multiple pairs of fake eyelashes adorning heavily lined lids. Her blonde mane was replaced by red locks that progressed to flowing brown hair. Floaty black – always black – capes and robes in weighty fabrics replaced tailored white suits. Heavy boots replaced flimsy knee-high pumps. ‘It was almost a burden to be so beautiful … She was a very serious person and wanted to be recognized as a poet and songwriter,’ said Fields. ‘Everything was turbulent about her, starting with the bombs during her childhood. You can hear it in the words of her songs. It’s a mythical thing that I think we are going to be trying to explain for a long time. She was terrifying in her austere beauty, which she didn’t want. She really was girlish, in a nice way. She just liked to laugh.’ In another interview, Fields provides a further illustration of the complicated layers behind the facade: ‘In her photographs, she looks glacially beautiful but unapproachable. She was really very shy, which can frequently be mistaken for disdain, arrogance, lack of interest or inhumanity. It is one of the consequences of being shy. You don’t expect that. There was Nico, the persona, and then there was Christa Päffgen – but nobody called her Christa Päffgen. She was easily hurt, easily wounded, very sensitive.’

John Cale underscores this, noting in the 2018 radio docu­mentary Being Nico, ‘Nico arrived in the Factory as a dazzling, blonde beauty. She didn’t like what had happened to her or how she’d gotten to La Dolce Vita and all that. She just felt that nobody took her seriously as a person and certainly as a woman … She came into the Factory a blonde goddess and left to become a ­hennaed, dark-haired, dressed-in-black musician/songwriter. This is a lady who really did not end up liking herself very much. There’s a lot of fear and loathing, and that comes through. Everything she did was part of this statement that now she was a different person.’ Whether completely inspired by her liaison with Jim Morrison, revealing a long ignored or untapped aesthetic, or simply play­ing up to the new moniker of moon goddess, Nico seemed to fully embrace the crepuscular mantle. However, she was in need of somewhere new to stay. The constant organ-playing and candle-lighting had become too much for Viva, who had kicked Nico out after a heated argument. Shelter came via a new face at the Factory: Fred Hughes.

Hughes had become Warhol’s business manager, running the art side of Warhol’s empire, while Paul Morrissey looked after the film-making enterprises. Tired of the catty, drug-infused, silver-­walled Factory, the duo closed down the original studio, opening a new Warhol home base on a floor of an office block located at 33 Union Square West. Hughes leased an apartment on East 16th Street, opposite the new Factory. It was here that Nico found sanc­tuary after the blow-up with Viva. It was a mutually beneficial set-up, as Hughes provided the perfect environment to encourage the songstress. ‘Fred doted on eccentrics … And the more peculi­arities Nico indulged in, the more fascinated Fred became – to find a woman that beautiful and that eccentric was a fantasy come true for him,’ said Warhol. One such ‘peculiarity’ was Nico’s affinity for the bathtub in Hughes’s house. Though she had a lifelong aversion to water, the tub at East 16th Street held a particular allure for the singer, providing her with unprecedented inspiration. Warhol recalled how Nico ‘liked to lie in the bathtub all night with candles burning around her, composing the songs that would be on her second album, The Marble Index, and when Fred came home from Max’s [nightclub] really late, she’d still be in the water.’ Another of Nico’s peccadillos that emerged during her stay with Hughes was the attraction to candles, especially in lieu of electrical lighting. ‘Nico was a true specimen: among other things, she thrived only in the gloom – the gloomier she could make the atmosphere around her, the more radiant she became,’ noted Warhol in POPism. ‘Fred was back and forth to Europe a lot. When he arrived back at the apartment one night with all his suitcases, he stumbled into the living room and found that he couldn’t switch the lights on. He saw a candle flickering in another room around a corner, and then Nico walked in holding a candelabra. “Oh, Nico! I’m so sorry!” he said, suddenly realizing that Con Edison must have turned off the electricity. “I just remembered I forgot to pay the light bill, and here you’ve been in the dark all this time!” “Nooooo, it’s fiiiiine,” she said, positively beaming with joy. She’d had the happiest time of her whole life, drifting around there in the dark for a whole month.’

These idiosyncrasies became cemented in Nico’s mythology. Appearing in Eye magazine, an article later in the year titled ‘On the Eve of Destruction, What Was Andy Warhol’s Gang Up To?’ also helped to bolster Nico’s vampire-like lifestyle. The exposé featured a behind-closed-doors look at the Hughes/Nico household, ­stating, ‘Nico sleeps or stays sequestered all day (sometimes playing the organ), then goes out to Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant hangout for representatives from art, fashion, and movie worlds, until the wee hours. When she returns, according to Freddy, she climbs – fully clothed – into the empty bathtub where she sits all night compos­ing songs … Meanwhile, Freddy stumbles, bleary-eyed, into the bathroom and is always surprised to find Nico sitting in the tub.’ Though barely a year had passed since her debut on stage as the Velvets’ blonde bombshell, the press had already embraced Nico’s radical change.

*

Nico had been practising the harmonium constantly, spending her days focused on writing lyrics and mastering the instrument. Though few people seemed to understand her new direction, the ones that did were impressed. ‘The next phase of Nico was the real Nico. She was doing her own songs and she performed them for me on her little harmonium and I thought they were magnificent. They were so startling. The songs just spoke for themselves,’ said Danny Fields. This was the first time that Nico felt the music was hers and that she was able to pull from her own experiences, ideas and feelings for inspiration. When asked where the lyrical content came from, Nico said, ‘It has to do with my going to Berlin in 1946 when I was a little girl and seeing the entire city destroyed. I like the fallen empire, the image of the fallen empire.’

Nico felt it was her art, not her appearance, that was, for the first time, being engaged with. ‘In the ’60s, in the Velvet Underground period, she’s like a mirror, and she plays so much with mirror images that anything she might say in the press is not really her, it’s that mirror image,’ Bockris says. ‘Later on, she’s more her own person; she’s not so much refracting the light of the Factory, or the light of Warhol.’

The hours spent working by herself paid off, at least in Nico’s mind. She expresses these feelings in the Twen interview, remark­ing, ‘I write the music independently of the lyrics. I play the organ and I write everything that comes to my mind … I never think about it, things just happen. Really. I have little reason. When I tell you that I became a songwriter, I do not mean that I meant it. One day I had a song, and that was the beginning. Everything happens somehow. They are not coincidences, everything is predetermined. I am very fatalistic.’

Having crafted the songs for the new album, Nico now needed a record label that would put them out. She was concerned that her reputation as a model, actress and Superstar would be detrimental in her transition to serious solo artist. She turned to Fields for help. ‘She was so afraid,’ he said. ‘She knew that she had this great beauty and this great mystery, but she was so worried (“but I want them to know my songs”) and people would say, “Yeah, yeah. Now she writes songs. What a day. What else does she do?” But look at those songs; they’re amazing. The great art songs of the ’60s.’

Fields was perfectly positioned to bolster Nico’s career. In 1968, he was working at Elektra Records and had immediate access to the label’s president, Jac Holzman. ‘Danny was close to the whole Warhol crowd,’ said Holzman. ‘One day, he brought Nico in. I knew who Nico was, and she brought in her little harmonium; she sat, and she played. Was it off the wall? Unbelievably so. But so what? It’s not gonna be an expensive record to make and she’s an interesting artist and let’s just see what happens.’

Fields has a similar memory of the day he brought the singer in to see the label president, which he shared in a 2002 magazine interview. ‘At that time, I think I had established some credibil­ity with Jac because he thought I had an ear for the future, as it were. He has wonderful taste, and I kinda knew that he would see through the legend, the myth, the beauty, the goddess. I don’t think he wanted to fuck her. Jac simply recognized good songs – that was the essence of Elektra. And he saw that in Nico, even though that was the last thing you imagined about her. Nico wasn’t known as a songwriter but Jac saw something beyond the fact that she was an actress and had been in the Velvets and was associated with Andy Warhol.’ With the support of Holzman, Fields signed Nico to the label. ‘Even though it wasn’t technically her first album, it was the first album of her music, of her as a musician. I don’t know any­thing about music, but I know it’s extraplanetary,’ he said.