Chapter 26 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

If I’d gone ahead and died, I would be a cult figure now.

Andy Warhol           

On 3 June 1968, Valerie Solanas entered the Factory. Solanas was known to Warhol, having appeared in his movie from the previous year, I, a Man. She was also renowned for her extremist views on feminism, which she collated in her manifesto ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’ or ‘SCUM’. The document railed against the patriarchy, arguing that men had ruined the world and only women could fix it for the future.

Warhol was not alarmed by Solanas’s arrival, thinking she was looking for money or wanting to pester him about a script she had previously left with him. Hence, the artist was completely surprised when the woman removed a .32 automatic from a paper bag and fired at him. Two shots went astray before Solanas succeeded in hitting Warhol in the chest. The bullet went into his right side and straight through him, coming out on the left side of his back. Warhol later told friends, ‘It hurt so much, I wished I was dead.’ Solanas then turned to visiting art critic and curator Mario Amaya and pulled the trigger. Though her shot went astray, she wasn’t deterred and fired again, this time hitting him near the hip. Fred Hughes was also in the room as the entire horror show unfolded. He may have thought he had escaped the mad woman’s wrath, as Solanas sauntered over to the elevator and pressed the button to bring it up to the Factory. However, instead of leaving immediately, she walked back to Hughes and aimed the gun at his forehead. She again pulled the trigger, but the firearm jammed. She reached for her back-up piece, a .22, to finish the job. But the lift arrived, and instead of cutting down the terrified Hughes, she went to the wait­ing carriage and left the scene of the crime. Solanas gave herself up not long after in Times Square, explaining the reason why she had attacked Warhol could be found within the pages of her manifesto.

While Warhol lay bleeding, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, Billy Name had tears streaming down his face as he cradled the artist’s head in his lap. Warhol’s only response to the situation was, ‘Please don’t make me laugh, it hurts too much.’ One report claimed that Warhol was clinically dead when the paramedics arrived. The artist was quickly rushed off to Columbus Hospital and placed in intensive care. He went on to spend two months in the hospital, recuperating from the various surgeries needed to bring him back to health. The attack left him having to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life to hold his organs in place.

David Croland clearly remembers getting the news of the attack. ‘I was with Nico and Susan at my apartment on 71st Street. The phone rang, and it was Viva Superstar. She said that Andy had been shot. We were all a little freaked out. I said to Susan and Nico, “We’re going to the hospital to see Andy. We don’t know if he’s going to live or die.” Nico did not want to. She said, “No, we’re not. We’re going to stay here because they’re shooting Superstars pos­sibly.” So I said, “So what do you want to do?” And she said, “We’ll stay here, we’ll light a candle and some incense, we’ll smoke a joint, if you have any marijuana” – which we probably did. We just stayed in my apartment with the lights off and the candles burning, until we heard from Viva that Andy was alive and would possibly pull through.’

Nico was terribly shaken by Warhol’s brush with death and wrote a new song specially for him called ‘The Falconer’. She did not think the people around him had taken the shooting seriously.

Physically, if not mentally, recovered, Warhol and Elektra Records held the premiere of The Marble Index at the Factory on 19 September. The evening promised a ‘playing of the album’, which was to start ‘promptly at 8:40pm’, with ‘wine, supper and dancing to follow’. A newspaper write-up highlighted the happening, as it marked the first party that Warhol had hosted since being shot. ‘Before I thought it would be fun to be dead. Now I know it’s fun to be alive,’ Warhol said in the piece. The album is described as ‘an ear-piercing 16 minutes that everyone said was beautiful’, including Warhol. Adding further to Nico’s growing mystique as the queen of weird, the artist confided that ‘Nico spent the whole summer writing it [The Marble Index] in the bathtub. She works well there.’ Nico had by this time changed her hair colour and is noted as being ‘a tall redhead who refuses to give her age (“I’m too old to talk about it”)’. Taking the opportunity to promote her album, she tells the reporter that it is ‘like a movie. It has all the senses and it is in my line.’ When asked if she thinks the LP will succeed, she confidently replies, ‘Of course. There’s very little good music around.’

Nico seems equally eager to develop the album in a postcard she wrote to Danny Fields around the same time, in which she refers to British DJ John Peel and a song title from The Marble Index:

Danny Fields c/o Elektra Records 1855 Broadway New York City 10025 USA

They won’t let me back past the frozen borderline. Please send Record to John Peel in London & François’s movie to Hamburg c/o Mr EHRFELD Metro Nomex Records. Release due in three weeks’ time. I love you! Nico.

Nico continued her promotional activities, giving a ‘guided tour’ for Eye magazine ‘of the legendary Rock Castle in the hills of Los Angeles – the dreamlike mansion where the stars stay when they can’t bear being away from home’. The piece strived to showcase an unbeatable list of musical movers and shakers who had graced the ‘the electronic Olympus, the hip Versailles, the Taj Mahal of sound’, with Nico providing the inside story: ‘The list of tenants reads like a social register of rock ’n roll. Nico has lived here, as have Bob Dylan, The Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Andy Warhol, the Who, Barry McGuire, Tiny Tim, and yes, the Beatles.’ However, instead of lending a knowledgeable voice to the article, Nico seemed mel­ancholic and already nostalgic, longing for an era that had ended only a year earlier: ‘She speaks in her tentative manner about the Castle’s special meaning to her, of the idyllic isolation it provides from smog and groupies.’ As she leads the reporter from one room to another, the article becomes more like a historic account of strangers, not the intimate recounting of someone’s personal his­tory: ‘“This was Bob Dylan’s room,” says Nico, guiding me to the first now-empty chamber off the stairway. Large windows overlook a garden, resplendent with afternoon sun. “He had a beautiful desk here where he spent a lot of time writing songs, and he had a huge bed here, but now it’s all gone. He wrote so many beautiful songs. You can see why he liked it here.”’

Towards the end of the tour, Nico brings the reporter back to ‘a goldfish pond in the garden … “There are five small deer who live down here near the fountain. It’s just like living in a forest. And all the overgrown garden, it’s like Gothic ruins,” she says wistfully.’ The theme of sadness and longing continues to the end of the piece, with Nico confiding, ‘The Castle used to seem so happy to me. But now it seems sad. I had some wonderful times here, but I could never live in it again. It is a very unusual place in the world.’ It is hard to work out whether Nico was openly showing herself in the piece or if she was simply adding fodder to the spooky moon goddess persona she had newly inhabited. The closing line complements her Garboesque traits only further, as Nico says, ‘A twenty-two room castle can be awfully lonely place for just one person.’