Chapter 33 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

The Inner Scar had taken several years to complete; now Philippe Garrel and Nico were moving at a fast clip, adding to their cine­matic collaborations with great speed. April 1975 saw the premiere of the rarely screened Un ange passe (‘An Angel Is Passing’) in Paris. In Garrel’s eyes, the project fulfilled its purpose, which was ‘to show love to my father’. While the movie may have been meant as ‘a portrait of Philippe Garrel’s father, Maurice’, the Internet Movie Database summarizes the film very differently, saying it is about ‘A woman sitting on a bench, silent, filmed long and closely.’

Nico’s musical output, however, was not as robust. ‘Nico had no management for a while, because managers don’t want a junkie as a client. So she didn’t play a lot of concerts, and that was really diffi­cult for her,’ says Lutz Graf-Ulbrich. ‘Money which we earned from Nico gigs was directly spent on drugs and was always short … We ourselves were poor as church mice!’ Though financially desperate, Nico was still recognized everywhere she went, her fame a stark con­trast to her poor health and squalid living conditions. The reality of her poverty often forced her to steal in order to survive and feed her addiction. ‘I was invited to parties still and people would look at me and point at me and say, “Look, that’s Nico!” But I would be slipping the cutlery into my pockets and making sure I got a lot of drink and a free lift home,’ she notes in her diary. Her appearance, once striking for her often being clothed in head-to-toe pristine white, was now ragged. ‘She always wore this big, black robe and carried the harmonium over her shoulder. She was like someone from another world, I guess also because of the drugs,’ Graf-Ulbrich said. Not all of her family and friends were as accepting of her as her lover Graf-Ulbrich. In a letter to Danny Fields, Nico recounts the treatment she received from her former mentors Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol, while admitting to adopting a pitiful look:

Dear Danny, when will we see each other again? It has been so very long & all my old friends, like Paul & Andy, are all kind of hostile toward me, because I do not see myself running around like a doll. I look more like a prehistoric figure with rags hanging around her & worn out boots.

Eventually, Graf-Ulbrich began playing and travelling with Nico. One tour of the south of France in August 1975 found the two reunited with a bunch of other musicians, including Kevin Ayers, for the Arles Festival. On a day off, Graf-Ulbrich recalled everyone ‘hang[ing] out in and around the pool, philosophizing or just look­ing at the gracious young groupies in their tiny bikinis’ – everyone except Nico, who instead was ‘sitting under a parasol fully dressed in her black clothes despite the high temperature reading The Book of the Dead’. It was during this concert that Garrel decided to use Graf-Ulbrich’s and Ash Ra Tempel’s music as the soundtrack to his forthcoming film, film Le Berceau de cristal (‘The Crystal Cradle’), featuring Nico, Anita Pallenberg and Dominique Sanda. Though the deal was ‘sealed with a handshake’, the musicians ‘never saw a penny’ in payment for his use of their songs.

When not on tour, Graf-Ulbrich lived with the singer, at one point even decamping to his parents’ house in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin. ‘When I invited Nico, they said, “Of course she can live here with you,” even [with her] having the curtains closed dur­ing the day and getting up very late, with her long black dresses and the white make-up … She was, of course, a bit strange to look at for my parents. They were very open-minded, even if they were typical Germans. I said from the start that I wanted to be a musician, which for the parents wasn’t the best choice for a profes­sion. But they were always very supportive. They always have been.’ But even the most accommodating families have their limits. Once Graf-Ulbrich’s mother and father figured out that there was heroin in the house, the duo were asked to leave, once again adjourning to Garrel’s wretched apartment, where conditions were still unbearably bleak. Though having used Graf-Ulbrich’s music in his film, Garrel was still uncommunicative. ‘The winter was cold. Philippe used to hang around in his fur coat and smoked one cigarette after the other, always until the very end … He just stared into space. Nico had a small room with her bed and her harmonium. When she had concerts, she was rehearsing her songs, but only then,’ Graf-Ulbrich recounts. His own accommodation was equally minimal, consisting of ‘a mattress in the room in front. Apart from that there was only an old piano, a TV set and a harpsichord, no other furniture.’

*

Even though she had been scared for years about possible retribu­tion by the Black Panthers following the Emmaretta Marks inci­dent, Nico still could not resist returning to New York, and the Chelsea Hotel itself, the scene of the horrific event. In 1978, she moved herself and Graf-Ulbrich back into her old haunt, right in the wake of Nancy Spungen’s death. Spungen had been the notorious girlfriend of John Ritchie, better known by his stage name of Sid Vicious.21 The couple had been abusing drugs and became addicted to heroin before taking up residence in the Chelsea. Their stay was punctuated by each of them publicly abusing the other, both mentally and physically, and ended abruptly on 12 October, when Nancy was found in the couple’s bathroom, having bled out on the tiled floor following a single fatal stab wound to the stomach. Vicious was immediately arrested and charged with second-degree murder, to which he pleaded not guilty before being released on bail. Nico was aware of the tragedy, writing in her diary, ‘Staying at the Chelsea Hotel once again in 1978 shortly after Nancy had been stabbed in a room without a window, very nearly became my own fate … drifting into a bottomless pit …’ The reference to ‘drifting into a bottomless pit’ does make it seem as though Nico was aware of how dire her situation, with her own addiction, had become; the terrible reality of moving into the Chelsea directly after Spungen’s grisly passing, following a life riddled with drug problems, was not lost on her.

The Chelsea was at the centre of many alternative cultures. Joe Bidewell was Nico’s neighbour during her stay, and later performed with her and John Cale. For him, the hotel offered both affordable shelter and the opportunity to rub shoulders with like-minded cre­atives. ‘I went down to the Chelsea, which, to tell you the truth, had a really bad reputation at that time. It was inexpensive and run-down. You literally would see needles on the floor; people would come in and shoot up in the bathroom. This was all pre-Aids. As for the junk scene in New York City, it was still rampant, of mythological proportions, at that point in time. I’m from the Midwest, and I had no interest really in doing hard drugs, except from a literary point of view. I always thought that it was sort of romantic. Fortunately, my Baptist upbringing kept me from indulging. I did have to deal with the theft and the different things that went on because of so much rampant drug abuse in the city. I had personal experiences with stuff getting stolen [laughing], that sort of thing. A kid from the Midwest finds out pretty fast … But the Chelsea was really a mecca. I would walk into the lobby, and there’s Uma Thurman in the middle of a photo shoot – this is the building that I live in! One day I walked out of my door and there was Allen Ginsberg.’

Like Bidewell, Jim Tisdall was a New York transplant who later toured with Nico during her time in the US. Before installing them­selves in the Chelsea, Nico and Graf-Ulbrich stayed with Tisdall. ‘I didn’t know Lutz until I met Nico,’ he tells me. ‘But my brother John and our mutual friend Blaine Johnston knew her and Lutz in Berlin, so when Nico came to NYC, they asked if she could stay at my loft on 17th Street and 5th Avenue, and I agreed.’ Tisdall enjoyed Nico’s company, recalling, ‘I remember her style of dress made me think right away of hippies. She seemed very serious, but I soon realized that she had a wry sense of humour. She was a good house guest and was considerate to me and to my girlfriend, who shared the loft with me. I did notice that she seemed a bit ill and soon learned about the drug problem. I found her conversa­tion quite interesting; she would respond to things creatively and honestly. Indeed, I quickly concluded that she had a poetic sensibil­ity, and this was reflected in her conversation in unexpected and fas­cinating ways.’ Nico and Graf-Ulbrich’s stay was short-lived, as the duo soon got the room at the Chelsea Hotel. Graf-Ulbrich recorded the same events in his autobiography, recalling, ‘After we had filled out the immigration papers, we were welcomed by Blaine together with his old pal John Tisdall at JFK Airport. John had a car, so we drove through the winter snow of night-time New York City. Nico had told me a lot about the Chelsea Hotel. She had met Leonard Cohen here, with whom she had had a heavy romance. She showed me a scar on her wrist from that. Also Bob Dylan had written songs here. We lived in the first floor, room 121, just across that [sic] room 100, where not so long ago Sid Viscous [sic] had killed his friend Nancy. At the Chelsea Hotel everything seemed possible.’

Though it had been several years since her tenure in the Velvet Underground, Nico was still being judged against her blonde, svelte image, by both the press and herself. ‘Nico’s physical appearance – slimmer and released from the tell-tale puffiness of our last meeting – was matched by the brightness of her answers and easy wit … Time’s tugged at the corner of her eyes a little but she’s still a strik­ingly beautiful woman,’ starts one article for Sounds in April 1978.

In an interview with Graf-Ulbrich and his wife Daniela, Daniela says, ‘You [Lutz] told me she was always putting on makeup and that she was very concerned with her appearance. And that she used that as an excuse, like she didn’t want to be beautiful anymore so she gave it away.’ Graf-Ulbrich replied, ‘It’s true. She could be insecure. When we were living at the Chelsea at one point she had put on a lot of weight. And she didn’t like that.’ Nico’s own Aunt Helma was mortified by what she saw as the demise of her niece’s great beauty. ‘In the end, she wanted to be as ugly as a witch,’ Wolff asserted, con­tinuing, ‘She wanted to destroy herself. It was a campaign of anni­hilation against herself.’ Tisdall also recalled, ‘She was a bit out of shape when I met her, due, I assumed, to the addictions and to the drinking. She didn’t dress the way a model and film star might, but more like a hippie. I wondered if she had adopted a Baudelairean22 attitude. I also felt that she had succumbed to the pernicious theory that you have to engage in excess in order to develop artistically. But these were my own thoughts, not explicitly said by her. She did keep a copy of Fleurs du mal,23 and I think the poet’s work was an influence.’ Of the consistently brutal press remarks, Tisdall notes, ‘Snark sells. Mean people like to take down those who have had suc­cess and who they envy.’ To the public, Nico did not seem bothered. When asked by a journalist for Sounds magazine, ‘Does time pass­ing make you sad? Ageing?’ Nico replied, ‘No. It’s, uh, very boring.’

One piece, written in a June edition of ZigZag magazine, offers a rare glimpse into Nico’s personality, noting, ‘She’s dressed in black cape, rust-coloured Cossack-style trousers and her trusty boots. She smiles and laughs a lot, while still retaining this detached charisma, her voice rich and Teutonic. All in all, we get along like a house on fire, much to my relief. I soon realise that it’s best to let Nico steer her own course …’ The article goes on to showcase Nico’s intellect, a characteristic rarely commented on, as she shared that ‘I read a lot, I like to read. I prefer Nietzsche of all. Then I like some English poets: William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, Lord Byron, Shelley … Shakespeare sometimes, but Tennyson is the best of all. He’s an incredible Romantic, it’s just so beautiful. You find everything there. In Shakespeare you just find death.’ Such acknowledgements of cognitive engagement were exceedingly uncommon, with most publications – and people in general – still infatuated with Nico’s physicality.

*

For all her outward bravado, Nico was very much doubting herself and her future. A letter sent from Barcelona to Graf-Ulbrich, dated 15 September, reveals this inner turmoil. Her reason for being in Spain is unknown, though she writes:

Dear Lutz, I was here in the city all the time & am back to Paris today. As always, there is a losing streak … Your Nico

Another piece of correspondence – undated but likely from the same period – echoes this despair, Nico once again seeming to be looking for something to help or inspire her, and once again com­ing up empty:

Le Côte d’Azur, Cannes

Dear Lutz, I’ll go back tomorrow night after I’ve missed everything. Except for some interesting dreams. Everything seems pretty unimportant to me here. Nico.

Things were about to get worse. After returning to Paris, Nico left her harmonium in the entrance hallway of the apartment she shared with Garrel, coming back soon after to find that it had been stolen. Penniless, without even her beloved instrument to provide comfort, she found some solace in providing vocals to a track on Spanish electronic band Neuronium’s second album Vuelo Químico. This happened by accident, as the singer found herself in the same studio while it was being recorded, and reportedly was so moved by the music that she wanted to contribute. She speaks more than sings excerpts from poet Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ulalume’ on the track. The specific passages of the poem she uses are a poignant counter­point to Nico’s own circumstances – especially their references to October, the month of Nico’s birth – the bleak and unrelenting text a reflection of the singer’s own circumstances:

The skies they were ashen and sober;

The leaves they were crispéd and sere—

The leaves they were withering and sere;

It was night in the lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year;

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

In the misty mid region of Weir—

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.