Chapter 46 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

In Ibiza, Nico had found her spiritual and emotional home. Her return in 1988 was an opportunity for her to fully embrace a heroin-­free lifestyle and her budding writing ambitions and to forge a new start with twenty-five-year-old Ari. She even told a journalist as she left the UK, ‘I’m flying to Ibiza. It’s my favourite place. I think I’ll die there.’ The myth of Nico being obsessed with darkness is a prev­alent leitmotif. It may have been more that death fascinated her and she knew how to play the macabre persona up to the media, as it was what they – and the fans – expected. In an interview in Berlin in 1975, she is asked, ‘Are there still any human beings around that you love?’ Nico answers, ‘Yes. Death for example. (chuckles) Definitely.’

It may have been the death of the ‘Nico’ persona that she wanted, however. In her diary, she may have been hinting at this. She references her birthday, marking a renewal, when she first began taking opiates heavily (most likely the diet pills when she was twenty-one) and became internationally known as ‘Nico’. She writes, ‘One is only once in a lifetime seven times seven years old. In sixteen days exactly will that happen to me, in sixteen more days I might be dead twice. But when she comes alive again, you better watch out for that shadow somewhere not far behind you.’ This shadow may have been the repressed, authentic Christa. ‘Warm, naive again,’ Ari notes of her temperament in Ibiza. ‘She thought that running a flower shop was the most beautiful job in the world.’ Alan Wise also recalled this fascination, saying, ‘Towards the end, she wanted to work in a flower shop until she found out the wages. She went to a florist’s to ask how much they paid. They told her £150, she said “I can’t live on a £150 a day”. They said no, it’s £150 a week. She liked flowers.’ ‘She wanted to focus on writing – only writing – poems, autobiography, and other books,’ Ari concludes of Nico’s plans.

She and Ari had been staying with a friend who went by the name of ‘Russian George’ in a cottage close to the nearby Sant Josep Road. In mid-July, Ari was ill. Nico nursed him, taking the oppor­tunity to make up for lost time, even biking in extreme tempera­tures to get her son water. Ari writes, ‘I had salmonella and she took care of me like a real mother, cooked me rice so I’d only drink the water it was cooking in. On 13th July, she went into town to do some groceries and buy some water; there was no drinking water where we lived. She pushed her bike over seven kilometres, under the fiery sun of July, with two jugs of ten litres of drinking water, as well as some food and bread. I recall her arrival, I was sat in the shadow, sickly, she was sat on the chair beside me, exhausted.’

On 17 July, Peter Hook happened to be in Ibiza and saw Nico at the end of the four days that Ari notes Nico spent caring for him. Hook and his New Order bandmates were in Spain to record their latest album, Technique. ‘We’d heard Nico was on the island and she’d actually got clean. That coincided with us getting really dirty. We had been out all night and decided to get breakfast Bloody Marys. We were sat in Ibiza town in a café. Lo and behold, who walked past but bloody Nico with Ari. We knew them both. We knew how difficult Ari could be, so we hid.17 She didn’t see us. They went in another café and had something to eat and drink. It was breakfast time. It was like 11 o’clock in the morning. She decided to cycle back to Santa Eulària, which is a long way.’

Once back at the cottage, despite it being over 32ºC outside and the hottest day of the year, Nico decided to head back down into town in order to buy some hash, pedalling the eight kilometres to get there. She had been complaining of a bad headache and thought the medicinal properties of the drug would ease the pain. As James Young had seen her do before, she wrapped a large piece of black fabric around her head, as she believed it would help alleviate her discomfort and protect her from the sun. According to Ari, she spent almost an hour in front of the mirror, getting her makeshift headdress just right. She then asked Ari to pump the front tyre of her bike, but seeing how weak he still was from his illness, Nico went ahead and filled it with air herself. At precisely 1 p.m., she left the cottage on her bike, heading down the hill, donning sunglasses and with a copy of Mark Twain’s semi-autobiographical travel novel Roughing It tucked into her black coat. ‘See you later, darling,’ she said to Ari. ‘I saw her go down the dirt and rock road and disappear behind the pine trees,’ he recalled.

Afternoon turned to evening, and Nico still had not returned home. At first Ari, still sick with diarrhoea, was not concerned about his mother’s absence. ‘The night of the 18th, as she wasn’t back yet, I wasn’t too worried, thinking she was sleeping over at some friends of hers, in Figueretas,’ he writes in his memoir. However, when Nico did not return the next day, Ari started to get anxious about his mother’s whereabouts. Though still ill himself, he began to look for her:

The next morning, no Nico; at noon, I was worried. I struggled down the large path going from la finca to the road; we lived two and a half kilometres into the mountain. I took the bus, went to the hospital – the very one, I would learn later, where she was refused treatment – to obtain medication for diarrhoea. Then, I walked to my friend Manolo, who was the only one who had a phone. We called the police: nothing. Clive [Crocker], a long-time friend, arrived later. We called hospitals: Insular Hospital, the Cruz-Roja, where she was also refused admission; then the last one, the biggest, slightly out of town. A doctor answered us: ‘Yes, you can come, she’s well.’ We jumped in Clive’s Jeep and went to the hospital right away.

Clive Crocker recalled the hunt for Nico. ‘“Has someone been brought in?” “Yes, yes.” We finally found her. We went to the hos­pital,’ he remembered. ‘Once there,’ said Ari, ‘the doctor, with vivid emotions on his face, told us: “I’m sorry, it was the wrong person.”’ Crocker continued: ‘They said, “She was in here.” “What do you mean, was?” “She died.” We didn’t know why they were speaking of her in the past tense.’ Ari, Crocker and their friend Manolo, who had also accompanied them to the hospital, were then asked to go to the morgue to identify the body. ‘Manolo entered the room with me,’ Ari recounted. ‘Clive, her old friend, couldn’t. I kissed my mother on the forehead, then left to puke behind a car parked in the entrance of the hospital.’ Crocker lamented, ‘It was a terrible sight; she was so dour, lying there.’

Lutz Graf-Ulbrich got the call from Ari that Nico had passed away. Having bought his ticket earlier the same day, he was greeted at the airport by ‘headlines of the newspapers everywhere: “Icon Dead”’. Even in death, Nico was defined by the men in her life, as Graf-Ulbrich recalled arriving at the terminal, only to see the ‘Berliner Zeitung headline: “Nico: Death of a Star from Berlin Reveals the Secret Love Drama of Alain Delon”’.

Ari brought Graf-Ulbrich back to the finca. He showed his ­mother’s friend around the house, then offered Graf-Ulbrich the use of Nico’s bedroom. ‘When I entered, I felt strange,’ Graf-Ulbrich recalls. ‘Her organ was standing there, and next to it her high boots. It was as if she had just left the house for a walk and would come back any moment. Ari had asked me to bring a cassette from her last concert … He put it into the recorder. We were listening to it and each of us was crying silently.’ Ari also loaned Graf-Ulbrich Nico’s diary, which she was hoping to turn into a book.18

Graf-Ulbrich eventually went to the hospital to get a last glimpse of his old friend. ‘The terrible look on her face of …’ – Lutz pauses to find the right word – ‘… aloneness.’

No one knows exactly what happened to Nico. Various theories and versions of events have been batted around since her passing. One story has her falling off her bike and rolling down an embank­ment, with passers-by calling for an ambulance. An alternative is that a taxi driver found her slumped on the side of the steep road that goes down Figueretas hill, her bicycle on the dusty ground nearby. Some newspapers declared that she was ‘thrown’ from her bike, then suffered an injury which led to her passing. One website even went so far as to use Nico’s fatal accident as an example of why it is important to wear a bike helmet. Sunstroke has been blamed, as well as undetected underlying medical issues, which may have arisen from years of drug abuse or been hereditary or set off by the methadone or caused by the fall. There is no definitive answer.

It was noted on the medical records that a young couple had brought Nico to the hospital but left without providing their names or contact information. In the attempt to find out what exactly had happened, Graf-Ulbrich and Ari took to the airwaves in Ibiza, asking for those involved to come forward and identify themselves. A German girl and a Spanish guy responded and related what had happened. The couple had seen Nico ride by them on her bike as she travelled into town. In her book Shadows Across the Moon, Helen Donlon retraces (with James Young) what is thought to be the exact path of Nico’s last journey:

We walked on past the giant elevated clock that also serves as a barometer at the top of Vara de Rey, we turned uphill into Via Punica and stopped at the exact spot where Nico had fallen off her bicycle. We took photos in the shadows; in the urine-scented alleyway just off the main drag of Avenida Espanya, where the blazing summer sun had by now turned the afternoon into an eternal siesta. The alleyway contained a dowdy and old-looking flower shop and no other signs of life. James pointed out the sad irony of the florists being probably the last thing she saw before she fell off her bike: apparently she had been considering retiring from the world of touring and opening a flower shop herself.

According to the couple, they later found her on the side of the road, next to the upturned bike, near to where the Hotel Montesol used to be. The two tried to talk to her, but she had become para­lyzed on one side and could not communicate – a horrible irony as she spoke seven different languages. The duo also claimed that Nico was waving a book by Oscar Wilde19 around with her one good hand. They took the singer to a Red Cross hospital, which would not admit her; the staff there thought she was a vagrant and ‘refused to deal with her because of the state of her arms … shattered with needle marks’. A second hospital would not see her as she was a for­eigner and did not have health insurance. A third also barred entry, asserting that Nico was just an old hippie who had been out in the heat too long, her heavy, dark, woollen clothing adding to their disgust. Finally, a fourth hospital, the Can Misses, agreed to take her in. Though she was unable to speak, at the entryway Nico vehe­mently shook her head and attempted to say ‘No’, her lifelong lack of faith in traditional medical practices most likely having been fur­ther underpinned by her recent experience with Ari’s care. Ignoring her pleas, a nurse put the singer onto a gurney, misdiagnosing her as having succumbed to sunstroke. She was left on a hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness.

In the morning, a doctor finally examined her and realized that she had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, leading to a large quan­tity of blood leaking into Nico’s brain. The medical staff attempted to give her life-saving injections. Tragically, after over a decade of intravenous drug abuse, there wasn’t one viable vein via which they could administer the medication, leaving Nico to suffer a slow death alone in a hospital room, horribly aware of where she was but unable to speak, unable to ask why nobody was helping her. No one recognized her; they thought she was just another drug casualty. She officially passed away at 8 p.m. on 18 July 1988.

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In a 2017 interview, Lutz Graf-Ulbrich was asked whether Nico had any phobias. He answered, ‘The sun. And that was what killed her in the end.’ In another article, he goes on to say, ‘She was 49, but it was more a miracle that she survived so long. She outlived her colleagues who died much earlier, because of drugs or whatever. She was so strong, and she’d had such a full and rich life.’ Paul Morrissey blamed her passing on the Spanish care system, saying, ‘Nico died from not having health insurance in Ibiza.’ ‘She didn’t even reach this thing we call “Saturn return”,’20 mused Andrew Loog Oldham during our interview. ‘Mind you, the years she put under her belt, she still qualified.’ Victor Brox shared Graf-Ulbrich’s shock that the singer had lasted as long as she had. ‘It’s ironic, given her inclin­ation for romance, that her death was already mythic,’ he noted. Her fellow Superstar Viva, sounding vindictive to the end, added, ‘To survive all those years and then fall off a bike to your death seems a little cruel. When I heard the story I said, “I bet she was stoned.” She outlived most of the others – Edie, Jim Morrison, Tim Hardin, a lot of the Factory people, even Andy himself. It’s kind of hopeful news for junkies. She’s their Saint Nico now.’

More than thirty years later, Peter Hook is still upset that he did not get to say goodbye properly. ‘I always regret that. There’s quite a cautionary tale in it, to see her on that day that she died. That was a real shock. I felt really stupid with that one, honestly. Shame.’

‘I feel sure it could have been prevented in some way,’ James Young says, reflecting on her death. ‘If she had been in Manchester, then Alan Wise would have insisted she saw a doctor … a real one.’

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Ari has precious memories of the last days he shared with his mother in Ibiza. ‘A fortnight before her death, we went to the hotel El Corsario together to drink a beer. Through a small window, she showed me where she lived thirty years ago, on a boat stuck to the quay, with Alejandro, the cousin of Juan Carlos the current king of Spain, who at this period, in 1958, was a friend of hers,’ he recalls. The Nico he describes sounds serene and content: ‘She was going through her memories, and was beautiful, very beautiful again, at peace; I would almost say happy. Looking, in the shadow of the finca, at some old books about Ibiza, illustrated with photo en­grav­ing … What I miss is kissing her or hugging her or holding her hand. She would turn up and say: Hello Arilein! Let’s go to the café and have a beer. She had a very low voice, like that.

‘It’s the sun,’ Ari concluded. ‘I know that killed her. Definitely.’

There is a theory that Nico may have known that she was unwell and had limited time left. ‘Last year I was talking to Ari,’ Young said in Shadows Across the Moon, ‘and he thinks she knew she was dying. So now, ultimately, I guess there was another agenda. She went to Ibiza to die. She didn’t want to die in Manchester, or Berlin or Paris or New York. She wanted to die in a cradle of life. As a girl she saw Berlin on fire, watched the death trains to the camps roll by, lived her dream life literally in a graveyard. The Mediterranean would bathe her body clean, bleach her bones, return her to the source … for Nico, Ibiza represented freedom: freedom from the world and, ultimately, freedom from herself. It was a place she chose to live, to re-invent herself … and to die, a free woman.’