Chapter 47 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Twen: What are you especially proud of?

Nico: To have survived so far. I often thought that it was useless to go on living. As a child, I was very sad, but looking back, I am grateful for my childhood. I do not think that I can still make any bad experiences, I have them all behind me. I realize that one does not die and then is dead. It continues, only in a different form. There is no escape …

Her grave is impossible to find. It is in a forest, in Berlin, obscured by ivy, trees and leaves.

Danny Fields          

Lutz Graf-Ulbrich took on the task of telling friends and family of Nico’s passing, including her beloved Aunt Helma. She remem­bered, ‘Lutz brought us the news of her death. That was all terrible. I do not want to go through that time again.’ Graf-Ulbrich and Ari began to plan Nico’s funeral. They decided to have her cremated, as she had written in her notebook specifically that she wanted ‘to be burned’. This entry appeared next to a carefully handwritten copy of William Blake’s poem ‘The Tyger’, Nico’s animal on the Chinese horoscope.

Even in death, Nico could not find a place to rest. It was not pos­sible to get her cremated in Ibiza as her German nationality made her a ‘foreigner’, so her body was placed in a crate and shipped to Barcelona, where friends and family had been told it would not be a problem to have the service performed. However, in an eerie echo of her hospital refusals, her body was barred from entry as there was a two-week backlog of funeral services. The crate was finally flown to Berlin, with the ever-supportive Helma and cousin Ulli paying for transportation. Nico finally got her wish and was cremated, her ashes being placed in an urn.

Alan Wise wanted the ashes to be sent to Manchester, saying that Nico had told him she wanted to be spread over the moors above the city. With this in mind, Wise and the Manchester contingent held a memorial service on 6 August at a Yorkshire church where Nico had supposedly once said she wanted to be buried.

Meanwhile, other plans were in motion for the final resting place of Nico’s remains. Ari and Graf-Ulbrich decided that because of the close relationship between Grete and Nico, the two should be reunited at last. Nico’s remains would be interred at Grunewald Forest Cemetery, a burial ground still known by many as ‘Suicide Cemetery’. Located on the outskirts of Berlin, Suicide Cemetery got its name from the high number of people who took their lives in the nearby Havel river, only to have their bodies washed ashore and buried, often illegally, by their relatives in Grunewald Forest (in the past, suicide victims were not allowed to be buried on sacred soil, leaving few other options for the bereaved). It was here, amidst the green, overgrown foliage within the gated ceme­tery, that Nico’s ashes were buried, alongside her mother’s, on 16 August 1988.

Many of Nico’s friends from Manchester attended the funeral, among them James Young, Alan Wise, Eric Random, Graham Dowdall, Phil Rainford and Victor Brox, as well as Barbara Wilkin’s parents and sister. Wilkin was preparing to get married when she heard the news. ‘When I found out, I thought, “I have to fly out, get my flight, because Ari is alone there.” Lutz flew out, so that was okay. Alan couldn’t fly; he didn’t go onto aeroplanes. I missed most of it [the funeral] because I was in transit. I was flying over [it] and I could see them down there in the middle of a forest at a beautiful lake.’

‘I remember being really, really sad,’ says Faction drummer Graham Dowdall. ‘The most distinct memory: as we lowered her into the hole, a little shrew came out of the hole and ran away. It was a beautiful moment. We all saw it as it scampered away. The whole thing was so sad. There’s this famous star and singer – a human being – and the only people who were there to commemor­ate her life were a handful of friends. That was it. It was like, “Wow, so that’s how it ends.” That was horrible. It’s sad to lose your friend, and particularly to lose her at a time when she was about to burst into a new vein of post-heroin creativity.’

Phil Rainford was especially disturbed by the absence of the East Coast community. ‘Alan informed all of those New York people that there was the funeral going on, and we didn’t get an answer off any of them,’ Rainford recalls. ‘Not even, “She passed away? Sorry to hear [that].” Nothing. There were not that many people at her funeral; there were about twenty, maybe a few more. It was all ­people who had either known her as a child or as a teenager or as a young woman, or the people from Manchester. I think that they were her friends. They were the people that cared about her. We all really liked her and had great affection for her. I loved her as a friend and felt very protective of her. All of these people that had nothing to do with her for the last ten, fifteen years of her life, they were never there.’ Wilkin concurs about the glaring absence of those from Nico’s Factory days, saying, ‘None of those big names were there – none from New York.’ However, like Rainford, Wilkin affirms that ‘quite a few’ people from Nico’s adopted home town of Manchester made the journey to say their last goodbyes to the singer. Danny Fields tells me that he was never made aware of Nico’s funeral, as he would have made it a priority to go if he would have known. Fields makes it a point to visit Nico’s grave at every oppor­tunity; he has been there at least five times to pay his respects to his dear friend since her passing.

One person from Nico’s past who did show up on his own was her long-time lover and collaborator Philippe Garrel, making the trip from Paris to Berlin. Described by Young as ‘a shy, rumpled little guy in a borrowed suit and tie’, Garrel was one of the only attendees representing Nico’s post-youth/pre-Manchester existence that day.

‘It is convenient now for them to be friends with somebody that is mythologized,’ says Rainford. ‘They have a connection with her in some way. When Nico was alive, it was convenient for her to have that connection with Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, because that was a selling point for her as well. But in actual fact, they weren’t her friends in the sense that they actually cared about her. The one she had a bit more connection with was the Welsh guy, John Cale, out of the Velvet Underground. He produced a couple of her records, but once he was done, he would disappear. Maybe he’d call her once a year to say, “How are you, Nico?” and that’d be about it. None of the other ones ever did. And even he didn’t turn up at her funeral.’

After the ceremony, the attendees got together at a lakeside café for a few drinks, bought by Aunt Helma, and shared their favourite Nico stories. In an effort to offset the funeral costs, Graf-Ulbrich had set up a memorial concert that evening at the same Berlin plan­etarium where Nico had performed just months before. The record­ing of Nico’s last performance, at ‘Fata Morgana’, was played, as the visual effects of the lights, stars and planets swirled by.

*

‘Everyone was concerned about the unstable Ari,’ Graf-Ulbrich recalled of the period right after Nico’s death. ‘To me, he seemed more or less okay, but he was obviously taking tranquillizers.’ According to James Young, a deeply distressed Ari tried to sell the last of Nico’s methadone to interested buyers, his own dependency on drugs increasing in the months following the funeral. Alan Wise set up Nico’s only child to inherit any money from sales or pub­lishing that would have been due to his mother. ‘When I got my mum’s royalties for the first time, I spent the money on smack,’ Ari confided. ‘I was hooked. I was taking a gram a day … I called my psychiatric doctor in Paris and I spent two weeks in the hospital. I got off heroin. Then I got a check from the Velvet Underground and bought a ticket for Raroia, Tahiti. I was taking Valium, pot and beer and I got beaten up, then arrested, and someone tried to kill me.’

Ari returned to the East Coast of the US in the hope of recap­turing some of the magic from his younger years. Yet things did not improve for the lost son. ‘Back in New York, I went out of my mind,’ he writes. ‘I spent winter out on the street; rescuers found me in the River Hudson … I had no money, no passport, nothing. Someone told the cops, who took me to a psychiatric hospital. They gave me five brain electric shocks. A friend got me out and took me back to Paris. I had two months of treatment in psychiatric hospitals there and then in the south of France. Now I’m trying to get back into myself. I’m not yet strong enough, but one day, when I am, I will confront my father and I will do it for the sake of my mother.’

As he had haunted Nico, Alain Delon is a dark, unpleasant ghost who still torments Ari. Nico never stopped trying to get the actor to recognize her son, but sadly she died without achieving any resolution. ‘My mother was accused of “poisoning” the life of the star and his family,’ Ari asserted. ‘It was not so. Certainly, she was obsessed, all her life, by Delon, to the point of writing letters to him that she never sent. Shortly before her death, she had written him a letter of reproach for not having reached out to me. She would have so desired that something bring peace to our three minds.’

‘For me, she was a very good mother,’ Ari said in a 2018 inter­view. ‘She gave me everything, even the drugs. I lived it with her without it being a problem. In the end, we shared the drug, the same syringe, it was a way of being together. Until the last moments of her life, she was flamboyant. She had a crazy, dry, acidic humour, with a great sense of derision, a rock’n’roll woman who seized the stage like a lioness.

‘I have only good memories of my mother. She was a very funny character, she had a great sense of humour. She loved me very much, we had a special relationship. It was unique, almost like man and wife, although nothing incestuous, although people sometimes thought we were married. We had an artistic relationship. She was a great lady and I miss her very much. To me she was just my mother, a great woman who always tried to protect me.

‘There was something that never was broken between us … although we’ve been separated by these bloody bureaucrats and laws. My mother was an artist. Is an artist. She was there for me.

‘She was what she was,’ he concludes, ‘living her life the way she wanted to. And she did it until the end.’