Chapter 6 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

When she was still just sixteen, Nico travelled for the first time to the Spanish island of Ibiza. Tobias had previously worked there and booked Nico for some upcoming shoots. The sunny Mediterranean climate, a sparkling ocean and cheap rent made it a magnet for the burgeoning bohemian movement, expats and artists alike. Ibiza’s geographic location among the Balearic Islands meant it was still relatively isolated when the model arrived, and this combined with an appealing mix of medieval architecture and alternative ideas. Nico was so enthralled by the place that she decided to relocate to the island. In 1954, she persuaded her mother to join her.

While Nico may have found a location she could finally call home, Grete did not share that feeling. In preparation for the move, the elder Päffgen had sold everything she owned, including all of her dressmaking equipment – her way of making an income. Though not even fifty years old, without her sewing machines Grete was at a loose end, having no career path or hobby to keep her occupied. Nico’s work in Paris made her visits to Ibiza few and far between. According to Helma, Nico thought that putting her mother up in a lovely home on the Spanish island ‘would all be wonderful’; how­ever, ‘she hadn’t thought out the practical problems’, like the run­ning costs of the new abode. With Nico away, Grete was left on her own, with few opportunities to create a new network of friends or earn a living. ‘I think my sister made friends with a German school­teacher on the island, a woman, but I don’t think their friendship lasted,’ Helma recalled. ‘There were no men. Not one. My sister became ill, ill in the head. I don’t think Nico understood this tra­gedy. It got worse and worse, and my sister was forced to face it alone.’

Though Nico loved Ibiza, France was still the centre of the European fashion world, and the main stage for the teen to try on different versions of herself.11 One thing that provided comfort for the young woman was her discovery of jazz. As opera had afforded her escape and solace during her childhood, so Nico found this new form of music permeating the Parisian streets intoxicating. When she arrived in 1956, the French capital was already a hot spot for the genre, having hosted the first Festival International de Jazz in 1948. At scene hotspot Hotel La Louisiane, Nico tried marijuana. The experience left the model ‘coughing and coughing until I was dark red. Then I laughed too much, and I do not like to be vulner­able in this way.’ It is rumoured that she tried heroin for the first time during this period, with Chet Baker. When asked during an interview in the 1980s how she came to cover his classic ‘My Funny Valentine’, Nico reminisced about listening to jazz when she was sixteen and in Paris, singing along to various songs she heard, even though she did not know the language. ‘It was a wild music, against all the conventions that I knew then,’ she later said.

This landscape of eccentrics and mavericks suited Ernest Hemingway perfectly. The writer had already spent ample time in the French capital during the early 1920s, living in the Latin Quarter with his first wife Hadley and fraternizing with other cul­tural luminaries, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso. During a subsequent visit three decades later, in November 1956, Hemingway made a discovery: he had left several large trunks, packed with writing, notebooks and other documents, at the Hôtel Ritz in 1928. The archive provided the material for what would become Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast. It was during this period that Nico met the Nobel Prize-winner. It has been written that Nico’s diary refers to Hemingway taking her to a party before trying to seduce her, all the while promising to write her into one of his books. However, her personal notes men­tion the author just twice across their entirety: once only vaguely in passing,12 and a second time when she describes her room on the Contrescarpe as being ‘next door’ to the ‘Grand Hotel’, where Hemingway stayed and ‘wrote a Novel, which one I don’t know’. She makes no other claims referring to any sort of relationship or liaison between the two.

While it is incredibly titillating to contemplate the legendary writer and iconic singer having a brief fling in the opulent capital, it was Coco Chanel, not Hemingway, who, Nico said, ‘corrupted her’, beginning the idea that Nico was bisexual.13 Chanel was already seventy-three years old when Nico arrived in Paris to start modelling, making it unlikely that the two did have any sort of affair. Though it has been written repeatedly that Nico worked for Chanel, the com­pany has no official records documenting this claim. The teenager did socialize with others who were employed by the designer. ‘We were like a gang, we young girls,’ observed Anne-Marie Quazza, a distinguished Chanel model of the era. ‘Nico would call round, say hello to us girls – “What are you doing tonight? Where shall we go?”’ This provided ample access to gossip and for allegations made about the fashion house and its founder to be passed along to the teen.

There were similarities between the designer and Nico, provid­ing a clear illustration of why the older woman may have been a compelling figure for the young model. Chanel biographer Janet Wallach provides a take on the designer that could also be applied to Nico, deducing that ‘Chanel was simply lonely, and while she may have flirted with her beautiful models, she was desperate for companionship.’14 In a world where her worth was based almost solely on her appearance and, later, her notoriety, Nico may have craved genuine connection wherever she could find it.

Clive Crocker is old-school Ibiza, the owner of the legendary nightclub Domino’s and a stalwart of the early bohemian scene on the island. Crocker first had a romance, then a friendship with the singer that lasted from her first trips to the island until her death. Crocker,15 a British expat who moved to Ibiza in 1958, has rarely talked about his relationship with the icon, but kindly supplied an exclusive interview for this book to help draw a more well-rounded portrait of his former companion. The two were lovers during Nico’s early years in Ibiza, and he recalled the model having ‘this crazy idea that she preferred women’.

Nico allegedly confided to having an affair with French actress Jeanne Moreau while she was shooting the François Truffaut film Jules et Jim. Referring to studio shots promoting the movie, Nico supposedly suggested, ‘I wonder if you can tell from the picture that she is happy from the love of a woman, not the men you are meant to believe in?’ At the time of the possible affair, Moreau would have been ten years Nico’s senior. Awed by the older woman, Nico reflected, ‘She was not a typical woman, at least … She is beautiful and shadowy. She commands your attention with a look, which is how strong people should be.’ Friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock also recalled Nico telling him about the intrigue with Moreau, say­ing, ‘Nico had these romances with women … She had this notion that it was chic to be a lesbian. It was like the idea of her reading Nietzsche; she probably carried the book around because it was a fashion … the fashion of bohemianism. It’s a kind of put-on rebel­lion, and she picked it up from other people.’16