Chapter 9 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Towards the end of 1961, Nico found out that Alain Delon was in New York, staying at the St Regis Hotel. With little hesitation, she rang him up. The two had a night on the town, driving around in a Maserati, before getting stopped by the police. They then made their way to the Blue Angel club, before heading back to Nico’s place. Delon stayed the night, leaving in the early hours of the morning.

At the time of the liaison, Delon was engaged to Romy Schneider. ‘Although she [Nico] knew that he belonged to Romy, she put up with it too. Delon took advantage of it. He has children all over the world, I think, whom he doesn’t know,’ Helma Wolff claimed. ‘It couldn’t have been a great love. Rather an encounter,’ she concluded. Friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock recalled Nico’s enthralment with the actor: ‘I was just leaving for Paris … when Nico came round, very happy and excited: “I’ve just slept with Alain Delon!” It was like Snow White had met her prince. She was obsessed with this ghastly man for some reason.’

For several weeks after the one-night stand, Nico felt extremely ill, throwing up almost daily and complaining of nausea. More than eight weeks after her night of fervour with Delon, a doctor’s appointment revealed the cause: Nico was almost through her first trimester of pregnancy.

Almost forty years later, Helma still vividly remembered how Grete found out she was to become a grandmother. ‘[Nico] had rented a very nice house for her mother on Ibiza, right on the beach, and came to her mother: “Mother, I am pregnant. I’m having a child,” she said. “The father is Alain Delon.” My sister didn’t even know who that was then. “I’m really happy,” Christa said. My sister suggested an abortion to her, saying that “You are constantly on the move in the world. How do you want to be a mother to the child?” “Don’t worry,” Christa said, “I won’t let it drift away. This child should be my own. I also want to have a person for me.”’

Though pregnant, Nico did not stop trying to further her acting career. She was considered for the lead in the French–Italian film L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad).27 The role eventually went to French actress Delphine Seyrig, freeing Nico up to take on other offers, including a photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar in the Bahamas, and to contemplate another seemingly juicy role: the main character in French film director/actor Jacques Poitrenaud’s new project, Strip-Tease (or Sweet Skin, as it was alternatively called, depending on the country). So keen was Poitrenaud to get Nico to sign the contract for his movie that he flew to the tropical location of the Harper’s shoot to deliver it. After agreeing to the role, Nico informed a most likely startled Poitrenaud that she was pregnant, but would be ready by the time filming was supposed to start in November – just over two months after she was due to give birth.

Model Anne-Marie Quazza recalls encountering a giddy Nico turning up during the spring Chanel shows of 1962. Fresh from the shoot in the Bahamas, she announced to Quazza and the other ­models, ‘I am the most happy girl in the world. I have found the most beautiful boy in the world. I wanted a baby and now I am going to have one by him!’ Quazza recounted everyone looking at Nico and asking who the father was. When Nico exclaimed, ‘Alain Delon!’ as Quazza said, ‘You can imagine the silence.’ Quazza reminded Nico that Delon was not her ‘boyfriend’, calling her ‘crazy’ for getting herself into this predicament. Nico replied, ‘I didn’t want anything from him. I didn’t ask for it. I just want now a baby of my own.’ ‘It was like a fairy tale to her,’ Quazza concluded.

Though neither Helma nor Quazza thought Nico wanted to carry on a relationship, let alone get married to Delon, others remember her being deeply infatuated with the French actor and very much looking for a betrothal. Nico Papatakis, her long-time partner, was working on a film in Paris28 and was the last to know of the impend­ing arrival. He recalled, ‘One day she called me from New York and said, “I’m having an affair. I’m expecting a baby. Alain Delon is the father. I want to keep it. He has accepted paternity.” “Are you sure?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “and I’ll marry him.” “Well, good luck,” I said.’ In another interview, Papatakis is quoted differently, saying that from the start of the phone call, Nico was acting ‘very strange’, before she broke the news. ‘We had to separate because of what she had said,’ he recounted. ‘I warned her, I really warned her: “This man has had many affairs, and he couldn’t care less. Please don’t try any blackmail on Delon. Don’t blackmail him.” The whole thing to her was not like something in reality, but like something in a film.’

Delon, however, did not share Nico’s joy, denying paternity and ignoring any correspondence from the model and her friends.

Throughout the early months of 1962, Nico continued taking modelling jobs.29 By June, she was ensconced back in Ibiza, where Grete still had the house outside the old town. Though living in a beautiful setting, the elder Päffgen was not well. Friend Anne-Sophie Monet accompanied Nico to Spain. ‘It was frightening to see her mother, because she was so obviously ill,’ Monet said. ‘She was developing Parkinson’s disease but there was also something mentally wrong. To put it simply, she was paranoid – everyone was against her, trying to poison her. There was a kind of reversal in the relationship between the two of them; the mother had become the child of the daughter.’ Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock further embellished the situation, saying, ‘[M]entally the mother relied entirely on Nico, because she was absolutely lonely otherwise.’

Nico’s unsettled relationship with her own nationality may have been what pushed her to have Ari in France, thinking that her son would automatically receive citizenship in the country of his birth. Now heavily pregnant, the only available transport from Ibiza involved various trains and boats. Grete insisted upon coming, wanting to be on hand when her grandchild was born. Monet accompanied the Päffgens on the harrowing journey, which included a night spent in Barcelona. ‘The mother started to howl,’ she remembered. ‘She became hysterical, thinking that strangers were after her, frightening hallucinations … [she] was unpredict­able the entire time. Then we had the train journey, and this was nerve-racking, because the mother would react in an unstable way that drew attention and could not be controlled.’

Monet said in an interview that she had a small apartment on the rue Jacob in Paris, which she allowed Nico and Grete to stay in before the birth. It is likely that Nico Papatakis accompanied Nico to the Clinic Emmailloté, located in the western Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, where she was admitted on 9 August 1962. Having nowhere to stay at the hospital, Papatakis was forced to leave Nico on her own. For the next two days, he waited anxiously by the phone for any update on what was happening. On 11 August, the hospital called with the news that Nico had delivered a baby by Caesarean section. De Maldonado-Bostock recalls Papatakis being ‘beside himself with fury’ after hearing the news, slamming the phone down and immediately going to the hospital. ‘I was angry with this arrogance of the surgeon,’ Papatakis said. ‘These kinds of men always want to open people up! He had no right to assume this with Nico, who was in no condition to argue.’

Papatakis signed the witness document for the baby boy, Christian Aaron, writing down ‘Päffgen’ for the last name. Instead of using his formal name, Nico decided to call her son ‘Ari’, meaning ‘little lion’, Leo being Ari’s zodiac sign. Her naivety with regard to formal docu­mentation later led to Ari being ‘stateless’ when he came of age (at fourteen) in France. ‘[Taking French nationality] was not possible under the law because there was no father, nothing registered in the name of a father, nor of anyone French,’ Alain Delon’s half-sister Pauledith Soubrier later said in an interview. ‘As a German citi­zen, she should properly have gone to the German Consulate for the purpose of registering Ari. So he was not German, he was not French, he was not anything.’

Despite Nico very publicly naming Delon as the father of her child, the actor – ‘the most famous man in France’ – refused to accept that Ari was his, even though the resemblance between the two was indisputable. At the time, some people questioned Nico’s claim of Delon’s paternity. Nico had been openly captivated by the Frenchman since the two met on the set of Plein soleil. Maybe she had made the entire affair up. It could be Papatakis, not Delon, who was the child’s dad. Nico was, after all, living sporadically with Papatakis when she got pregnant. And Papatakis was the only per­son there to witness the birth documents (though, as Ari points out, ‘No declared father … at this empty place,’ referring to the line where paternity would be normally be listed). Ari also had a Mediterranean skin tone, similar to that of Papatakis.

Yet as Ari got older, the striking likeness between Delon and him became ever more uncanny. Though Papatakis and Nico had lived together for two years, de Maldonado-Bostock said that the rela­tionship was ‘a romantic liaison with very little physical intimacy’. Papatakis did seem to genuinely care about Nico. Unlike Delon, he did not want to leave the new mother alone, with only the sickly Grete for support. As soon as he could, he picked Nico and the infant Ari up from the clinic, collected Grete and brought the trio to the studio he had rented for them in the Marais. ‘Papatakis was a decent chap. He had integrity in the matter,’ de Maldonado-Bostock recalled. ‘I think he only wanted to see that Nico was treated right … He was simply being honourable, unlike Delon.’

*

When Ari was six weeks old, he, Nico and Grete returned to Ibiza. This time renting a small set of rooms near the harbour, Nico set about learning her lines for her upcoming star turn in Strip-Tease. Grete made a convenient babysitter, living just up the hill. It was during this period that Nico first met Mancunian jazz musician and self-proclaimed bohemian Victor Brox. Still playing shows and making music today, Brox has a hearty laugh and a beguiling story-­telling style that is apparent even over the phone. Though at the time he had heard about Nico and seen her from afar, they had not been formally introduced. Having bought the latest in tech­nology – an audio recorder – to help her memorize her script, Nico soon found herself taping the flugelhorn player who lived above her. When his errant football fell onto her balcony, a flustered Brox had to knock on the model’s door. ‘She was simply breath-taking to look at … but she was very shy,’ he recalls.

Nico was ravenous for information about music and soaked up any crumb of knowledge provided by Brox. ‘She wanted to know everything about jazz and blues, absolutely everything. She started to come upstairs, and I’d talk her through the history of the forms, the styles, the key musicians, the singers, like Bessie Smith – just everything I could tell her and play her. She just sat there and lis­tened intently, though I had no way of knowing how much she took in,’ he notes. These salad days in Ibiza built on Nico’s aborted singing lessons in New York, as she found herself surrounded by artists, gaining entry to Brox’s group of like-minded jazz players. Eventually, she joined in with the locals’ improvisation sessions. ‘There was a rule for entry: you had to bring an instrument,’ states Brox. ‘Nico brought her tape recorder.’ A romantic affair lasting a couple of weeks followed.30

Though having found romance and a free-wheeling set of friends in her beloved Ibiza, Nico had a film to make. Flying to Paris with baby Ari in tow, she prepared to start work on Strip-Tease, where she was billed as ‘Krista Nico’ for tax purposes. Upon landing, her old mentor and trusted friend Willy Maywald surprised the model/actress with a trip to his studio. There he shot a colour portrait of the new mother and her infant son.31 Nico looks much older than twenty-four, her hair ratted and teased into a sweeping, chin-length bouffant. She is wearing a bright-pink blouse, with a gold and pearl-studded pendant necklace. In her arms, she proudly clutches Ari, who is swaddled in a white, fluffy, cloud-like blanket. In all of the various images of Nico throughout her life, it is one of the only ones in which not only is she smiling, but she looks truly, authentic­ally happy and hopeful.