Chapter 29 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Nico first met Philippe Garrel in 1969, through her friend, actress Tina Aumont. Aumont was shooting a movie, Le Lit de la vierge (‘The Virgin’s Bed’), with the model Zouzou and an underground star named Pierre Clémenti.1 Garrel was looking for music to score his new project, and Nico hesitantly offered her ‘Warhol’ song, ‘The Falconer’. This was the start of an almost decade-long relationship, one that was based on creativity and addiction.

True to Nico’s usual taste, Garrel was three years her junior but just as offbeat as she was, with Paul Morrissey describing her new suitor as looking like ‘Laurence Olivier doing Richard the Third’. ‘He was all hair with a pointed nose sticking through,’ Morrissey continued. ‘You thought he should have been surrounded by snarl­ing hounds and a raven on his shoulder. But he was terribly quiet and slightly pretentious – just the sort of person Nico would fall for then, of course.’ Pauledith Soubrier, Ari’s aunt, had a similar recol­lection of Garrel, stating, ‘There was nothing to see above his neck but an immense mass of dark hair. My mother looked at this figure standing there, went right up and swept the hair from the centre across either side of his head. She tugged the hair aside like it was a pair of curtains, to look at the face. He was very bony.’

Garrel came from Parisian entertainment royalty, his father being revered screen actor Maurice Garrel. Young Philippe seemed poised to be the new enfant terrible of French underground cinema, having made his first movie at the age of sixteen. By twenty-five, he had completed six features, though none was ever widely released. This combination of pedigree and weirdness was appealing to Nico, who soon began collaborating with the upstart.

While embarking on this new relationship, Nico received some terrible news. On 3 July, her former lover Brian Jones was found motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool. Though an autopsy revealed a heavily enlarged liver and heart – most likely the result of his heavy drug use – the official cause of death was ‘misadven­ture’ by accidental drowning. The rock royalty were shaken. Nico despaired at the loss of her former beau, while both the Who’s Pete Townshend and the Doors’ Jim Morrison wrote poems in homage to the Stones’ founder.2 During an appearance on a US television show around the same time, Jimi Hendrix dedicated a song to the fallen musician. Within two years, both Morrison and Hendrix would be dead, like Jones, at the age of twenty-seven.

By the start of 1970, Nico had begun shooting what would be the first of seven films with Garrel: La Cicatrice intérieure (The Inner Scar), which became the best known of these collaborations. Nico was not sure when the project would be finished but did not care, saying in an interview, ‘This new one is very important to me. It’s so powerful. We did part of it in the American desert and part of it in the Egyptian desert … I don’t know when we’ll finish it. It doesn’t matter, there’s no hurry because it’s a very timeless thing.’

It took two years to complete, as Garrel would often take breaks from the production in order to find the additional funds required to finish it. Filmed across three different, barren terrains, Scar is composed mostly of long, simple, linear tracking shots, with min­imal editing during scenes. What little dialogue there is was written by Nico, usually moments before the camera began rolling.3 She also provided five songs for the soundtrack, all of which went on to be featured on her third studio album, Desertshore (which came out at the end of the year). In a postcard to Danny Fields, dated 12 January 1970 and sent from Luxor, Egypt, Nico confides:

Dear Danny, I am getting nostalgic over the old life of living so solitary. Can you do anything for me in NY? I would follow your advice. The movie is O.K. but does not take me into my world. Love you, Nico.

Ari accompanied his mother during filming and appeared throughout the movie.4 He recalls the clashing dualism of living with Delon’s mother and spending time with Nico, saying, ‘The beginning of the school year coincided with the shooting of La Cicatrice intérieure. I was part of the adventurous life of Nico and the most avant-garde of French films. We were reclusive in a palace, fed broth and Coca-Cola. I can still see myself on all fours on the carpet of our room, building castles while listening with my mother to the tape of Procol Harum.’ Ari’s vivid description dovetails with the bleak but beautiful vistas in The Inner Scar, which are as prom­inent as the characters themselves. The film mainly features Nico, dressed in loose, flowing robes, Pierre Clémenti, wearing nothing, and Garrel drifting across the various endless landscapes.

Upon release, the film was applauded and panned equally, seen as either a stark, visionary expression of cinematic genius or the result of two junkies with a camera and financial backing. The New York Times summarized it best, saying, ‘Clémenti speaks French; Nico sometimes complains in English and sometimes declaims in German verse, and sometimes sings for musical background on the soundtrack. There are no subtitles. The people, never more than two at a time, move through a variety of landscapes from glacial to nearly tropical – but that are always, in some manner, desert. The people may walk or run or ride a horse, or drive a flock of sheep or even sail a little boat – but almost always they are in movement … In such stark, unyielding simplicity there is surely a good deal of pretension.’ Garrel admitted to taking LSD to ‘prepare’ for the film, which must have added to the strange, non-linear sequences that make up the movie in its entirety. One Time Out reviewer wrote, ‘You need a bloody big spliff to enjoy this. A miserable couple who you would not wish to meet at a party [Garrel and Nico] are joined by a naked weirdo [Clémenti] … with a bow and arrow and a desire to set everything on fire. That’s about it, frankly, unless I fell asleep, which is likely.’

The film’s title, and much of the very subjective ‘plot’, refers back to deep-seated pain, hurt and regret. In an interview, Nico recalled the genesis of the film, saying that ‘it started out with Philippe hav­ing had electric shock treatment. And that’s how he called the film, “The Inner Scar,” which is you know, madness. It’s a scar in the brain. I was with him while he was in this clinic, near Rome. I was in the same room. And they sent me out a few times before giv­ing him electroshocks. I didn’t know it until I discovered it. It was horrible.’

At the start of the production, Garrel was sewing his own clothes. He eventually began also to make Nico’s wardrobe, resulting in the two of them often being dressed similarly in flowing, almost medi­eval garments, usually in black or white. The bond was made even stronger by their simultaneous further descent into heroin addic­tion. Drugs became a tool for wielding power, and one of Nico’s former lovers claims that the relationship was abusive. ‘Garrel was Nico’s … nightmare, for years,’ says Robert King. ‘He wanted her to make films with him. She was initially good about it, and then became bad about it. That’s what I know.’

While with Garrel, heroin became the most important thing in Nico’s life. Previously, she had smoked the drug; by 1970, she had been taught how to liquefy and inject it. It is still unclear when the transition between the two methods of administering the opiate occurred or who guided her in the different techniques. People who use heroin typically report feeling a surge of pleasurable sensation – a ‘rush’. The intensity of the rush is a function of how much drug is taken and how rapidly it enters the brain and binds to the opi­oid receptors. After the initial effects wear off, users will usually be drowsy for several hours, their mental function is clouded, their heart function reduces and breathing is also severely slowed, sometimes enough to be life-threatening. These numbing elements allowed Nico to function, to temporarily forget the past and the uncertain present. As she stumbled across former acquaintances and friends, they were almost unanimously shocked by her new look and dev­asting addiction. ‘It was extraordinary. I had not seen her for some years, and I was dismayed. She wore orange–red dyed hair, long but severely cut, and terrible clothes. When I first knew her, she was uncontaminated,’ said her pal Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock, ‘but now she was contaminated beyond belief. I hardly knew what to say. In fact, I didn’t know what to say. I simply couldn’t speak. It was as though some terrible tragedy had befallen her. I was appalled.’ Paul Morrissey was equally upset, saying, ‘She came back to New York soon after with Garrel and she looked hideous. She had been one of the most famous blonde models there was, an icon to thousands of people whom she’d never meet, and here she was with this awful crimson hair and unshapely clothes and screaming to the world, “I don’t want to be beautiful anymore.” It was tragic to see this change. This is the time when the drugs got heavy. This was the start of the slide down to hell. It was this Garrel guy who turned her round. She had become artistic, and she did what she thought artists do – go mad, get wired, go to hell.’

The drugs momentarily assuaged the acute loneliness inherent in Nico, while driving a wedge between her and those who cared for her, making her more isolated than ever before. Danny Fields emphasized this point, saying, ‘She didn’t seem to help herself in many instances, but she felt she could indulge those impulses because there were always men around. There was always a cushion of guardians. There was a Paul Morrissey or there was someone in place there … Andy Warhol. We all took care of her. And she knew that was there. She knew that she could do frail and helpless. Getting a phone call in the middle of the night. “Oh, Danny, I must have some heroin. Can you give me $10?” And I’d have to tell her, “Nico, not for that. Leave me alone. It’s the middle of the night.” People would say to me, “You talk to her like that? You know, she’s Nico.” But you could talk to her like that. “Fuck off, Nico. Not for that. I love you. Goodbye.” Click. But she knew who loved her,’ he con­cluded. ‘At the end of the day, we would be there for her as much as you could, but you can’t be there for a junkie. I’m sorry. You can’t.’ The drugs also stripped Nico of her sense of humour, with scoring the next hit becoming the most important, if not only, priority. ‘If she hadn’t been jonesing she would have laughed at that herself,’ said Fields. ‘That’s the way she was. She loved the absurdities of life.’