Chapter 12 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

On 13 January 1964, Bob Dylan released his third studio album, The Times They Are a-Changin’. In support of the record, Dylan found himself on a tour of Europe in the spring. He hit London in May, making TV, radio and press appearances, before playing a sold-out show at the Royal Festival Hall. The gig was a surprise success, and the record went on to reach no. 4 in the UK charts. After the show, Dylan decided to go to Paris.33 It was during a stroll around the city that he bumped into Nico and another acquaintance. ‘I was traveling with one of his friends, and we happened to meet him on the street,’ Nico recalled to Twen of her first meeting with Dylan.34 The folk star recognized Nico almost immediately as the girl from La Dolce Vita. Legend has it that Nico invited the folkie up to her apartment, where they stayed for ‘an evening and a week’. ‘His music fascinated me, and we became good friends,’ Nico told Twen. She found Dylan ‘magnetic … [with] heavenly blue eyes! He should not wear sunglasses. His whole personality is in the eyes. At first he is not easy to judge.’ Dylan lectured her on the politics of Germany, without having a clear grasp of issues that were intimate to Nico. In Richard Witts’s biography of Nico, she confides, ‘As I was from Berlin, he [Dylan] asked me if I knew the playwright Brecht. I told him that Brecht had run a theatre in Berlin, but we were forbidden to go there because it was in the Soviet sector. He said, “You see? That would never happen in America. At least we are free to see things.” I said, “But it’s the Americans who are stopping us walking through.” For a man who was preaching about politics he did not know his history too well. Anyway, what about William Burroughs? Wasn’t his book banned in his own country? I could buy it in Berlin.’

However, Nico was able to put the singer’s naivety, possible sex­ism and bloated gravitas aside, saying, ‘He was so charming. I had not quite met someone like him – assertive and delightful – and young.’ The two headed to Greece for a short vacation in a small vil­lage near Athens, bringing Ari along. Dylan looked after the child while Nico did modelling work. It was here that he wrote most of what would become his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. He also penned ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’,35 which Nico claimed was written ‘about me and my little baby’, and that Dylan ‘sent [me] the acetate [of his version] because he had promised [me] a song for singing’.

Connecting with Dylan was a turnstile moment for Nico. Before spending time with him, she believed her only singing opportun­ities would come from following in the footsteps of her country­woman, Marlene Dietrich, and performing jazzy swing songs. Feeling pigeonholed by her nationality, and deflated by her other lacklustre attempts at performing and the failure of her recording of Strip-Tease’s title song to be released, Nico credited Dylan with opening her eyes to the possibilities, saying in the Witts book that ‘he … changed the idea that I had that I should only sing torch songs, you know, love songs’. Though setting her firmly on course for her next career move, Dylan was not necessarily a fan of Nico’s voice. She remarked in a later interview that ‘[Dylan] didn’t like it when I tried to sing along with him. I thought he was being chau­vinistic and a little annoyed that I could sing properly – at least in tune – so he made me more determined to sing to other people’.36

Dylan suggested to Nico that she revisit the idea of playing live, specifically to give the Blue Angel nightclub another try. When a modelling job brought her back to the East Coast, she got booked to sing there for a couple of nights. Billed as ‘That Girl from La Dolce Vita!’ Nico once again found herself in front of a crowd at the venue named after the Dietrich movie. Despite her newfound chutzpah, the same issues that Nico found challenging during her previous Blue Angel engagement began repeating themselves. Nico would come in late and forget lyrics and she found the behaviour of drunk patrons degrading. Once again striking out on her aspir­ations for a singing career, Nico went back to Paris to do some modelling and visit Ari.37

At the start of 1965, Nico was twenty-six years old, ancient by industry standards. Still parlaying her part from La Dolce Vita into credibility, she found work in the burgeoning Swinging London scene. However, there were some challenges: though still looking young enough to score assignments, Nico’s appearance was not in line with the emerging gamine styles popularized by current It girls like Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Pattie Boyd. An inch shy of six foot tall, she towered over the petite, doe-like models popular with photographers and fashion houses alike. Designers such as mini­skirt inventor Mary Quant were creating lines for the ‘everygirl’ to wear in her everyday life, not high-end couture to be donned by untouchable glamazons like Nico.

Nico’s weight was another issue. During the height of her mod­elling years, Nico and many of her fashion contemporaries were expected to adhere to a steady diet of amphetamines to keep their waistlines tiny and appetites in check. Now off the stimulants, the pounds began piling on. ‘To be a model in that period, you had to be seriously skinny,’ recalled iconic photographer David Bailey. ‘But she was fat – well, plumper than the others, I mean. Weight was obviously a problem for her. It wasn’t under control.’ However, Nico’s drive to make money was evident to Bailey, who described her as ‘a bit of a hustler’. Yet despite her graft, she did not have the right look for the UK market. ‘You felt she was trying to prolong her career. I did some shots of her for Vogue, but I don’t think they were used. She wasn’t very commercial; she was unusual, stunning but unusual,’ Bailey concluded.

Despite the obstacles, Nico still managed to find print-ad work, most notably in a campaign for London Fog trench coats. Shot on a blustery day in March near Trafalgar Square, Nico is shown in pro­file, looking at the ground, long hair somewhat obscuring her face, the text attempting to capitalize on the manic energy of the bustling city. Any opportunity for income was welcomed: Nico needed to make money to post back to Ibiza for a fading Grete.

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In January 1966, Nico sent £200 to her aunt Helma Wolff, encour­aging her to use it to visit Grete in Ibiza. It had been six years since Helma had last seen her sister, and the change in Grete’s health was dramatic and ‘terrifying’. Her hands shook almost constantly. She had acquired a drinking problem, having rum throughout the day to take the edge off both her mental anguish and her physical disability. Helma found herself doing basic tasks like cooking and shopping, as Grete lay in bed most of the day. She was mortified by the crippling circumstances – not only financially, but emotion­ally – that her sister was existing under. ‘She had nothing to do … Nowhere to go … She was a prisoner there, drunk and in need of a doctor,’ Helma later stated. With appropriate medical care a reprieve from the impending paralysis and trembling limbs caused by Parkinson’s could be had, yet without any sort of health insur­ance these were beyond Grete’s reach. Nico had failed of late to send any money back to her mother to provide for such aid, and she was even defaulting on the payments for Grete’s home.

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While her mother’s health was getting increasingly perilous, Nico was busy trying to forge a new romantic – and career – path. It was at a party thrown by their record label in celebration of their second LP that Nico met the Rolling Stones. The entire band – Mick, Keith, Brian, Bill and Charlie – were in attendance, as was their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham had been a major catalyst for the Stones’ meteoric rise, including positioning them as the dangerous bad boys, in contrast to the Beatles’ clean-cut image. He was as commanding and charismatic as the band he looked after, donning Mod suits and sunglasses indoors and exuding sexy self-confidence. Oldham was not the only one in the Stones’ camp whose interest may have been piqued that night; guitarist and well-known ladies’ man Brian Jones was also reportedly giving Nico the eye throughout the evening.

In April, Nico found herself in Paris on a modelling assignment, on the same night as the Stones were playing a concert. Her friend, fellow model Zouzou,38 was with Jones at the show and shuffled Nico backstage. It is thought that this is when Nico and the Stones’ co-founder first connected romantically. At the tender age of just twenty-two, Jones was already notorious for his sexual conquests, having fathered four children by four different women before hit­ting twenty.

None of this put Nico off. Asked later about what attracted her to the guitarist, she said, ‘It’s really very simple … He was sexy. He seduced girls. He was charming, until he locked the door.’ It was then that Jones’s sadistic tendencies came to the surface, often aided by his copious drug use. ‘Brian was the kind of man who would take anything you gave him. Offer him a handful of pills, uppers and downers, acid, whatever, and he’d just swallow them all,’ poet Brion Gysin wrote of Jones’s insatiable appetite for illegal substances. Yet the very drugs he voraciously consumed caused him to have a myriad of physical problems, ranging from debilitating asthma to more dire conditions demanding immediate medical attention. The illicit substances also hampered his sexual performance, making him impotent and violent. Nico later spoke about various occasions when Jones became almost frenzied in his rage, on one occasion hitting and punching her hard enough to leave a bruise. Another time, while tripping on acid, Jones cut her labia during an attempt to skewer them with a brooch. Sex acts would often include various objects, with Jones using both candles and a gun as dildos, insert­ing them roughly into Nico’s vagina. He dripped hot wax onto his nipples and the sensitive skin of Nico’s vulva. In a later account Nico revealed that Jones anally penetrated her without using any lubricant, causing pain and copious bleeding.

Despite all these tales of abusive behaviour, Nico would still say, years after her time with Jones, that ‘It was fascinating and fright­ening … But Brian gave the best sex, when he could. He took too many drugs. He was like my little brother, and I had to stop him sometimes from destroying everything, including himself.’ ‘Best sex’, though, was not enough for Nico. She often tried to strike up conversations about poetry or music with Jones, but found that ‘he was really too stoned to talk about anything, and often so was I … but he was gifted and could have made some original music. I kept saying that, but he called me a nag.’39

Model Zouzou contended years later, though, that it was actually Nico who held the upper hand in the relationship, if for no other reason than the difference in height between the two. Standing at barely five foot five, Jones was significantly shorter than the German model. ‘He was scared of her and frightened of confrontations with her. We would be at parties and if Nico came into the room Brian would say, “Oh no, you’d better disappear for a bit.” She was a big, threatening woman.’