Chapter 13 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Andy Warhol was in Paris for his May 1965 exhibition.40 Nico was visiting Willy Maywald and was out at a nightclub when she first encountered the Factory entourage. In his memoir, Maywald, recall­ing the evening, writes, ‘One evening we were together in the night­-club Castel when she made herself known to a group of Americans. One of them was the young American artist Andy Warhol.’ The Factory was the name of Warhol’s art studio, which doubled as a clubhouse for a chosen set of artists, weirdos and eccentrics deemed cool enough to gain entrance. Spotting her friend, actor Denis Deegan, with the New York contingent, Nico made her way over to where Warhol was holding court with Factory insiders Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick and introduced herself.41

Warhol already knew of the model from her turn in La Dolce Vita and had cut out and saved the London Fog ad for his scrapbook. The model immediately began regaling the group with her personal résumé, starting with Fellini and sprinkling in new additions Dylan and the Rolling Stones for good measure. The New Yorkers were impressed. Nico later recalled this first interaction, saying, ‘Gerard Malanga told me about the studio where they worked in New York. It was called the Factory. He said I would be welcome to visit when I was next in New York.’ However, the trip had to wait, as Nico had already been promised a shot at working with Andrew Loog Oldham.

Having already launched the Stones, Oldham was in the pro­cess of starting his own label, Immediate, with Tony Calder, the producer behind Marianne Faithfull’s success. Nico was keen to produce a single through the new endeavour and thought the track Bob Dylan had given her would be perfect to entice Oldham to sign her.42 Oldham had other plans, however, deciding to have Nico cover the Gordon Lightfoot song ‘I’m Not Sayin’’ instead of using the Dylan original.

Time has not mitigated the magnetic aura of the legendary man­ager. Our interview took place over a cup of tea in the London neighbourhood of Soho. Oldham separated misconstrued stories from the facts of his time working with Nico. Though it has been written previously that Brian Jones promised to both coach Nico and play on her debut, Oldham vehemently denies either occurred. ‘Pundits seem to have it Brian played on the A-side. Impossible! [The Musicians’] Union would not have let him on [the studio] floor,’ he declared.

Oldham had instated a new head of A&R at Immediate, a young man named Jimmy Page.43 He believes that it was Page who recorded and demoed the model, with two acoustic guitars, at Regent Sounds, a recording studio in the British capital. ‘I obviously heard the result of that [session], and then I made the most awful record with her, the A-side “I’m Not Sayin’”,’ Oldham recalls. Not happy with the way the Lightfoot song was turning out, Oldham quickly penned some lyrics for a new cut, ‘The Last Mile’. He then gave the words to Page, who wrote the music for the track, which became the ­single’s B-side. ‘He [Page] didn’t have anything to do with the first one [“I’m Not Sayin’”]. He might have been playing on it, but he was just reading parts. One way or the other, I wrote the lyrics [for “The Last Mile”], and he put the music to it. Either way, I just gave him the fucking poetry, and she sang it. Looking back at it, the B-side is better than the A-side.’44

An appearance on British TV’s Friday-night hipster show Ready, Steady, Go! to promote the single proved to be equally problematic, with Nico rushing through the performance, leading to an abrupt and premature end, her lip-syncing concluding long before the backing track had finished. She later brushed these early disasters off, saying in the Witts biography, ‘I was acting a role that I had to do … It was like being back with [Lee] Strasberg [at the Actors Studio]. It was fun, really. But I was not acting a role on a stage or on a record. I was acting for contracts. I was too shy to be me, and it’s easier to play someone else, isn’t it?’

What Nico did excel at was winning over the people she met during an Immediate promotional tour. An entourage consisting of Oldham, Nico, a driver and a person hired to be the designated ‘joint-roller’ made its way to a record-label sales conference and then up to Manchester to introduce themselves at the Philips Records plant. ‘We were all so wonderfully stoned on hash, and we had a great laugh. But everybody loved her because … she was funny, and she enjoyed herself … When the single didn’t go, I don’t think I saw her again … I didn’t socialize with her, and the next thing you knew she turned up in New York with Warhol,’ said Oldham, adding, ‘She wasn’t aloof at that point.’ Though the song did not prove to be the breakthrough hit he was hoping for, he still praised the singer later, saying, ‘She was one of a new breed of woman, like Anita Pallenberg and Yoko Ono, who could have been a man. She was no doormat. Far better that than the silly little English teacups around at that time.’

The video for the song, shot by the London docks, showcases an incredibly skinny Nico miming to the camera. Clothed in a long-sleeved black blouse, below-the-knee print skirt, and high boots, and with long hair and an eyelash-skimming fringe, the singer looks chic – but out of step with the 1960s fashion of micro-minis and asymmetrical Vidal Sassoon hairstyles. A set of negatives, taken from the video shoot, show Nico vamping and, in some images, even smiling. An unknown young man with long brown hair is her companion in some of the proofs.

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A scene from the 2007 Bob Dylan documentary 65 Revisited not only provides a glimpse into Nico’s hopes and dreams during that time period, but shows her naive vulnerability, masked by a rigid determination.45 Directed by D. A. Pennebaker, the film is com­posed of footage from his original Dylan movie, 1967’s Don’t Look Back, as well as outtakes not included in that version. The feature, shot in 1965, follows Dylan and his entourage during their tour of the UK that year. The Nico clip opens with an image of a news­paper, the Beatles and Dylan splashed across the front cover. It then cuts to Nico, wearing a long dress and what looks like leggings, sit­ting in front of a window in what appears to be a living room. She is talking to Dylan’s manager, the much older, stout Albert Grossman. The camera quickly zooms in on her face, as the two discuss another entertainer – most likely Marianne Faithfull:

Grossman: Last time I saw her she had a little yellow bow in her hair, and she looked like a [gets interrupted] … grammar-school girl.

Nico (over top of Grossman saying ‘grammar-school girl’, smiling): You think that would suit me?

Grossman: No! You’d have to find your own thing.

Camera zooms in on Nico’s face, looking away from Grossman and smirking.

Grossman: But she takes full advantage of the fact that she can put on her yellow hair ribbon and go talk to the head of Paramount Pictures.

Nico’s face becomes serious.

Nico: And she hasn’t been [gets interrupted] …

Grossman: And she’s concentrating on what she has to do, and he’s looking at the hair ribbon.

Nico looks at Grossman.

Nico: She never thought of herself looking like a fool?

Grossman: She doesn’t look like a fool!

Nico (smiling): No?

Grossman: Not at all.

Nico smiles incredulously and laughs.

Grossman: What, you think that would be the worst thing, would be to look like a fool?

Nico (frowning): Yes.

Grossman: Yeah?

Nico nods.

Camera pans across the room to a man on a sofa.

Nico: Like [a flower?]

Grossman: Oh, yeah really? Your heart is in the right place. (Camera cuts to close-up of Grossman’s face.) You have good instincts, right?

Camera pans to Nico. She smiles at Grossman’s question.

Nico: Yes.

Grossman: So you’re just talking about style.

Nico (smiling and laughing): That’s about all!

Grossman: You’re just talking about style.

Nico may have been hoping for Grossman to take her on and help her become established in US music circles. This film snippet illustrates the reality that Nico had nothing and nobody to fall back on; she had only herself. While it may be easy to accuse her of being a name-dropper, it is by associating herself with others that she wisely manoeuvred and wiggled her way through soci­ety. Friends later commented that she always felt inadequate and un­edu­cated compared to her contemporaries, who had either been to college or dropped out of one, like Dylan. That makes it a much more poignant and heartbreaking scene when Grossman says to Nico that she has ‘good instincts’ and her ‘heart is in the right place’, and she responds with a sad, melancholic smile. Though he never officially managed her, Grossman did give Nico the idea of returning to New York.

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With the failure of her Immediate single, Nico once again boomer­anged to New York, swinging by Paris to pick up Ari from where he was staying with his grandmother Edith. With no clear plan, modelling work provided much-needed income. As per usual, Nico was not snobby about what product to promote, as long as it paid.46 She remembered her invitation from Gerard Malanga to come to the Factory and decided to take him up on his offer. ‘She called us from a Mexican restaurant and we [Warhol and Paul Morrissey] went right over to meet her,’ Warhol wrote in his book POPism. ‘She was sitting at a table with a pitcher in front of her, dipping her long beautiful fingers into the sangría, lifting out slices of wine-soaked oranges.’ On spotting Morrissey and Warhol enter the premises, Nico ‘tilted her head to the side and brushed her hair back with her other hand and said very slowly, “I only like the fooood that flooooats in the wiiine.”’ Over dinner, she proceeded to tell the duo about Dylan writing a song for her, her appearance on Ready, Steady, Go! and the promises made by Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman to look after her if she came to the US. She car­ried on, telling the impressed Warhol and Morrissey about her fling with Alain Delon, La Dolce Vita and the Immediate record she had cut with Oldham. By the time dinner was finished, Warhol recalled, ‘Paul said that we should use Nico in the movies and find a rock group to play for her. He was raving that she was “the most beautiful creature that ever lived”.’

The return to the East Coast also brought Nico back in touch with her former flame Brian Jones. Jones suggested that they go to the Factory and visit Warhol at East 47th Street. Nico brought a copy of ‘I’m Not Sayin’’ along with her. ‘I first heard of Nico, one day, an afternoon, at the Factory,’ recalled Billy Name. Born William Linich, Name was a Factory insider, collaborator and archiv­ist for Warhol. ‘Andy was at his worktable doing silk screening. I was either helping him or doing something else. Gerard Malanga came up the elevator into the Factory and said, “Hey Everybody! I want you to hear this record I have. It’s by this new friend I have in Europe. Her name is Nico.” He put this little 45" on our stereo system and it played in.’

Just to have the confidence to breach the Factory walls was an accomplishment for the non-initiated, according to Name. ‘It was perilous to be there. A lot of people couldn’t even come there. They wouldn’t come there because of what they heard about it. Or if they did come, they left immediately. The aura was so intense. High-powered people. Andy was a magician. A wizard. The specialty at the Factory was a synthetic aura where anyone who came into it who did have skills or talent was accepted by Andy and the rest of the group there as another player in the play and could interact.’

Nico, however, was an entirely different kind of person than previous Warhol intimates. ‘Most people at The Factory were very loquacious and verbose and would easily talk or tell you some­thing. Nico … rarely spoke. And only when someone spoke to her,’ remembered Name. ‘She was totally nonflamboyant, nonpre­tentious, but absolutely magnetically controlling. She didn’t wear all the hippie flowers, she just wore these black pantsuits, or white pantsuits – a real Nordic beauty. She was too much, really, let me tell you, so anything we could think of to have her play a role in our scene, that’s what we were gonna do.’

Paul Morrissey agreed. Morrissey managed all of Warhol’s busi­ness affairs, as well as directing films with the artist.47 Possessing the talent to turn art into commerce, he spotted an opportunity with Nico that differed from what was offered by those already inhabit­ing Factory circles. ‘Nico was spectacular,’ he said. ‘She had a def­inite charisma. She was interesting. She was distinctive. She had a magnificent deep voice. She was extraordinary-looking. She was tall. She was somebody.’

Warhol, too, was taken by the new arrival, and immediately brought her over to a pre-existing ‘set’ within the Factory: a chair set against a plywood background, with lighting and a camera. Here Nico undertook the right of passage experienced by everyone, from Dylan to Allen Ginsberg, who entered the Factory: the Warhol screen test.48 Four and a half minutes later, Gerard Malanga, who was operating the camera, declared that they had enough material and started shooting a second piece with the model. He was also enthralled by the tall blonde.49 While the first test had captured the icy, detached Nico, with barely a smile, the next one showcased the fun side of the singer, as she flipped her hair around before rolling a magazine into a tube and peering down it into the camera. Several days later, Warhol cast her in what would be their first collabor­ation, the sixty-six-minute-long film The Closet.

Shot in November 1965 at Panna Grady’s50 apartment in the Dakota building on Central Park West and 72nd Street, the stun­ningly attractive Nico and a young, gay college student, Randy Borscheidt, find themselves in a closet.51 She tries to coax him to literally come out of the closet – to no avail. There was no script that the actors followed; everything was ad-libbed on the spot.

Photographer and friend Peter Sahula accompanied Nico to some of the first shoots for the film and was not impressed by what he saw. ‘The way they did movies was very, very bizarre,’ he later recalled, adding, ‘It was like they spent all day doing nothing. I can’t imagine how anybody really could have done a movie. There was just a lot of people milling around, and nobody knew what they were doing. Nico was supposed to be in the movie, but she wasn’t doing anything, and everybody was just talking. It was crazy. I said, Get me out of here.’

The film was rarely seen;52 however, it did grant Nico an entrée into the Factory’s inner circle, providing her with a proverbial foot in Malanga, Morrissey and Warhol’s door. The Closet was the first of the nine movies she would make with Warhol. These early notable interactions with the Warhol gang provided a strong foundation for what was to come, as meeting the pop artist would change the entire trajectory of Nico’s life.