Chapter 44 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Tragically, as Nico entered this turning point in her life, Ari suffered a mental collapse, landing him in a Parisian mental institution. In his autobiography, he touches on the incident, but not in a great amount of detail. Nico’s anguish is recorded throughout her jour­nal, as she vacillates between worrying about her son, having hope and trying to spend as much time with him as possible. Within the entries about Ari, she reflects on her own flaws and troubles, even referencing Alain Delon. In one paragraph, she writes, ‘It frightens me how much we are alike sometimes, when I am bored I would also take anything to get rid of my depression, but you can’t just take any old thing that’ll make you crazy and insane.’

Indeed, though now more than two decades had gone by since Ari’s birth, Nico still remained angry, hurt and frustrated by her ex-lover. A letter in her diary, seemingly written for Ari, illustrates this:

Monday morning, today I managed to wake up a little earlier than normal and I shall go to see your father this evening. Perhaps we can talk some sense, or must this go on for another twenty years? Today has been the most destructive day since I came here, as soon as one involves other people even if they belong to the family it turns out to be a disaster, at the moment I have nothing to lose and everything to win.

Such notes directed to her son were not uncommon in Nico’s diary, with the subject often being Delon, according to Ari. ‘She never ceased writing letters that she often did not send,’ he asserts. ‘And this correspondence never had a destiny other than myself. You who had left him. This obsession she had to reconnect with the flamboyant feelings that tied her to her carnal memory! This father who was more inaccessible than a star.’

Now off heroin, Nico began to gain clarity. Even critics com­mented on her staying power, with one saying, ‘Possibly the only rumour about Nico that hasn’t circulated so far is that she was once a man … Nico hardly needs such a drastic career boost. She is weird enough already.’ But Nico did need a different way of managing her life. She started to express frustration at the constant, demanding tour schedule, which brought what she perceived as little return. ‘My Management doesn’t do me justice at all … I will not yield for less than three hundred, even that is an insult. If I sing long enough on some busy street corner I’ll make enough to pay my rent. My Gas and Electricity is about to be cut off. This undervalued fee for the original Underground is uncomfortable. It creates all sorts of inconveniences. Like catching a cold because some other guys are driving the car that I should drive.’

Pressure was mounting to once again return to the studio and make a new album. Nico was not excited about this prospect, writing, ‘When they say, that it’s time for a new Album they mean I should repeat myself once again, the damned music nonstop and loud.’ Her patience with her schedule, her band and the music business in its entirety had run out. Yet the gruelling days continued, as she still needed the money shows provided to survive. A letter to Lutz Graf-Ulbrich from February 1986 illustrates the global scope of Nico’s tours:

Bondi 17 February 1986

Hello Babies, I’m here on tour with my group in Sydney, where we had three days of great success. It is summer here and very hot when we arrived. Since I’ve been here, it has cooled down. All the best, Nico.

Another entry from her diary further revealed her feelings, as she writes:

The End of the month the damn Tour in Germany is starting, I am not in the least excited about it either. If anybody dares to be cheeky on this Tour, I will break his face. I shall tell them upfront, so it doesn’t come as a surprise. They are unable to get a Concert together on their Name alone and are only using my Name to try and make it. This whole Music business [is] starting to bore me very much.

Amidst all of the exasperation, Nico seemed to be rediscovering a trace of her self-worth. She recognized that she had hit rock bottom, writing, ‘But nothing can give me a bad reputation any­more.’ She even calls out various bootleg recordings of her shows that had been made into poor-quality LPs as a quick source of cash, saying, ‘Even my Musicians and my Manager have tried to destroy my Music; either by playing badly or else by bringing out some cheap Production on Live tapes.’ Yet Nico saw herself as the proverbial phoenix from the flame, concluding the passage with, ‘All that cannot harm me, because my singing will always prevail. There isn’t such a thing as my singing being bad, not even if I tried to be.’

James Young shared Nico’s irritation, but for different reasons. ‘At the end of 1986, I left [the Faction]. Nico wasn’t doing anything new. If I’m really honest, I left in the hope that she’d say, “Don’t go, let’s work on new material.” It had got to the point where it was just going round and round revisiting the same venues, playing the same music, and that carried on.’ Young wanted to provide Nico with a new direction in which she could take her music. ‘I’d get accused of being a prima donna because I’d always try and push her into doing new projects, which she’d always resist. I remember I was always trying to hit on her with new ideas. I said, “I wanna do a German album and do German songs. We could do Kurt Weill! If anybody could do a Kurt Weill thing, it should be you! You were in Berlin! You’re German. If anybody could do it …!” [does impression of Nico] “I wanna sing my own songs. I don’t wanna do it!” Just stubborn, stubborn, stubborn! I just saw so much potential. It was so fucking frustrating.

‘She did like classical music, and I wanted to do a contemporary treatment of Schubert’s Winterreise. That would have been amazing! Bringing in electronica, bringing in strange sounds that would not have been present in Schubert’s world, but with her – wow! And some of her amazing lyrics. She may have been scared to bust out on her own completely, to leave behind the security of doing three or four Velvet Underground songs and then the rest of it all hers. To suddenly start doing stuff that these serious classical musicians do, it was probably terrifying. But that was the exciting thing, and I just couldn’t get that through to her. Endlessly frustrating. I used to really nag her about it, and I think she got pissed off with me as much as I got pissed off with her.’

Possibly to alleviate some of the pressure from her musical career, Nico returned to film, making an eleven-minute short with writer/director Sylvain Roumette. Called L’Interview (‘The Interview’), the movie features Nico and her former lover Philippe Garrel’s father, Maurice. The black-and-white movie begins with Nico looking into a mirror, touching up her make-up – a contrast to the idea that she did not care about her appearance. She and the elder Garrel are seated side by side, with Nico holding a notebook and pen. Behind them is a piano, and they appear to be in a living-room setting.

The conversation bounces between the two, with Garrel first appearing to talk about the use of silence and actors in his films, then Nico seeming to read back from her notebook what he just said, interpreting it while adding her own flourishes and ideas. Every so often, an off-camera voice directs and comments. It is unclear what the movie is trying to expound. It does, however, capture Nico’s innate ability to both speak French fluently and be effortlessly captivating in front of the camera, bringing drama and a regalness to even the most pedestrian of movements, such as when she dons dark glasses and sips some sort of beverage from a snifter at the end of the movie.

*

The new year started off with a startling event. On 20 February 1987, Andy Warhol was admitted to New York Hospital, where his gall bladder was successfully removed. He seemed to be recov­ering; however, complications flared up and he suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. He died on 22 February. Less than two weeks before, on 10 February, Warhol had mentioned Nico in his diary, saying how ‘everything just looks right when she does it’, referring to some ‘raggy clothes’ that he had seen her wearing. Nico does not mention the passing of her former friend and mentor in her journal, but his death would most likely have saddened her. It may also have helped begin to set her free from the past, which Warhol had played such a large part in creating. Now off heroin, Nico was starting to think clearly for the first time in decades.

In his excellent book Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young recalls seeing Nico in 1987: ‘I’d hardly seen her for the best part of a year, and there was a distinct change in her. She looked older but seemed happier.’ Her diary captures this, as she seems to be making an inventory of her life, as if awakening from a dream. Manchester provided the stability she needed not only to let go of her addiction, but to begin to take responsibility for herself. Passages written throughout the year evoke the changing of seasons, but also the evolution of Nico.

The prospect of writing as a new outlet for expressing herself clearly excited Nico. It is clear that she is starting to set goals for herself – pos­sibly for the first time:

In exactly three months and four days The book and the Record must be finished. This typewriter is beautiful … yes, it’s true: if I write three thousand words every day, in one month [sic] time my book can be finished … When I write in this style it only coordinates my Plans, and I have a clear focus on everything.

Even when feeling uninspired, Nico still puts pen to paper, show­ing the same determination that propelled her out of Germany in the first place, while indulging in some self-reflection at the same time:

It’s late and I find it hard to write anything of interest, except for the Girls on the Street that are very fashionable with their braids, some look healthy and others don’t, I am working on mine by just letting it grow for the rest of my middle-aged life, it sounds like Paradox looking at myself in the mirror.

Writing provided Nico with something she felt she could con­trol. Her thoughts on her own music at the time when she was using the journal on a regular basis make it seem as if she feels she no longer has ownership of her art. The book she is hoping to pull together will be her doing, and she is navigating the way it comes together without the intervention of anyone else:

Writing this book is going to take some time and nobody is going to steal any more of mine. Wherever I go in future the typewriter will be my companion, if that makes any sense at all. What am I talking about anyway, Smalltalk.

She expresses resentment towards her own band and believes she has been taken advantage of, stating, ‘All those young Musicians make me laugh having the nerve of demanding anything at all. They act like Superstars14 and want to make it running around on my expense, any more of that and it’ll be the End15 of their playing with me. If anybody thinks that nothing has changed or going to and that I refuse to sing for one hundred pounds a show they must be mad. Until now I have not budged to all these whims.’ On metha done, a strong, determined Nico emerges, as she swears ‘on the Name of my only child that nobody will steal from me anymore’.

By this time, after more than 1,200 shows in just a handful of years, Nico was sick of the perpetual cycle of being on the road. The actual performance was always the same as well, surely mak­ing it exhausting and mind-numbing for everyone involved. Nico underscores this repetition, documenting in her own diary, ‘Tour is starting in ten days is crazy, when my tonsils hurt already. People think that tomorrow is a good day to rob me of my precious time.’ James Young also recalled her desire to stop playing so many gigs, noting, ‘She was tired of the endless tours and now just wanted to do the occasional well-paid prestigious show.’ Even gig attendees who were fans started to see the toll that non-stop performing had taken on Nico. In March 1987, a Brixton local named Andy saw her show at neighbourhood venue the Fridge. ‘There weren’t many people there. We stood right at the front and watched her with her little harmonium,’ he reflected. ‘Best thing she did were the old Velvet Underground songs. She was still very striking looking with a charisma that was noticeable but looked old and worn out. She looked like she might have been a bit of a junkie or something like that. Her skin wasn’t too good. You never can tell, can you? I wouldn’t like to judge somebody just on their appearance. But the voice was good. The backup band too did a good imitation of the Velvet Underground. They did “Waiting for the Man”.’

*

Just as Nico was in the midst of all these emotional, professional and personal breakthroughs, tragedy struck once again. Ari fell into a coma for two weeks. It is unclear if this was due to a mental breakdown, a suicide attempt, an opiate overdose or an adverse reaction to a cocktail of drugs. It seems likely from Ari’s diary and Nico’s own notes that contact with Alain Delon had been attempted, with the ultimate result being rejection.

Guilt clearly dominates Nico’s consciousness, as she writes of herself in the third person, documenting the struggles with her own recovery and touring:

Code of Honour: Promises that I can’t keep and feeling like a traitor, an unloyal mother, only to preserve nervous energy for the days of the end of this month when just before each performance she’s just about to drop. One time, shortly after the show, in Halifax she nearly did not get back up. The heaviness of stone. Weighing that against a slow reducing dose, over two years on Methadone.

Much of the later part of Nico’s diary is composed of her detail­ing her trips to and from the Parisian hospital to see Ari and her attempts to stick to the methadone:

The sound of the life-support machines is something else and I shall put it on my next Album. When I come back on Tuesday perhaps they will let me tape it, without seeming bizarre. The Doctor must have thought that you have a funny mother, asking for Methadone. How could I leave M.[anchester] without enough of my Medication, they gave me a whole day’s supply, amazing …

Nico portrays herself as the protective parent, discussing Ari’s progress with nurses and doctors, specifically one Hedi Dahoud, who attended to Ari. Reviewing her diary, it appears that she tried to be with Ari as much as possible, the guilt of not being with him until this point clearly cutting her to the bone: ‘I can feel my nerves go bad, now is not the time to go insane, so it is slow motion for me, until this extensive nightmare is over … My dreams have not exactly given me the most of comfort. Three o’clock in the morn­ing and I should go to sleep in order to wake up easier.’ Her notes are filled with details of her visits to Ari and his slow steps back to health:

Today is my third day here and in a few minutes I am going to see my Ari baby at the Hospital …

It’s quarter to one p.m. and my Ari baby has just had his lunch at the Hospital in Paris …

I am sitting next to you by your bedside my Aribaby …

My Ari baby is much better than I expected.

At one point, Ari’s doctors asked for a meeting with Nico, which she was not pleased with: ‘In the morning Ari’s Psychiatrist wants to see me, if he chooses to be cheeky, I will tell him something.’ Nico ends up confiding to the doctor the family history of drug problems, but she feels that she is not believed or heard, writing in her diary:

Sitting in your Psychiatrist’s chair yesterday was an Experience, him asking me all these Questions about my maternity. I forgot to tell him that my father was an Opium addict and that I was conceived an Opium addict, nobody would believe me. The microscopical Vision of the world in my early childhood was something hard to deal with.

The longer Ari is in care, the more Nico’s trust in the medical system crumbles. Her frustration at her inability to really help him is obvious, as she feels he is not receiving the correct care nor being housed in an appropriate facility:

At this place in Paris, Le Centre de Readaptation, it is a narrow building, most Patients are getting strong Medication, better get the hell out of there for they make you crazy, I would not be surprised if they do tape telephone conversations.

Delon is a spectre who constantly haunts both mother and son. Nico’s notes are filled with frustration, loathing and desperation. ‘Wherever I may wind up tonight, I haven’t a clue, to go and see Ari’s father without a warning I might as well throw a Petrol bomb into his Office,’ she writes. ‘One hour ago I tried telephoning your father and … he wasn’t back yet. It would have been useless to even try to see him tonight.’ Even as Ari lay in the hospital unconscious, Nico still continued to reach out to Delon, hoping he would finally accept her son.

He never has.