Yahoo News You Are Beautiful And You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike review
She helped the Velvet Underground record one of the most influential albums of modern times, but as this new biography explains, Nico remains such an enigma that it’s still the matter of some debate when and where the German artist was even born.
“It has not been an easy task to tease apart fiction and folklore from often long-forgotten fact,” writes Jennifer Otter Bickerdike in the opening pages of her book, but she soon answers the first question. Nico was born Christa Päffgen, in Cologne, on October 16 1938, and had a traumatic upbringing among the ruins of Hitler’s Germany. The grim atrocities she endured during World War Two and its aftermath haunted her for the rest of her life.
From this point on, across 400 pages, Otter Bickerdike sets about dispelling the notions that have remained tied to Nico’s legacy: that the value of this famously good-looking woman was only skin-deep, that her artistic output was middling at best, and that in her later years, she was little more than a heroin-addicted junkie.
That first one, about Nico’s “beauty” (you’ll soon lose count of how many times the book’s wide-ranging interviewees refer to it), feels like the defining thread. Nico herself seemed well aware of the power her attractiveness could wield, and as an adolescent in Germany, “she decided to exploit her burgeoning asset of striking good looks to attain financial mobility and freedom”.
It worked. At age 16, Nico moved to Paris to model for Vogue. It was here that she got the mononym, christened by photographer Herbert Tobias, and that her mythology began. The biography is littered with accounts of people left awestruck by Nico’s visage upon first meeting her, but as the book makes the point repeatedly, rarely did anyone care to dig deeper.
It was a source of constant anguish for Nico, who “hated [her physical features] being the sole quality that she was judged upon”. When she started performing with the Velvet Underground in the Sixties, live reviews would only focus on the way she looked on stage. Later, as she became an entrenched heroin user, journalists would delight in describing her increasingly unhealthy figure.
Nico’s beauty is often mentioned in tandem with her long list of famous love interests — everyone from Alain Delon, who fathered a child with Nico but always shunned their son, to Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan — and though they all get a mention in the book, it’s far from a kiss-and-tell rundown. Some rumours are busted (she never had a fling with Ernest Hemingway, nor Jimi Hendrix) and the relationships that did happen are examined. Morrison, for example, physically mistreated Nico, but also encouraged her to make her own music — something few others did.
Her time with the Velvet Underground, to whom she was introduced by Andy Warhol, is painted as a period of maltreatment. Lou Reed comes across as thorny and insecure, jealous that this “chanteuse” was getting all the limelight. And though her contribution to their seminal 1967 album is often downplayed, it was Nico — at this point an internationally renowned model — who “made the band noteworthy and helped gain them a vast amount of publicity”, Otter Bickerdike writes.
Dismissive misogyny followed Nico throughout her solo career, with a series of boundary-pushing albums written off by the press and public. Plenty of interviewees, from Iggy Pop to Cosey Fanni Tutti, lavish praise on Nico’s solo albums, but it would have been nice to be taken on a critical deep-dive of what actually makes these albums so great.
The book does occasionally get bogged down by the sheer number of interviews it tries to squeeze in. The voices range from Nico’s surviving family to former band members and adoring fans, all of whom give great colour, but too often they appear as a series of blocky quotes, sometimes repeating information we’ve already been given.
Overall, though, this is a detailed and sympathetic retelling of a life too often dimmed by harsh criticism or careless hearsay. Towards the end of the book, as Nico finds relative happiness living in Manchester during the Eighties and manages to kick the heroin habit that beleaguered her for years, it seems like things are looking up, with Nico feeling creatively recharged.
It makes her death at the age of 49, caused by falling off her bike in Ibiza and suffering a cerebral haemorrhage, especially tragic. We’ll never know what kind of art a later-career Nico would have produced, but we should all find time to revisit — and re-evaluate — the art she had already given us.
You Are Beautiful And You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike (Faber, £20)
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