NICO: “I cannot be surprised by hell, which I do believe in. I have seen hell, I have smelt hell, which was in Berlin when the bombs destroyed it. Hell is like a city destroyed, and it’s beautiful to see... The past, the present, and the future become irrelevant when they go into a big melting pot. They all begin in Berlin, wherever I am… A wilderness of bricks.”
NICO: “But I have never desired to grow up from my world as
a child, which is when things are most clear and Utopian. They are clear because you are at the center
and you see all around you… I lost something of my childishness when people
around me started dying. Four members of
my family died within a year.”
GERARD MALANGA: “If there exists beauty so universal as to be unquestionable, Nico possessed it.”
NICO: “I had a tendency to get lost. Daydreaming was a favorite. If I got lost I noticed that if I cried I could find the riverbed of the tear and follow it back to the eye and when I jumped into the eye, bingo. I would be myself again. At least the same person that remembered how painful a thing beauty is.”
HELMA WOLFF: “She was always smartly dressed, like a princess. She wore a pageboy haircut and had a long neck and everything looked so good on her. I knew that she would make it. And she knew it too.”
NICO: “I was sixteen when I met Ernest Hemingway in Paris, maybe I was seventeen. I was staying on the Left Bank in a little hotel in Place de la Contrescarpe and he was staying next door. I was sitting in a bar and he made an excuse to talk to me. My French was very simple, and so was my English. But he was a big man and he hypnotized me. He said he was writing a book and he would put me in it, a pretty young girl sitting in a bar. I don’t know which book this is. Do you know it? I am probably in many books like this, scattered about in the bookshops, and I will never know.”
NICO: “Ernest Hemingway invited me to a party near the rue Bonaparte. I did not understand a thing at this party. There were all these people like Jean Paul Sartre and Jean Genet. But Hemingway was very kind to me and I think he wanted to make love to me, but he was more like my father. He was old with a beard; he was like a bear. He tried to feel me. He said I was a princess, but he said Princess Nico sounded as if I was Swedish. I think that is why I said I was Swedish to many people. I am supposed to be Swedish in ‘La Dolce Vita,’ did you notice? He said that if I was Swedish, then I should be a blonde, instead of my dark hair. He had just won the Nobel Prize and I thought that if a winner of the Nobel Prize told you to do something about your hair, there is something to consider. I could be a Nobel blonde.”
CARLOS DE MALDONADO-BOSTOCK: There are many copies of Nico now-a-days, in those days, in the Sixties, she was very tall, very lovely, and she couldn’t speak English, she couldn’t speak French, she couldn’t speak German… she spoke no language articulately. She just had to look, and people looked at her. She was very imposing… Nico, I don’t know where she came from. She was unrooted. And she was always alone… no one loved Nico and Nico loved no one.”
STEVEN WATSON: “Some friends who were acting in ‘La Dolce Vita’ said that the director, Federico Fellini, was preparing to shoot an orgy scene, but no one knew how to act in an orgy. Nico thought she could advise them, and so she followed her friends to Cinecitta. From a table in the vast Mussolini-built studio, she picked up an elaborate candelabra, and this dramatic gesture excited Fellini: ‘I have dreamt of you,’ he told her. ‘I recognize your face. You will look wonderful with candlelight. You must be a star in ‘La Dolce Vita.’”
JACKSON BROWNE: “When I knew her she was just like you see her in ‘La Dolce Vita.’ You know that scene where she’s giggling a lot in a castle? She puts a metal visor on her head and horses around. That’s how she could be, like a child, playing, sweet and real fun.”
JOHN CALE: “Nico had a style that she had picked up from Elia Kazan who taught her at the Actor’s Studio: Take your time, create your own time. And she did, with a vengeance.”
CARLOS DE MALDONADO-BOSTOCK: “She hated men and she hated women and she wanted men and she wanted women, but she didn’t want any of them in the end, not as lovers, she wanted friends. Nico was so lonely so she took friendship very easily and so she was open to exploitation. This beautiful girl, she was full of romance, you have to keep reminding yourself of that, she was elsewhere.”
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: “She was no door mat. She was a lethal woman. She was one of a new breed of woman, like Anita Pallenberg and Yoko Ono, who could have been a man. Far better than the silly little English teacups around at that time.”
DANNY FIELDS: “Nico and I were dear friends. Then she got impossible. The first time I met her, she came to my assassination party in ’63… Nico came in with Dennis Deegan and an Argentine guy and went over to the punch bowl – all I served, because all I could afford was cheap vodka and grapefruit juice. A giant punch bowl. Nico put her head back and ladled the punch right into her mouth. She didn’t even bother with a glass. People stood back, they made this ten-foot circle, and asked, who is this woman. She was very scary. She immediately picked up my friend Seymour, who was from an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, and very gay. She seduced him and became his lover. She taught him how to have sex with women.”
NICO: “In Paris, Edie Sedgwick was too occupied with her lipstick to listen, but 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, but Edie interrupted with some stupid comment about my hair color.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Nico looked like she could have made the trip over right at the front of a Viking ship, she had that kind of face and body… People described her voice as everything from eery, to bland and smooth, to slow and hollow, to ‘wind in a drainpipe,’ to an ‘IBM computer with a Garbo accent.’ She called us from a Mexican restaurant and we went right over to meet her. She was sitting at a table with a pitcher in front of her, dipping her long beautiful fingers into the sangria, lifting out slices of wine-soaked oranges. When she saw us, she tilted her head to the side and brushed her hair back with the other hand and said very slowly, ‘I only like the fooood that flooooats in the wiiiiine.’”
NICO: “One man talked to me, when I was singing at The Blue Angel, who knew Garbo, who lived then in New York in seclusion. I don’t blame her – anyway, everyone lives in seclusion in New York. He said I was like her. I was flattered to know that I shared her character and her appearance. When she died I think something entered me, something from Garbo. Isn’t that romantic?”
JOHN PAUL JONES: “I worked on her test for the record company. She sang ‘Blowin In The Wind’ in the most unusual manner. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, to be honest, but she was certainly something unusual. Very imposing too, about a head taller than me. When I heard her later stuff, it sort of made sense, though the music was so austere. I remember the session well, because Ari, her son, was with her and spent the whole time just tearing the studio apart. He was wild, running around and causing havoc.”
DONALD LYONS: “Nico was the most beautiful person who ever lived. She came out of the European avant garde, the model world, La Dolce Vita. The first time I met her she was staying at the Hotel Earle, learning Bob Dylan’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine.’ She was very taken with Lou Reed and wanted to hook up with the Velvets. We talked about poetry a good deal. I taught her a little Greek…. She was billed as the moon goddess. She was a remote and otherworldly creature, with that incredible voice and an incredible sensibility. She was a genuine anarchist, devoted to a kind of destruction although she had periods of coherence, at various points.”
RICHARD WITTS: “Nico the born liar constructed for herself a generous supply of parallel histories, peopled with phantom families. She mapped them mentally in the form of her favorite gothic image, the palace. Her many memories, true or false and assorted according to taste, were linked together as the corridors and wings of a capricious castle, just like the one Fellini filmed her in for ‘La Dolce Vita.’ Nico rambled around her snaking corridors of memory from one story to another, always invoking fresh panoramas whenever the press called around, because ‘they take down everything I say – silly, isn’t it?’”
NICO: “When I hear a door close behind me, it makes me cry. It is like walking in a palace, like the castle in ‘La Dolce Vita.’ You walk around the corridors and the doors behind you close, and you can only walk ahead but you know that one day you may return to that door in a different way and now it is closed to you, and you have reached the end of something that had been in your life. It is necessary to avoid that, and so I always look ahead and let chance lead me around to escape from nostalgia, which stops artists from advancing.”
