Chelsea Girl

In the early-to-mid-1960s, visitors to Andy Warhol’s silver-plated Manhattan Factory were often asked to sit for a screen test. Unlike traditional screen tests, which are more like auditions, Warhol’s brief black-and-white 16mm films were silent portraits of an individual in a moment of unguarded stillness. Nico’s 1966 Screen Test finds the singer perfectly content in front of the camera. She fiddles with a few props, stares off into space, and nibbles on her fingernails. It’s almost as if the camera is not there at all, which for Nico, it may as well not have been. She was always under someone’s gaze, a kohl-lined enigma glaring out from behind her bangs.

Nico spent most of her life as a manifold figure reduced to a muse. She was so often limited to her striking physical presence and icy “unapproachable mystique.” As Warhol’s Screen Test shows, Nico possessed that inexplicable magnetism, a wordless ennui. But she was also written off as untouchable and unknowable, which by all accounts she was. “She had no inner life. What inner life she did have was always strictly kept in her,” said Viva, one of Warhol’s Superstars, in the 1995 documentary Nico Icon. “There was really nothing to talk to Nico about because she had no interests.” “[Nico] didn’t hate people,” says her friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock in the same film. “She was just alone, alone. And she was scared to death. Of herself, of everybody.”

Nico’s beloved 1967 solo debut Chelsea Girl is her aura commodified by men who were intoxicated by the idea of Nico. Despite the fact that each song on the album feels extracted from Nico’s soul, she did not write any of the lyrics. Of course, men writing music for women is a constant in the history of pop music. But there’s something about Nico’s qualities—ennui, detachment, mystery, beauty—that make Chelsea Girl a double-edged sword. Consider the lyrics to “Afraid” off Nico’s 1970 record Desertshore: “You are beautiful and you are alone.” Detachment, the ever-present quality of Nico’s voice, only intensified the idea of her as just an image.

Throughout her life, Nico actively encouraged the air of mystery that followed her. She claimed to have been born everywhere, from Berlin to Budapest (definitively, it was Cologne, 1938). She said her estranged father was either a soldier with Hitler’s Wehrmacht armed forces or a Turkish Sufi (it was former, and he was killed by a commanding officer, after being shot by a French sniper). When the British bombardment of Cologne intensified, mother and daughter moved to a small town outside of Berlin. After dropping out of school around the age of 14, Christa Päffgen was discovered by the German fashion designer Heinz Oestergaard and began a fruitful modeling career. Eventually, she would take on the name of photographer Herbert Tobias’ ex-boyfriend: Nico.

Nico began acting in her early 20s, appearing most notably in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita. About a year later, while studying at New York’s Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, she had a brief affair with French actor Alain Delon, which resulted in a son, Ari. By the time Nico met Warhol in 1965, she was already a Superstar of her own creation.

She was hardly a singer, nor did she aspire to be one. Her unwavering Germanic baritone was a result of the opera and wartime propaganda anthems she grew up with and the jazz and blues she witnessed as a young model in Paris. But Nico’s voice only heightened the spectacle Warhol desired. “The group needed something beautiful to counteract the kind of screeching ugliness they were trying to sell,” explained Paul Morrissey, a Factory filmmaker and one of the Velvet Underground’s first managers, “and the combination of a really beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed.” Warhol had recently been approached to help open a discotheque in Long Island and was looking for a house band. Coincidentally, he had just encountered the Velvets at the Greenwich Village venue Café Bizarre and decided that the quartet were the perfect fit. Enter Nico, who would be the band’s “window-dressing.”

Conflict between the Velvets and Nico erupted immediately, largely because of Nico’s desire to sing every song. At this point, there were no songs fit for Nico’s low, unbroken rumble in the Velvets’ repertoire, so Warhol commissioned a reluctant Lou Reed to write a few ballads for his rising star. The resulting songs—”Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror”—are deep psychological studies rooted in Reed’s complicated relationship to Nico and the cultural spectacle swirling around them. While each of these songs seems directly drawn from Nico’s psyche, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is Nico in a nutshell. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his 1979 book Seduction, “’I’ll be your mirror’ does not signify ’I’ll be your reflection’ but ’I’ll be your deception.’”

Despite its historical accolades, their 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico was considered a commercial and financial failure, and as a result, the band was not playing many shows. Nico began a solo residency at the St. Marks street club The Dom where she was initially accompanied by a tape deck playing Reed’s pre-recorded guitar solos. Apparently, it was painfully awkward, and soon Nico was joined by the actual Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Tim Buckley, and a young Jackson Browne, who later became her lover. In the final weeks of Nico’s residency, the Velvets presented her with an opportunity to join them on tour. Nico chose to stay in New York, symbolically ending her time with the Velvet Underground. “I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big might have happened for me,” she would say.

But something big was happening for Nico. Her 1967 solo debut Chelsea Girl would be her first step towards claiming herself as an artist and individual. Although the record’s 10 sparse folk-pop songs were written by Nico’s male collaborators—Browne, Reed, Cale, Bob Dylan, Morrison, and Tim Hardin—Chelsea Girl is not a covers record. Rather, these were the unreleased songs she had acquired through her residency at The Dom. Like her songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico, each track is a remarkable communion between writer and singer. “I am the person, the Chelsea Girl,” Nico declared while revisiting the hotel years later. The record takes its name from Warhol’s split-screen 1966 experimental film Chelsea Girls, which documents the mundane activities of scenesters at the legendary Chelsea Hotel. “Chelsea Girl” is a continuation of the film in the form of a ballad about the hotel’s S&M queens, Superstars, and junkies; every character’s verse contains a heartbreaking epitaph like, “Her future died/In someone’s past.”

Chelsea Girl presents a young woman torn between the regrets of her past and the unknown but hopeful future. Browne’s three contributions—“These Days,” “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “Somewhere There’s a Feather”—are introspective meditations on change backed up by Cale’s chirping viola and Browne’s gentle acoustic guitar. “These Days,” the ultimate loner anthem and the most famous song of Nico’s career, has been covered by artists from Drake to Elliott Smith, and is as iconic as Nico herself. It’s no wonder Wes Anderson chose to use it as a theme of sorts for The Royal Tenenbaums’ Margot, a character whose mystery and sadness is as heavy as her mink coat. But upon listening to Browne’s twangy version of “These Days,” it becomes obvious that Nico’s droning, Germanic drawl is what makes the song so affecting.

While Browne focuses on transitions, Cale pushes Nico into more a more esoteric realm. On “Little Sister” (co-written with Reed), Nico’s voice is flat and brooding in direct contrast to the whimsical organ which pipes along beside her. She sings in “perfect mellow ovals” as Goldstein wrote in 1966. “It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning.” “Winter Song” on the other hand, basks in an almost medieval atmosphere which is heightened lyrically by talk of “tyranny,” “royal decay,” and the “worshipping wicked.” The closest thing to a Velvet Underground song on Chelsea Girl is Reed, Nico, and Cale’s hefty eight-minute “It Was a Pleasure Then.” While Cale’s viola groans with distortion and Reed’s guitar drives into darkness, Nico’s voice soars into a wordless soprano at the peak of her range. She draws out the words until they lose definition and simply become expressions.

Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” provides some levity at the end of Chelsea Girl. Though Judy Collins also claimed that Dylan wrote the song for her, technically he wrote it while on vacation in Greece with Nico in 1964. Whereas Collins’ version is an alarmingly cheery love song drowning in organ, Nico’s take indulges in darkness despite the poppy orchestra backing her up. “I’ll Keep It With Mine” brings Nico full-circle from “I’m Not Sayin,” and would be the last time she ever made a song so conventional.

Reactions to Chelsea Girl was at best indifferent and at worst, sexist. One Los Angeles Times writer remarked, “Nico’s a classy girl, but they’d sell more Nico if she were naked...and not hiding behind a string orchestra in a flower print dress.” For her next record, 1968’s wintry The Marble Index, Nico picked up the harmonium and wrote all of the songs after being encouraged by her “soul brother” and part-time lover Jim Morrison to document her dreams. She dyed her blonde hair with henna and trading her white clothing for an all-black ensemble. “I felt that at last I was independent, and that I knew what independence was,” she said.

But while Nico was taking some control of her music, her life was spiraling. There was the time in 1974 that she performed the German national anthem “Das Lied der Deutschen” including the verses that were banned in 1945 due to their Nazi associations. A year later, Nico was dropped from Island because she told a reporter that she “didn’t like negroes.” In an alleged instance in the early ’70s, Nico declared that she “hate[d] black people,” smashed a wine glass on a table, and stabbed the eye of a mixed-race singer who worked with Jimi Hendrix. Concert footage of a middle-age Nico in the early ’80s portray her as a skeletal figure with gaunt cheeks, rotten teeth, and sunken eyes from a disturbing heroin addiction. It’s as if Nico found power in destroying her image.

Nico once admitted that she could not relate to the songs Reed wrote for her. “I can’t identify with that,” she said of “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “to notice only the beautiful and not the ugliness.” Despite its melancholy, Chelsea Girl is still very much caught up in this world of the Screen Test, one focused on ineffable, alluring melancholy. To today’s casual Nico fans, she still exists in this bubble, a blonde monolith in a white pantsuit, a vessel for dreams and desires. But to consider Nico as frozen in her Chelsea Girl years is a disservice to the active efforts she made later in life to move beyond her image. But consider all of Nico, the strange circumstances of the Velvet Underground, the image of Chelsea Girl, and the horrific, inexcusable actions of her later life. It’s a wholeness she craved all along.