Ivy Nicholson liked to say that she owed her flickering moments of fame as a fashion model and actress to “one white lie”. In truth the falsehood she told when she walked into the Paris office of Elle magazine one day in 1953 was quite a whopper. Dressed head-to-toe in haute couture and with a Rolls-Royce waiting for her outside, she told the magazine’s editor she was about to be on the cover of American Vogue and suggested they might be interested in photographing her, too.
The French magazine put her on the cover and launched her on a career in which she featured on the covers of magazines from Life to Harper’s Bazaar, was painted topless by Salvador Dalí and was photographed with Marc Chagall, wearing a dress printed with one of his paintings. She went on to achieve a countercultural celebrity in the experimental films of Andy Warhol.
Within months of appearing on the cover of Elle, she also appeared on the front of Vogue. It was simply a case of the magazines not appearing in quite the sequence she had claimed.
Of course, it is highly probable that Nicholson would have made it as a model without the white lie. She was, after all, photogenic and as she admitted to friends, she believed she was the reincarnation of a Botticelli model.
However, that flaky notion betrayed an emotional instability which stalled her career and eventually led to her living on the streets. Erratic and demanding, she would arrive hours late for shoots and make impossible demands as flunkeys were sent out to bring her caviar and foie gras.
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At the age of 21 she had the opportunity to become a movie star. Howard Hawks cast her as the female lead in his 1955 epic Land of the Pharaohs. She was then offered a seven-year contract with Warner Bros and flew to Egypt to begin shooting, only to change her mind.
She claimed that she bit another actor to get out of the deal. “I didn’t like the woman in the script and so I refused to sign a contract,” she explained. It made sense to Nicholson but left everyone else baffled. She was replaced by Joan Collins.
Her relationship with Warhol was similarly troubled. She met him at a Greenwich Village cocktail party, where she noticed “a man with white hair staring at me from behind dark eyeglasses”. Baby Jane Holzer, one of Warhol’s “starlets”, came over and told her: “That man is a movie director. He’d like you to be in one of his movies this week.” All the while Warhol continued to stare at her. “I had no work. I was running out of money,” she recalled. So she said: “I’d be delighted.”
She went on to appear in half a dozen of Warhol’s films between 1964 and 1967, including I, a Man, Soap Opera, Couch and The Loves Of Ondine. She also became obsessed with the director. “I fell in love with him on the first shoot and he with me,” she said.
She convinced herself that he wanted to marry her and placed an announcement of their engagement in a newspaper without telling him. Warhol was furious.
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At a party shortly afterwards, she crawled across the floor and tried to lick his boots. He kicked her away and she climbed out of a sixth-floor window and threatened to jump. She was pulled back in but Warhol allegedly told his entourage they should have let her fall.
Married and divorced at least twice, she met her first husband, Count Regis de Poleon, in Paris in 1958 and had a son, Darius de Poleon, a musician who has played in various bands, including one called Eurotrash, and with whom his mother later recorded.
In 1963 she married John Palmer, who co-directed Empire, Warhol’s eight-hour silent movie of the Empire State Building. Their short marriage produced twins, Pénélope Palmer, a child actress who starred in La Femme Enfant alongside Klaus Kinski, and Gunther Palmer, an actor and rock musician. From another relationship with Larry Shaw, a photographer, in the early 1960s, she had another child, Sean Bolger, a fashion photographer in Los Angeles.
Ivy Martha Nicholson was born in 1933 in New York City, the youngest of three children. Her mother, Nora (née Bolger), was a nanny and her father, Harry Nicholson, a cab driver.
At 16 she won a beauty contest, dropped out of school and left home in pursuit of a modelling career. When she could not get any work she ended up as an underage dancer at a nightclub in Florida, where she persuaded one of the punters to take her to Paris, the scene of the white lie that launched her modelling career.
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After the failure of her first marriage she returned to New York, modelled for Richard Avedon, was photographed for Life magazine with Chagall and with Dalí and was taken up by Warhol and his Factory crew.
Her behaviour proved too erratic even for such a freewheeling and bohemian group. Thrown out of the Factory one night, she paid Warhol back by defecating on the floor of his lift.
By 1970 she was back in Paris, where she worked sporadically as a dilettante painter and photographer but she eventually ran out of money as well as friends who were prepared to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed.
Her later decades were spent in America, living on benefits and with periods of homelessness. Her by now addled looks, it was said, spoke silently but eloquently of a free spirit who had lived her life on her own terms.
Ivy Nicholson, fashion model and actress, was born on February 22, 1933. She died after a series of seizures on October 25, 2021, aged 88