“I got into this profession thanks to women,” Alain Delon, who died last month, said in 2018. “They’re the ones who got me into making movies. It was women who wanted me, who made me, who gave me everything.”
In 1962, a brief affair with the German singer Nico (née Christa Päffgen) gave him a son, Christian Aaron Päffgen, known to the world as “Ari.”
Delon never recognized Ari’s parentage and even went so far as to tell the kid, “You’re my friend, you’re my friend, but I’ll tell you something, you’re not my son, you’ll never be my son, you don’t have my eyes, you don’t have my hair, I’ve only slept once with your mother, and that’s it, but you’re not my son, you’ll never be my son.”
Just what every boy wants to hear from his father, right?
Nico met Delon on the set of Plein Soleil (released in America as Purple Noon), an adaption of the Patrica Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Delon was cast as the amoral but charming Tom Ripley. Nico was offered a small supporting role, but was forced to drop out due to prior modeling commitments.
Nico would say of Delon, “He was the most dangerous man I ever met.... He was like a gypsy, with strong eyes and dark hair, and I wanted him for myself.”
Delon, who was engaged to the actress Romy Schneider, evidently felt the same way. After Plein Soleil wrapped, he followed Nico to New York, where their affair blossomed. Nico had come to Manhattan to further her burgeoning singing career. After releasing a single of the song Bob Dylan had written for her, “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” she ended up joining the Velvet Underground.
“Nico was very happy and excited,” according to her friend Carlos De Maldonado-Bostock. “She said, ‘I’ve just slept with Alain Delon!’ It was like Snow White had met her prince. She was obsessed with this ghastly man.”
“I stayed three months in New York, alone, thinking he would come,” Nico later said. “Later on, distressed, I went to Paris to look for him, to meet him. I tried to call him but I couldn’t contact him. Invariably, they always told me Alain was absent.”
Nico would say of Delon, “He was the most dangerous man I ever met.”
Delon had abandoned the pregnant beauty. Even Nico’s own mother, Margarete “Grete” Päffgen, urged her to get an abortion. But Nico refused, telling her, “I won’t let it drift away. This child should be my own. I also want to have a person for me.”
Unfortunately, Nico was too busy pursuing her career to have time for Ari. She left her son in Ibiza with her mother, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
When Delon’s mother, Edith Boulogne, saw a photo of Ari in a French newspaper, she immediately recognized the child as her grandson.
“I said to myself, that’s my son’s child,” Boulogne later recalled. “We went to see [Nico] and the baby. The kid was about two years old. He came running into my husband’s arms. We were so moved. I saw my own son in him. And I truly believed that my son would accept him.”
Boulogne readily admitted that Ari’s life with Nico was not what it should be. “She came to see him once in three years,” Boulogne said. “She brought him something from America. Guess what? An orange. My husband and I looked at each other, speechless. We took the orange and thought, she’s really not like other people. But I still liked her. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.” Boulogne adopted Ari, who was renamed Christian Aaron Boulogne.
When Delon discovered that his mother had taken Ari in, Boulogne said, “He had his agent tell me that I had to choose between the baby and my son. My husband said, ‘Your son can feed himself, but Ari can’t raise himself.’ So we kept him.”
Ari’s caretaker, Annett-Patrice van York, posted on her blog after Delon’s death, on August 18, 2024, at age 88, “When Delon rejected Ari, and Delon’s mother took Ari in to raise him, Delon even rejected his own mother then! I took care of Ari for a while, [and] Ari suffered all his life from this rejection.”
Meanwhile, Delon was busily sleeping his way through Hollywood: reportedly with Anita Ekberg, Brigitte Bardot, Shirley MacLaine, Ann-Margret, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, and Marianne Faithfull, to name a few.
Then, on October 1, 1968, Delon’s bodyguard, Stefan Marković, was found dead in a public dump in the village of Élancourt, Yvelines, west of Paris, with a bullet in his head.
Marković was a known compulsive gambler and an obsessive voyeur who allegedly wired Delon’s bedroom with movie cameras, with which he supposedly filmed a parade of well-known women taking part in his boss’s sex parties, including Claude Pompidou, the wife of Georges Pompidou, who was running for president of France.
It was rumored that Delon had a hand in the murder, but no charges were ever filed, no explicit photos ever surfaced, and the case remains unsolved.
The murder of Marković was such a media scandal in France that Boulogne and her husband placed Ari in a Catholic boarding school out of fear that he would be kidnapped—without telling Nico what they had done.
Maybe they should have been more worried about the priests. As Ari later said, “When you see someone get beaten until he bleeds through his shirt…someone being lifted by the ears …the principal came from behind because there were communicating doors in each classroom, and paff, without making a sound, he’d come up and slap you behind both ears at once, and repeated three times… no really, it was very harsh.”
When Ari came of age, Delon gave him 20,000 francs and told his son to never contact him again. Inevitably, Ari and Nico began sharing needles, and he soon developed a habit. He even copped dope for his mother and was with her in Ibiza when she took her fateful bicycle ride.
On October 1, 1968, Alain Delon’s bodyguard, Stefan Marković, was found dead in a public dump in the village of Elancourt, Yvelines, west of Paris, with a bullet in his head.
“In the late morning of July 17, 1988,” Ari told Richard Witts in Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, “my mother told me she needed to go downtown to buy marijuana. She sat down in front of the mirror and wrapped a black scarf around her head. My mother stared at the mirror and took great care to wrap the scarf appropriately. Down the hill on her bike: ‘I’ll be back soon.’ She left in the early afternoon on the hottest day of the year.”
Nico hit her head when she fell off the bike and was found unconscious by a passing taxi driver, who tried to get her admitted to different hospitals, all of which refused her because she didn’t have health insurance.
Finally, she was misdiagnosed as suffering from heat exposure and declared dead. But X-rays later confirmed that she had actually died from a cerebral hemorrhage.
Ari was found dead in his Paris apartment on May 20, 2023, following a heroin overdose a full month earlier. A woman, supposedly his partner, was taken into custody for “failure to provide assistance to a person in danger.”
Ari, who was 60 years old, is survived by his wife, Véronique, and two children: a son, Charles, and a daughter, Blanche. In 2001, he published a memoir, Love Never Forgets, but it’s doubtful that his father ever read it.
Legs McNeil is a co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry
