I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Less than two months after arriving in Manhattan, Leonard had a manager and two songs on a major artist’s album. He had discovered, to his joy, that he could write songs “on the run,”16 that writing did not have to be the life-and-death ordeal it had been with Beautiful Losers. He had found that he could live in real life as he had on film: in a cheap hotel, unfettered and within arm’s reach of an exit. Leonard put his plan to go to Nashville on hold. Instead, he packed his case and moved into the Henry Hudson Hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street. It was not, in the midsixties, the glamorous boutique hotel it is today; it was more like a low-rent version of the Chelsea Hotel, with the look and smell of a Victorian hospital for down-and-outs. If someone were taking a register of junkies, hustlers, drifters and penniless artists, many of its residents would have raised their hands.

  Leonard’s room, with its flowery curtain and threadbare counterpane, was barely twice the size of its single bed. But the window closed, at least, and there was a swimming pool in the hotel, as well as hashish and several young women willing to keep him warm at night. There was a tall Swedish woman who studied yoga and turned tricks; a pretty young writer, barely twenty years old, who was fighting a narcotics charge, with a little financial support from Leonard; and the lovely homeless artist whom Leonard invited in off the street and who, he found, shared his fascination with Saint Catherine Tekakwitha. Saint Catherine’s image was embossed on a door of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets. Leonard would go there and climb the stone steps, a pilgrim, and lay a flower at her feet.

  Although it might not have won an arm-wrestling contest with Greenwich Village, the Montreal folk music scene was thriving. Penny Lang, a singer and guitar player, had been playing the city’s coffeehouses since 1963. “If you liked folk music you didn’t have to search for it, it seemed like it was everywhere. There were seven or eight coffeehouses but a lot of music happened spontaneously, in parks and other places. It felt very vibrant, as if a side of the city woke up which had been sleeping for a long time.” Lang did not hear of Leonard (“I didn’t read poetry”) until 1966, when the Stormy Clovers started playing “Suzanne.” “Then the song sort of passed down to the other singers around town and I learned it, and came up with a sort of different version. He’s an exquisite writer, there was no one who writes as he does. And that’s really all I knew about Leonard Cohen.”

  It was December and Leonard, back once again in Canada, was thinking hard about this music career into which he had made his first inroads. He wrote a letter to Marianne telling her that he knew what he must be, “a singer, a man who owns nothing. . . . I know now what I must train myself for.”17 He phoned Penny Lang. “It was the first time I’d ever spoken to him and he just called and said, ‘Would you consider teaching me some guitar’?” says Lang. “But I was in very bad shape—I’m bipolar—and I said, ‘No, I’m very depressed,’ and that was the end of that. Later I realized that if anyone would have understood the word ‘depression’ at the time, it probably would have been Leonard.” Lang would make her own way to New York a few months later, where a talent scout from Warner Bros. heard her play “Suzanne” at Gerde’s in Greenwich Village and offered her a deal if she would record it with a rock band. “When ‘rock band’ came into the picture I said no.” Lang did say yes to giving guitar lessons to Janis Joplin. Janis wanted to be able to accompany herself onstage when singing her version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” “But it never happened, because Janis died.” Leonard did not ask again. He practiced alone, playing in front of a full-length mirror to an audience of one, the only one whose opinion really mattered.

  What was with the mirror?

  “Through some version of narcissism, I always used to play in front of a mirror—I guess it was to figure out the best way to look while playing guitar, or maybe it was just where the chair was and the mirror in the room I happened to be living in. But I was very comfortable looking at myself playing.”

  The more he played, the more songs would come. It was as if his relatively minimal skills as a guitar player added a simplicity to the proceedings. “I was always interested by minimalism, even if we didn’t use that term. I liked simple things, simple poetry, more than the decorative.”18 In the same way that the poetry he wrote had an implied melody, his melodies had an implied poetry. “I generally find the song arises out of the guitar playing, just fooling around on the guitar. Just trying different sequences of chords, really, just like playing guitar every day and singing until I make myself cry, then I stop. I don’t weep copiously, I just feel a little catch in my throat or something like that. Then I know that I am in contact with something that is just a little deeper than where I started when I picked the guitar up.”19

  Leonard’s letter to Marianne closed with the words, “Darling, I hope we can repair the painful spaces where uncertainties have led us. I hope you can lead yourself out of despair and I hope I can help you.”20 The mailman arrived with a package for Leonard from New York: Judy Collins’s new album. Carrying it carefully, by the edges, to the turntable, he placed the needle on track four. The snow was thick outside; in a few days baby Jesus would be reborn. Leonard, alone in his room in West Montreal, listened to Judy sing “Suzanne.” When it was done playing he lifted the needle and put it back at the start of the track, over, and over, and over.

  Nine

  How to Court a Lady

  The ad in the Village Voice read “Andy Warhol Presents Nico Singing to the Sounds of the Velvet Underground.” It was February 1967 and Leonard, back in New York again, turned up the collar on his raincoat and walked through the East Village to the Dom. The cavernous room in a row of Victorian town houses on Saint Mark’s Place had been a German immigrant community hall, a Polish restaurant and a music venue before Warhol had taken over the lease a year earlier and transformed it into an avant-garde circus-discotheque. It was the stage for his Exploding Plastic Inevitable performance art shows, offering experimental films (Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s), dancers (beauties and freaks from Warhol’s Factory studio, like the socialite-turned-Warhol-film-star Edie Sedgwick and poet-photographer Gerard Malanga) and music. The house band was the Velvet Underground, whom Warhol managed. At his decree, their singer and songwriter Lou Reed, a short, young, Jewish New Yorker, shared the spotlight with a tall, blond German in her late twenties. Nico, said Lou Reed, “set some kind of standard for incredible-looking people.”

  Leonard happened upon Nico by chance. One night, during his last stay in New York, he had wandered into a nightclub and there she was, an ice queen, posed like Dietrich at the end of the bar. She had a chiseled face, porcelain skin, piercing eyes and a pretty-boy guitar player, who was her sole accompanist as she sang her songs in a strange, deep monotone. “I was completely taken,” Leonard said. “I had been through the blonde trip; I had lived with a blonde girl and I had felt for a long time that I was living in a Nazi poster. This was a kind of repetition.”1 (Since he was presumably referring to Marianne, it might also have some bearing on why Marianne had to move out during Leonard’s mother’s visit.)

  The woman who would become Leonard’s next muse was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne in 1938, four years after Leonard was born and five years after Hitler came to power. She was a fashion model in Berlin and an actress who studied alongside Marilyn Monroe at Lee Strasberg’s Method school in New York, and won a small role in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and a large one in Jacques Poitrenaud’s Strip-Tease (1963). The first time she went into a recording studio was in Paris, with Serge Gainsbourg, to sing the title song for Strip-Tease, which he wrote. Her somber, death’s-head voice was not to Gainsbourg’s taste and a version by Juliette Gréco was used in its place.* Nico’s second attempt at recording was more successful—in London this time, in 1965, with an equally celebrated producer, guitarist Jimmy Page. Her cover of Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot’s song “I’m Not Sayin’ ” was
released as a single on Immediate Records, a label owned by Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager of the Rolling Stones; the Stones’ guitar player Brian Jones was Nico’s lover.

  A liaison with Bob Dylan brought Nico back to New York. While Dylan was babysitting her son, Ari—the result of her brief affair with the French movie star Alain Delon—Dylan wrote the song “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” which he gave to Nico. When his manager Albert Grossman sent her a plane ticket to New York, she assumed it was because Grossman wanted to manage her as a singer. He did not. But through the Dylan/Grossman connection she met Warhol, and Warhol thought her perfect. He put her in his films—most famously Chelsea Girls, in which Ari, then four years old, also appeared—and he put her in the Velvet Underground. Her bored, narcotic, gothic voice was featured on both sides of the band’s first single, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”/“I’ll Be Your Mirror,” which was released in October 1966, around the same time that Leonard was playing Judy Collins his songs. Leonard took to following Nico around New York, his unwitting tourist guide leading him from one haunt of the hip and demimonde to another.

  “I remember walking into a club called Max’s Kansas City that I’d heard was the place where everybody went—I didn’t know anybody in New York—and I remember lingering by the bar, I was never good at that kind of hard work that’s involved with socializing, and a young man came over to me and said, “You’re Leonard Cohen, you wrote Beautiful Losers,” which nobody had read, it only sold a few copies in America. And it was Lou Reed. He brought me over to a table full of luminaries—Andy Warhol, Nico. I was suddenly sitting at this table with the great spirits of the time. [Laughs]”

  But you were more interested in talking to Nico. How did it go?

  “I was among the multitudes that wanted Nico. A mysterious woman. I tried to talk to her, I introduced myself, but she wasn’t interested.”

  Says Lou Reed, “Beautiful Losers is an incredible book, an amazing book, and on top of everything else, incredibly funny and very tricky. I remember later Leonard said to me he started writing songs after hearing ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ Who knows.”2 Leonard took a liking to Reed, at least in some part because Nico liked him.

  You would imagine that Leonard and Warhol might get along, two men who believed in making their life their work, and their work their life. But, as with the Beats, Leonard claimed not to fit in. They made him feel provincial. According to Danny Fields, though, “There was no club that Leonard wasn’t part of. We loved him, Nico loved him, I loved him, he was loved. His reputation then was fierce—and he was sexy. He didn’t have to do very much except not vomit on the table.” Fields was Elektra Records’s New York A & R man, a close friend of Nico, who knew the midsixties Manhattan scene like the back of his hand. It was something else with Leonard, a kind of shyness, or a taste for being an outsider, or both, that turned the once-clubby youth into a man who really did not want to join any club, whether they wanted him or not.

  Nico told Leonard she liked younger men and did not make an exception. Her young man du jour, her guitar player, was a fresh-faced singer-songwriter from Southern California, barely eighteen years old, named Jackson Browne. A surfer boy crossed with an angel, his natural good looks appeared unnatural alongside the cadaverous Warhol and his black-clad entourage. Browne had gone to New York on an adventure: some friends were driving cross-country and needed someone to split the bill; Browne grabbed his acoustic guitar and his mother’s gas station credit card. When they rolled into Manhattan, Browne, looking up through the back window, saw “all these huge Nico posters everywhere, really beautiful, just amazing.”3 They were advertising her solo shows. Opening the show was Tim Buckley, a singer-songwriter Browne knew from the Orange County coffeehouse circuit. Buckley told him Nico was looking for a full-time electric guitarist and, since he “had his own thing going,” he didn’t want to do it. Browne borrowed an electric guitar.

  Nico opened the door to her apartment. She looked him up and down with her famous stare. Liking what she saw, she invited him in. She sang the boy her songs, and he assured her he could play them. She asked him if he had any songs and he did, quite a lot of them; although he did not yet have a record deal, Browne had a publishing contract. The first of his songs he played Nico was “These Days,” an exquisite, pensive ballad he wrote when he was sixteen years old, after his second acid trip. Says Browne, “She said, ‘I vill do zis song’—everybody did a Nico impersonation, she’s fun to imitate.”4 She chose two more of Browne’s songs and appointed him her new accompanist and lover, both effective immediately.

  “Nico lived in this apartment with her little son who was about four years old. She had a roommate, a really big guy named Ronnie who wore big fur coats and had a lot of money and I don’t know what he did, but I think that maybe he was a club owner or restaurateur or something. He was a very nice guy and amazingly he didn’t seem to have any interest in her at all except as a friend; I thought, ‘Wow, that’s incredible.’ ” Browne laughs. “I remember Leonard used to come over to her house. I knew he had just become kind of very celebrated for ‘Suzanne,’ which Judy Collins covered, and he had this really great book he had written, Beautiful Losers, which he seemed to be embarrassed by for some reason, who knows. He used to also come to the club where we played. He’d just sit there at the front table and write and look at her.”5

  The picture he paints is somewhat reminiscent of Death in Venice—a solemn, love-struck old writer (at thirty-two years old, Leonard would have appeared quite old to the teenage Browne) mooning over a dangerous, unattainable beauty. Browne simply assumed that Leonard was “writing her a song,” and in a way he was, although he was hoping for more than a cover. “She’d been given a song by Bob Dylan, one by Tim Hardin; she was gathering these great songs to interpret and they were songs that no one had ever heard of—sort of what Judy Collins was doing at the time, so if anybody cares to make the connection between Judy Collins and Nico, there it is.”6

  Leonard befriended the pair of them. “He would read us the poems he wrote while he watched her, very dreamy, and they were amazing poems,” says Browne. On a few occasions he would go with the two of them to the Dom, before Browne broke up with Nico. “I was into her,” Browne says, “and it took me a while to realize I was a fling. So I quit, but even though we weren’t lovers anymore I was working for her and seeing her every night. Then things got weird. There was somebody calling and harassing her, a stalker, and she accused me of making the calls and she kind of flipped.” Browne flew back to California—just in time for the Summer of Love. “Nico was crazy and mysterious,” says Browne. “She wouldn’t tell anyone where she was from—I don’t think she wanted to be thought of as German—and she had this ice-queen countenance. But she also had this really girlish smile, and when she laughed she was like a little kid, and she spent almost all her time with her son. There was this side of Nico that I don’t think many people know. I really dug her.”7

  So did Leonard. Although he never won her, he was “madly in love with her.”8 Exclaims Danny Fields,* “She didn’t with Leonard? She did it with Lou [Reed], God knows! And Nico worshipped Leonard. She would call him up: ‘Ohh, Lennhaarrrdt’—that’s the way she said his name, in that Germanic voice. ‘Vat do you think, Lennhaarrrdt?’ ‘Would Lennhaarrrdt like my songs?’ Nico was eager to ally herself with creative people. Leonard was very important to her. She certainly was a girl of conflicted emotions.” Though she was consistent in her taste in men. After Jackson Browne, Nico moved on to Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, both in their early twenties.

  “I bumped into Jim Morrison a couple of times but I did not know him well. And Hendrix—we actually jammed together one night in New York. I forget the name of the club, but I was there and he was there and he knew my song ‘Suzanne,’ so we kind of jammed on it.”

  You and Hendrix jammed on “Suzanne”? What did he do with it?

  “He was very gentle. He didn’t distort his g
uitar. It was just a lovely thing. I did bump into him again. I remember I was walking up Twenty-third Street, which is the street the Chelsea Hotel was on, and I was with Joni Mitchell, a very beautiful woman, and a big limousine pulled up and Jimi Hendrix was in the backseat, and he was chatting up Joni from the inside of the limo.”

  It didn’t matter to him that she was with another man, specifically you?

  “Well, you know, he was a very elegant man so it wasn’t impolite.”

  Did Joni go off with him and leave you?

  “No, she didn’t. But Nico did. I went with Nico to hear Jim Morrison—I think he was playing for the first time in New York at a club—and Hendrix showed up and he was glorious, very beautiful, and I’d come with Nico and when it was time to go I said, ‘Let’s go,’ and she said, ‘I’m going to stay. You go.’ [Laughs]”

  Some years later, Leonard and Nico bumped into each other in the Spanish restaurant and bar El Quijote. When the bar closed, they wound up in Leonard’s room in the Chelsea Hotel next door. It was one of the smaller guest rooms—Leonard was only passing through—and so they sat together on the bed, side by side, continuing the conversation they had begun downstairs. At one point, feeling encouraged, Leonard put a hand on her arm. Nico swung round and hit him so hard he levitated. “There are stories of her flare-ups and physical brutality,” says Fields. “Her other brutality, the passive brutality, was just making you wonder what she was thinking, so much that people fell in love with her. Maybe it was a love punch, ‘I don’t vont to fall in love viz you’—pow! Maybe she wanted him to be a caveman conqueror, because men were so afraid of her. Nico loved Leonard. We all did.”