I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  The Crosby-produced “Nothing to One” has Crosby singing harmony, while his production of “Bird on the Wire” has something of a solo, coffeehouse Byrds feel: folk rock with a touch of rhythmic pop. These two recordings were eventually unearthed as bonus tracks on the 2007 reissue of Songs from a Room. The Cohen-Crosby version of “Lady Midnight” remains in the vaults. “I’ve wondered over the years,” says Crosby of the experience, “if Leonard forgave me. God knows he deserved somebody a bit smarter and more experienced than I was. But Bob Johnston knew exactly what he was doing.”

  Leonard ran into Bob Johnston in L.A. Normally Los Angeles is not a place to run into people, since they’re all in cars inching along endless boulevards to some important meeting or other, but Johnston made a point of being the exception to the rule. Johnston, as Bob Dylan wrote of the man who produced many of his finest albums, was “unreal.”4 Like God, Johnston was everywhere, he had fire in his eyes, and heaven help you if you questioned his ways, particularly if you worked for a record company. Johnston was—still is at age eighty, at the time of writing this book—a maverick, a wiry, bearded redhead with a thick Texas accent and music in his blood. His great-grandfather was a classical pianist, his grandmother a songwriter, his mother won a songwriting Grammy at the age of ninety-two, and his wife, Joy Byers, had written songs that Elvis Presley covered. Johnston wrote songs too, but he was best known at that time as the producer of many of the era’s greatest and most influential artists. Just four and a half months into 1968 he had recorded Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, Marty Robbins’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Flatt & Scruggs’s The Story of Bonnie and Clyde and Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison, some of these albums still waiting their turn to come out, like buses in a depot. But having been thwarted the first time, he was still determined to produce a Leonard Cohen album.

  “I had no plans to make another record,” Leonard said. “I didn’t think it was necessary. Then one day I met Bob Johnston and I liked the way he talked and how he understood my first album, exactly what was good and what was bad about it.”5 Johnston says, “Leonard said, ‘Let’s get together,’ and I said, ‘Fuck yeah.’ I had just rented a farm, two thousand acres, Boudleaux Bryant’s place”—Bryant and his wife, Felice, were successful Nashville songwriters, with hits that included “Love Hurts” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream”—“and I told Leonard about it. He said, ‘Someday I’ll have a farm like this and I’ll write a couple of albums.’ I said, ‘Here, do it now,’ and I gave him the key, and he moved in for two years.”

  But first Leonard went to Hydra. His affiliations with his second home were the opposite of his “neurotic affiliations” with Montreal. He wanted to sit in his shirtsleeves in the sun and smoke a cigarette and watch life crawl slowly by; he wanted to return to the simple life in the house on the hill with Marianne and her child. He was pleased to discover that the military junta had not had much tangible effect on the place. At first, when the new Greek government announced bans on long hair, miniskirts and a number of musicians and artists, the expats would gather in the tavernas at night, lock the doors, pull the shutters closed and play the outlawed music. But really the colonels hadn’t noticed Hydra, or if they had, they did not much care. Still, there were some changes on the island that Leonard could not ignore. For one, George Johnston and Charmian Clift were no longer sitting at a table in the sun outside Katsikas, waiting for the ferry to arrive with its news and its newcomers. For another, at night the houses on the hills were lit up with electric lights.

  It had been three years since Leonard had woken to find his house newly tethered to the twentieth century. Says Marianne, “Leonard got out of bed after a week of feeling lousy—he had been for a trip around the islands with Irving Layton and had some kind of flu. He came to his studio and he looked out and discovered that during the night they had put up all the new electric wires and they crossed in front of his window. He was sitting in this rocking chair that I brought from my little house. I brought him a cup of hot chocolate, and I took the guitar down which was hanging on the wall and it was totally out of tune. While we’re sitting there, birds are landing on the wire like notes on a music sheet. I heard ‘Like a bird—on the wire . . .’ So beautiful. But it took him three years before he felt the song was finished.”

  Finishing their relationship also took a long time. Leonard would say in 1970 (when introducing the song “So Long, Marianne” at a concert), “I lived with her for about eight years, about six months of the year, then the other six months I was stuck somewhere else. Then I found I was living with her four months of the year and then two months of the year and then about the eighth year I was living with her a couple of weeks of the year, and I thought it was time to write this particular song for her.” But soon after starting the song he stopped singing and added, “I still live with her a couple of days of the year.”6

  All that Marianne will say about the end of the affair is, “To me he was still the same, he was a gentleman, and he had that stoic thing about him and that smile he will try to hide behind—‘Am I serious now or is all this a joke?’ We were in love and then the time was up. We were always friends, and he still is my dearest friend and I will always love him. I feel very lucky to have met Leonard at that time in my life. He taught me so much, and I hope I gave him a line or two.”

  From Hydra Leonard went to London, where that summer he made two appearances on the BBC: the radio show Top Gear, hosted by John Peel (the revered and influential British DJ was an early Leonard Cohen enthusiast) and a television concert in which he performed almost all the songs from his first album, along with three songs that would appear on later albums, and an improvised, self-deprecating, stoned-sounding sing-along titled “There’s No Reason Why You Should Remember Me.” Both shows were very well received. By now Songs of Leonard Cohen was in the Top 20 in the UK. He was to all intents and purposes a pop/rock star. There was some attention from the U.S. too. That summer, Leonard was featured in two different articles in the New York Times: one was an examination of the new singer-songwriter movement in pop; the other, illustrated with photographs of Leonard and Dylan, debated whether pop lyrics should be considered “poetry.”

  That Leonard’s latest book of poetry, Selected Poems, was proving popular in America only muddied the waters. The dust-jacket blurb made an appeal to the pop/rock market by mentioning Leonard’s album and the covers of his songs by Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Noel Harrison. It also appealed to the literary underground by recalling the outrage that greeted his novel Beautiful Losers, to critics and academics by calling him “a contemporary Minnesinger” (a singer-poet in the German chivalric tradition), and to sensitive souls with its description of him as “eclectic, searching, deeply personal.”7

  But the literati, particularly in Canada, did not take warmly to his move into the popular field. It made him a “personality,” which brought with it the danger, as Michael Ondaatje wrote, that “our interest in Cohen makes the final judgement, not the quality of the writing.”8 Cohen and Dylan, Ondaatje said, were “public artists” who relied heavily “on their ability to be cynical about their egos or pop sainthood while at the same time continuing to build it up. They can con the media men who are their loudspeakers, yet keep their integrity and appear sincere to their audiences.” It was a reasonable argument, although the media was often well aware of this game and interpreted Leonard as a work of fiction in action, where academics interpreted the words on the page. Leonard’s words, thanks to the publicity and sales of his first album, had now started to sell in previously unimaginable quantities. Rock album numbers, not poetry book numbers. Selected Poems would sell two hundred thousand

  copies.

  After his short promotional trip to London, Leonard returned to New York and the Chelsea. He checked into room 100 (which Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen would later make notorious) and propped his guitar in the corner and put his typewrit
er on the desk. On the bedside table he put the books he was reading: Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (a book that, like Beautiful Losers, had been deemed pornographic by several critics) and Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters by Martin Buber, stories about rabbis searching for enlightenment. As to this particular descendant of Aaron, he had started attending the Church of Scientology.

  Scientology was a new religion, founded a decade and a half earlier by an American science fiction novelist named L. Ron Hubbard. It had some of the trappings of the old religions, like its eight-pointed cross and its sacred books. The first such book, Dianetics, an imaginative hodgepodge of, among other things, Eastern mysticism and Freud, read like an early self-help book and, like one, sold in enormous quantities. It claimed to heal the unconscious mind and, along with it, man’s physical and psychological problems, resulting in liberation from pain and trauma, universal brotherhood, the end to war and oneness with the universe. Scientology, unsurprisingly, did good business in America in 1968, when there was no shortage of traumatized young people looking for some kind of answer. It was a year of turbulence and paranoia—the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in the ghettos, protests in the universities, young Americans still being sent to Vietnam and coming home in caskets—and neither the drugs nor the old orthodoxies were working.

  Hubbard’s religion, in keeping with the times, had a slogan, “Scientology works,” and spread the word through young adherents approaching other young people on the street. It also reflected its founder’s origins in science fiction, coming with extraterrestrials, strange contraptions and its own language. Man’s strongest urge, Hubbard wrote, was survival, but this survival was under attack by engrams, cellular memories of physical and mental pain that chain him to his past. The way to remove these charges was by auditing—revisiting past traumas under supervision with an auditor, a Scientology counselor, while wired to an e-meter, a device that resembled a couple of small tin cans and a dial. After a course of successful auditing, you go clear and are ready to take the next step toward becoming an Operating Thetan and living in a pain-free present. Leonard thought Scientology, for all its snake oil, had “very good data.”9 He signed up for auditing.

  At night the Chelsea Hotel came to life. People who rarely left their rooms by daylight emerged and came together, often in Harry Smith’s room. Smith was an extraordinary man, a forty-five-year-old in the body of an eccentric old man: wild white hair, scraggly beard, towering forehead and oversized spectacles that magnified his bright, intelligent eyes. He lived with his pet birds in a dark, tiny, room with no bathroom on the eighth floor. It was crammed with curios: magic wands, Seminole Indian clothes, painted Ukrainian eggs, a collection of paper airplanes, esoteric books and weird old American records. In music circles Smith was renowned for his Anthology of American Folk Music, three double albums he compiled from his collection of old, raw folk, blues and gospel. The albums were an enormous influence on Dylan and the sixties folk revival. Smith was not only a musicologist but an anthropologist, an expert on Native America and shamanism, an experimental filmmaker, a raconteur and a mystic, who claimed to have learned the art of alchemy at around the same age Leonard was studying hypnotism. Little surprise that Leonard was drawn to him. Along with other assorted Chelsea residents and writers and music celebrities who were passing through, he would sit at Smith’s feet and listen to his labyrinthine monologue.

  “We saw Harry as a national monument and sardonic guru from whom even Leonard had something to learn,” says Terese Coe, the author of the play Harry Smith at the Chelsea. “That’s why Leonard was there. Harry could be expounding upon any number of intellectual, historical and artistic themes, he might be showing his paintings, talking about his recent misadventures in filmmaking, bewailing his financial disasters, insulting present guests in elliptical terms, playing Brecht-Weill or Woody or Arlo Guthrie—I never heard him play any Leonard Cohen songs. As far as anyone could tell, we were hanging out with a sage who was also at times an antihero, an amusement where anything could happen, but nothing truly decadent ever did in my experience. We were rather well behaved.”

  Leonard, noticeably more formally dressed than the others in the room, sat quietly, Coe recalls, and rarely said a word. She was a young poet and journalist for an underground newspaper when she met Leonard in Smith’s room. She became the muse for two poems in The Energy of Slaves (1972): “It Takes a Long Time to See You Terez” and “Terez and Deanne.” Says Coe, “I was a passing fancy and he made a fancy pass with provocative lines.” She recognized him as “an incurable romantic. In that ‘love and peace’ era, many were caught in that conundrum. He wasn’t one to speak about his philosophy of love in person. He kept his private life and friendships close to the vest. The answers are in his songs, and they are many and mercurial.”

  There were a number of regulars at Harry Smith’s evenings. Peggy Biderman worked at the Museum of Modern Art and had a teenage daughter, Ann (now a successful TV screenwriter), whom Leonard saw for a while. Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach were collage artists who edited a magazine and translated Burroughs and Ginsberg into French. Stanley Amos ran an art gallery from his Chelsea room, complete with vernissages, and would come to Harry’s room and read the tarot. Sandy Daley was a photographer, cinematographer and friend of Warhol and of Leonard. In 1970 Daley shot an underground film in her room, on the tenth floor, which was painted and decorated all in white. The film was called Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, the Robert being Mapplethorpe. The narrator of the film, Mapplethorpe’s partner Patti Smith, was another close friend of Harry Smith. There was also Liberty, a beautiful blond poet and model, with whom Leonard had an affair. Liberty had sat for Salvador Dalí and was a muse for Richard Brautigan and Jerome Charyn, but she was also active in feminist politics, having left her Republican politician husband for the Yippies and the counterculture. After the gatherings everyone, Harry included, would meet up in El Quijote, at the large table at the back of the bar. Leonard would often discreetly pick up the tab for the whole crowd and leave before they discovered it had been paid. Being generous with money was one of the few things Leonard seemed to like about this new level of success.

  September 21, 1968. The sun cast long shadows, three-quarters of the year had now passed and Leonard was still in New York. It was the eve of the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, and Leonard’s thirty-fourth birthday. To celebrate, he went by himself to a very crowded place, the Paradox, a macrobiotic restaurant in an East Village basement run by Scientologists. It was a hippie hangout, a place where a person could come to trip out and no one would bother them. If they had no money, they could work in the kitchen for food. Thelma Blitz, a young woman who worked as an ad agency copywriter, sat at one of the long, communal tables and looked up from her dinner to see the man sitting opposite looking deeply into her eyes.

  “I didn’t know him. He didn’t look like a lot of the other people. He had short hair—everyone else there had long hair—and he looked kind of straight; he was dressed conservatively, not like a businessman, more like a college professor.” And a lot like Dustin Hoffman, Blitz told him. “Leonard said, ‘People often tell me that.’ ” They talked about all sorts of things—poetry, metaphysics, vegetarianism—with Leonard cordially taking the contrary position to everything she said. “It was a great debate. I didn’t know until I read biographies of him that he was president of his debating club in college.” They argued all night, until the Paradox closed and Leonard asked if she would like to walk with him. They strolled along Saint Mark’s Place, where the freaks congregated. Leonard stopped to talk to a young man who was taking a large tortoise for a walk. “He asked him, ‘What do you feed that thing?’ and the young man said, ‘Hamburger meat, speed and smack.’ ”

  As they walked, Leonard told her that they were going to the Chelsea Hotel. “I didn’t know what the Chelsea Hotel was so I said, ‘What’s there?’ and he said, ‘Nico.’ I only had a
vague idea then of Nico and Andy Warhol but he had a wistfulness in his voice when he said ‘Nico,’ which makes me think that was why he was there.” At the hotel, Leonard went straight to the mail desk at the back of the lobby and gave them his name. “Which is how I found out who he was,” says Blitz. “I freaked out a little bit, because I realized this man is important—his first album was in the window of the Saint Mark’s bookstore—but I didn’t recognize him, he didn’t look anything like the picture on the cover. But instead of trying to floor me with his accomplishments, like the usual fellow who picks you up, he wouldn’t even tell me who he was. He said, with a tinge of self-irony, downplaying his achievements, ‘Well, I have some following in Canada.’ ”

  He told Thelma that it was his birthday and they toasted it in El Quijote with a plate of celery and olives in place of alcohol. Then they went to Leonard’s room on the first floor. “He took out a guitar and sang two songs to me that I didn’t recognize until the second album came out, ‘Bird on the Wire’ and ‘The Partisan Song’ [sic]. When he sang, I saw this remoteness, and I noted in my journal that his mask of grief and remoteness deepened as he sang. He kept spacing out, coming back and forth, something like the nictitating membrane of a frog came over his eyes and he would seem not to be there. I thought, ‘Am I boring him?’ I told him I was sick of being an advertising writer, and he suggested starvation and several good books. He talked about teachers and masters and conquering pain, saying things like, ‘The more we conquer pain, the more pain we incur on a higher level’—which sounds like the line from [the song] ‘Avalanche,’ ‘You who wish to conquer pain.’ But there was a lot of pain at that time among the people who made up the counterculture: the pain of hating your culture, hating the system, being completely at odds with everything. Everybody was into something.”