Four months after the last Whitney session in February, during which “Fingerprints” and “I Guess It’s Time” were recorded, there was one session in June, back in Gold Star, for “Paper-Thin Hotel.” The song, with the familiar Leonard Cohen themes of separation, cuckolding and surrender, had been given a bittersweet, romantic arrangement with choirs, pianos and pedal steel. And that was it. Spector took home the tapes under armed guard, as he always did, and went to work mixing them in a secret location.
No one appeared to have told Leonard that the album was finished. He believed that the exhausted parts he sang in the early hours of the morning were rough vocals that he would have the chance to redo. They were not. When Leonard listened to the playback of the finished album, he flinched. What he heard coming out of the large speakers was a spent man, a punch-drunk singer, lost in the tracks. “I thought he had taken the guts out of the record and I sent him a telegram to that effect,” Leonard said.13 He asked Spector if they might go back into the studio so that he could sing his parts again, but Spector demurred. “In the final moment,” Leonard said, “Phil couldn’t resist annihilating me. I don’t think he can tolerate any other shadows in his darkness.”14
Leonard told the New York Times that he liked nothing about the album. “The music in some places is very powerful but, by and large, I think it’s too loud, too aggressive. The arrangements got in my way. I wasn’t able to convey the meaning of the songs”15—songs that feature some of Leonard’s most powerful lyrics about desperate, suffocating, true, faithless, tender, but more often murderous, love. Yet, however he felt about Death of a Ladies’ Man, it would be hard to deny that Spector had captured Leonard’s own sense of annihilation during that period of his life. Leonard was lost and spent, and there was nothing left. Suzanne had left him. Leonard’s mother was in the process of leaving too.
Masha was in the late stages of leukemia. Leonard had been flying back and forth to Montreal, jet-lagged and heavyhearted. While all this was going on, he was also making the final edits to a new book, titled Death of a Lady’s Man. Marty Machat, meanwhile, had recruited his son Steven, just out of law school, to persuade Warner Bros. to release the record. Mo Ostin, the head of the label, wanted nothing to do with it. Neither, for that matter, did Leonard’s label, Columbia.
“That record,” says Steven Machat, “was two drunks being no different than any other boys, making an album about picking up girls and getting laid. It was the most honest album Leonard Cohen has ever made.” Steven Machat succeeded in winning over a Warner Bros. product manager, and from there he “got the deal done for [his] father.” He made it clear that he did not do it for Leonard, for whom he has no great affection, although there may have been some satisfaction in knowing that Leonard “didn’t want the album to see daylight.” In his book Gods, Gangsters and Honor Steven Machat wrote that Leonard told him, “This album is junk. It’s your father’s masturbation. I love Marty, he’s my brother. But I never want to see that man Spector again. He is the worst human being I have ever met.”
“At home Phil was delightful—except for the air-conditioning and the fact that he wouldn’t let you leave. When it was just the two of us it was a very agreeable time. You know Phil, he has something endearing about him; it’s impossible not to be fond of him. It was only when there was a large audience that a kind of performance that he’s famous for would arise.”
What changed when you went in the studio?
“He got into a kind of Wagnerian mood. There were lots of guns in the studio and lots of liquor. It was a somewhat dangerous atmosphere. There were a lot of guns around. He liked guns. I liked guns too but I generally don’t carry one.”
Were the guns being fired?
“No firing, but it’s hard to ignore a .45 lying on the console. The more people in the room, the wilder Phil would get. I couldn’t help but admire the extravagance of his performance. But my personal life was chaotic, I wasn’t in good shape at the time mentally, and I couldn’t really hold my own in there.”
Death of a Ladies’ Man was released in November 1977, credited in large letters, front and back, to “Spector & Cohen.” It was not surprising that Spector should have given himself equal billing, but for the producer to put his name ahead of the artist’s was a curious outcome for an album that Leonard told Harvey Kubernik was “the most autobiographical album of [his] career.”16 Its gatefold sleeve opens out to a panoramic, sepia-tinged photograph shot in a restaurant in L.A., where Leonard sits at a table, flanked by Suzanne and her woman friend, looking like a deer in the headlights, the expression on his face some unidentifiable place between stoned and stunned. The moment the picture captures could hardly be more different from the only other Leonard Cohen album sleeve with a photo of one of his nonmusician lovers—Songs from a Room, where Marianne, dressed only in a towel, sits at his writing table in their house on Hydra, smiling shyly.
Critics seemed unsure what to make of the album; it was such a departure from what one had come to expect from Leonard. Yet the reviews were not particularly savage. In the U.S., in fact, they were quite positive, particularly in comparison with those for Leonard’s earlier albums. The New York Times wrote, “This record may be one of the most bizarre, slowly satisfying hybrids pop music has ever produced.”17 Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times was “convinced it’s the album of ’77. Everything is done with an ear for intensity and nerve-edged emotion.” Paul Nelson wrote in Rolling Stone, “It’s either greatly flawed or great and flawed, and I’m betting on the latter,” noting that in spite of their differences (“the world’s most flamboyant extrovert producing the world’s most fatalistic introvert”) Spector and Cohen had a lot in common, such as both being members of “that select club of lone-wolf poets,” and each painfully aware of “what fame and longing are.”18
In the UK, the music paper Sounds compared the album with Dylan’s Desire and the title track with John Lennon’s “Imagine” and John Cale’s “Hedda Gabler,” while adding, “Diehard acolytes need not worry; it still sounds like [Cohen] but with a much wider appeal.”19 It did turn out to be a durable album. Many who disliked it intensely for its incongruous bombast would warm to it in later years. Leonard also became less negative toward it in time, although, with the exception of “Memories,” he would rarely play songs from it in concert. The album did nothing to help Leonard’s standing in the U.S.; it did not enter the charts. But had he wanted proof of how much he was loved overseas, it made it to No. 35 in the UK.
With Suzanne gone, Leonard moved out of the house in Brentwood and back to Montreal. He wanted to be close to his mother for whatever time she might have left. When she was taken into the hospital, Leonard visited her every day and sat by her bed. One time Mort Rosengarten came with him and they smuggled in a bottle of alcohol so that they could all raise a glass together, like the old days. He phoned Suzanne and told her Masha was dying. “The last phone call convinced me to come home immediately,” Suzanne says. She flew to Montreal with the children. In February 1978, Leonard’s mother died. Shortly before her death, someone broke into the house on Belmont Avenue; the one thing that was stolen was Leonard’s father’s gun.
You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard. I eschew the philosopher’s stone. I bury my girlfriend. I remove my personality from the line so that I am permitted to use the first person as often as I wish without offending my appetite for modesty. Then I resign. I do errands for my mother, or someone like her. I eat too much. I blame those closest to me for ruining my talent. Then you come to me. The joyous news is mine.
“I Bury My Girlfriend,” DEATH OF A LADY’S MAN
Death of a Lady’s Man, Leonard’s new book, which he dedicated “to Masha Cohen, the memory of my mother,” was published in the autumn of 1978. Although the title was almost identical to that of his new album, there was a small but telling difference. Here it referred to one woman in particular. The illustr
ation on the front and back cover—the coniunctio spirituum, symbol of the union of the male and female principle—was the same as on the sleeve of his album before last, New Skin for the Old Ceremony. “I thought I’d confuse the public as much as I was confused myself,” Leonard said.20 Its ninety-six poems and prose poems had been written largely over a period of ten years—the span of Leonard’s “marriage” to Suzanne—in a number of places, including Hydra, Mount Baldy, Montreal, the Tennessee cabin and Los Angeles. Some of them had been reworked from the novel Leonard had withdrawn from publication, which at various junctures had been titled “The Woman Being Born,” “My Life in Art” and “Final Revision of My Life in Art.”
At the core of Death of a Lady’s Man is the story of a marriage and the capacity of this particular union—whose rise and fall are digested in the poem “Death of a Lady’s Man,” much as they were in the album’s title song “Death of a Ladies’ Man”—to both heal and wound. The discussion extends beyond man-woman union to a man’s relationship with God and the world, and a writer’s relationship with his words, but in all cases war and peace, victory and defeat, seem to be separated by a paper-thin wall. Leonard’s intention had been to publish the book before the album’s release. He had submitted the manuscript in 1976, but at the last minute he withdrew it. He wanted to write a series of companion pieces to its contents to—as he put it—“confront the book,” go back through it page by page, and write his reaction to what he read.
Leonard’s commentaries appear on the facing page of eighty-three of the poems. The device gives Death of a Lady’s Man the appearance of a school textbook, crib notes to Death of a Ladies’ Man or a Leonard Cohen I Ching. The commentaries take on a variety of forms. In some Leonard offers critiques of his poems—at various times serious, playful, critical, laudatory, ironic, enlightening and obfuscating. Some commentaries are prose poems in themselves. On several occasions the poems appear to be in an ongoing debate with their companion piece. Some commentaries, adding a further layer, are made not in the voice of the author but of a character in the poem. In others, like a professor teaching a course on the writings of Leonard Cohen, he tells us what meaning we should take from the poems, referring the student to the unpublished “My Life in Art,” “Final Revision of My Life in Art” and “the Nashville Notebooks of 1969,” which of course the reader is unable to consult. His commentary to a poem titled “My Life in Art” offers a Buddhist teaching: “Destroy particular self and absolute appears.” The commentary on “Death to this Book”—the book is full of deaths and births—makes a close study of the poem’s angry, brutal rant and declares, “It will become clear that I am the stylist of my era and the only honest man in town.” The last poem in the book, just five lines long, is “Final Examination”:
I am almost 90
Everyone I know has died off
except Leonard
He can still be seen
hobbling with his love
The commentary questions the accuracy of this ending to the story and, after raising more questions than it answers, concludes with a declaration of union: “Long live the marriage of men and women. Long live the one heart.”
Death of a Lady’s Man is a remarkable book, as tightly structured as Leonard’s first novel, The Favorite Game, and as complex, puzzling and ambiguous as his second, Beautiful Losers. It is a mirror, a hall of mirrors, and smoke and mirrors, all of its many layers bleeding into each other like, well, a Phil Spector production. It was not Leonard’s most popular book of poems but, particularly when coupled with Death of a Ladies’ Man, it is one of his most wide ranging and fully realized. Leonard thought the book “good” and “funny” and felt “very warm” toward it, but it was “very coldly received in all circles. It got no respect.” Hardly anyone reviewed it, he said, and when they did they “dismissed it uniformly . . . And that was it. That was the end of the book.”21
A month after Masha’s death, Leonard was back in L.A. with Suzanne and the children. Suzanne never could stand the Montreal cold. They were renting a new place in the Hollywood Hills. Then, when spring arrived, Suzanne “abruptly left.” “I loved him one day and said good-bye that evening,” Suzanne says. “It was the story of ‘the mouse that roared’ and shocked both of us.” Although they were never legally married, in 1979 Leonard and Suzanne divorced. Steven Machat took care of the arrangements. “They both came in and they told me everything they owned and they told me the deal that they’d made and I drew up the deal. What I was told,” says Machat, “was he honored every single clause in it.”
Sixteen
A Sacred Kind of Conversation
In November 1978, in Montreal, Leonard was in a studio, recording. He worked by himself, no musicians, no producer. It felt good to be alone. It felt bad to be alone. It was Leonard’s first summer in a decade without Suzanne. Suzanne was in Leonard’s house on Hydra with her lover. Leonard was in his house in Montreal with Adam and Lorca. Barbara Amiel was there, interviewing Leonard for Maclean’s magazine, when the telephone rang. It was Suzanne, calling long-distance from the police station on Hydra. After locals had complained about “commotions” at the house, she and her boyfriend had been arrested for possession of drugs. The combination of the Kama Sutra woodcuts she had hung on the walls and the absence of the beloved patriarch had, it seemed, proven too much for the locals to bear. Leonard told Amiel that he had warned Suzanne that her new decor would offend the cleaning lady. The case against Suzanne and her friend was dropped, but at the cost of several thousand dollars to Leonard. “These days,” he told Amiel, “I work to support my wife, my children and my responsibilities.”1
When Suzanne returned to Montreal, she took the children and moved with them to France, renting a house in Roussillon, in the Vaucluse. If Leonard wanted to see them—and he did; after his initial misgivings about fatherhood he had taken to it seriously, and his friends say he was grief-stricken at being separated from them—there were negotiations to be made. Leonard had chosen not to tour with Death of a Ladies’ Man, saying, “I didn’t really feel I could be behind it.”2 Aside from its having been such a volatile and enervating experience, the large-scale, sometimes brawling, songs that resulted would have to be seriously de-Spectorized for him to sing them onstage. Not touring also gave Leonard more time to negotiate this new, long-distance family life, which would involve spending even more time on transatlantic flights. Leonard chose, somewhat curiously, to move back to Los Angeles, making the journey to France considerably longer than from Montreal. He bought, along with two fellow students of Roshi, another cheap house in an inexpensive neighborhood. The duplex was a short drive from the Cimarron Zen Center. Every morning at the same time, Leonard would go to the Zen Center to meditate. From there he would go to the gym, before returning to his sparsely furnished part of the house to write. His life without Suzanne and the children was, it seemed, more structured, not less.
Leonard’s old friend Nancy Bacal was also living in Los Angeles. When Leonard showed up at the door of her home in the Hollywood Hills, she had recently suffered a terrible loss; her fiancé had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Bacal was “devastated,” she remembers. “I could barely breathe. Leonard looked at me, smiled his sweet wry smile and said quietly, ‘Welcome to life.’ ” He urged her to come with him to Mount Baldy and sit with Roshi, saying, “It’s perfect for you. It’s for the truly lost.” That Leonard clearly considered himself among that congregation was evidenced by the central role that Roshi and his austere form of Zen Buddhism played in his life at this time. When Leonard was not at the Zen Center in L.A., you might find him in the monastery on Mount Baldy—a “hospital for the broken-hearted,” as he called it3—or accompanying Roshi to various monasteries of other religious denominations around the U.S.
Leonard also became a contributing editor of a new Buddhist magazine called Zero, which had been founded a year earlier and was named for Roshi’s fondness for mathem
atical terms—zero, to Roshi, was the place where all the pluses and minuses equated in God, the absence of self, and true love. Steve Sanfield had been one of its first editors. Each issue contained some words from Roshi, interviews with artists such as Joni Mitchell and John Cage, articles by scholars and poems by, among others, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and Leonard Cohen.
In spite of his deep involvement with Buddhism, Leonard insisted to anyone who asked that he remained a Jew. “I have a perfectly good religion,” he said, and pointed out that Roshi had never made any attempt to give him a new one.4 When Bob Dylan went public with his conversion to Christianity in 1979 “it seriously rocked [Leonard’s] world,” said Jennifer Warnes, who was staying at that time at Leonard’s house. He would “wander around the house, wringing his hands saying, ‘I don’t get it. I just don’t get this. Why would he go for Jesus at a late time like this? I don’t get the Jesus part.’ ”5
In the summer of 1979 Leonard began work on a new album to which he had given the working title The Smokey Life. Still smarting from his experience with Phil Spector, he planned to produce, or at least coproduce, it himself. He had been thinking about working with John Lissauer again, but Lissauer was in New York and Roshi was in L.A. and Leonard did not feel ready to leave him. Joni Mitchell, with whom Leonard had remained friends, suggested that he work with her longtime engineer-producer, Henry Lewy. Since Leonard had ignored her last recommendation—that he not work with Phil Spector—at his peril, he agreed. Leonard met Lewy, a soft-spoken man in his fifties, and liked him immediately. Lewy was born in Germany and had been in his teens when World War II broke out and his family had bribed their way out of the country. His background was as a radio man and a studio engineer, which made him more interested than the average record producer in simply getting things done, rather than having them done his way.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 32