I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  In Europe, Leonard was often mobbed by fans. “Women would follow us around,” Julie says, “and men for that matter, and go, ‘Where is Leonard staying?’ ” In Sweden they had to fight their way through a crowd of teenage girls to get on the ferry to Denmark. Perla says, “If Leonard was in the street or in a café people would come up to him; there was no privacy whatsoever. But he was very happy. We’d take long walks through the streets together and he was in his element, I think, delighted with his success.” In the UK, the BBC made a documentary about him, Songs from the Life of Leonard Cohen, and Buckingham Palace sent him an invitation to appear at the Prince’s Trust concert, alongside Eric Clapton, Elton John, Dire Straits, the Bee Gees and Peter Gabriel. Julie remembers, “Peter Gabriel came up to Leonard with a couple of albums for Leonard to sign. He was like a little disciple: ‘Can you sign this one? And this one’s for my son.’ ” Prince Charles, whose charity the concert benefited, was also a Leonard Cohen fan. “The orchestration is fantastic and the words, the lyrics and everything,” the prince said in a British television interview. “He’s a remarkable man and he has this incredibly laid-back, gravelly voice.”6 In Iceland, Leonard was received by the president of the country.

  On the eve of Independence Day they flew back to the U.S. By now Leonard had become used to the difference between the European and American tour experience. But the Carnegie Hall concert on July 6 could not have gone much better. The show was sold out and the media had come in droves. “I remember thinking that if they dropped a bomb on the place, American rock music criticism would be over,” says Sharon Weisz, “because of the number of journalists who had requested tickets to this show.” The New York Post reviewer Ira Mayer wrote, “If ever there is an award for emotional laureate of the pop world, Leonard Cohen will be the uncontested winner. He gave vent—magnificently—to all the doubts, fears, longings, memories and regrets that comprise love in the twentieth century.”

  Following two West Coast shows, in Berkeley and L.A., there was a three-month break before the North American tour resumed in October. At Halloween, in Texas, they performed in a TV studio for Austin City Limits, a popular long-running concert program that airs on PBS. On November 16 the tour ended, as it had begun, in New York, where the New York Times named I’m Your Man its album of the year. Leonard stayed on in New York. Adam and Lorca were living there now and Hanukkah was just a couple of weeks away. Leonard rented a room in a hotel in one of Manhattan’s less fashionable neighborhoods and began preparing for the holiday.

  The eighties had not been easy on many of the recording artists who had come up in the sixties. They tended to flounder in a decade when style took the place of substance, yuppies replaced hippies, shiny CDs made vinyl LPs obsolete and the drugs of choice were designed to boost egos, not to expand consciousness. Although Leonard had had a tough time of it during the first half of the eighties, by the end of the decade he had adapted far more successfully than most of his near-contemporaries. He had the style, the beats, the synthesizers and the videos—two excellent videos made by Dominique Issermann, to whom I’m Your Man had been dedicated. (Written around a picture of a man and woman ballroom dancing were the words “All these songs are for you, D.I.”)

  I’m Your Man had outsold all of his earlier albums. “In terms of my so-called career,” Leonard said, “it certainly was a rebirth. But it was hard to consider it a rebirth on a personal level. It was made under the usual dismal and morbid conditions.”7 Suzanne was suing him over money, and his romantic relationship with Dominique was unraveling. This was a dance whose complicated steps Leonard knew well: the intimacy and the distance, the separations and reconciliations, running on the spot and, when the music stopped, good-bye. Romance would often be replaced by an enduring friendship; Leonard appears to have remained good friends with many of his former lovers, remarkably few of whom seem to bear him any ill will. But the more immediate result of the end of a long love affair would be a rush of freedom, which gave way to depression, from which Leonard might emerge with a poem or a song.

  Leonard has claimed in several interviews—and confirmed it in the closing verse of “Chelsea Hotel #2”—that he is not a sentimental or a nostalgic man, that he does not look back. Religion would validate this as a healthy position: when Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom she was turned into a pillar of salt. As a writer, although he tended to look inside himself or at his immediate environs, Leonard also looked back at lovers from whom he had parted. In The Favorite Game, Leonard’s fictional alter ego writes to the girl he loved in fond anticipation of their separation: “Dearest Shell, if you let me I’d always keep you 400 miles away and write you pretty poems and letters. . . . I’m afraid to live any place but in expectation.” As a writer Leonard seemed to thrive on this paradox of distance and intimacy. As a man, it was more complicated. Often it seemed to make him wretched, and, as a wretch, he turned to God. But as Roshi told him, “You can’t live in God’s world. There are no restaurants or toilets.”8

  Back in L.A., with little to keep Leonard occupied, his depression reappeared. It came “in cycles,” he said9—sometimes even when things were going well, which would make him feel ashamed. “One might think that success helps you fix up your personal problems,” he said, “but it doesn’t work that way.”10 When things were not going well, though, depression could send him into a serious tailspin.

  “I never knew where it was coming from and I tried everything to shake it, but nothing worked.”

  What did you try?

  “Well, I tried all that stuff, all the antidepressants before Prozac, like Demerol, desipramine, the MAO inhibitors.”

  Valium? The morphines?

  “No, not morphine. That would have been deadly. But I tried everything right up to Zoloft and Wellbutrin. I tried everything they had. Most of it made me feel worse than when I started.”

  So, you’re an expert in all things pharmaceutical when it comes to depression?

  “I think I am. But nothing worked.”

  Leonard told the actress Anjelica Huston, “When I was on Prozac my relationship with the landscape improved. I actually stopped thinking about myself for a minute or two.” He stopped taking it because, he said, “it didn’t seem to have any effect whatsoever on my melancholy, my dark vision,” and because “what it does is completely annihilate the sexual drive.”11 He had friends who had recommended psychotherapy, but, he said, “I never deeply believed. I had no conviction that this model was workable. And having observed a number of friends who for many years had undergone this treatment, it began to be clear that it wasn’t terribly effective for these people, so I was never convinced in the value it would have for me.”12 It might be that Leonard felt that, as a former debating society president and a man of words, he could run rings around anyone trying to administer the talking cure. There were also his dignity and an almost British stiff upper lip to contend with. Leonard was not the kind of man to give someone else the responsibility of removing the suffering from him. Amphetamines helped, if he didn’t use them too much for too long—though now that he was in his fifties he was finding them hard to take at all. Drinking was also helpful, as was sex—Leonard had become something of an expert at self-medication. But what seemed to work best of all was a disciplined routine. The long hours of meditation and study Leonard had put in with Roshi had not cured him of depression but had helped him view the situation from a more useful perspective. He had come to recognize that his depression “had to do with an isolation of”13 himself—an isolation he had tried to address through his various spiritual pursuits. The hard part was making it work in the world of restaurants and toilets.

  For the first time in a long while, the world was treating him well, as regards his work. The success of I’m Your Man had pushed Leonard’s Best Of album back again onto the UK charts, and his American label had been inspired to give a belated release to his slighted last album, Various Positions. In Canada his poet
ry was being celebrated in an exhibition at the Library and Archives. Both Leonard and his music appeared in a Canadian television program called A Moving Picture, a dance fantasy that featured the National Ballet of Canada. In February 1989 Leonard was in New York, where he was invited to perform on the U.S. TV show Night Music, cohosted by David Sanborn and Jools Holland. One of its young producers was Hal Willner.

  “Like they say about the Kennedy assassination,” Willner says, “you remember the first time you heard Leonard Cohen. It was on WDAS in Philadelphia, I was very young, and ‘Suzanne’ came on the radio, and there was nothing like it. Hearing Leonard, I think even more than Dylan, I was able to see music as poetry. When I moved to New York, I had a little internship job at Warner Bros., around the time they were doing Death of a Ladies’ Man, and I remember seeing what a controversial figure he was within the industry. They either got it or they didn’t, there was nobody who was in the middle. That record had a very big effect on me, and Doc Pomus loved that record too; we used to listen to it all the time.” Willner considered I’m Your Man a “masterpiece.” He had gone to see Leonard’s last show in New York at the Beacon Theatre and thought it “one of the most perfect concerts I’ve ever seen. Since he was doing TV for the album, I jumped at having him on the show.”

  Willner had become known for curating albums and performances that featured eclectic ensembles of musicians and singers performing material written by another artist. As Willner put it, he was “trying to combine things that are sort of fantasy.” He took the same approach to Leonard’s appearance on Night Music. “Leonard said he wanted to do ‘Tower of Song,’ but I had a fantasy in my head of doing ‘Who by Fire’ with Leonard and Sonny Rollins, who was another guest on the show. Usually when people jam they go with up-tempo things; that song had a spiritual aspect, but I knew that people would relate.” When he mentioned his idea to Leonard, “there was this silence. Then he said—tentatively—‘Will he do that?’ ” At the rehearsal, Leonard appeared wary. Sonny Rollins was watching him closely as if trying to read him. Leonard looked behind him: Julie and Perla were there, watching his back, and they smiled. Leonard started singing “Who by Fire.” Then, Willner recalls, “Sonny Rollins, who was sitting there staring at Leonard the whole time, picked up his horn and started wailing in a different kind of understanding of the song.” After the rehearsal, says Julie, Rollins—“this saxophone colossus, this master”—came up to her and asked, quietly, “Do you think Mr. Cohen likes what I’m doing?”

  Back in Los Angeles, a heat wave had set in. Leonard was upstairs in his duplex, in the corner of the living room, playing his Technics synthesizer—something he spent much of his time doing when he was not needed elsewhere. He was happy enough in his cell with its bare floorboards and its plain white walls, no pictures or distractions. The windows were open, letting in the sweltering heat. He had thought about installing air-conditioning but would not get around to it until the next decade. He was interrupted by the phone ringing. It was a young woman friend, Sean Dixon, who sounded distressed and wanted Leonard to come over. They had met when Leonard was working at Rock Steady Studios on I’m Your Man; Dixon was the receptionist. One day Leonard had gone to the studio with Leanne Ungar to pick up the master tapes, since they planned to mix them in another studio. When they arrived, Dixon was there on her own, nursing a stray dog she had just found in the street. Leonard decided on the spot that they would stay and mix at Rock Steady. “Every day,” Dixon remembers, “I would come in with this little lost dog which was very depressed. And we would just sit there when Leonard wasn’t working and hold this little dog, while he talked and thought about what he wanted to do.”

  Dixon was actually phoning Leonard about a cat. Her roommate had gone back to Texas, leaving her with Hank, a long-haired cat of indeterminate age, which was now very sick. The vets could not figure out what was wrong with it. The enema and IV fluids they had given him on the previous two visits had not helped. Hank had crawled under the Murphy bed in her small apartment. Dixon thought he was dying. The next morning she went to take him back to the vet, but her car was gone; it had been stolen. She says, “I pleaded with Leonard, ‘Can’t you please just come and look at him? I don’t know what to do.’ ”

  Leonard drove over and Dixon pulled the cat out from under the bed. “He looked horrible, he was covered with all this medicine he had spit up and he hadn’t groomed in days. But right away Leonard said, ‘Oh, I don’t think this is a dying animal.’ He said, ‘I’m going to chant to him.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, Leonard is such a freak,’ but he was, ‘No, really, it vibrates all the internal organs, it’s a really good thing.’ I was desperate so I said, ‘Okay, fine, you do whatever you want to do.’ So he put Hank on the bed.

  “There was a chair at the end of the bed, right up against the bed, and Leonard sat and leaned over, put his mouth right up against Hank’s forehead, and he just chanted like they chant at the monastery, ‘Ooooooooooooooooooom,’ very, very deeply, way lower than he sings, like a rumble. He did that for ten minutes—and he’s allergic to cats so his nose was running and his eyes were running and he was getting stuffed up, but he just kept doing it. And Hank just sat there, didn’t try to get away or scratch him or anything. Then finally Leonard stopped and said, ‘That’s it, darling, that’ll fix him up,’ with total confidence.” He gave her $1,000, insisting that she use it to get another car, and left. Hank slunk back under the bed. “But in the middle of the night I heard him get up and wander into the kitchen and I heard a lot of strangled sounds coming from the cat box. The next thing I heard in the morning was Hank crunching away on his food. I couldn’t believe he was eating, he hadn’t eaten in days. Then I looked at the cat box, expecting to see something really horrible, but the weird thing was there wasn’t anything—the miracle of the cat box. And the cat was fine. Apart from the odd hairball he was never sick again.”

  Dixon witnessed another demonstration of Leonard’s skills at his house, when his kitchen was invaded by ants. “They were all over the counter and I was looking for something to spray them with, and he said, ‘No. I’ll get them to go. Watch.’ He leaned over, pointed his finger and admonished them: ‘You get out of my kitchen this instant, all of you, right now, get going!’ He did that for a few minutes and, I swear, the ants all left and didn’t come back. A cat whisperer and an ant whisperer.”

  Two miracles. Enough to qualify Leonard for sainthood. He had also, miraculously, found another love and muse—a beautiful blond actress, smart, successful and almost thirty years younger than him. “I don’t think anyone masters the heart,” said Leonard. “It continues to cook like a shish kebab, bubbling and sizzling in everyone’s breast.”14 Or it does on the flames in the ovens in the tower of song.

  Nineteen

  Jeremiah in Tin Pan Alley

  Interestingly, he thinks we first met when I was five or six years old,” says Rebecca De Mornay. Leonard would have been in his early thirties. It was in the late sixties, in England, when Rebecca attended a boarding school named Summerhill. A friend of Leonard had a child there and Leonard had gone to give a little concert. Summerhill was an early experiment in progressive education, a school with no rules; Leonard remembered seeing a female teacher walking about the place, topless. He also remembered seeing Rebecca. “I said, ‘How could you remember me from then?’ He said, ‘It was something about your light.’ Amazing, but Leonard would remember light, and he doesn’t tend to make things up.”

  Rebecca was born in California and raised there until her father, the conservative talk-show host Wally George, left her bohemian mother. From then, she spent her childhood on the move, from Austria to Australia and several points in between. Rebecca’s mother had been a Leonard Cohen fan and would play her his records when she was small. “I remember going to sleep listening to his music, almost as a lullaby—‘Suzanne,’ ‘The Stranger Song,’ ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.’ ” When Rebecca started playing the guitar,
his were some of the first songs she learned, and when she decided to become a singer-songwriter in her midteens, his songs were an influence. In her late teens, Rebecca turned to acting and moved back to California, where she started her successful movie career at the age of twenty-two in Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart.

  The first time Leonard and Rebecca met as adults was in the mideighties, at a party thrown by film director Robert Altman, another Leonard Cohen fan. Rebecca, having recognized Leonard from across the room, remembers that she went over to him “and sat down and proceeded to talk to him, which is actually very unlike me with someone I don’t know. I just had this feeling I could and should talk to him. I don’t know what I said, but he seemed a little skeptical. I remember a great reticence on his part—I couldn’t tell if he was shy or wary of me. There’s that saying, ‘Trust the art, not the artist,’ which is almost always true, but when I met Leonard, the person was as interesting, if not more so, than the art.”

  Their paths crossed again in 1987 in Los Angeles at a Roy Orbison concert that was being recorded for a PBS TV special, A Black and White Night. Among Orbison’s guests were Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Jackson Browne and Jennifer Warnes. Leonard was in the audience. So, separately, was Rebecca. “I saw Leonard and again I went up to him: ‘Hey, remember we met?’ And again there was the skeptical look. It was funny, as if he anticipated that making a connection with me might wind up some kind of arduous enterprise. Which maybe it did.” Rebecca laughs. “I said, ‘You know, I’d really like to get together and talk.’ He simply said, ‘All right,’ and it sounded like a reluctant surrender.”

  So they got together and talked, and continued to do so. “We had this friendship at first that lasted two or three years. Strictly a friendship; I had a boyfriend,” says Rebecca. They talked about art and work, in particular Leonard’s. “I ask a lot of questions if somebody interests me and he enjoyed talking to me about his process.” Slowly, imperceptibly, it became a courtship. “It started to become this meaningful relationship to me; we started talking about our real lives, our secret lives. Then at some point after all this talking, I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but it turned this corner and we were just suddenly madly, passionately in love. He gave me a very beautiful ring. Unbelievably, in a way, we were to be married.”