There was a proposal—“Ah, baby, let’s get married, we’ve been alone too long”—in the song “Waiting for the Miracle.” A very Leonard Cohen proposal admittedly: resigned, cheerfully pessimistic and with references to nakedness and war. Leonard and Rebecca discussed moving in together, but for now it suited them to keep their separate homes. Rebecca lived with her cats in a house in the hills, two miles north of Leonard’s, and Leonard shared his with his daughter, Lorca. She had taken a job working for a distress help line. He could hear her at night through the bare floorboards, downstairs, talking to would-be suicides on the phone. Of his relationship with Rebecca, Leonard said, “I find the whole thing very workable.” Although he felt it “incautious to declare yourself a happy man,” even he had to admit that he “couldn’t complain.”1
Those who have read this far and are not punching the air or saying “at long last” might be thinking this a curious development. Not that Leonard had a beautiful girlfriend, or even that he was happy, but that he was taking a wife. An old Eastern European adage says that a man should pray once before going to sea, twice before going to war and three times before getting married, but when it came to the last of the three, Leonard never seemed to stop praying. But marriage to Rebecca De Mornay really did appear to be workable. Movie stars are used to early starts, so they are unfazed by someone who sets his alarm for four thirty every morning to go to the Zen Center. Their work requires them to leave home for lengthy periods, so they are less likely to be bothered if you do the same. They are committed to their work. They have their own income. They are accustomed to being around people who are distracted or self-involved. To have got where they are in their business, they have to be fiercely tenacious. And, if they are Rebecca De Mornay, they are young, strikingly beautiful, very sexy and love music, and Leonard’s music in particular. So, if Leonard should forget to pray for the angels, perhaps it might not be quite so perilous now that the miracle appeared to have come.
“In the midst of all this,” says Rebecca, “I was doing what turned out to be so far the biggest movie of my career and he was trying to get his record The Future together, which also turned out to be his biggest American success. We had a very creative, inspiring impact on each other, smoking up a storm of cigarettes, drinking cauldrons of coffee—just together, living, working.” Rebecca had won the starring role in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, in which she plays a disturbed young woman pretending to be a nanny. The film was shot in Tacoma, a suburb of Seattle. Leonard went with her, “which very few men would feel comfortable doing,” Rebecca points out. This was Leonard’s first significant relationship with a woman more celebrated and successful than himself, but it appeared not to trouble him in the least. “He stayed with me at a house I rented there, and actually spent time in my trailer, happily songwriting while I was shooting, playing his synthesizer. The last track on The Future is called ‘Tacoma Trailer,’ and that was the trailer.”
It is a nice image, Leonard noodling contentedly on his keyboard while Rebecca goes off to play a psychotic nanny, and playing a song to her when she comes home from work. “Tacoma Trailer” is an instrumental, but it came quickly. Rebecca was doing a good job as a muse. And Leonard needed one. Writing songs had become no less arduous. There had rarely been a time when it was easy, but sometime around 1982 something had changed in him—he couldn’t say exactly what—and it had become much worse. It appeared to be some kind of acute perfectionism related to a craving for complete authenticity. He could write a “perfectly reasonable” song, he said, even “a good song,” but when he listened to it sung he could hear “that the guy was putting you on.”2
Leonard speculated that the problem might have to do with a sense of mortality, “that this whole enterprise is limited, that there was an end in sight.”3 As deadlines do, it focused him, but instead of moving things along, it kept him in the same place, going deeper, trying to find “the kind of truth that I can recognize, the kind of balance of truth and lies, light and dark.”4 He would work on the same song over and over, diligently and devotedly, for years, forever if need be, trying to make it work. Ever since he was a young poet, he had felt intensely passionate about writing, he said, and the feeling “of being in this for keeps.”5 When it came to his romantic relationships, he did not appear to have given that kind of dedication to staying in one place, with one person, “for keeps,” and doing whatever it took to make it work. The problem with romantic relationships, though, was that they tended to get in the way of the isolation and space, the distance and longing, that his writing required. In 1993, Leonard wrote an advice page (sadly just a one-off) for the American men’s magazine Details. He answered the question “What is the one thing men ought to know about women?” with “Women are deeply involved in a pattern of thought centered around the notion of commitment.”6 Yet he seemed at last ready to commit to Rebecca. He told journalists that his and Rebecca’s was “an exclusive and highly conventional relationship,”7 and said, “There is a formal arrangement between us, yes.”8
The success of I’m Your Man had resulted in anticipation for a new album. That did nothing to speed up the process. Nor did the fact that more than half the songs Leonard was working on had been around in some unfinished form or other for a long time. He was writing the sixtieth verse for one such song, “Democracy,” when he was interrupted by the phone. His son, Adam, had been in a serious car accident in Guadeloupe, where he had been working as a roadie for a calypso band. He was badly injured: fractured neck and pelvis, nine broken ribs and a collapsed lung. The eighteen-year-old was air-ambulanced, unconscious, to a hospital in Toronto. Leonard flew up to meet him as he was taken into intensive care. During the four months Adam spent in the hospital, Leonard stayed there, keeping vigil. He would sit in the room quietly, watching his son, who remained in a coma. Sometimes he would read aloud to him from the Bible. When Adam finally regained consciousness, his first words to his father were, “Dad, can you read something else?”9 Suzanne says, “Leonard wanted to stay there by his bedside—for months—and did practically nothing else, dropped everything else to be there. Finally, if I had forgotten why I loved him even for a moment with what might have been a heart full of resentments, after Guadeloupe, to see how he was so solidly there for our children, I remembered.”
Adam made a complete recovery. During the process, father and son became very tight. Leonard, having put all thoughts of work aside while he focused on Adam, had once again begun to think that, if he never got around to finishing another album, it was not the end of the world. As had happened in the past, his songs seemed to be doing all right without his direct involvement. One of them, “Bird on a Wire” was at No. 1 on the U.S. charts, a soulful version by the Neville Brothers, taken from the soundtrack of a romantic comedy of the same name. Another contemporary movie, Pump Up the Volume, used his song “Everybody Knows”—two versions of it, in fact, Leonard’s original and a cover by Concrete Blonde. As it happened, the soundtrack of the latter also featured a hip young rock band called the Pixies, whose front man would, inadvertently, be the impetus for a Leonard Cohen tribute album.
The French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles had thought up the idea of making an album of Leonard Cohen covers by artists from the more interesting end of the rock spectrum after an interview with the Pixies’ Black Francis, during which he raved about I’m Your Man. Francis had not been a fan of Leonard’s music until 1990, when, on a particularly grim European tour with his band, he happened upon a cassette of I’m Your Man in a French highway service station. The tape remained unopened in his bag until the bus reached Spain and the band had a few days off. “The plan,” says Francis, “had been for us to all go to a beach town with nightclubs. But the band wasn’t in a happy space and I really wanted to get away from everybody—in particular Kim, the bass player.” He asked the tour manager to take him somewhere quiet, where he could be alone. He was dropped at a large, empty tourist hotel farther down the coast
. Checking in, he saw to his chagrin that Kim Deal had had the same idea. “The hotel assumed we were the best of friends and, although there were eight hundred rooms in this hotel and no one in it, they put us right next to each other. We were both too exhausted to resist and just accepted our fate.”
Francis stayed locked in his room and did not come out. He had brought with him the two new cassettes he had bought on the road, one being I’m Your Man. “It was summer, bright and sunny, but I had all the curtains drawn and it was very dark and black in my little room, and I played I’m Your Man on my boom box. It was all I listened to for three days straight, over and over. I was in the right kind of emotional state—kind of lonely, frustrated, bored, a whole combination, and alone in this empty place, this hotel at the end of the universe—and I got it. The voice, those little Casio keyboards, that kind of lush but spacious artificial landscape that frames his work on that record, just brought everything about him right to a head: everything that’s sexy about him was extra sexy, anything funny about him extra funny, anything heavy was extra heavy. I was a fan.”
Nick Cave was a Leonard Cohen fan too, but of longer standing, He had first heard Leonard’s music in his teens, in a small country town in Australia, when a girlfriend made him sit with her in her room and listen to Songs of Love and Hate. Many were the men introduced in such fashion to Leonard’s early albums. “I’d never heard anything like it,” says Cave. “It remains one of the seminal albums that completely changed the kind of music I would make. It was really the first record that showed a way where it was possible to take some of the kind of dark, self-lacerating visions we found in much of the European poetry and literature we were reading in those days and apply them to a kind of rock sound. When the Bad Seeds put out our first record we did a version of ‘Avalanche’ as the first track—even more lugubrious than his—as a kind of attempt to set the tone.” When seven years later Les Inrockuptibles asked Cave and the Bad Seeds to appear on the album, he declined; he despised tribute albums and “could not think of anything worse. Then what happened was we went to the pub and spent the afternoon there, and came back into the studio rather intoxicated, and just started to play ‘Tower of Song.’ We played it for about three hours nonstop, kind of segueing through all the different kinds of musical styles in history, just playing around, and then we forgot about it. Someone found it and did an edit on it, and it sounded good, or it at least like there was a sense of humor behind it. That was one fucked-up version of that song.” It wound up on the tribute album.
I’m Your Fan was released in November 1991, with eighteen Leonard Cohen songs covered by, among others, the Pixies (“I Can’t Forget”), R.E.M. (“First We Take Manhattan”), James (“So Long, Marianne”), Lloyd Cole (“Chelsea Hotel”) and Ian McCulloch (“Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”). John Cale, the oldest of the contributors, gave “Hallelujah” its first cover by any artist of substance—NME described his version as “a thing of wondrous, savage beauty.” Leonard was “tickled pink” by the whole album. It did not bother him so much, he said, if his books were left to gather dust on shelves, “but the song really has an urgency, and if it isn’t sung, it’s nowhere.”10 Everybody, he said, could use some encouragement, and if you hung around long enough it was bound to happen, and Leonard’s time had come. The same year, Leonard was inducted into the Juno Hall of Fame in Canada. In his acceptance speech he quipped, “If I had been given this attention when I was twenty-six it would have turned my head. At thirty-six it might have confirmed my flight on a rather morbid spiritual path. At forty-six it would have rubbed my nose in my failing powers and have prompted a plotting of a getaway and an alibi. But at fifty-six, hell, I’m just hitting my stride and it doesn’t hurt at all.”11 Which was fortunate, since his countrymen gave him an even higher honor in October, making Leonard an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Perhaps to help balance the scales, Leonard agreed to Hal Willner’s request to appear on a tribute album to Charles Mingus, Weird Nightmare. “I went over to his house in L.A. one night with a bunch of Mingus’s poetry,” Willner says, “and he picked out one stanza that he loved in a poem called ‘The Chill of Death.’ I had a little DAT recorder and he sat at his desk and repeated the poem over and over again into the microphone for half an hour. While he was doing so, someone made a phone call, and he picked up the phone, still reading the poem. They said, ‘Leonard, what are you doing?’ ‘I am a man reading “The Chill of Death.” ’ That’s on the record too.”
In March 1992, Rebecca attended the Oscars ceremony. Her escort, the immaculately dressed man who walked down the red carpet beside her, was Leonard. Cameras buzzed like mosquitoes, and photos of Rebecca and Leonard made it into a number of tabloids. “There was an English magazine that printed pictures of us and said ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ” says Rebecca. How mean of them to call her a beast. It brought to mind the headlines that greeted Serge Gainsbourg when he was photographed with his famous lovers Bardot, Gréco and Birkin. The difference was that Leonard, unlike Gainsbourg, had always gone out of his way in the past to avoid such attention. “The Academy Awards was probably the least likely place to sight Leonard Cohen,” Rebecca says. “I asked him to go with me, because they asked me, and I was with him at the time, and he just went, ‘Okay.’ He didn’t do the regular guy thing of having some reaction or antireaction to it, he just accepted it. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to, but it wasn’t something that he was going to say no to and leave me standing there without him. I think Leonard, like I am, is really in the moment with the individual he’s with, as opposed to the image of what the person is supposed to be. There was just the reality of us as two people, irrespective of me being an actress, Leonard being a famous songwriter.”
Leonard, as well as working at home, was writing songs at Rebecca’s house on her synthesizer. Two of those songs in particular stuck in her mind. One was “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” which Leonard kept writing over and over, “like a painter who paints over his original painting that you loved, and paints a whole new painting on top of it, and then he paints a whole new one on top of that, and ten years later it exists on a record* and doesn’t have a single note or word that’s the same as anything I heard when he first played that song.” The other was “Anthem.” “He got stuck on this one song. He was at my synthesizer and played it again—I’d heard it for years by now—and I suddenly said, ‘Just like that, those words, that’s the song.’ Again he looked at me kind of skeptical; I guess I just must provoke that response in him. He said, ‘You know what? You produce this song. I think you really know what this song has to be, I think you ought to produce it with me.’ So he sort of launched me into this position, which I was extremely flattered by, and surprised. But I really did feel that I knew the song—in fact I just played it before I spoke to you for this interview and it still makes me cry. It has the impact of ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ it’s just immortal, it’s the final statement on the subject, it’s the searing authenticity that he has in his voice when you talk to him, the presence that he is in person. He is so fully present, with compassion for the underdog, as well as genuine compassion and understanding for the enemy—which is very hard to do and hard-won.
“However,” Rebecca says, “within this stance it’s extremely hard to be Leonard Cohen. He’s on his own solo voyage, and he’s lying on a bed of cactus perpetually, but somehow finding windows into infinity everywhere: ‘Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee. . .; Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.’ It’s definitive. Such a unique way to describe the wisdom of compassion. I heard from a friend of mine who was in one of the established rehab places that they quoted this line in their pamphlets on recovery. He has taught me so much; he’s humble but also fierce. He has this subtext of ‘Let’s get down to the truth here. Let’s not kid ourselves.’ ” Early on in their relationship, Rebecca was “whining about the various pain I had, my chi
ldhood, and this and that. And Leonard is the best listener, but at a certain point he said, ‘I understand, it must have been really terrible for you, Rebecca, having had to grow up poor and black.’ ” Rebecca laughed. “It wasn’t in any way mean-spirited, there was no judgment from him; there never is. Leonard developed the tenacity and character to sit still within suffering—even though in earlier years, like many people, he tried every form of escape, be it drugs, sex, music, fame, money, all the usual things—but, early in his life compared to most people, he was brave enough to sit in the suffering, and write out of it, and live out of it, and not try to escape from it.”
April 1, 1992, was Roshi’s eighty-fifth birthday. Shortly after the Academy Awards, Leonard threw a grand party of his own. A hundred people gathered in one of the big hotels on Sunset Boulevard. There was a band, fronted by Perla Batalla, and Leonard asked them to end the evening by singing “Auld Lang Syne,” Roshi’s favorite song. By the time they got to it, the old man had nodded off in his chair. Leonard smiled. “It was a great sign if he’s asleep,” he said. Guests left with a book that Leonard had organized and published, with help from Kelley Lynch, celebrating the old man’s life. Leonard had it bound in gold, like an Oscar.
Leonard was in the studio, working on his new album The Future, when the L.A. riots broke out on April 29, 1992. Four white police officers had been acquitted of the beating of a black motorist—an incident that had been caught on video by an onlooker and was frequently aired on television—and South Central L.A., a predominantly African-American neighborhood, erupted. Cars and buildings were set on fire and stores attacked and looted. A white man was dragged from his truck by a mob and severely beaten. As the violence spread, the dinner-party conversation in affluent white neighborhoods turned to buying guns. By the fourth day, the government sent in the marines. There had been fifty-three deaths, hundreds of buildings destroyed and around four thousand fires. Leonard could see them burning from his window. There was a layer of soot on his front lawn. His home was not far from South Central. The Zen Center was closer still. He had become used to hearing gunshots on his way to the zendo in the early hours of morning and to stepping over syringes to get through the gate. Now from his car he could see boarded-up stores and the charred remains of a gas station. It was “truly an apocalyptic landscape and a very appropriate landscape for my work.”12 He had started writing the song “The Future”—then titled “If You Could See What’s Coming Next”—in 1989, when the Berlin Wall toppled, and just as he had predicted, it was all coming down.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 39