I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  The album seemed content to sell itself without Leonard’s help. It made the charts just about everywhere in Europe, reaching No. 34 in the UK and going gold in Canada, Poland, Demark, Ireland, Norway and the Czech Republic. In the U.S., oddly, it made it into the Top 20 of the World Music chart, while failing yet again to make Billboard’s Top 100. In the absence of any word from Leonard, many journalists appeared to view the album as the Last Word of Leonard, a prelude to retirement. But, as Leonard wrote to Jarkko Arjatsalo at the Leonard Cohen Files in the summer of 2004, he saw it as closing a circle in his work before moving on to the next record, which he was “deep into,” he wrote, “six or seven songs already sketched out, and, g-d willing, it will be done over the next year. Also the B of L [Book of Longing], or something resembling it, seems to be about to step out under a new name and form.”15 Leonard clearly had no plans for retirement. Which was fortunate, since a strange and unexpected set of circumstances dictated that he could not have retired if he had wanted to.

  In October 2004, the telephone rang in Leonard’s Montreal apartment. It was his daughter, Lorca, calling from L.A. She had just had an enigmatic conversation with the boyfriend of an employee of Kelley Lynch, who had come into her shop. He told her that Leonard needed to take a look at his bank accounts, and quickly. It was as puzzling to Leonard as it had been to Lorca. Kelley took care of Leonard’s business affairs—good, reliable Kelley, not simply his manager but a close friend, almost part of the family; he even employed Kelley’s parents. Leonard, who took little interest in such things, had given Lynch broad power of attorney over his finances. He trusted her enough to have named her in his living will as the person responsible in an extreme medical circumstance for giving the order as to whether he should live or die. Lynch had been there almost continuously during the making of Dear Heather and they had been in regular contact since the album was completed, just as they always were, and Kelley had said nothing about any financial problems. But Lorca was uneasy, so Leonard agreed to fly back to L.A. He went straightaway to his bank—he had been there so infrequently he could barely remember the address—and they pulled up his accounts. Apparently, it was true; just a few days earlier Leonard had paid an American Express bill of Kelley’s for $75,000. As the clerk scrolled through his earlier statements, it became clear that this was not an isolated incident. Almost all of Leonard’s money was gone.

  Back at the house, Leonard lit a cigarette. He dialed Kelley’s office number. Her voice on the phone was bright and friendly. Leonard told her that he had removed her name as a signatory on his accounts, and he fired her. Kelley. Of all the women in his life to do him wrong. Leonard knew that Lynch—like Marty Machat, his previous manager and Lynch’s previous employer—had her faults, but like Machat she knew Leonard’s business and had taken care of it. In 1998 Leonard had told Billboard (in a special feature celebrating Leonard’s thirtieth year as an artist), that in matters of business he had been “taken many, many times,” but then “I found Kelley and set my house in order and I’ve been making a living ever since . . . almost exclusively because of Kelley. Kelley, bless her heart, organized me and my son.”16

  Kelley, also like Marty Machat, loved Leonard—or had given every appearance of loving him for years. They had been lovers some fourteen years earlier, but it was “a casual sexual arrangement,” Leonard said; he “never spent the night, and it had been mutually enjoyed and terminated”17 giving no appearance of having damaged their close friendship. To have had almost all the money he had made stolen out from under him was difficult to take in, but also remarkably easy. It was the oldest story in showbiz. Hadn’t his mother warned him about it when he left for New York in the sixties with his guitar? “You be careful of those people down there,” she had told him. “They’re not like us.” To which Leonard responded with an indulgent smile before going on to unwittingly sign away the rights to several songs. But losing a few songs was a drop in the ocean compared to the epic financial impropriety this would turn out to be. That it appeared to have dated back to the time when Leonard left the material world to live in a monastery added more than a touch of irony. That it continued after Leonard came down from the mountain proved only what many already know, or at least suspect: musicians and monks tend to have few skills in matters of finance. Leonard had been happy to let his manager Kelley take care of the business and money, but now Kelley was gone, and so was the money, leaving Leonard with a monumental mess to take care of, and no manager or money with which to do it. If not quite a koan, it was a hell of a conundrum, and a debilitating distraction. “It’s enough to put a dent in one’s mood,” Leonard told his friends. He repeated the same understatement to the media once the lawsuits began and the story went public. And what a strange story it would turn out to be, one with a tangled plot whose cast of characters included a SWAT team, financiers, a tough-talking parrot, Tibetan Buddhists and Leonard’s lover Anjani’s ex-husband.

  Twenty-two

  Taxes, Children, Lost Pussy

  Death by a thousand paper cuts. To have been redeemed from depression in his old age only to have to spend it in an eternity of legal and financial paperwork was a cosmic joke so black as to test even Leonard’s famous gallows humor. His temptation had been to simply let the whole thing go. He had been broke before, he did not need much to live on and he had a roof—roofs, in fact—over his head. If, on balance, he would have preferred having money in the bank to not having it—and when he did have it, he tended to spend it on other people and on Roshi’s monasteries, in his own personal version of his ancestors’ philanthropy and synagogue-building—there was very little evidence in his lifestyle or his career, apart from the initial move into songwriting, that money was anywhere near the top of Leonard’s motivations.

  When he had unknowingly signed away the rights to “Suzanne” in the sixties, his response had reportedly been sanguine; it was appropriate somehow, he had said, that he did not own a song that he felt had become beyond ownership. Admittedly that is what he told the press; in private he might well have expressed a different view, since it is unlikely that a man in his thirties, renowned in the Canadian literary world and unused to being treated dishonorably, would feel anything but incensed at having been duped of his first known—and for years best-known—and most successful song. But what Leonard said both publicly and privately about the business with Kelley Lynch suggested that it meant less to Leonard to lose his fortune than his songs. Though as the story continued to unfold, it appeared he might have lost them too.

  Leonard’s relative calm in the face of financial disaster might have reflected his long, hard Zen training with Roshi, or the perspectives he learned from his studies with Ramesh, but his survival instinct may have also played a part; to risk becoming too engaged might have invited the return of his anxiety and depression. Leonard had wanted to walk away from the whole thing, but the lawyers said he couldn’t. They told him that lot of the missing money had been in retirement accounts and charitable trust funds, which left Leonard liable for large tax bills on the sums withdrawn and no money with which to pay them. It was no good telling the IRS that he had not been the one who had made the withdrawals; they needed proof. Which was why Leonard was sitting at his desk with Anjani and Lorca, in the house he had been forced to mortgage in order to pay his legal bills, grimly going through stacks of financial statements and e-mails. It was a complicated business. Since Kelley Lynch, with his blessing, had dealt with his finances on his behalf, he knew few details himself about the various accounts, trusts and companies set up in his name. His lawyers had spent the past month trying to make sense of it and still Leonard seemed to be getting nowhere except deeper in debt.

  Then something occurred to Lorca. Wasn’t Anjani’s ex-husband a music industry lawyer? Perhaps he might have some ideas. Robert Kory was indeed a lawyer. He had worked with the Beach Boys for ten years, although he had since sworn off the music business in favor of a practice in entertainment
and technology finance. “But when Leonard Cohen shows up at your office,” Kory says, “what are you going to do? Close the door?” He had opened it to see his ex-wife standing hand in hand with a man whose poetry books he had read as a student at Yale. “Hello,” Leonard said. “I may have lost a few million dollars.”

  Kory agreed to help. Deferring his fees, he set about “trying to get a basic understanding of Leonard’s affairs, to understand the history, understand what money he had and what happened to it, the magnitude of the loss, and figure out legally what they had done.” Quite a challenge, since Kelley Lynch had the records. “I started making contacts in a very delicate way with bankers and with Leonard’s accountant, who was also Kelley’s accountant, and lawyers that represented Leonard in the sale of his music publishing and his future record royalties.” Three months later, after Kory’s then litigation associate and now partner Michelle Rice had conducted a comprehensive review of the available documents, along with bank records that had been subpoenaed, Kory and Rice explained to Leonard that a case could probably be made that between ten and thirteen million dollars had been improperly taken. “That stunned him,” says Kory. “It stunned me.”

  Rice’s analysis suggested it possibly dated as far back as 1996, the year Leonard was ordained as a monk. Around that time, Lynch, with the aid of Leonard’s other financial advisers, made the first of two separate sales of Leonard’s music publishing to Sony/ATV—127 songs. In Kory’s opinion there had been no need for Leonard to sell his songs because he had money in the bank and income from royalties. Much of the proceeds from the sale, less Lynch’s 15 percent commission, had been deposited in Leonard’s bank account, over which Lynch had control, and some had been deposited in charitable trusts. To manage the investments, Lynch had brought in a friend, a Tibetan Buddhist financier named Neal Greenberg, who was the head of a securities company in Colorado. Greenberg had studied since the early seventies under the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Lynch herself was a longtime student and friend of Trungpa, as was Doug Penick, the father of the older of her two sons, Rutger. (Penick had been involved in the 1994 Canadian documentary The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for which Leonard provided the narration.) Greenberg in turn brought in a lawyer and tax professor from Kentucky named Richard Westin. In 2001, Kelley, Greenberg and Westin orchestrated the sale of Leonard’s future record royalties to Sony/ATV for $8 million. After various cuts, Leonard apparently netted $4.7 million, according to documents later filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The money from this second sale of Leonard’s intellectual property went into a company account, which had been set up with the intention of paying Leonard a pension when he retired and to provide an inheritance for his children. What went wrong, according to Rice’s analysis and what was alleged in later litigation, was that the plan only worked if Leonard’s children owned 99 percent of the company and Leonard 1 percent. At the last minute, Rice alleged, they gave Kelley 99 percent ownership instead of his children, and Leonard had no idea about the last-minute change in the documents.

  Since Leonard had expressed a strong desire to avoid the ordeal of litigation, Kory, after consulting with the former L.A. district attorney Ira Reiner, wrote to Lynch, Greenberg and Westin. Greenberg’s response was to file a preemptive lawsuit which accused Leonard and Kory of attempted extortion. Westin agreed to go into mediation, and a confidential settlement was reached. Lynch’s lawyers insisted at first that their client had been given the authority to do what she did, though later they advised her to mediate. At that point, Lynch fired them. She made a phone call to Kory herself and asked him to meet her for lunch. This surprised Kory, but he accepted, and they agreed on a place.

  At that meeting, Kory held out the possibility of a reasonable settlement if Kelley would disclose what had happened to all the money. The alternative, he said, would be serious litigation and ultimately the destruction of her life as she knew it. Her response, Kory said, was “Hell will freeze over before you find out what happened to the money. It was my money.”

  So in August 2005 the first of the lawsuits began. That same month, somewhat ironically, a short film titled This Beggar’s Description, in which Leonard made an appearance, premiered on Canadian TV. It was a documentary about a schizophrenic Montreal poet named Philip Tétrault. Leonard had been his longtime supporter and friend. We see Leonard sitting on a park bench in Montreal with Tétrault, chatting about frostbite and Kris Kristofferson, while the soundtrack plays Leonard Cohen songs Leonard no longer owned.

  Back in Los Angeles, the letters and lawsuits, accusations and counteraccusations continued, becoming ever more convoluted and bizarre. A particularly sorry and surreal episode occurred at Lynch’s home in Mandeville Canyon. Looking out of her front window, she could see police officers cordoning off the road. Several police cars pulled up on her lawn. As Lynch described it, twenty-five armed men jumped out—a SWAT team—and aimed weapons at her house. The police had been called about an alleged hostage-taking. They were told there were guns in the house. Lynch, who had kept the younger of her two sons, Ray Charles Lindsey, home from school because he felt unwell, assumed that he must be the alleged hostage and that the call had been made by the boy’s father, her estranged partner Steve Lindsey—the producer and musician Lynch had met when he worked on Leonard’s album The Future. The boy was at that moment with his half brother, Rutger; Lynch had asked her older son to take Ray out of the house and down the road to where the actress Cloris Leachman, apparently, was waiting for them in her car.

  Lynch came out of the front door, dressed in a bikini and holding a dog on a leash. As she walked toward the policemen, she said, several trained their guns on her and the dog while other officers ran into the house. When they entered, they were greeted by a voice screeching, “I see dead people! I see dead people!”—it was Lou, Lynch’s gray African parrot. Lynch ran to the swimming pool and jumped in. She was removed by officers, handcuffed and taken away in a squad car, still in her wet bathing suit.

  By Lynch’s account, the police took her on a long drive, interrogating her en route about her friendship with Phil Spector (who had been freed on $1 million bail while awaiting trial for murder). The journey ended at a hospital across town, where Lynch was taken to the psychiatric ward. She claimed that she was involuntarily drugged and held in the hospital for twenty-four hours, and that during this time Steve Lindsey filed for and subsequently won custody of their son. Lynch believed that Leonard and Kory were behind the whole episode, as well as several other strange things she claimed had happened to her following the hostage incident, such as being rear-ended by a Mercedes and threatened by a mysterious man.1

  Lynch’s subsequent accounts, related in thousands upon thousands of words she posted on the Internet, involved long, elaborate conspiracies, in which Phil Spector’s murder trial seemed to feature frequently and in which Lynch claimed to be a scapegoat in a scheme devised to hide Leonard’s lavish spending and tax fraud. Rather than fight Leonard in court, Kelley did so in cyberspace. Wherever Leonard was mentioned online and there was a space for comments, she left them, and not in brief. She sent innumerable lengthy e-mails to Leonard and his friends, family, musicians, associates and former girlfriends, as well as to the police, the district attorney, the media, the Buddhist community and the IRS.

  Leonard, who had been obliged to stay in L.A. while the litigation continued, kept his head down and tried to work. For such a private man, having his confidential affairs made so distastefully public was a real test of his Buddhist nature. It was hard to work under these conditions, but at the same time, focusing on work kept his mind off it. There was also the matter of having to try to make some money; at this point in the game, Leonard had no idea how things might turn out. Thanks in good part to this urgency, in the space of a few months Leonard had written and recorded almost an entire new album—not the album on which he had started work immediately after Dear Heather, but a collaboration with Anjani, titled Blue Alert
.

  Leonard also finally completed Book of Longing—which his friends had started calling Book of Prolonging, Leonard having spent so long working on it. The one thing that was missing was some artwork, which had been in one of the thirty boxes of sketchbooks, notebooks, journals and personal papers that Leonard had left in Lynch’s office for safekeeping. Lynch, with her source of income cut off, had given up the office, so presumably they were in her house. Lynch wasn’t saying. With her house now heading toward foreclosure, there had been reports that she had been looking into selling Leonard’s archives.

  Leonard, who had become close to Rice, called her about the pending foreclosure. Although she and Kory had engaged another law firm by then to assist in the litigation, Rice felt the situation was too pressing to wait for the slow resolution of the lawsuits. She employed a writ of possession, a rarely used self-help legal procedure in which someone can make a claim that another person has his or her property and refuses to give it back. Lynch had ignored Leonard’s lawsuit, including requests for discovery, and he was frustrated by her ability to avoid any accountability, even in litigation. But once a court issues the writ, Rice explained, the person who filed it can take it to the sheriff’s office and ask for officers to go with him to where his property is being held and take it back.