I'm Your Man (25 page)

Released in April 1969,
Songs from a Room
performed better than its predecessor. It made it to No. 12 in Canada and No. 63 on the U.S. charts. In the UK, though it soared to No. 2, it was kept from the top position by a budget-priced compilation of hit singles titled
20 Dynamic Hits
, by artists from Deep Purple to Cilla Black. Reviewers across Europe all seemed to appreciate this new, unadorned production style. It was right that Leonard came to us naked, with very little baggage besides these strangely comforting songs that seemed to be written from a life led in the long dark hours before dawn, by someone whose word you could trust.

“I think that element of trust is critical. Certainly I think what draws anyone to a book or a poem or a song is that you trust the guy, the woman.”

You too? Is that what draws you to others' work?

“I never put it that way but yes, I think that's so, I go for that feeling of trust. When I listen to somebody like George Jones, he's working with the best studio musicians in Nashville and it's an absolutely impeccable production, sometimes over the top, but it doesn't matter, you trust the voice.”

S
ome thirty-five miles south of Nashville—the last half dozen of them down a winding dirt road from the outskirts of Franklin, the nearest town—was 5435 Big East Fork Road. The Bryants' two thousand acres encompassed forests, a creek, horses, herds of thoroughbred cattle, wild peafowl, chickens, four barns and a cabin. Stepping down from his new jeep, Leonard surveyed his new kingdom. He had sung in “Stories of the Street” about finding a farm—it was a common sentiment in the late sixties, going back to the land, since urban life had become increasingly dystopic—and here it was, his for two years for $75 a month. The cabin, in contrast to the rest of the place, was tiny. The front door opened straight into a living room, with a small kitchen at the back, two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom at the side. The back door opened onto the creek. It was plainly decorated and modestly furnished, a rural Tennessee version of his house on Hydra, only more isolated.

His nearest neighbor lived almost half a mile away, in a small tar-paper-roofed house raised up on cement blocks; out back there was an illegal still. Willie York was a toothless moonshiner who, along with his brother, had served eleven and a half years for the killing of a sheriff in 1944. The country singer Johnny Seay immortalized York in a song—“Willie's Drunk and Nellie's Dyin',” Nellie being his wife—which led to
Life
magazine descending on Big East Fork Road for the story. Leonard, who had had his own experience with
Life
when they came to Hydra to profile its expat artists, took a shine to York. Often at night he'd walk across the fields with a bottle of whiskey and visit.

Leonard bought pistols and a rifle at the army surplus store and a horse from a friend of York's, Ray “Kid” Marley, a champion rodeo rider from Texas who moved to Tennessee and trained horses. “Kid was truly one of a kind,” says Ron Cornelius. “He was a big, big guy, a mountain of a man, who used to run with us [the band West] quite a bit when we were in town and stayed drunk all the time.” Leonard said, “I thought I could ride—we used to ride at summer camp—but the horse Kid Marley sold me changed my idea of whether I could ride or not. I guess he saw this city slicker and it was a kind of practical joke of his to sell me this horse that I could rarely catch to saddle him up. This horse was mean.” Leonard would later immortalize the horse in the song “Ballad of the Absent Mare,”
*
and would have done the same for Marley and York in “Chelsea Hotel,” had the original version not been usurped by “Chelsea Hotel #2,” which had quite different words.

“I was pretty much a bust as a cowboy. [Laughs] But I did have a rifle. During the winter there, there were these icicles that formed on this slate cliff a few hundred yards from my cabin, and I'd stand in the doorway and shoot icicles for a lot of the time so I got quite good.”

Were you living alone in the cabin?

“I was living alone for much of the time but Suzanne would come down from time to time.”

You liked it better on your own.

“Yeah, I've always liked that.”

It is strange to think how different Leonard's life was now from nine months ago in New York. In Tennessee Leonard was Nature Boy
.
When Ron Cornelius took Bill Donovan—a close friend of Cornelius from San Francisco, who would become Leonard's and the band's tour manager—to the cabin to meet Leonard, “Leonard opened the door and he's stark naked,” Donovan remembers. “He says, ‘Welcome, friends, come in,' like it's nothing.” Leonard offered them tea and declined a joint, “and he walked round the whole time naked,” entirely unself-conscious and making friendly conversation.

“I thought,” Leonard said, “I was living the life down there.” In a poem written in the cabin and published in
The Energy of Slaves,
“I Try to Keep in Touch Wherever I Am,” he wrote,

    
The sun comes in the skylight

    
My work calls to me

    
sweet as the sound of the creek

Twelve

O Make Me a Mask

T
he sixties had no intention of slipping out quietly. The last year of the decade witnessed the first man walk on the moon, while on Earth, in America, there was the Woodstock festival, the gathering of the hippie tribes, and also Charles Manson and Altamont, the death of the hippie dream. For Leonard too, 1969 would be a momentous year. It was the year in which he met the woman who would make him a father and the man who would make him a monk.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi is a short, round Japanese man, a Zen master of the Rinzai school—hard-core Buddhism—born on the first day of April 1907. In 1962, when Roshi was fifty-five, just a kid with a crazy dream, he left Japan for Los Angeles to establish the first Rinzai center in the U.S. Leonard first heard of Roshi through his friend Steve Sanfield, who studied with him and had lived for three years in the garage of his small, rented house in Gardena, an inexpensive Los Angeles suburb. Sanfield had fallen in love with another student's wife and Roshi had asked them to leave. Several months later, when the couple were expecting a child, Roshi told them to come back and he would marry them at the newly opened Zen Center on Cimarron Street. Sanfield wrote to Leonard in Nashville, asking him to be best man. There was no reply, but when he and his partner arrived for the wedding, Leonard was there, waiting.

Leonard appeared fascinated by the ceremony, particularly the Ten Vows of Buddhism, and how Roshi ignored the one about not indulging in drugs and alcohol by drinking an impressive amount of sake. Leonard and Roshi barely exchanged a word that day, which was fine with Leonard. Since becoming a music celebrity, Leonard seemed to have acquired a large number of “friends” he barely knew who wanted to talk to him. In his view, the ancient Japanese way, where men would meet and “bow to each other for as much as half an hour speaking words of greeting, gradually moving closer together, understanding the necessity of entering another's consciousness carefully,”
1
was a good one.

Some weeks later Leonard made another unannounced appearance, this time in Ottawa at a celebration thrown by Jack McClelland for the winners of the coveted Governor General's Award for literature. Leonard had won for
Selected Poems 1956–1968
but sent a telegram, declining to accept the award. This was most unusual. Only one other winner in the past had refused the honor and its $2,500 purse—a French separatist, who was making a political protest. Even more unusual, though, was turning down the prize and showing up at the party.

Mordecai Richler cornered Leonard and demanded to know his reasons; Leonard replied that he did not know what they were himself. In his telegram to the committee Leonard had written, “Much in me strives for this honour, but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely.” Whether he meant that he had written books more deserving of the award than this anthology or that his poems had had it with being judged by anyone but himself is open to debate. Certainly since he had become a recording artist his work was receiving far more attention from far more critics. It had also brought a large increase in income, which meant that Leonard no longer depended on awards to help to pay the bills. However, to Canada's literary world, such behavior would have seemed nothing more than an expatriate pop celebrity rejecting his old country and his former life.

From Ottawa, Leonard traveled to Montreal, where he went to his old workplace, his uncle Horace's factory, to visit his cousin David. Over lunch in the factory cafeteria, David told Leonard, “You're famous, you're a big star.” “I didn't mean it sarcastically,” he recalls, “and he didn't take it that way. He just said, ‘You get into Columbia's publicity mill and you cannot help but become very well-known. I'm no child, and I've seen it destroy a lot of young people who go from nothing to stardom. I've been through the mill. You can't escape it. Once you become an artist with them, that's it.' ” When Leonard left Montreal for Nashville, once again he stopped off first in New York. After checking into the Chelsea Hotel, he went to the Scientology Center. There he met a woman.

I
t was early spring in 1969. We both seemed to have signed up for a Scientology class the same day. He was getting into the elevator at the Scientology Center as I was coming out of it and our eyes locked. Some days later we both took seats near each other. Although I had another person I was living with, I left that relationship immediately for Leonard and moved into the Chelsea with him.” Suzanne Elrod was a dark-haired beauty from Miami, Florida—some people in Montreal said she bore a resemblance to the Suzanne of Leonard's song. She was nineteen years old.

Leonard, at thirty-four, was fifteen years older than her—almost the same age difference as there was between his mother and father—but considerably younger than the wealthy man Suzanne was living with at the upscale Plaza Hotel. Suzanne declines to talk about her family background, which was secular Jewish. She had come to New York not for study or adventure or escape but as “a very young, naïve girl only armed with the typical romantic fantasies of my generation, wanting a family of my own. I had a river of love to give and found Leonard,” she said. “I knew he was destined to be the father of my children and the love of my life, no matter what happened.” When she told the man she lived with that she was leaving, he insisted on meeting “the poor poet” who had usurped him and organized a dinner for the three of them. Then, “he locked himself in one of the suites for hours and listened to the music and read the books he had his chauffeur go out and buy of Leonard's. He came out and said he at least felt I was leaving him for someone worthwhile.”

Their life together in Leonard's room in the Chelsea was by Suzanne's account reclusive, with little partying or socializing. Leonard seemed as smitten with this headstrong, sexual young woman as she was with him. But he also appeared to have one eye on the door. In his passport was a folded sheet of motel notepaper containing a list of names and numbers of people all over the world,
2
among them Viva, one of Warhol's stars; folksinger Dave Van Ronk; folk rocker Julie Felix; Judy Collins; Marianne; and a “Jane” who lived at 41 West Street. Also on the list were the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein and the Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli. In June 1969, not long after meeting Suzanne, Leonard joined Bernstein and Zeffirelli in Italy, where Zeffirelli was making a film on the life of Saint Francis. He took the two Leonards to Saint Francis's tomb and discussed the possibility of collaborating on the score. Nothing came of it, unfortunately; when
Brother Sun, Sister Moon
premiered in 1972, it featured a soundtrack by Donovan.

From Italy, Leonard went to Greece. Suzanne flew over and stayed with him in his little white house on Hydra. “My first impression was that the rooms were so small and run-down,” Suzanne recalls. Over time she “changed many things, rebuilt the downstairs room and garden,” but she says, “I kept the authenticity of the house, as that's what Leonard and I loved about it. I was very respectful of the spirit of the house. I liked it elegant, sparse and white, in all its Greek peasant simplicity.”

While they were on the island, news came of the suicide of Charmian Clift. On July 8, on the eve of the publication of her husband's new novel,
Clean Straw for Nothing,
Clift took an overdose of barbiturates. (George Johnston would die a year later from tuberculosis.) Leonard mourned with the rest of the island, but on Hydra, as in New York, he and Suzanne kept mostly to themselves.

When he returned to his cabin in Tennessee, Leonard took Suzanne with him. He introduced her to Willie York and Kid Marley. The rodeo rider “would come by, uninvited and often drunk, to tell sometimes hilarious, sometimes insipid stories while he spat on the floor and dug his cowboy boot heels, spurs and all, into the wood floors, and slapped his hand on his knee saying, ‘But ain't we having fun!' Sometimes he was fascinating,” says Suzanne, “and we laughed and kept him drunk. Sometimes we got rid of him as fast as we could, politely, without being shot. They all had rifles in their back windows of their trucks. Did I mention the many Confederate flags that were still up down there ‘in the holler'? It was an interesting place to visit and understand, but we lived there quietly, and briefly, thank goodness, as we lived everywhere else.”

Leonard also took Suzanne to Montreal to meet his mother. For a short while, they stayed at Leonard's childhood home on Belmont Avenue, while he set about finding them a place of their own. Masha, said Suzanne in 1980, “was his most dreamy spiritual influence. The only thing that bothered me was that she always called me Marianne.”
3
Leonard bought a cheap little cottage near the Parc du Portugal, off the Main, a neighborhood mostly populated by Portuguese and Greek immigrant families but that still retained the old Jewish delis with oilcloth-covered tables. The couple had barely moved in before they left for New York once again. In the city, Leonard revisited some of his old haunts—including the Gaslight, where he caught a show by Loudon Wainwright III—but this time with Suzanne. But Leonard no longer attended the Scientology Center. Disenchantment had set in, as well as anger that the organization had begun to exploit his name. Leonard had “gone clear”; he had a certificate confirming him as a “Senior Dianetic, Grade IV Release.”
4
“I participated in all those investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,” said Leonard. “I even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas—no robe, I didn't join them, but I was trying everything.”
5

The dawn of the new decade found Leonard and Suzanne in their little house in Montreal until Suzanne could no longer take the cold and flew to Miami. Leonard in turn returned to Nashville. Bob Johnston was talking about a third album. And Columbia Records was talking even more loudly about a European tour.

L
eonard had never really toured but he knew he did not like touring. Traveling wasn't the problem; “I tossed myself around like a cork,” he said, “for most of my life.”
6
But it was a different matter if someone else did the tossing, telling him where he had to be and when. Leonard's uncles would have been pleased to confirm his distaste for clock-punching, while his habit of becoming president of many of the clubs he joined might give some indication that Leonard did not much like following rules, unless they were his own. He also had a problem with stage fright—“I felt that the risks of humiliation were too wide”
7
—and had to psych himself up to perform. But mostly he was afraid for his songs. They had come to him in private, from somewhere pure and honest, and he had worked long and hard to make them sincere representations of the moment. He wanted to protect them, not parade and pimp them to paying strangers in an artificial intimacy. “My idea was to be able to make records only,” he told Danny Fields. He said he had hoped his songs “would make their way through the world” on albums, audio equivalents of poetry books, without his having to get onstage and perform them.

Leonard called Bob Johnston. He told his producer that he would not tour unless Johnston agreed to manage him and play keyboards in his band. It was a good ruse. Johnston would have been the first to admit that he was not a musician, and the likelihood of Columbia letting the head of its Nashville division simply take off and go on tour would have seemed slim. Except that Johnston had just left Columbia to go independent. Celebrating with a trip around Europe, all expenses paid by his former employers, struck Johnston as a fine idea. As for management, he told Leonard that he would play in his band and look after him on the road, and not charge a dime for doing so, but that he would do better to talk to Marty Machat, the lawyer-manager who handled Johnston's business affairs. Machat had been the right-hand man of Allen Klein, who managed the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Leonard and Johnston shook on it, and Johnston appointed Bill Donovan as tour manager and summoned the band for rehearsals—Cornelius, Daniels, Fowler and backing singers Susan Mussmano and Corlynn Hanney. Leonard, in turn, phoned Mort Rosengarten in Montreal and asked him to come to Tennessee.

“Leonard asked me to make a mask for him,” says Rosengarten. “A theatrical mask. He said he wanted to wear it while he was performing. So I went out to his little place, down the dirt road, in the middle of nowhere.” There was nowhere to buy materials, but they found a hobby shop in Franklin that sold “these little packages for model kits.” “I bought them all,” he says, “and Leonard came back from Nashville with a bag of plaster.” While Leonard was in Nashville, rehearsing, Mort stayed in the cabin and worked on the mask. “With Leonard gone there was no one around except for this old guy who made moonshine and Kid Marley, who dressed like a cowboy and never went anywhere without his horse, which was in a trailer at the back of his pickup truck. One night he turned up at the cabin, drunk, and we were waiting for Leonard to come back, but then he decided to go back into town and get more booze. So I went with him and the horse came with us too, in the trailer.”

The mask he made for Leonard to perform in was actually a mask of Leonard himself: a live death mask made from a plaster cast of his face, expressionless, with gaps for his mouth and eyes. Leonard clearly had enough self-regard that he did not want to operate behind someone else's face. The mask of himself would give him a thicker skin to cover his sensitivity and help protect his songs from contamination, but it also would make it obvious that the public Leonard was a performance and that he was well aware of the masquerade. As he wrote on the bathroom mirror in
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen,
“
caveat emptor
”—“Let the man watching me know,” he said, “that this is not entirely devoid of the con.” Leonard also knew his Dylan Thomas (“O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies / Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws”) and his Nietzsche (“Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment . . . desires and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place”).