I'm Your Man (33 page)

The Berlin concert was in the hall where Goebbels made his speech announcing total war. Leonard, echoing the Nazi salute on his last tour, decided to give the same speech. There were some boos and catcalls from the crowd, but mostly they loved him. The connection between Leonard and the audience at many of the concerts, as the film footage shows, was palpable, very physical. In Hamburg, Leonard jumped into the crowd and kissed a young woman—a deep, long kiss. “It just went on and on and on,” Cornelius recalls. “It ended up with Leonard on the floor, and you wondered if they were going to start taking their clothes off now.” Backstage Leonard told Palmer, “I've disgraced myself.” The next night, in Frankfurt, he invited the audience onstage, and while the band played on, the fans pulled Leonard to the floor and lay on top of him. “There were people all over him, writhing like a pile of worms,” says Cornelius. “He just lost it; he just got so sexually involved with the crowd that he took it to a new level.”

A procession of women offered themselves. One woman, a beautiful actress, came backstage with her husband and, while her husband watched and Palmer kept filming, hit on Leonard. He turned her down. “There were numerous ladies he took a shine to,” says Palmer. “I had thought at one point he was feeling very close to Jennifer [Warnes]. If they were they were very discreet, but we certainly filmed them looking very happy together.” The camera also caught Leonard in crisis, debating with himself—and with his band, the fans, the media and Palmer—about performance and celebrity and their corruptive nature, the damage that they do to an artist. “One feels a sense of importance in one's heart that is absolutely fatal to the writing of poetry,” he told an interviewer. “You can't feel important and write well.”

He spoke of his humiliation at “not having delivered the goods,” meaning the songs; it was always the songs. When Palmer remonstrated that “the audience was absolutely transfixed,” Leonard said, “There's no point in them being transfixed if I am not conveying my songs to them properly.” At the Manchester concert, Leonard tried to explain to the audience that he was striving for more than “just the observance of a few ‘museum' songs.” He elaborated, “I wrote the songs to myself and to women several years ago and it is a curious thing to be trapped in that original effort, because here I wanted to tell one person one thing and now I am in a situation where I must repeat them like some parrot chained to his stand, night after night.” He also called himself a “broken-down nightingale.” At several shows he offered to give everyone their money back. Offstage, he recited his prayer-poem from
The Energy of Slaves
to the cameraman: “
Let me be for a moment in this miserable and bewildering wretchedness a happy animal.
”

O
n the plane journey from Paris to Israel, Leonard was quiet. “He liked to sit near the front of an aeroplane, usually with me,” says Palmer, “and, because he hated aeroplane food, he always had his little bowl of inexpensive caviar and lemons and a slice of brown bread. He was contemplative.” He was looking forward to playing Israel. He was terrified of playing Israel. The day before he had played to doting crowds and he had gone on a date with Brigitte Bardot—he had invited Bill Donovan to come to lunch with them and meet her, but Donovan had to leave for Israel before the rest of them to make sure everything was set up for the shows.

Their first show, at the Yad Eliyahu Arena, was on the same day that Leonard and the band flew into Tel Aviv. Airport security was slow and grim, guns everywhere, but they arrived at the venue in good time. When they came out onstage though, the floor was completely empty. The audience was packed into the stands around the edges, like they were there to see an invisible basketball game. Security had been told to keep everyone off the floor, which had been newly varnished. When Leonard, disturbed by the distance between them, invited the audience to come down, they were set upon by armed guards in orange boiler suits. “They freaked out and started clubbing everybody, beating kids up,” Donovan remembers. “Leonard jumped off the stage into the crowd and a guy ran up onstage and grabbed Ron's guitar and I knocked the guy offstage and then somebody hit me from behind and knocked me out. It ended up as sort of a riot.” Peter Marshall says, “I was hiding behind my string bass and there was some guy raising a chair, like it was a movie, and he's going to hit me in the face, but somebody grabbed the chair from behind.”

The band reconvened backstage. Jennifer Warnes said she was scared. Leonard wondered aloud, “Maybe I pushed it too hard.” Then he led everyone back onstage. “I know you're trying to do your job, but you don't have to do it with your fists,” he told the guards, then dedicated a song to them. He urged the audience to sit down and enjoy the concert. “Eventually,” says Marshall, “he got everybody to calm down and he completed that show.” As soon as it was done, they dashed out of the hall and into the tour bus—an Israeli street bus they had hired for the stay. As they drove toward Jerusalem, “the whole band drinking wine, playing music, having a grand old time,” Marshall recalls, “there was this one Israeli soldier hitchhiking way out in the country. We pulled up. This guy thinks he's just getting on a regular bus and there's this gigantic party. We took his rifle and gave him whatever was going around”—pot, acid—“and the look on his face, I can still see it. Those guys had a tough life at that time.”

The Binyanei Ha'uma hall in Jerusalem was small and new, with excellent acoustics. The audience were where they ought to be, sitting downstairs near the stage. In the dressing room, Bob Johnston handed around the LSD du tour, Desert Dust. “Think that stuff still works?” asked Leonard. “We'll be in serious trouble if it works—or it doesn't work.” Standing at the microphone, looking out at the attentive, adoring crowd, he appeared even more affected than usual. The connection he shared with them was more than just emotional; it encompassed their shared Jewish history and blood. Leonard's eyes were stoned and bright. He looked both energized and enervated, a tightrope walker who might fall any moment or be taken up out of his body into the sky. The songs sounded beautiful as he sang, and the band seemed to be wired into his nervous system. But Leonard felt that it was not good enough, that he was letting down this precious audience and these precious songs. He tried to explain this to them, but his explanation kept getting more and more complex.

“They become meditations for me and sometimes, you know, I just don't get high on it, I feel that I am cheating you, so I'll try it again, okay? If it doesn't work I'll stop. There's no reason why we should mutilate a song to save face. If it doesn't get any better we'll just end the concert and I'll refund your money. Some nights one is raised off the ground and some nights you just can't get off the ground and there's no point lying about it, and tonight we just haven't been getting off the ground. It says in the Kabbalah that if you can't get off the ground you should stay on the ground. It says in the Kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne, and somehow the male and female part of me refuse to encounter one another tonight and God does not sit on his throne and this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem. So listen, we're going to leave the stage now and try to profoundly meditate in the dressing room to try to get ourselves back into shape and if we can manage,” Leonard said, “we'll be back.”
16

Backstage, Leonard was having a meltdown. He announced, “I'm splitting.” He said he would give the fans their money back. But the fans didn't want their money back, they told him, the tickets weren't expensive, and some people had come two hundred miles for this show. Someone came to the dressing room door and told him that the audience was still out there, waiting, and that they wanted to sing Leonard a song. At first Leonard misunderstood. But then he heard them. They were singing him “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem,” “We Bring You Peace.” Marshall took Leonard aside. “We have to take care of business and finish the show or we might not get out of here in one piece.” Leonard said, “I think what I need is a shave.” That's what his mother had told him to do when things got bad. There was a mirror and a basin in the dressing room and someone fetched him a razor. Slowly, serenely, while the crowd clapped and sang in the auditorium, Leonard shaved. When he was done, he smiled. They went back onstage. As Leonard sang “So Long, Marianne,” immersing himself in the song he'd written to a woman in a moment in a less complicated time, changing her description from “
pretty one
” to “
beautiful one,
” tears began to stream down his face.

Backstage, when the show was over, everyone was crying. It was the last night of the tour; they were going home. Leonard picked up his guitar and started to sing “Bird on the Wire” in the style of a country song. Bob Johnston sang a verse and turned it into a gospel blues, and then the whole band joined in, making instruments with their voices, humming softly in the background, as sweet and comforting as a lullaby.

A
dam Cohen was born in Montreal on September 18, 1972—“not an
enfant du hasard,
” said Suzanne, but “planned.” If Leonard had planned on becoming a father, he did not behave that way. When Steve Sanfield showed up at the house with his wife and son to congratulate his friend on his first child, Suzanne was there, “very solemn,” and Leonard was in New York. He was at the Chelsea, having what might have been a somber, one-man bachelor party. The hotel would have been the perfect setting, the Chelsea scene having become as fractured and dark at times as Leonard's state of mind.

“There were a lot of factions, a lot of drugs and trauma, a lot of rough stuff going on, a shooting,” says Liberty, the model turned poet and feminist writer who lived in the Chelsea Hotel and who was Leonard's lover at one time. “I had a room with high ceilings, a fireplace and a wrought-iron balcony, but my next-door neighbors were cocaine dealers and pimps.” If Leonard had gone back there to remind himself of a time when he was free and unencumbered, he did not strike Liberty as “someone [who was] reaching for freedom. . . . In some ways he seemed to carry the vestiges of a privileged middle-class background,” particularly in the context of the early seventies and the Chelsea circle. She remembers him as “sweet and gentle” but “constrained.” Liberty says, “I felt he hadn't yet gone through the looking glass, had not entered his own ‘house of mystery,' or hadn't stayed there long enough—though, of course, Leonard survived. Many of the wild ones did not.”

Even if Leonard were not wild, he clearly felt trapped. At the same time, his upbringing, his patriarchal roots, his sense of duty ensured that he could not shrug off fatherhood. He returned home, but reluctantly and impossibly weary. He was depressed. It was hard work, trying to find a way to keep going and not be pulled off course. Sanfield and his wife returned to the house for dinner. It was a “very uncomfortable” evening. Once they had eaten, says Sanfield, “Leonard said, ‘Let's go,' and we got up and went to a couple of clubs. I was thinking, ‘This guy just had a child; what are you doing, man?' Leonard said, ‘It's tough, this life. It's just tough.' ”

Later that year, when Sanfield was back in California, Leonard called him. “He said, ‘Would you bring me to your teacher? He's been on my mind for a long time.' ” Sanfield asked Leonard where he was. Montreal, he said; he was going to go to Tennessee and pick up his jeep and drive cross-country. It was more than two thousand miles from Tennessee to the Santa Barbara mountains and took several days. The mountain road was thick with snow when Leonard arrived at Sanfield's house. When they left together for L.A., the jeep got stuck on a back road and they had to hike through deep snow to find a pickup to pull them out. They stopped on the way in Fresno, where they took in an afternoon movie, then set off again for the Zen Center in L.A. “I brought Leonard to Roshi and we sat down and had tea,” said Sanfield. “It was mostly silent. Then Roshi said, ‘You bring friend to Mount Baldy.' So a couple of days later Leonard and I drove up there in his jeep, and Roshi said to Leonard, ‘Okay, you stay here.' ”

He stayed, but for barely a week. It was winter, it was Mount Baldy, it was a Buddhist boot camp, grim, with all these broken young people trudging through snow in walking meditation at three o'clock in the morning. Leonard came down from the frozen mountain and flew with Suzanne to Acapulco and the sun.

Fourteen

A Shield Against the Enemy

M
arch 15, 1973: “Thank you for the knife and the good belt. I used them to scratch and choke her a little. While she suffers I have a chance to breathe the free air and look under the flab for my body.” March 17: “Listening to gypsy violins, my jeep rusting in Tennessee, married as usual to the wrong woman. She loves the way I make love to her.” March 19: “Lie down, there's no one watching you . . . the show is over.”
1

Leonard had given up the Tennessee cabin. He left his jeep in Bob Johnston's drive and went back to Montreal and Suzanne. He bought the house next door to his cottage—they were a matching pair, with a shared dividing wall—and designated the ground floor a sculpture studio for Mort and the upstairs his writing room. A place to escape to when domesticity became too much. To all appearances, a man not cut out for domesticity was making a real effort to make his domestic situation work. What Leonard was writing, though, did not give much cause for optimism.

In April, Columbia released Leonard's fourth album,
Live Songs
. Although it failed to make even the UK charts, it was a contender for the most somber live album ever. The album contains nine songs recorded on the 1970 and 1972 tours and one that Leonard recorded alone, in the cabin, on a tape recorder borrowed from Johnston. It opens with “Minute Prologue,” a despairing rumination on “dissension” and “pain,” improvised over a slow solo guitar, and closes with the doleful cabin recording of “Queen Victoria,” a poem from
Flowers for Hitler
(“
my love, she gone with other boys
”) to which he had given minimal musical adornment. In between, alongside naked and emotional performances of songs from his first two albums, are “Please Don't Pass Me By (A Disgrace),” a thirteen-minute revival meeting sing-along with a Holocaust reference (“
I sing this for the Jews and the gypsies and the smoke that they made
”), “Passing Thru,” performed as a weary country hymn, and “Improvisation,” a mournful riff on the instrumental intro to “You Know Who I Am.” The bleached-out photograph of Leonard on the front sleeve was taken by Suzanne. He is thin and blank faced, ashen, his hair shorn, his white-clad body fading like a ghost into the backdrop of white bathroom tiles.

The liner notes came from a letter to Leonard from a young British writer and artist named Daphne Richardson, with whom he had a correspondence. Richardson had first written to him about an experimental book she was working on, which included collages of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen poems. She asked for permission to use them, which (unlike Dylan) Leonard gave. Some time later Richardson, who had been in and out of mental hospitals, wrote to Leonard from a hospital, sending him a book she had written while she was there. Leonard had found it “shattering. A testimony of pain I've never read anything like.”
2
When he was next in London, they arranged to meet; he found a “very attractive girl in her thirties” and a talented artist. He asked Richardson if she would like to illustrate
The Energy of Slaves
. During a period when he failed to check his mail, a pile of letters from her had accrued. She wrote, with growing desperation, that she had been readmitted to the hospital and had insisted on leaving because she had work to do on Leonard's book. They did not believe her, she said, and strapped her down. Leonard tried to get in contact, but he says, “I was just too late.” She had killed herself three days before. Leonard was mentioned in her suicide note. He published her letter on the album sleeve, he said, because she had always wanted to be published and no one would do so.
3

In February 1973, Leonard was back again in London, this time to meet with Tony Palmer and Marty Machat and see
Bird on a Wire,
Palmer's film of the previous year's tour. As he watched himself, there were tears in Leonard's eyes. “He wept for a good 50 percent of the film,” Palmer says. “He kept saying, ‘This is too true, this is too true,' repeating it like a mantra.” Machat liked the film; “I'm very happy about this,” he told Palmer. So did the BBC, who bought it on the spot, effectively covering 75 percent of what the film had cost to make. A week later, Machat called Palmer. There was a problem. Leonard thought the film “too confrontational.” A meeting was set up during which, according to Palmer, a film editor named Humphrey Dixon, who had worked as his editing assistant on the film, stepped up and said that he could rescue it. “Go ahead,” said Palmer, and the long, expensive business of remaking
Bird on a Wire
began. “I've read that, according to Leonard's testimony, a further half a million dollars was spent,” Palmer says. “Marty looked at me somewhat wryly and said, ‘Don't worry, it's not my money this time.' ”

In an interview Leonard gave
Melody Maker
's Roy Hollingworth while in London, he described the film as “totally unacceptable” and said that he was paying from his own pocket just to get it finished. When it was done, he said, he would “get out of the scene.” Asked what he meant by that, Leonard answered, “Well, I'm leaving. I want to return to another rhythm. Somehow I haven't organised my life within rock very well. Somehow
it
—the rock life—became important rather than the thing that produced the song. I don't find myself leading a life that has many good moments in it. So I've decided to screw it, and go. Maybe the other life won't have many good moments either, but I know this one, and I don't want it.” Throughout the interview, various people from Leonard's UK record company fussed about him. They had brought him a gold disc for UK sales of
Songs of Love and Hate,
which he had put on the floor, with no great regard for its well-being. By the end of the interview it was covered with trash, including an upturned coffee cup. “I've found myself not writing at all,” he said, lighting another Turkish cigarette from the butt of the one he had just finished. “I feel that I'm no longer learning. I began to feel I was doing some of the songs a disservice. So I have to get into something else.”
4

Leonard hired Henry Zemel to work on
Bird on a Wire
with Dixon as coeditor; he needed someone he trusted to watch his back. Zemel, watching the footage from the tour, could see his friend's struggle with celebrity and how hard he worked at trying to maintain the sincerity of his engagement with both the audiences and his songs. He knew that Leonard felt that celebrity had taken a toll on his work. “He very much saw himself as a lyric poet,” says Zemel, and “a lyric poet has a certain kind of innocence and naïveté and an uncompromising relationship with the world and with what they're doing. When something cracks that vision and idea of what the world could be and what they're devoted to making it be, can they ever put the pieces back together again? The quality of the work, the voice, is never the same.”

Marianne was back on Hydra, in the house where she and Leonard had lived, when one day Suzanne appeared at the door. She had a baby in her arms who was crying loudly. She told Marianne, over her son's sobs, that she had been staying at a hotel and wanted to know when Marianne was moving out. Marianne packed her things and left. “That was a sad scene,” says Marianne quietly. When Leonard heard about this he offered to buy Marianne a house—she had sold her own back in their impecunious days—or, if she wanted to stay, he would buy another house for Suzanne. “He was always very generous,” says Marianne, who declined his offer. It was time to return to Norway. When Leonard joined Suzanne and Adam in the little white house on the hill, it is hard to imagine that, as he tried to find his old rhythm, his thoughts did not turn now and then to life there with another woman and child in more innocent, nurturing times.

He resumed his old routine of a morning swim in the harbor. Afterward “he just hung around on the port, sitting on rocks and staring at people, for hours,” says Terry Oldfield, a young composer and musician who had moved to Hydra in the early seventies; for a while he gave flute lessons to Marianne's son. Leonard was one of the first people Oldfield met on the island. Leonard, who struck Oldfield as being “in a very lucid state of mind,” told him that he had recently been staying in a monastery.

On Hydra Leonard painted and also worked on the book of prose he had begun in Montreal, its title since changed from “The Woman Being Born” to “My Life in Art.” Meanwhile, several of his old poems and songs were strutting the boards without him, sometimes in curious guises. “The New Step,” from
Flowers for Hitler,
had been turned into a one-act ballet-drama of the same name, which was aired on CBC television, and an assortment of his lyrics and poems on the subject of women made up Gene Lesser's off-Broadway musical
Sisters of Mercy
. What Leonard was writing about women—or one particular woman—in “My Life in Art” was not pretty. “Fuck this marriage [and] your dead bed night after night.”
*
He needed, he wrote, to “study the hatred I have for her and how it is transmuted into desire by solitude and distance.”
5
He voiced the sentiment less savagely in a new song:

    
I live here with a woman and a child

    
The situation makes me kind of nervous

The title he gave the song, which was in great part about his domestic situation, was “There Is a War.”

O
n October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched the attack on Israel that began the Yom Kippur War. The next day Leonard left Suzanne and Adam on Hydra and flew from Athens to Tel Aviv. His plan was to enlist in the Israeli Army: “I will go and stop Egypt's bullet. Trumpets and a curtain of razor blades,” he wrote.
6
His motives, as these words might suggest, were complex: commitment to the cause certainly (“I've never disguised the fact that I'm Jewish and in any crisis in Israel I would be there,” Leonard said in 1974. “I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people”
7
), but also bravado, narcissism and, near the top of the list, desperation to get away. “Women,” he said, “only let you out of the house for two reasons: to make money or to fight a war,”
8
and in his present state of mind dying for a noble cause—any cause—was better than this life he was living as an indentured artist and a caged man.

Suzanne says, “I felt proud about Leonard's heroic actions and acts of generosity but fear about something happening—there was much hostility at that time—which turned into a fear of loss and dread of the worst. Knowing his mind couldn't be changed, I remember putting a blue ribbon inside his breast pocket without telling him, so that—in my mind—he'd be safe. And I was truly praying those first days.” Leonard, on the other hand, sitting on the plane, heading for what he called his “myth home,” felt free. He was “thin again and loose.”
9
Shortly after arriving in Tel Aviv, Leonard met Oshik Levi, an Israeli singer. Levi was putting together a small team of performers to entertain the troops—Matti Caspi, Mordechai “Pupik” Arnon, Ilana Rovina—to which he was pleased to add Leonard. This was not what Leonard had in mind. He protested that his songs were sad and not known for their morale-boosting qualities. But Levi was persuasive and there had been no better offer from the Israeli Army. For the next few weeks Leonard traveled by truck, tank and jeep to outposts, encampments, aircraft hangars, field hospitals, anywhere they saw soldiers, and performed for them up to eight times a day. The soldiers would gather closely around—sometimes barely a dozen of them—and, if it was night and too dark to see, they would shine their flashlights on him as he played.

“Every unit we came to, he would ask what is the position of this or that soldier, and each and every time he wanted to join the forces and be one of them,” Levi told the newspaper
Maariv
. “I used to tease him: ‘Make up your mind, do you want to be a pilot, or an artillery man, or a naval commando diver? Each day you get excited by something else.' ” The musicians would camp with the soldiers and talk to them all night long. “He was a modest person, with the soul of a philosopher, wondering about the meaning of human life,” said Levi. “He had many talks with Arnon about philosophy, astrology and the Bible. He used to talk often about the essence of Judaism, and about his Hebrew name, Eliezer.”
10

In the notebook Leonard always carried with him, he made notes of what he had seen in Israel—the beauty of the desert, the kinship of the soldiers, the dead and wounded, who had made him weep. As he had in Cuba, he also wrote fantasies of glorious escapades, such as stealing a gun and killing the officer who bugged him “with relentless requests to sing ‘Suzanne.' ”
11
He wrote a song in Israel—miraculously quickly—called “Lover Lover Lover.” Caspi remembered Leonard improvising it in front of the soldiers during their second performance.

    
May the spirit of this song

    
May it rise up pure and free

    
May it be a shield for you

    
A shield against the enemy

On his 1974 tour Leonard would introduce it as a song “written in the Sinai desert for soldiers of both sides.”
12
That same year, when describing his experience to
ZigZag
magazine, he said, “War is wonderful. They'll never stamp it out. It's one of the few times people can act their best. It's so economical in terms of gesture and motion, every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. There are opportunities to feel things that you simply cannot feel in modern city life”
13
—all of these, and the last in particular, having been things that had long exercised him.