I'm Your Man (44 page)

“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.

F
or 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 poetry 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

I
nterestingly, 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.”

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.