I'm Your Man (47 page)

In November 1993 Leonard flew to Ottawa, accompanied by Julie and Perla; there was to be a tribute gala performance at which the two women were to sing “Anthem,” backed by an orchestra and a gospel choir.

At the presentation ceremony in Rideau Hall, Leonard, his hair shorn almost to a stubble, said, “I feel like a soldier.” From the stage he could see his old comrade-in-arms Pierre Trudeau in the audience. “You may get decorated for a successful campaign or a particular action that appears heroic but probably is just in the line of duty,” he continued. “You can't let these honors deeply alter the way you fight.”
25
His acceptance speech was a perfect Cohenesque mix of modesty, honesty and statement of intent. Irving Layton, as ever, rose to the occasion, declaring, “He makes you think of a Jeremiah in Tin Pan Alley. He wants to be bare-knuckled and smash whatever remaining illusions people have about the time in which they're living and what they can expect.”
26
Leonard also seemed compelled to smash his own.

Work was under way in Canada on another tribute to Leonard, a book titled
Take This Waltz
, with contributions from writers and personalities such as Louis Dudek, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Collins and Kris Kristofferson, scheduled for release in September 1994 to celebrate Leonard's sixtieth birthday. Leonard, meanwhile, had flown back to L.A. He unpacked his suitcase, packed a knapsack and climbed in his car and drove away from the city and from a future with a beautiful young actress. He was returning to the place where he had moved quietly, with no announcement, a few months before, not long after the last date of the
Future
tour. A small, bare hut on a mountain, where he had chosen to live as the servant and companion of an old Japanese monk.

Twenty

From This Broken Hill

T
he day was hot and dry but a sliver of snow still clung to the mountaintop like a broken fingernail on a worn sweater.

Leonard, dressed in a long black robe and sandals, walked briskly along the winding path, eyes cast down, hands folded in front of him. There were other black-clad figures on the path and they marched in formation, silent but for the sound of stones crunching underfoot. “People have romantic ideas about monasteries,” Leonard said. Mount Baldy Zen Center was decidedly unromantic, an abandoned Boy Scouts camp sixty-five hundred feet up in the San Gabriel mountains, fifty-five miles east of L.A., where the pine trees were as thin as the atmosphere.

Leonard's new home looked like the archaeological remains of a small, civilized community cruelly reduced to rubble—a scattering of simple wood cabins, a small statue of Buddha, the stone circle where the scouts once had their campfire sing-alongs—that some kindly souls with primitive tools had done their best to fix up. It did not even offer the romance of seclusion, being just off the road that linked the university town of Claremont below with the ski slopes above. On the other side of the road was an inn, whose sign, offering cocktails, food and lodging, only served to remind the monks of the pleasures of the flesh. On Saturday nights, laughter and music would waft on the cold night air through the monks' thin wood cabin walls. In winter the Zen Center was shrouded in deep snow. On summer days there were swarms of gnats. The place seemed full of things that bite—rattlesnakes, even the occasional bear, which the monks would chase off by throwing rocks, as compassionately as possible of course.

There are a lot of rocks on Mount Baldy. The slopes are heaped with large boulders, sharp edged and ash gray. They give the appearance of having stopped midtumble, as if a vote had been taken midavalanche and they had unanimously chosen not to continue. The paths that circle the property and link the residences with the common buildings—meditation hall, refectory, outhouses and showers (no hot running water until the late nineties)—are bordered with medium-sized stones and surfaced with small crumbly ones. The place looks like a rock pile, a hard-labor camp.

It was, Leonard admits, “a rigorous and disciplined existence.”
1
During
sesshin—
weeklong periods of intense Buddhist study—a three
A.M
. wake-up call gave the residents ten minutes to dress and trudge through the pitch-darkness (and in winter shovel through the snow) to the kitchen/dining hall, where tea was served in a formal manner and drunk in silence. Fifteen minutes later a gong signaled that it was time to file silently into the meditation hall and take their allotted place on the wooden benches around the walls, facing center. An hour of chanted meditation—“very long chants, all one note”
2
—was followed by the first of six daily periods of
zazen,
an hour or more of seated meditation, legs crossed in full lotus, back rigid, eyes pointed at the floor. Monks carrying sticks patrolled the room on the lookout for anyone who appeared to be nodding back to sleep, whom they would return to consciousness by giving them a sharp rap on the shoulder. After the meditation came more meditation,
kinhin,
walking meditation, outdoors, whatever the weather—and this high up the mountain the climate was extreme; sometimes there were hailstones the size of limes. Then came the first of several daily
sanzen,
individual meetings with Roshi for instruction and
koan
(riddle) practice.

There were short breaks for meals at six forty-five
A.M
., noon and five forty-five
P.M
. for dinner, during which everybody filed into the dining room, took their allotted plastic bowl set, wrapped in a napkin, from the shelf, and sat at one of the seven long tables, where they would eat in silence. After lunch came shower breaks and work duties; after dinner there was
gyodo—
simultaneous walking and chanting meditation—and more
zazen
and
sanzen
until nine, ten, maybe eleven at night, depending on how long Roshi decided it should continue. But however late the day might run, the next morning at three
A.M.
promptly, the whole process would start again.

The daily schedule when there were no
sesshin
was somewhat less relentless, beginning at five
A.M
. and ending at nine
P.M
. and allowing for some private time between study and work duties. Nevertheless, for a man in his early sixties, for a musical icon whose last album was the biggest seller of his career, for a sophisticate, a man of the world, a ladies' man, none of this life Leonard had chosen was anything but extraordinary. The first rule of celebrity is that celebrities are to be served; but here was Leonard, chopping wood, banging nails, fixing toilets, doing whatever the monk charged with doling out and supervising work duties assigned him to do. Kigen, who held that position when Leonard first moved into the monastery, says he had “no idea at all that Leonard was a celebrity. I didn't know Leonard from beans.” Leonard was perfectly happy with this. When Kigen told Leonard to rake out the bamboo and, having checked his work, told him to go back and do it again, that he'd missed some, Leonard did as he was instructed without protest.

Leonard lived in a wood cabin in the center of the monastery, close to the path. A doormat on his front step read
WELCOME
. A brave cluster of yellow wildflowers had forced their way through the stones to bloom beside his front door. Leonard had always been partial to small, plain dwellings and this answered the description perfectly. A white-walled room about nine feet square—between the size of a U.S. and a Canadian prison cell—held a narrow, metal-framed single bed and a chest of drawers. There was a menorah on the dresser and a tiny mirror on the wall. Its one small window was covered by a thin white curtain and a fly screen, which at nighttime was layered with dust-brown moths, attracted by the light. Leonard's cabin also had an additional room the size of a walk-in closet, in which were a desk, an old Macintosh computer, some books, a bottle of liquor or two and a Technics synthesizer. There was no TV, radio or stereo; if Leonard wanted to listen to a CD he would have to do so in his jeep, which was parked near the Zen Center entrance. His main luxuries were having his own toilet and a coffee machine. Roshi had granted Leonard special dispensation to get up earlier than the others and enjoy a solitary cigarette and coffee—sipped from a mug decorated with the album sleeve design of
The Future
—before joining the other residents in their daily tasks and observances.

Leonard's main job was working directly with Roshi, mostly as his chauffeur and cook. In the monastic tradition, the monks subsisted on lentils, lima beans, rice, split peas and pasta—there was a row of large garbage cans in the kitchen filled with them—and on food donations, which came once a week. These last made for all manner of curiosities, like the sweet wafer biscuits that appeared to have time-traveled from a 1940s English afternoon tea tray, which fortuitously arrived on the same day as a separate consignment of Indian tea marked for export to Russia. Leonard became expert at rustling up soups. At the age of sixty-one, he would earn a certificate from San Bernardino County that qualified him to take work as a chef, waiter or busboy.
*
Sometimes he would ask himself what he was doing living like this, in this “land of broken hearts,”
3
as he called it, but he knew the answer. There was nowhere else he could be.

Leonard had been coming to Mount Baldy for
sesshin
and retreats for more than twenty years; he was familiar with everything about the place. He knew what he was in for—this was no celebrity-friendly Zen-lite retreat, of which California had no shortage. Rinzai monks, Leonard liked to boast, were “the Marines of the spiritual world”
4
with a regimen “designed to overthrow a twenty-year-old.”
5
Why he should have chosen to sign up full-time at the age of sixty, when he was too old for the regimen and old enough to know better, is a question that has a three-part answer: Rebecca, the record business and Roshi.

Shortly before he left L.A. for the monastic life, Leonard ran into Roscoe Beck. He told his former musical director, “I've had it with this music racket.” He was getting out. Strange timing, one might think.
The Future
was no
Various Positions;
it had been one of Leonard's most successful albums. But the tour that followed the album's release had been a dislocating and debilitating experience. He hated it and he was drinking heavily. So heavily that Roshi, a man by no means averse to alcohol, expressed his concern.

Leonard's relationship with touring had always been complicated. From the outset he viewed it at best as a necessary evil, foisted upon him by his record contract, and he approached it under sufferance, usually with the aid of alcohol, or in the early days, other palliatives. Stage fright was a part of it, a shy man's fear of humiliating himself. Though the attention and the stage had not appeared to trouble him as a young poetry reader, his insecurities as a singer and a musician made his fear of failure more acute. His first-ever major concert appearance—when Judy Collins had brought him out in 1967 at a benefit in New York—had been a “total failure.”
6
Over the next few years, as he became more used to performing, the fear had mutated into a kind of public projection of his perfectionism, “that to take up people's time with anything but excellence is really too much to think about.”
7
He was never able to take a concert he did casually, he said—which is believable, since Leonard had never shown any great ability at doing “casual” in any aspect of his life. If a show did not go well, “you feel you've betrayed yourself,” he said,
8
which in turn evolved into a fear of betraying his art, by making it work like a prostitute night after night.

But Leonard also wanted people to hear his songs and buy his records. Given his general lack of radio attention and the geographical distance between him and his main fan base, which was not in the U.S. or even Canada, this meant going on the road and playing them. And as time passed, sometimes he would actually quite enjoy it, so long as everything ran smoothly and nothing felt out of his control. He had felt “entirely at home” on the
I'm Your Man
tour. Those who knew him well remarked how relaxed he seemed; he had even stopped drinking by the intermission. In 1993, when it came time to go out with
The Future,
Leonard rehired several crew members from the 1988 tour as well as five of its musicians for the eight-piece band he took on the road. Julie Christensen, who was on both tours, says, “I think Leonard really depends on the people around him to sustain the magic. He knows he can't do it all alone.” But this time the magic didn't work.

Perla Batalla, who was also on both tours, describes the
Future
tour as “very, very drama laden.” Though it might not have appeared so dramatic to an outsider, to someone as sensitive and conflicted about touring as Leonard, it was. The scheduling was more onerous than usual, with a great deal of travel and little time to catch one's breath. The North American leg, which followed almost directly on from the twenty-six European concerts, had been particularly exacting: thirty-seven shows in under two months, with meet-and-greets arranged backstage after almost every show—Leonard's second album in succession to be well received in the U.S. seemed to have sent his once-indifferent U.S. record label into overdrive. (The
I'm Your Man
tour, by comparison, had twenty-five dates separated by a fifteen-week summer break.) The routing, which doubled back and forth across the border, was also stressful, while the tour bus, which suffered from defective shock absorbers, was hell on Canada's curvy mountain roads and did nothing to help with bonhomie. Spirits were already at an all-time low. Leonard's keyboard player Bill Ginn had an addiction problem, which other members of the band were trying and failing to help him with. That Perla Batalla had married since the last tour and Julie Christensen had a young baby she had had to leave behind only compounded the feeling that this was not the carefree tour experience it had been five years before. Leonard had more than once expressed anxiety that he was pulling families apart.

Leonard's fiancée, Rebecca De Mornay, had shown up at various points in Europe and North America and on occasion traveled on the bus with them for three or four days at a time. She could see that touring was “very rough on him. It's a terrific conflict of taking someone who really likes to spend his time in one room that he could probably not leave for three days at a time, and to suddenly thrust himself onto a stage with thousands of people listening.” Rebecca appeared well liked by everyone, but however good her intention she was a distraction, sometimes good, sometimes not. His energy seemed to shift when she was there, affecting band rapport, which some of the musicians believed could be felt sometimes onstage. Offstage, there were times when Leonard seemed elated at having Rebecca there. But other times, later on the tour, raised voices could be heard behind the closed dressing room door. By the midsummer of 1993, when the tour was finally over, Leonard and Rebecca's engagement was too.

One of the most public of Leonard's relationships ended privately and quietly. Neither of them spoke about it to the press. Later Leonard would say, “She kind of got wise to me. Finally she saw I was a guy who just couldn't come across. In the sense of being a husband and having more children and the rest.”
9
Rebecca disagrees. “I think the real truth is that Leonard in fact did come across more than he ever had with anyone. I think that's why there's no hard feelings, because we both know we each gave it our all.”