I'm Your Man (53 page)

If
Ten New Songs
was Leonard's most collaborative album (
Death of a Ladies' Man
had been written with Spector as equal, but Leonard had no say in the recording, and the Cohen-Lissauer project
Songs for Rebecca
was never released),
Dear Heather
is his most experimental. Its thirteen songs, recorded once again in his home studio, make up a sort of scrapbook, a collage of word, image and sound. The CD liner-note booklet, in which the lyrics appear side by side with Leonard's sketches, might have been a pocket-sized companion for
Book of Longing,
on which he worked at the same time. His idea, Leanne Ungar remembers, had been “to put together some melodies that the songs evoked and to actually do some poetry readings”—reminiscent, perhaps, of the shows he had performed in the late fifties with Maury Kaye.

The opening song, “Go No More A-Roving,” is (in the manner of “Villanelle”) a poem by Lord Byron set to music by Leonard. The accompanying drawings in the booklet are of Irving Layton, to whom the song is dedicated—wide hangdog face, crushed poor-boy cap—and the entirely Cohenesque image of a guitar by an open door. “To a Teacher” also concerns a poet who was important to Leonard, A. M. Klein, who was silenced in his later years by mental illness. This time the poem set to music is Leonard's, from his 1961 collection
The Spice-Box of Earth
:

    
Let me cry Help beside you, Teacher

    
I have entered under this dark roof

    
As fearlessly as an honoured son

    
Enters his father's house

For an avowed nonsentimentalist like Leonard, there seems to be a good deal of looking back in these songs, from absent friends to the unnamed women he thanks in the delightful “Because Of,” for having been inspired to take off their clothes by “
a few songs / Wherein I spoke of their mystery.
”

The sense of collage is also evident in the music, which is diverse in style: folk, beatnik jazz, waltzes and some of the French-sounding music Leonard had talked about having written on his synthesizer on Mount Baldy. The title track takes lyrics not much longer than a haiku and repeats them, deconstructs them, then folds them over the keyboards and trumpet like aural origami. “On That Day,” a ballad written about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has the sentimentality and straight-talking of a Randy Newman song. There is no lack of synthesizers, but there are real instruments too, including a Jew's harp, which Leonard plays on “Nightingale,” a collaboration with Anjani, and “On That Day.” On two of the collaborations with Sharon Robinson, “There for You” and “The Letters,” Leonard's voice is almost a whisper; most of the singing is left for the women to do. On “Morning Glory,” sung by its muse, Anjani, Leonard sounds like a ghost of himself, hovering around the beauty of her multitracked voice. On some songs Leonard lets the women sing alone; on others he speaks his words over their voices, murmuring softly, deeply and close to the microphone, like Serge Gainsbourg, or “bassing in” once in a while like a Jewish-Buddhist A. P. Carter. Although there was a very strong female presence on his previous album, on
Dear Heather
the women are given even greater prominence.

Anjani says, “That record was a turning point, for both of us.” Leonard had initially called her in to sing harmony on “Undertow,” then decided that he wanted to scrap the melody and use the harmony as the lead. The song was about a bereaved, lost woman; what he liked about the harmony part was that it did not get to the root note except at the very end of the song, which gave it a tension that mirrored her emotional distress. He left Anjani and Leanne Ungar to record it while he went back to the house and made some phone calls. “I went through it a couple of times,” Anjani remembers, “and we ended up with this track that I thought was gorgeous, the best thing I've ever done, and Leanne loved it.” When Leonard came back, she said, “Wait until you hear this.” “Leanne ran the playback,” says Anjani, “and he does what he always does when he listens to music, which is stare off into space, no expression—I don't care if you're playing a salsa tune, he won't move, he just sits there motionless. At the end of it he said, ‘That's beautiful. Now sing it but don't sing it.' ” Anjani looked at him quizzically. “He said, ‘This is not an anthem. It's the song of a broken woman, so
be
the woman on the deserted beach with nothing left.' I remember feeling outraged that he didn't like the superb performance that I'd just belted out, and then I thought, ‘What am I supposed to do?' and I got really nervous and kind of shaky, like every tool I had just went out the window; I really truly had nothing left. And when I sang, this really tentative, broken thing came out. At the end of it he said, ‘That's it. Now you've got it,' and that's when he said he had never heard me in that way before. He later described it as ‘Her voice dropped from her throat to her heart.' ”

What also distinguishes
Dear Heather
from earlier albums is the gentle modesty with which it deals with the Big Subjects, like love, death, life, faith and madness. As Leon Wieseltier noted in his album review, it “revels in its own lack of monumentality.”
13
There was simplicity instead of grandiosity in his song mourning the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “On That Day,” while in the title track whimsy replaced the more common anguish about women and lust. “The longing persists,” Wieseltier concluded, “but the slavery is over. And the evidence of inner freedom is everywhere in
Dear Heather.
It is a window upon the heart of an uncommonly interesting and uncommonly mortal man.”
14

Leonard was for the most part straightforward and unambiguous in his lyrics (although it's perfectly possible that he had attained such Zen mastery that the lack of ambivalence was actually a refined ambiguity). Whatever it is, it's a beautiful, muted, beguiling album. On its front cover is a sketch by Leonard of Anjani; on the back is a photo by Anjani of Leonard, bestubbled, crushed-capped and clutching a coffee cup. Leonard dedicated the album to the memory of Jack McClelland, his longtime Canadian publisher, who died in June 2004, the year of its release. Leonard declined to tour behind the album—not even a promotional tour, as he had done for
Ten New Songs.
As soon as he had finished it, he had left for Montreal, where he spent the summer, happily sitting in the Parc du Portugal with the other old men, watching the world go by.

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

D
eath 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.

On a rainy October morning at nine
A.M.
, Rice and her paralegal showed up, unannounced, at Lynch's house in Mandeville Canyon with two armed sheriffs in riot gear, to search the house and garage and take possession of Leonard's documents per the court order. The sheriffs emerged with one box after another. The process took nearly two days and required a moving truck, but they recovered a treasure trove: “precious notebooks, the history of ‘Hallelujah' and how it got written, letters from Joni Mitchell, Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and all the drawings,” Rice says. There were tears in Leonard's eyes as he opened the boxes and found what he thought had been lost. Among them was the sketchbook containing Leonard's drawing of a bird that would become the cover design of
Book of Longing
.

In December 2005, Lynch lost her home. For a while, she slept on the beach in Santa Monica, before setting off in a van across the U.S. In May 2006 a superior court judge granted a default judgment against Lynch for $7,341,345. Once again, she ignored it, and anyway, to all appearances she was penniless. Rice also prevailed in the lawsuits against Greenberg, insofar as she obtained dismissal of all Greenberg's claims against Leonard and Kory, and obtained an order that awarded Leonard the last $150,000 under Greenberg's control, even though Greenberg claimed these funds were owed to him for his legal fees. Through the various legal proceedings, Leonard had recovered some of his lost money, though nothing like all of it. Lynch, who continued her ceaseless assault of blogs and e-mails full of accusations and invective, also began to make threatening phone calls—to Leonard, to Kory and to friends and associates from various places across the U.S. State by state, Rice led an effort to obtain a series of restraining orders against Lynch. And so the ugly business dragged on.