Various Positions (22 page)

There was also a “Chelsea Hotel #1,” which had different lyrics and a much slower beat. Cohen performed “Chelsea Hotel #1” on his 1972 tour, often on Mandrax, which tranquilized both him and the song. It had a deadening beat; he realized that it had to be rewritten, and his guitarist, Ron Cornelius, provided him with a chord change that made the new version possible. But the song embarrassed him, and he later felt that it was indiscreet of him to reveal that Janis Joplin was the subject.

Cohen encountered Joan Baez at the Chelsea one night and she and Cohen got into an argument about Gandhi. Cohen had read a biography of the Indian leader and discovered that he regularly chewed rauwolfia, an Indian weed that is the active ingredient of Valium and other tranquilizers. Cohen had a vision of the nonviolent movement as an army of people stoned on Valium. Baez, who has called herself the only straight one at the party of the 1960s, took offense at Cohen’s suggestion that drugs were an integral part of the movement. “
She had this deep investment in being the straight girl,” Cohen remarked. Baez also had an antipathy to mysticism and the occult and couldn’t accept the last line of “Suzanne”: “And you know that you can trust her / For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.” Whenever she sang the song, she altered the last line because she found the action unreal. Only when she and Dylan came to Montreal in 1975 with the Rolling Thunder Review and sang at the Montreal Forum did she sing the correct line. Backstage she told Cohen, “
I finally got it right.”

Since his arrival in New York, Cohen had been on the edge of what he called the New York Renaissance of folk music. Clubs like the Bitter End were showcasing new and important talent. But until Mary Martin took him on, visits to several agents led only to the criticism that at thirty-two Cohen was a little old for this gig. Cohen was distressed, thin, and disappointed. He recalls sitting over a cup of coffee in a Greenwich Village cafe, feeling lonely and unwelcome, writing in frustration on a placemat, “
KILL COOL!” He then held it up for the patrons to see.

Cohen’s problematic professional life was mirrored by his equally
complicated personal life. Marianne and her son Axel had come to New York at Cohen’s request. He was living in the glorious chaos of the Chelsea Hotel, an inappropriate setting for a family, even one as loosely structured as theirs. He rented a loft space for Marianne and Axel on the lower east side, near Clinton Street. But he remained at the Chelsea, although his romantic energies were directed elsewhere. He and Marianne’s life made sense on Hydra, within that simple, ancient context. In New York they didn’t have a foundation, they didn’t have a pattern that worked.

At times they still operated as a family, going to Montreal to attend the wedding of Carol Moskowitz, a friend of Cohen’s. Cohen was dressed in a beautiful gray suit that he had had made and spent his time leaning in a doorway looking “
professionally tortured,” as someone noted. As well as the difficult romantic tribulations, Cohen also had to deal with the fact that several of his friends had recently been charged with drug dealing.

Cohen kept a sporadic journal in which he recorded hexagrams of the
I Ching
, which he was throwing, and the occasional poem that expressed self-criticism or desire, two favorite subjects. A poem from March 1967 offered this assessment:

The romance and sunsets of Greece evaporated into the realities and exhaust of New York. The order he had established with Marianne in Hydra had disappeared, replaced by darkness and chaos. He was taking more drugs, finding temporary refuge from a singing career that was not taking off. His behavior was skittish. Staying for a few days with a friend, he would unexpectedly disappear for a day or two if someone he didn’t
like arrived, even for a short visit. He would often leave a party moments after arriving. He was depressed but he still worked and wrote and sang. “
Everything serves his work,” his friend Yafa Lerner remarked, “which is arrived at only by tearing at the skin.”

In 1966, Cohen walked into the silver foil-lined La Dom, Andy Warhol’s club on 8th Street in the East Village, in search of “the scene.” He saw, and instantly fell for, a statuesque blonde with a misty, wavery voice and a German accent who was singing in a monotone. She was Nico, “
the perfect Aryan ice queen.” Amid the looped projections of parachutists on the walls, “
I saw this girl singing behind the bar. She was a sight to behold. I suppose the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up to that moment. I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside.” The art critic David Antrim described Nico as possessing a “
macabre face—so beautifully resembling a
memento mori
, the marvellous death-like voice coming from the lovely blonde head.” Cohen visited La Dom every night she sang and finally introduced himself. Accompanying her on guitar was a handsome young man, Jackson Browne, then just eighteen years old.

Nico had lived in New York since 1959, modeling and then taking acting lessons with Lee Strasberg; Marilyn Monroe had been one of her classmates for a short time. Dylan, who was a lasting influence on Nico, had introduced her to Warhol, suggesting that he make movies with her. Warhol decided to let her sing instead and foisted her on his rock band, the Velvet Underground, which included John Cale and Lou Reed. Paul Morrissey saw that the group needed something beautiful to counteract “
the screeching ugliness they were trying to sell.” The critic Richard Goldstein described it as a “
secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade.” Nico was soon singing with the group, and in 1967 their first album was released. Its signature image was an erotic banana drawn by Warhol.

Nico made it clear that nothing would happen between her and Cohen; she preferred younger men. But she introduced Cohen to Lou Reed, who surprised him with his knowledge of his work. Reed had a copy of
Flowers for Hitler
, which he asked Cohen to sign, and was an early reader of
Beautiful Losers
. Cohen confided, “
in those days I guess he [Reed] wasn’t getting very many compliments for his work and I
certainly wasn’t. So we told each other how good we were.” One night at Max’s Kansas City, someone insulted Cohen, but Reed told him not to pay any attention to it since he was the man who had written
Beautiful Losers
.

The infatuated Cohen followed Nico around the city, but she was clearly not interested in him. He was madly in love with her though, and persisted: “
I was lighting candles and praying and performing incantations and wearing amulets,
anything
to have her fall in love with me, but she never did.” A journal entry from the Chelsea Hotel dated March 15, 1967, highlights Cohen’s fascination with Nico, his entanglement with depression and his art: “
Terrible day, hopeless thoughts of Nico. The guitar dead, voice dead, tunes old and fake … Nico in terrible mood. Tried to reach her, tried to make her stay beside me for a second, impossible.” The journal that day also records a visit by Phil Ochs, Henry Moscovitch, a young Montreal poet, and the advice of a friend to see a psychiatrist, prompting this notation: “
poet maudit ca. 1890. Cut the call short. Visited Judy Collins, taught her ‘Sisters of Mercy.’”

Overwhelmed by Nico’s beauty—she had modeled in Paris and had had a bit part in Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
—Cohen wrote “Take This Longing” for her. She sang it to him several times but never recorded it. He also wrote a confessional prose piece about his longing for her. After defending his writing as the result of “too much acid,” too much loneliness, or an education beyond his intelligence, the narrator offers the following self-defense:

The speaker then identifies himself as “
the creator of the Black Photograph,” the photographer who after the setup puts his hand over the lens and takes the picture. Only Nico, he writes, could understand his
black pictures. “
My work among other things, is a monument to Nico’s eyes.” He continues:

Only after many weeks of being with Nico did Cohen finally understand her mysterious manner of speaking and singing: she was partially deaf. He was “
perplexed by her conversation and paralyzed by her beauty” and thought that she was a terrific singer. “
Completely disregarded … but she’s one of the really original talents in the whole racket.” Years later they re-met accidentally at the Chelsea, by then a dangerous place: the previous week a murder had occurred, and hustlers and drug dealers were everywhere, as were the police. Whether it was the drink or old times remembered, Nico suggested that the two of them go up to his room to talk because the bar was closing. They sat close to each other on his bed, and “
I put my hand on—I think it was her wrist—and she hauled off and hit me so hard it lifted me clean off the bed, and she screamed and screamed. And suddenly the door came down and about twenty policemen came in, thinking I was the killer they were looking for. …” Several lines from “Memories” on
Death of a Ladies’ Man
refer to her:

“
Once in my room,” Cohen said, Nico whispered “I can’t bear anything that isn’t artificial.” Nico’s sad decline into drug addiction later troubled Cohen; she died in Ibiza in 1988.

————

COHEN PLAYED
some of his songs for Mary Martin. Martin, who would become his first manager, introduced him to Judy Collins. In the fall of 1966, Cohen visited Collins and sang several of his songs for her. “
She said she loved the stuff, [but] there wasn’t anything there [for her], but if I ever did anything else, would I keep in touch with her,” Cohen recalled. Several months later, Cohen sang “Suzanne” to her over the telephone from his mother’s house. Collins liked it immediately and recorded it for
In My Life
, which was released in November 1966. He knew he was on to something, telling Sam Gesser, a Montreal producer, “
I’m really in the middle of writing a wonderful song and I never said that before or since to anybody. I just knew. It sounded like Montreal. It sounded like the waterfront. It sounded like the harbor.” Gesser replied, “There are a lot of songs like that around, Leonard.”

On December 2, 1966, Cohen received a copy of Collins’ album at his small Alymer Street apartment in Montreal. He couldn’t stop playing “Suzanne” over and over, as three McGill students reported when they arrived that afternoon to interview him. Cohen talked about Dylan and how pop music would be the future of poetry. He noted that the local community had dropped the word “pseudo” from his poetry only when he gained a sizable reputation. Cohen remarked on the spiritual division between the old and young, and supported any belief system that would work: “
Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, lsd.” The students asked about his singing and Cohen explained that even if you don’t have a voice or play well, “
just speak from the center, tell people where you are and you’ll reach them.”

Collins’ next album,
Wildflowers
(1967), included three of Cohen’s songs—“Sisters of Mercy,” “Priests,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”—as well as Joni Mitchell’s hit, “Both Sides Now.” Collins acknowledged that it was Cohen’s example that encouraged her to try
her own songwriting. Until she met him, she had not written any of her own songs. In turn, Collins encouraged Cohen’s first major singing performance, on April 30, 1967, at a Town Hall rally in New York for sane, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Cohen walked out and played a few bars of “Suzanne,” but then froze and walked off stage, a combination of stage fright and the fact that his Spanish guitar had gone out of tune because of the temperature change between the overheated backstage and the frigid stage out front. However, the audience shouted for him to come back and, with Collins encouraging him, he returned to finish the song.

After Cohen’s success with Judy Collins, Mary Martin called John Hammond, Columbia Records’ leading artist and repertory executive. Hammond had discovered and signed Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and, later, Bruce Springsteen. On the advice of Martin, Hammond viewed the 1965 NFB film about Cohen and then invited Cohen to lunch. They ate at White’s on 23rd Street, and later went back to Cohen’s room at the Chelsea, where Hammond asked to hear a few songs. Cohen played “Master Song,” “The Stranger Song,” “Suzanne,” “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and a still-unrecorded song about rivers. At the end of six or seven numbers, Hammond simply said, “
You got it, Leonard.” Cohen didn’t know if he meant he had talent or a contract. Hammond thought that Cohen had a “
hypnotic effect;” he was “enchanting” and unlike anyone he ever heard before: “
Leonard set his own rules and was an original.”

Columbia Records, however, was not so keen, and Bill Gallagher, acting head of the record division, opposed the deal on the grounds that a thirty-two-year-old poet was not a good bet to become a singing sensation. Over the years the relationship between Cohen and Columbia reflected this ambivalence. In 1984 Walter Yetnikoff, then president of CBS Records, said to Cohen, “
Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” Columbia had sensed the problem eighteen years earlier: Cohen had talent but would he sell? They decided to take a chance. Within a week of Hammond’s meeting him, Cohen was in Columbia’s Studio E on 52nd Street.