I'm Your Man (32 page)

Leonard had been in Montreal with Suzanne for six months now. It had begun to feel like a very long time. He took a trip to London in August, with the excuse that he was finding a UK publisher for an anthology of Irving Layton's poems that Leonard wanted to release. The following month, accompanied by a very attractive English girlfriend, an artist, he flew to Switzerland. He was there to meet his friend Henry Zemel, who was making a documentary film about Immanuel Velikovsky, the Russian psychoanalyst and catastrophist. Leonard had first read about Velikovsky in
Reader's Digest
; the magazine had been a particular favorite of his father. In later years Leonard explored Velikovsky's writings on the sexuality of the gods and his theories that evolution, religion and myth were a response to real catastrophes of celestial origin—comets and colliding planets causing the biblical floods and plagues as well as a collective post-traumatic amnesia in mankind.

Having been dismissed as a kook by the science community, Velikovsky had agreed to take a teaching position at the University of the New World—a utopian educational experiment founded in Switzerland by the American political and behavioral scientist Alfred de Grazia, a former writer of psychological warfare manuals for the CIA. His fellow professors were to include William Burroughs and Ornette Coleman. When would-be student Brian Cullman, a writer and musician from New York, showed up in September 1971, “there was nothing, no campus, no buildings, just fifteen or twenty mostly rich kids who were using this as a way to avoid the draft and avoid college.” Billeted in a resort hotel, they were given a small list of classes, including one on sexuality, which essentially consisted of “a sexy older woman with glasses and a lot of cleavage directing the students in sex games.”

Then Velikovsky arrived, with Leonard and Zemel, and started giving lectures. Leonard attended them. He wanted, he told Cullman, to ask the professor about the sexuality that generated the first life on Earth. “I was really excited to meet Leonard,” says Cullman, “but most people there, even the university kids, couldn't care less. One evening I sat around in the hotel lobby with Leonard and Henry, and Leonard had a guitar and played ‘Bird on the Wire' and songs from
Songs of Love and Hate
. There were some very beautiful French girls in the lobby who had no idea who he was, and there was this long period of Henry talking Leonard up, Leonard talking himself down, then trying to talk himself back up again: ‘Well have you heard of Charles Aznavour?' ‘No.' ‘Have you heard of Bob Dylan?' ‘Yes.' ‘Well, I'm sort of this, sort of that,' and they weren't vaguely interested. He was putting on a show about not being concerned about the French girls, but clearly wounded that they had no idea who he was.”

Leonard made an appearance in Zemel's film, near the end, asking Velikovsky questions. What effect would man's collective amnesia have on the future, what rituals might repeat the trauma and when would the next catastrophe happen? It would not stop happening, Velikovsky answered, while man continued to live “in a role that he created himself, in his arrogance, in his violence, in his misunderstanding of what happened in the past.” The film,
Bonds of the Past,
was broadcast by CBC in February 1972—a month after the publication of Leonard's newest volume of poetry.

“I've just written a book called
The Energy of Slaves
and in there I say that I'm in pain,” Leonard told journalist Paul Saltzman. “I don't say it in those words because I don't like those words, they don't represent the real situation. It took eighty poems to represent the situation of where I am right now. It's carefully worked on, you know. It's taken many years to write . . . and it's there . . . between hard covers. It's careful and controlled and it's what we call art.”
7
The “real situation” appeared to be as savage and lost as it was on
Songs of Love and Hate
. He wrote,

    
I have no talent left

    
I can't write a poem any more

    
You can call me Len or Lennie now

    
Like you always wanted
8

and elsewhere,

    
The poems don't love us anymore

    
they don't want to love us . . .

    
Do not summon us, they say

    
We can't help you any longer
9

He was “one of the slaves,” he wrote; “You are employers.” Everybody wanted something from him that he no longer had the energy to give—the record company, his audience, and “all the flabby liars of the Aquarian age.”
10
Even the women who had always been there for him, even though he was not always there for them, had started to become hard work.

    
You are almost always with someone else

    
I'm going to burn down your house

    
and fuck you in the ass . . .

    
Why don't you come over to my table

    
with no pants on

    
I'm sick of surprising you
11

He was a celebrity now and women were his reward:

    
The 15 year old girls

    
I wanted when I was 15

    
I have them now . . .

    
I advise you all

    
to become rich and famous
12

The Energy of Slaves

The review in the
Times Literary Supplement
sneered, “Teeny-boppers of all ages will have the book on their shelves between the Bhagavad Gita and the unopened copy of the Cantos.”
13
Other critics were not much kinder. Stephen Scobie, who was often Leonard's champion, described it as “blatantly bad . . . deliberately ugly, offensive, bitter, anti-romantic.”
14
The last four words are hard to argue with, but Leonard was deliberately no longer writing for beauty, he said, but truth. He had been brutally honest in
Songs of Love and Hate
bar the one untruth in the song “Last Year's Man,” in which he wrote that he was unable to write. Clearly he had found the clarity to finish the album.

The Energy of Slaves
has a similar brutal honesty. Revisiting it today, it almost reads like punk poetry. The poem “How We Used to Approach the Book of Changes: 1966” strips all of Leonard's darkness down to a prayer, one he would return to in the turbulent coming year:

    
Good father, since I am broken down, no leader

    
of the borning world, no saint for those in pain,

    
no singer, no musician, no master of anything, no

    
friend to my friends, no lover to those who love me

    
only my greed remains to me, biting into every

    
minute that has not come with my insane triumph

    
show me the way now . . .

    
. . . and let me be for a moment in

    
this miserable and bewildering wretchedness, a happy

    
animal.

Columbia Records tugged on Leonard's chain. They needed him to play the places where people were buying his record: seventeen cities across Europe and two in Israel, all within the space of a month. It was nearly two years since his last tour—he must have thought he'd got away with never doing another—and he didn't have a band; the Army had been decommissioned more than a year before. Charlie Daniels was making a second album of his own and Bubba Fowler had left his wife and kids and run off with Susan Mussmano, one of the backing singers. The pair, who had become lovers on Leonard's 1970 tour, had no place to go, so Bob Johnston let them live on his boat—a cabin cruiser that had belonged to the country great Hank Snow, before Johnston bought it and paid another country great, though poor and unknown at the time, Kris Kristofferson, to work on it. Says Bill Donovan, “Leonard and I went out there a couple of times and saw them; and then they pulled out of the harbor, said they were going to take it out to the gulf, and we never heard or saw them again.”
*

Bill Donovan signed on for the second tour, as did Ron Cornelius and Bob Johnston, who put a new band together. Fowler and Daniels were replaced by two Californians, David O'Connor, a flamenco guitarist, and Peter Marshall, a jazz bassist, who was living at that time in Vienna. Johnston was still looking for backing singers as the three weeks of rehearsals began. “There was a redheaded girl who was gorgeous; she said, ‘You'll be making the biggest mistake in the world if you don't take me with you,' and I said, ‘I know it, I haven't heard anybody better yet.' Then the next day this girl came in—a horse face, big glasses and ragged from a trip from L.A.” She told him she had sung in the musical
Hair
and made regular appearances on television in the Smothers Brothers' show. Johnston listened to her sing. “She was incredible—and she knew every song Leonard did. Though I hated to turn down the redheaded girl I told the horse-faced girl, ‘You're going.' ” Her name was Jennifer Warnes. The second female vocalist was another Los Angeleno, Donna Washburn, the daughter of the president of the 7-Up soft drinks company; her musical résumé included singing with Dillard & Clark and Joe Cocker.

Leonard was focusing all his efforts on holding it together and getting in shape for the campaign: yoga, swimming twice a day, fasting. He had a habit of fasting once a week, usually on a Friday if a tour did not get in the way. Brian Cullman recalls that when he and Leonard talked in Switzerland, Leonard spoke more about fasting than he did poetry. “But even his fasting was elegant; while fasting, he would drink white grape juice with lemon and seltzer.” Fasting was important to Leonard and had been ever since he began the task of chiseling away the softness that his old family photographs showed a tendency toward. He needed to keep the edges sharp.

Suzanne flew out to Nashville to join Leonard. She was there when Paul Saltzman interviewed Leonard in their hotel room. He noted how Leonard sat there quietly while Suzanne caressed his foot. Suzanne appeared to dote on Leonard, telling him at one point, “You've taught me most everything I know.” They looked “so fine together,” the journalist wrote, “warm and calm and loving.”
15
Marty Machat was also working on ways to ease the pain of touring for him: they would take a filmmaker on the road with them, who would shoot and record every show. That way, once this tour was over, if anyone wanted to see Leonard in concert, here he was, on film.

The man Machat had in mind for the job was Tony Palmer, a young Londoner, who had made films on Frank Zappa, Gustav Mahler and the band Cream, all of which had won acclaim. Palmer was also a music critic with the
Observer
—“the first person,” Palmer claims, “to review Leonard's first LP, and extremely favorably.” Machat flew him to New York to meet Leonard. “We talked for three hours, Leonard was extremely self-effacing, humble, almost apologetic—he kept asking, did I think the songs were any good?—and he expressed a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the existing recordings, going back to the first album and ‘Suzanne.' I asked him why and he said that they didn't really express the emotion that he'd felt when writing the songs; but probably, it was more complicated than that.” He told Palmer “he didn't like filming, and gave [Palmer] all the reasons why he thought it was a bad idea,” but added, “This will probably be the only tour I will make ever in my life. I'd like a proper record of what happens.” “Then it was just a discussion about how I would do it,” Palmer recalls. He signed a contract that gave him $35,000—“a low budget,” says Palmer, since it had to cover a four-man crew, their travel expenses and their equipment; he paid himself £2,000—but it also gave him free range to shoot what he wanted, be it a butt-naked Leonard in a sauna, Leonard weeping onstage or Leonard taking acid before the show. Machat, Palmer says, told him he was putting up the money for the film himself, “so that Leonard doesn't have to worry about it.”

“The impression one had was that he was very much a father figure for Leonard, his protective shield, who nursed him and looked after him. It was the same in the day-to-day life on the road: he was very solicitous, he'd always go and check out Leonard's room in the hotel first to see if it was okay and that Leonard felt comfortable. Leonard never wanted a grand suite on the top floor of the Ritz but he wanted the shower to be working.” Leonard had told Johnston that on this tour, unlike the last, where their hotels were among the grandest in Europe, they were going to stay “in little rooms with a little bed and a table.” He did not get his way. But that seemed to be happening a lot lately. When Leonard left with the band for Dublin, where the tour began on Saint Patrick's Day 1972, Suzanne was pregnant.

It was an extraordinary tour, all of it recorded by Palmer's camera, both the incandescent performances and the shambles, when the sound equipment, and on occasion Leonard, broke down. Palmer shot backstage too, and offstage, filming Leonard being interviewed by various European journalists asking much the same questions in different accents. Leonard would answer them patiently, sometimes candidly, more often evasively, or an inseparable mixture of the two. When asked by one reporter if he was a practicing Jew, he said, “I'm always practicing.” He told a German journalist, “I can't say my childhood was in any way inconvenienced by [World War II but] I did have a sense of empathy for my race.”