I'm Your Man (38 page)

“No firing, but it's hard to ignore a .45 lying on the console. The more people in the room, the wilder Phil would get. I couldn't help but admire the extravagance of his performance. But my personal life was chaotic, I wasn't in good shape at the time mentally, and I couldn't really hold my own in there.”

Death of a Ladies' Man
was released in November 1977, credited in large letters, front and back, to “Spector & Cohen.” It was not surprising that Spector should have given himself equal billing, but for the producer to put his name ahead of the artist's was a curious outcome for an album that Leonard told Harvey Kubernik was “the most autobiographical album of [his] career.”
16
Its gatefold sleeve opens out to a panoramic, sepia-tinged photograph shot in a restaurant in L.A., where Leonard sits at a table, flanked by Suzanne and her woman friend, looking like a deer in the headlights, the expression on his face some unidentifiable place between stoned and stunned. The moment the picture captures could hardly be more different from the only other Leonard Cohen album sleeve with a photo of one of his nonmusician lovers—
Songs from a Room,
where Marianne, dressed only in a towel, sits at his writing table in their house on Hydra, smiling shyly.

Critics seemed unsure what to make of the album; it was such a departure from what one had come to expect from Leonard. Yet the reviews were not particularly savage. In the U.S., in fact, they were quite positive, particularly in comparison with those for Leonard's earlier albums. The
New York Times
wrote, “This record may be one of the most bizarre, slowly satisfying hybrids pop music has ever produced.”
17
Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
was “convinced it's
the
album of '77. Everything is done with an ear for intensity and nerve-edged emotion.” Paul Nelson wrote in
Rolling Stone,
“It's either greatly flawed or great
and
flawed, and I'm betting on the latter,” noting that in spite of their differences (“the world's most flamboyant extrovert producing the world's most fatalistic introvert”) Spector and Cohen had a lot in common, such as both being members of “that select club of lone-wolf poets,” and each painfully aware of “what fame and longing are.”
18

In the UK, the music paper
Sounds
compared the album with Dylan's
Desire
and the title track with John Lennon's “Imagine” and John Cale's “Hedda Gabler,” while adding, “Diehard acolytes need not worry; it still sounds like [Cohen] but with a much wider appeal.”
19
It did turn out to be a durable album. Many who disliked it intensely for its incongruous bombast would warm to it in later years. Leonard also became less negative toward it in time, although, with the exception of “Memories,” he would rarely play songs from it in concert. The album did nothing to help Leonard's standing in the U.S.; it did not enter the charts. But had he wanted proof of how much he was loved overseas, it made it to No. 35 in the UK.

With Suzanne gone, Leonard moved out of the house in Brentwood and back to Montreal. He wanted to be close to his mother for whatever time she might have left. When she was taken into the hospital, Leonard visited her every day and sat by her bed. One time Mort Rosengarten came with him and they smuggled in a bottle of alcohol so that they could all raise a glass together, like the old days. He phoned Suzanne and told her Masha was dying. “The last phone call convinced me to come home immediately,” Suzanne says. She flew to Montreal with the children. In February 1978, Leonard's mother died. Shortly before her death, someone broke into the house on Belmont Avenue; the one thing that was stolen was Leonard's father's gun.

    
You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard. I eschew the philosopher's stone. I bury my girlfriend. I remove my personality from the line so that I am permitted to use the first person as often as I wish without offending my appetite for modesty. Then I resign. I do errands for my mother, or someone like her. I eat too much. I blame those closest to me for ruining my talent. Then you come to me. The joyous news is mine.

“I Bury My Girlfriend,”
DEATH OF A LADY'S MAN

Death of a Lady's Man,
Leonard's new book, which he dedicated “to Masha Cohen, the memory of my mother,” was published in the autumn of 1978. Although the title was almost identical to that of his new album, there was a small but telling difference. Here it referred to one woman in particular. The illustration on the front and back cover—the
coniunctio spirituum,
symbol of the union of the male and female principle—was the same as on the sleeve of his album before last,
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
. “I thought I'd confuse the public as much as I was confused myself,” Leonard said.
20
Its ninety-six poems and prose poems had been written largely over a period of ten years—the span of Leonard's “marriage” to Suzanne—in a number of places, including Hydra, Mount Baldy, Montreal, the Tennessee cabin and Los Angeles. Some of them had been reworked from the novel Leonard had withdrawn from publication, which at various junctures had been titled “The Woman Being Born,” “My Life in Art” and “Final Revision of My Life in Art.”

At the core of
Death of a Lady's Man
is the story of a marriage and the capacity of this particular union—whose rise and fall are digested in the poem “Death of a Lady's Man,” much as they were in the album's title song “Death of a Ladies' Man”—to both heal and wound. The discussion extends beyond man-woman union to a man's relationship with God and the world, and a writer's relationship with his words, but in all cases war and peace, victory and defeat, seem to be separated by a paper-thin wall. Leonard's intention had been to publish the book before the album's release. He had submitted the manuscript in 1976, but at the last minute he withdrew it. He wanted to write a series of companion pieces to its contents to—as he put it—“confront the book,” go back through it page by page, and write his reaction to what he read.

Leonard's commentaries appear on the facing page of eighty-three of the poems. The device gives
Death of a Lady's Man
the appearance of a school textbook, crib notes to
Death of a Ladies' Man
or a Leonard Cohen I Ching. The commentaries take on a variety of forms. In some Leonard offers critiques of his poems—at various times serious, playful, critical, laudatory, ironic, enlightening and obfuscating. Some commentaries are prose poems in themselves. On several occasions the poems appear to be in an ongoing debate with their companion piece. Some commentaries, adding a further layer, are made not in the voice of the author but of a character in the poem. In others, like a professor teaching a course on the writings of Leonard Cohen, he tells us what meaning we should take from the poems, referring the student to the unpublished “My Life in Art,” “Final Revision of My Life in Art” and “the Nashville Notebooks of 1969,” which of course the reader is unable to consult. His commentary to a poem titled “My Life in Art” offers a Buddhist teaching: “Destroy particular self and absolute appears.” The commentary on “Death to this Book”—the book is full of deaths and births—makes a close study of the poem's angry, brutal rant and declares, “It will become clear that I am the stylist of my era and the only honest man in town.” The last poem in the book, just five lines long, is “Final Examination”:

    
I am almost 90

    
Everyone I know has died off

    
except Leonard

    
He can still be seen

    
hobbling with his love

The commentary questions the accuracy of this ending to the story and, after raising more questions than it answers, concludes with a declaration of union: “Long live the marriage of men and women. Long live the one heart.”

Death of a Lady's Man
is a remarkable book, as tightly structured as Leonard's first novel,
The Favorite Game,
and as complex, puzzling and ambiguous as his second,
Beautiful Losers.
It is a mirror, a hall of mirrors, and smoke and mirrors, all of its many layers bleeding into each other like, well, a Phil Spector production. It was not Leonard's most popular book of poems but, particularly when coupled with
Death of a Ladies' Man,
it is one of his most wide ranging and fully realized. Leonard thought the book “good” and “funny” and felt “very warm” toward it, but it was “very coldly received in all circles. It got no respect.” Hardly anyone reviewed it, he said, and when they did they “dismissed it uniformly . . . And that was it. That was the end of the book.”
21

A month after Masha's death, Leonard was back in L.A. with Suzanne and the children. Suzanne never could stand the Montreal cold. They were renting a new place in the Hollywood Hills. Then, when spring arrived, Suzanne “abruptly left.” “I loved him one day and said good-bye that evening,” Suzanne says. “It was the story of ‘the mouse that roared' and shocked both of us.” Although they were never legally married, in 1979 Leonard and Suzanne divorced. Steven Machat took care of the arrangements. “They both came in and they told me everything they owned and they told me the deal that they'd made and I drew up the deal. What I was told,” says Machat, “was he honored every single clause in it.”

Sixteen

A Sacred Kind of Conversation

I
n November 1978, in Montreal, Leonard was in a studio, recording. He worked by himself, no musicians, no producer. It felt good to be alone. It felt bad to be alone. It was Leonard's first summer in a decade without Suzanne. Suzanne was in Leonard's house on Hydra with her lover. Leonard was in his house in Montreal with Adam and Lorca. Barbara Amiel was there, interviewing Leonard for
Maclean's
magazine, when the telephone rang. It was Suzanne, calling long-distance from the police station on Hydra. After locals had complained about “commotions” at the house, she and her boyfriend had been arrested for possession of drugs. The combination of the Kama Sutra woodcuts she had hung on the walls and the absence of the beloved patriarch had, it seemed, proven too much for the locals to bear. Leonard told Amiel that he had warned Suzanne that her new decor would offend the cleaning lady. The case against Suzanne and her friend was dropped, but at the cost of several thousand dollars to Leonard. “These days,” he told Amiel, “I work to support my wife, my children and my responsibilities.”
1

When Suzanne returned to Montreal, she took the children and moved with them to France, renting a house in Roussillon, in the Vaucluse. If Leonard wanted to see them—and he did; after his initial misgivings about fatherhood he had taken to it seriously, and his friends say he was grief-stricken at being separated from them—there were negotiations to be made. Leonard had chosen not to tour with
Death of a Ladies' Man,
saying, “I didn't really feel I could be behind it.”
2
Aside from its having been such a volatile and enervating experience, the large-scale, sometimes brawling, songs that resulted would have to be seriously de-Spectorized for him to sing them onstage. Not touring also gave Leonard more time to negotiate this new, long-distance family life, which would involve spending even more time on transatlantic flights. Leonard chose, somewhat curiously, to move back to Los Angeles, making the journey to France considerably longer than from Montreal. He bought, along with two fellow students of Roshi, another cheap house in an inexpensive neighborhood. The duplex was a short drive from the Cimarron Zen Center. Every morning at the same time, Leonard would go to the Zen Center to meditate. From there he would go to the gym, before returning to his sparsely furnished part of the house to write. His life without Suzanne and the children was, it seemed, more structured, not less.

Leonard's old friend Nancy Bacal was also living in Los Angeles. When Leonard showed up at the door of her home in the Hollywood Hills, she had recently suffered a terrible loss; her fiancé had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Bacal was “devastated,” she remembers. “I could barely breathe. Leonard looked at me, smiled his sweet wry smile and said quietly, ‘Welcome to life.' ” He urged her to come with him to Mount Baldy and sit with Roshi, saying, “It's perfect for you. It's for the truly lost.” That Leonard clearly considered himself among that congregation was evidenced by the central role that Roshi and his austere form of Zen Buddhism played in his life at this time. When Leonard was not at the Zen Center in L.A., you might find him in the monastery on Mount Baldy—a “hospital for the broken-hearted,” as he called it
3
—or accompanying Roshi to various monasteries of other religious denominations around the U.S.

Leonard also became a contributing editor of a new Buddhist magazine called
Zero,
which had been founded a year earlier and was named for Roshi's fondness for mathematical terms—zero, to Roshi, was the place where all the pluses and minuses equated in God, the absence of self, and true love. Steve Sanfield had been one of its first editors. Each issue contained some words from Roshi, interviews with artists such as Joni Mitchell and John Cage, articles by scholars and poems by, among others, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and Leonard Cohen.

In spite of his deep involvement with Buddhism, Leonard insisted to anyone who asked that he remained a Jew. “I have a perfectly good religion,” he said, and pointed out that Roshi had never made any attempt to give him a new one.
4
When Bob Dylan went public with his conversion to Christianity in 1979 “it seriously rocked [Leonard's] world,” said Jennifer Warnes, who was staying at that time at Leonard's house. He would “wander around the house, wringing his hands saying, ‘I don't get it. I just don't get this. Why would he go for Jesus at a late time like this? I don't get the Jesus part.' ”
5

In the summer of 1979 Leonard began work on a new album to which he had given the working title
The Smokey Life
. Still smarting from his experience with Phil Spector, he planned to produce, or at least coproduce, it himself. He had been thinking about working with John Lissauer again, but Lissauer was in New York and Roshi was in L.A. and Leonard did not feel ready to leave him. Joni Mitchell, with whom Leonard had remained friends, suggested that he work with her longtime engineer-producer, Henry Lewy. Since Leonard had ignored her last recommendation—that he not work with Phil Spector—at his peril, he agreed. Leonard met Lewy, a soft-spoken man in his fifties, and liked him immediately. Lewy was born in Germany and had been in his teens when World War II broke out and his family had bribed their way out of the country. His background was as a radio man and a studio engineer, which made him more interested than the average record producer in simply getting things done, rather than having them done his way.

Leonard played Lewy the new songs he had recorded in Montreal, including “Misty Blue,” a cover of a country-soul song from the sixties written by Bob Montgomery, and “The Smokey Life,” which Leonard had recorded in some form with both Lissauer and Spector (with the latter under the title “I Guess It's Time”). Lewy liked what he heard and suggested they book a studio and make some demos—very informal, just the two of them. The place Lewy chose was Kitchen Sync, a small eight-track studio in East Hollywood that was popular with L.A. punk bands. Harvey Kubernik, who was in Kitchen Sync recording
Voices of the Angels,
an album of punk artists reading poetry, “was startled,” he says, to see Leonard, “a guy who's been in the biggest studios in the world,” recording there. “This was Bukowski land, the only place where you'd get hit on by a hooker and she'd say, ‘I've got change for a fifty,' ” says Kubernik. When he asked Leonard what he was doing there. Leonard answered, “My friend Henry Lewy and I are doing some exploratory navigation.”

As work on Leonard's album continued, Lewy suggested they bring in a bass player. The man he had in mind was Roscoe Beck. Beck was a member of a young jazz-rock band based in Austin, Texas, named Passenger. They had come to L.A. because Joni Mitchell was looking for a backing band for her tour and Lewy had put their name forward. The tour failed to materialize. Lewy called Beck and booked a session. Beck says, “I went to the studio, met Leonard, shook his hand, and we sat down one-on-one to record. He showed me, on guitar, the two songs we did that day, ‘The Smokey Life' and ‘Misty Blue,' and Henry pushed ‘record' on the tape machine and that was that.” Leonard, dressed in a dark gray suit, a tie and black cowboy boots, “had a very gentlemanly manner about him and a lot of charisma,” Beck remembers. “I was really struck by that. I had the immediate feeling that it was the beginning of something.” Noting how pleased Leonard had been with the session, Lewy said, “He has a whole band, you know.” Leonard said, “Well, great, next time bring them all.”

The album, retitled
Recent Songs,
was recorded at A & M, a major studio situated on Charlie Chaplin's old lot in Hollywood. There were no guns, no bodyguards, not even any alcohol in the studio that anyone can recall. Lewy “created an extremely hospitable atmosphere where things could just happen,” Leonard said. “He had that great quality that Bob Johnston had: he had a lot of faith in the singer, as he did with Joni. And he just let it happen.”
6
Mitchell was actually at A & M herself, working in a studio down the hall on her album
Mingus,
which Lewy was producing at the same time as he was making Leonard's. Sometimes she would drop by Leonard's sessions. It was all very easygoing. “Henry's spirit was just lovely,” says Beck, “and ‘lovely' was a word he used a lot. You would finish a take and Henry would hit the talk-back and say, ‘That was just lovely.' I don't recall ever hearing a negative word out of Henry's mouth.”

After laying down the tracks with Passenger—augmented on “Our Lady of Solitude” by Garth Hudson, the keyboard player with the Band—Leonard brought in Jennifer Warnes as his main backing vocalist. He also hired John Bilezikjian and Raffi Hakopian to play oud and violin solos on “The Window,” “The Guests,” “The Traitor” and “The Gypsy's Wife.” Another thing in Lewy's favor was that, since he was not a musician—he was an engineer—he worked best with artists who had their own strong vision of what they wanted to do. “The musical ideas were specifically mine,” said Leonard. “I'd always wanted to combine those Middle Eastern or Eastern European sounds with the rhythmic possibilities of a five- or six-piece jazz band or rock 'n' roll rhythm section
.
”
7

In his album credits, Leonard thanked his mother for reminding him, “shortly before she died, of the kind of music she liked.” When he had played her his last album,
Death of a Ladies' Man,
she had asked why he didn't make songs like the ones they used to sing together around the house, many of these being old Russian and Jewish songs, whose sentimental melodies were often played on the violin. So Leonard did. He found the classical violinist Bilezikjian through a mutual acquaintance, Stuart Brotman.
*
When Bilezikjian came to the studio, he also brought with him his oud. Leonard was so taken with his improvisations on it that he had him switch instruments, hiring Bilezikjian's friend and fellow Armenian Hakopian to play the violin.

That the album would include a mariachi band was a spontaneous idea of Leonard's. He and the band had taken to enjoying a post-session burrito and margarita at El Compadre, a Mexican restaurant favored by rock musicians, on Sunset Boulevard, nearby. Mariachi bands would often perform there into the early hours, and Leonard approached one of them and asked if they would be willing to come to the studio and play on his record. The band, who seemed to have no idea who Leonard was, performed on “Ballad of the Absent Mare,” a song inspired in equal parts by the horse Leonard had bought from Kid Marley in Tennessee and Roshi's teachings on the Ten Bulls, illustrated poems depicting the stages along the path to enlightenment. They also played on “Un Canadien Errant” (“The Wandering Canadian”), a patriotic folk song from the 1840s, about a rebel from Quebec, banished to America and longing for home. Being sung in English by a Canadian Jew who had wandered to California of his own volition, accompanied by a Mexican band living in L.A., brought new layers to the song's theme of exile. And Leonard, newly orphaned and divorced, did appear, despite his self-proclaimed lack of sentimentality and nostalgia, to be longing for home—or some sort of home. The nearest he had was with Roshi, to whom he wrote in the album credits, “I owe my thanks.”

Leonard also thanked his late friend Robert Hershorn for introducing him to the Persian poets and mystics Attar and Rumi, “whose imagery influenced several songs, especially ‘The Guests' and ‘The Window,' even if the imagery in ‘The Window'—spears, thorns, angels, saints, “
the New Jerusalem glowing,
” the “
tangle of matter and ghost
” and “
the word being made into flesh
”
—
appears largely Christian.
*
The image of the window had long been important in Leonard's poetry and song, as a place of light and observation, as a mirror and as a boundary between different realities, between the internal and external. Leonard, talking about this song, described it as “a kind of prayer to bring the two parts of the soul together.”
8

Recent Songs
teems with feasts, thorns, roses, smoke and sainthood, songs about light and darkness, and about loss and being lost. “The Gypsy's Wife” directly addresses the loss of Suzanne. Its sensual melody is paired with dark, accusatory lyrics that are biblical in tone. Leonard said it was one of the quickest songs he had ever written. After Suzanne left him, he was in a woman's apartment in Los Angeles, and the woman had a guitar, which he picked up and played while she got ready to go out. “And that is exactly what I was thinking,” he said, “ ‘Where, where is my gypsy wife tonight?' In a sense it was written for . . . the wife that was wandering away, but in another way it's just a song about the way men and women have lost one another.”
9
It does seem a touch disproportionate that a man who had referred to himself in song as “some kind of gypsy boy”
10
and who clearly did not want for female company should be so apocalyptically stern in song about the judgment that awaited whomsoever might come between a man and his wife. But the pain of losing his family was still acute.

Recent Songs
also featured three songs from the abandoned
Songs for Rebecca
album: “Came So Far for Beauty,” “The Traitor” and the jazzy “The Smokey Life.” The first gave John Lissauer credit as its cowriter and coproducer. “It was exactly as I recorded the demo,” Lissauer says—Lissauer playing piano, John Miller on bass. “They didn't do anything to it.” Lissauer received no credit on the other two songs, although he says that they too were very much as he and Leonard had done them together.