I'm Your Man (23 page)

But the literati, particularly in Canada, did not take warmly to his move into the popular field. It made him a “personality,” which brought with it the danger, as Michael Ondaatje wrote, that “our interest in Cohen makes the final judgement, not the quality of the writing.”
8
Cohen and Dylan, Ondaatje said, were “public artists” who relied heavily “on their ability to be cynical about their egos or pop sainthood while at the same time continuing to build it up. They can con the media men who are their loudspeakers, yet keep their integrity and appear sincere to their audiences.” It was a reasonable argument, although the media was often well aware of this game and interpreted Leonard as a work of fiction in action, where academics interpreted the words on the page. Leonard's words, thanks to the publicity and sales of his first album, had now started to sell in previously unimaginable quantities. Rock album numbers, not poetry book numbers.
Selected Poems
would sell two hundred thousand
copies.

After his short promotional trip to London, Leonard returned to New York and the Chelsea. He checked into room 100 (which Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen would later make notorious) and propped his guitar in the corner and put his typewriter on the desk. On the bedside table he put the books he was reading: Gore Vidal's
Myra Breckinridge
(a book that, like
Beautiful Losers,
had been deemed pornographic by several critics) and
Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters
by Martin Buber, stories about rabbis searching for enlightenment. As to this particular descendant of Aaron, he had started attending the Church of Scientology.

Scientology was a new religion, founded a decade and a half earlier by an American science fiction novelist named L. Ron Hubbard. It had some of the trappings of the old religions, like its eight-pointed cross and its sacred books. The first such book,
Dianetics,
an imaginative hodgepodge of, among other things, Eastern mysticism and Freud, read like an early self-help book and, like one, sold in enormous quantities. It claimed to heal the unconscious mind and, along with it, man's physical and psychological problems, resulting in liberation from pain and trauma, universal brotherhood, the end to war and oneness with the universe. Scientology, unsurprisingly, did good business in America in 1968, when there was no shortage of traumatized young people looking for some kind of answer. It was a year of turbulence and paranoia—the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in the ghettos, protests in the universities, young Americans still being sent to Vietnam and coming home in caskets—and neither the drugs nor the old orthodoxies were working.

Hubbard's religion, in keeping with the times, had a slogan, “Scientology works,” and spread the word through young adherents approaching other young people on the street. It also reflected its founder's origins in science fiction, coming with extraterrestrials, strange contraptions and its own language. Man's strongest urge, Hubbard wrote, was survival, but this survival was under attack by engrams, cellular memories of physical and mental pain that chain him to his past. The way to remove these charges was by auditing—revisiting past traumas under supervision with an auditor, a Scientology counselor, while wired to an e-meter, a device that resembled a couple of small tin cans and a dial. After a course of successful auditing, you go clear and are ready to take the next step toward becoming an Operating Thetan and living in a pain-free present. Leonard thought Scientology, for all its snake oil, had “very good data.”
9
He signed up for auditing.

A
t night the Chelsea Hotel came to life. People who rarely left their rooms by daylight emerged and came together, often in Harry Smith's room. Smith was an extraordinary man, a forty-five-year-old in the body of an eccentric old man: wild white hair, scraggly beard, towering forehead and oversized spectacles that magnified his bright, intelligent eyes. He lived with his pet birds in a dark, tiny, room with no bathroom on the eighth floor. It was crammed with curios: magic wands, Seminole Indian clothes, painted Ukrainian eggs, a collection of paper airplanes, esoteric books and weird old American records. In music circles Smith was renowned for his
Anthology of American Folk Music,
three double albums he compiled from his collection of old, raw folk, blues and gospel. The albums were an enormous influence on Dylan and the sixties folk revival. Smith was not only a musicologist but an anthropologist, an expert on Native America and shamanism, an experimental filmmaker, a raconteur and a mystic, who claimed to have learned the art of alchemy at around the same age Leonard was studying hypnotism. Little surprise that Leonard was drawn to him. Along with other assorted Chelsea residents and writers and music celebrities who were passing through, he would sit at Smith's feet and listen to his labyrinthine monologue.

“We saw Harry as a national monument and sardonic guru from whom even Leonard had something to learn,” says Terese Coe, the author of the play
Harry Smith at the Chelsea
. “That's why Leonard was there. Harry could be expounding upon any number of intellectual, historical and artistic themes, he might be showing his paintings, talking about his recent misadventures in filmmaking, bewailing his financial disasters, insulting present guests in elliptical terms, playing Brecht-Weill or Woody or Arlo Guthrie—I never heard him play any Leonard Cohen songs. As far as anyone could tell, we were hanging out with a sage who was also at times an antihero, an amusement where anything could happen, but nothing truly decadent ever did in my experience. We were rather well behaved.”

Leonard, noticeably more formally dressed than the others in the room, sat quietly, Coe recalls, and rarely said a word. She was a young poet and journalist for an underground newspaper when she met Leonard in Smith's room. She became the muse for two poems in
The Energy of Slaves
(1972): “It Takes a Long Time to See You Terez” and “Terez and Deanne.” Says Coe, “I was a passing fancy and he made a fancy pass with provocative lines.” She recognized him as “an incurable romantic. In that ‘love and peace' era, many were caught in that conundrum. He wasn't one to speak about his philosophy of love in person. He kept his private life and friendships close to the vest. The answers are in his songs, and they are many and mercurial.”

There were a number of regulars at Harry Smith's evenings. Peggy Biderman worked at the Museum of Modern Art and had a teenage daughter, Ann (now a successful TV screenwriter), whom Leonard saw for a while. Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach were collage artists who edited a magazine and translated Burroughs and Ginsberg into French. Stanley Amos ran an art gallery from his Chelsea room, complete with vernissages, and would come to Harry's room and read the tarot. Sandy Daley was a photographer, cinematographer and friend of Warhol and of Leonard. In 1970 Daley shot an underground film in her room, on the tenth floor, which was painted and decorated all in white. The film was called
Robert Having His Nipple Pierced,
the Robert being Mapplethorpe. The narrator of the film, Mapplethorpe's partner Patti Smith, was another close friend of Harry Smith. There was also Liberty, a beautiful blond poet and model, with whom Leonard had an affair. Liberty had sat for Salvador Dalí and was a muse for Richard Brautigan and Jerome Charyn, but she was also active in feminist politics, having left her Republican politician husband for the Yippies and the counterculture. After the gatherings everyone, Harry included, would meet up in El Quijote, at the large table at the back of the bar. Leonard would often discreetly pick up the tab for the whole crowd and leave before they discovered it had been paid. Being generous with money was one of the few things Leonard seemed to like about this new level of success.

S
eptember 21, 1968. The sun cast long shadows, three-quarters of the year had now passed and Leonard was still in New York. It was the eve of the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, and Leonard's thirty-fourth birthday. To celebrate, he went by himself to a very crowded place, the Paradox, a macrobiotic restaurant in an East Village basement run by Scientologists. It was a hippie hangout, a place where a person could come to trip out and no one would bother them. If they had no money, they could work in the kitchen for food. Thelma Blitz, a young woman who worked as an ad agency copywriter, sat at one of the long, communal tables and looked up from her dinner to see the man sitting opposite looking deeply into her eyes.

“I didn't know him. He didn't look like a lot of the other people. He had short hair—everyone else there had long hair—and he looked kind of straight; he was dressed conservatively, not like a businessman, more like a college professor.” And a lot like Dustin Hoffman, Blitz told him. “Leonard said, ‘People often tell me that.' ” They talked about all sorts of things—poetry, metaphysics, vegetarianism—with Leonard cordially taking the contrary position to everything she said. “It was a great debate. I didn't know until I read biographies of him that he was president of his debating club in college.” They argued all night, until the Paradox closed and Leonard asked if she would like to walk with him. They strolled along Saint Mark's Place, where the freaks congregated. Leonard stopped to talk to a young man who was taking a large tortoise for a walk. “He asked him, ‘What do you feed that thing?' and the young man said, ‘Hamburger meat, speed and smack.' ”

As they walked, Leonard told her that they were going to the Chelsea Hotel. “I didn't know what the Chelsea Hotel was so I said, ‘What's there?' and he said, ‘Nico.' I only had a vague idea then of Nico and Andy Warhol but he had a wistfulness in his voice when he said ‘Nico,' which makes me think that was why he was there.” At the hotel, Leonard went straight to the mail desk at the back of the lobby and gave them his name. “Which is how I found out who he was,” says Blitz. “I freaked out a little bit, because I realized this man is important—his first album was in the window of the Saint Mark's bookstore—but I didn't recognize him, he didn't look anything like the picture on the cover. But instead of trying to floor me with his accomplishments, like the usual fellow who picks you up, he wouldn't even tell me who he was. He said, with a tinge of self-irony, downplaying his achievements, ‘Well, I have some following in Canada.' ”

He told Thelma that it was his birthday and they toasted it in El Quijote with a plate of celery and olives in place of alcohol. Then they went to Leonard's room on the first floor. “He took out a guitar and sang two songs to me that I didn't recognize until the second album came out, ‘Bird on the Wire' and ‘The Partisan Song' [
sic
]. When he sang, I saw this remoteness, and I noted in my journal that his mask of grief and remoteness deepened as he sang. He kept spacing out, coming back and forth, something like the nictitating membrane of a frog came over his eyes and he would seem not to be there. I thought, ‘Am I boring him?' I told him I was sick of being an advertising writer, and he suggested starvation and several good books. He talked about teachers and masters and conquering pain, saying things like, ‘The more we conquer pain, the more pain we incur on a higher level'—which sounds like the line from [the song] ‘Avalanche,' ‘
You who wish to conquer pain.
' But there was a lot of pain at that time among the people who made up the counterculture: the pain of hating your culture, hating the system, being completely at odds with everything. Everybody was into something.”

Leonard did not talk much to Blitz about Scientology, except “to say that it worked.” She remembered his talking to her about money, saying that “he had a hundred thousand dollars and he didn't know what to do with it—buy land in Nova Scotia? I remember him looking kind of agonized as he talked about money.” They spent the night together. The following morning, when Leonard walked her to the bus—she was off to spend the Jewish New Year with her family—he told her to call him when she got back. When she did, the operator at the Chelsea said he had checked out. He had gone to Tennessee.

T
wo years behind schedule, and three days before his first session for
Songs from a Room,
Leonard was finally in Nashville. His friend from Montreal Henry Zemel flew out with him. There at the gate to meet them was large man with long hair, a bandanna and a mustache. He was part hippie, bigger part good ol' boy. Since Bob Johnston was, as always, busy in the studio, he sent Charlie Daniels to pick them up. In 1968 Daniels wasn't the Opry-inducted, hard-core country star with the big beard and Stetson, but a songwriter and session musician—fiddle, guitar, bass and mandolin. Johnston first met Daniels in 1959 when he produced the Jaguars, the rock 'n' roll band Daniels fronted. They spent years playing the circuit, getting nowhere. One night Daniels called Johnston and asked if he could get him out of jail—it was advance planning; Daniels was about to get into a fistfight with a club owner. Johnston hollered down the phone that he should “get the fuck out to Nashville,” and he did. Johnston had kept him busy ever since, playing on albums by Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Bob Dylan, and now Leonard Cohen.

For a city, Nashville felt like a suburb. On the drive from the hotel Leonard saw more men in suits than cowboy hats and more churches than bars. The town's biggest businesses were insurance and Bible publishing; Music Row was all dinky buildings and tidy lawns. But Nashville was the second-biggest music city in America behind New York, home of the Grand Ole Opry and a magnet to songwriters, Tin Pan Alley with twang. It was—like Leonard used to say on Hydra—where the money was. Nashville was chock-full of songwriters—most, like Leonard, hailing from anywhere but Nashville—and it was full of ghosts, of men who'd left wives and families in the mountains to sell their songs and wound up drinking away what little cash and dignity they had left. After checking into their hotel, Leonard and Zemel set off on foot, mapping out the city: the YMCA for a morning swim, the greasiest hole-in-the-wall diners and the dingiest, smokiest heartbreak bars.