I'm Your Man (54 page)

C
ame So Far for Beauty,
Hal Willner's Leonard Cohen tribute concert, had taken on a life of its own. Staged in New York in 2003 and commissioned as a one-off by the Canadian consulate, it had been adopted by other countries—“We kept getting asked to do it,” says Willner—and had become something of an annual international event. First it went to England, as part of the 2004 Brighton Festival, surviving the transatlantic crossing with its spirit and almost the entire cast intact. Two more performers were added to the lineup, Beth Orton and Jarvis Cocker, and, to keep it fresh, some new songs.

Says Nick Cave, “Hal told you what songs he wanted you to do; you didn't get a choice. Nobody knows what's going on or gets time to rehearse, so it's done on a wing and a prayer, which was one of the great things about it.” Between them the cast, each channeling their own inner Leonard Cohen, conjured up his humor (“I'm Your Man”), piety (“If It Be Your Will”), melancholy (“Seems So Long Ago, Nancy”) and libidinous machismo (“Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On”). Willner says, “It became a team, all these artists who would never be in the same room, collaborating, watching each other at the side of the stage and cheering each other along.”

“Those concerts started to become a parallel universe to all of our lives,” says Rufus Wainwright. “We would meet up again in all these locations and it took on this mystical aura, like some exotic family get-together.” Wainwright was already something of an extended Cohen family member. He and Leonard's daughter, Lorca, who had met in their teens in Montreal, had become close friends. When he moved to Los Angeles they became roommates, living in Lorca's half of Leonard's duplex. The first time Lorca took Rufus upstairs to meet her father, “I walked in and Leonard was in his underwear—boxers, nothing too risqué, and a T-shirt, kind of a Billy Wilder morning outfit—and he was chewing a boiled hot dog into tiny little bits and spitting it out and putting it on a toothpick and feeding this little bird that he'd rescued from the front yard that had fallen from a nest. He was very nice and he made me noodles and we talked for a while. We didn't necessarily connect—it was sort of right before the crash and he was going through some stuff, and I'm a pretty brash character, very extroverted, and he's very introverted, and I would be trying to tap-dance all the time around his soft-shoe. That's what struck me the most: how shy he is and how unassuming. But I think we've figured each other out since.”

In 2005, the cast reconvened in Australia, for the Sydney Festival. Among them was a newcomer, Antony Hegarty, a New York singer with an otherworldly voice. “Before we met Antony,” Julie Christensen remembers, “Hal was saying, ‘Wait until you see this guy, he sounds like a cross between Janis Joplin and Tiny Tim.' We kind of wondered what this would be like.” A big, cobwebby sweater draped over his rotund body like a worn tarp on a Volkswagen Beetle, Antony sang a soulful version of “If It Be Your Will” that earned a standing ovation. “I'm an Australian,” says Cave, “I know what Australian audiences are like, and it was incredible to me to see their response to this guy.” Says Rufus Wainwright, “It was boiling hot, an insane summer day; we were playing the Opera House and I almost felt like we'd gone to the Krypton palace to summon Superman, and we did this amazing show. Thank God, it got filmed.”

Hal Willner had met Australian filmmaker Lian Lunson at a party in Los Angeles. After saying how much he had enjoyed her documentary on Willie Nelson, which had been broadcast on a public television station, he complained “that it was a shame these Leonard shows aren't going to be on film. So she did it.” The only way she could do something with the footage, she told him afterward, was if she could interview Leonard on camera. With some persuasion, Leonard agreed. Lunson also filmed him in a New York nightclub playing a secret performance with U2. They sang just one song together—“Tower of Song,” the title track of the 1995 Leonard Cohen tribute album on which Bono did his beatnik-soul version of “Hallelujah”—and there was no audience, but for a man who since 1993 had been content to let other people sing his songs onstage, it was not insignificant. Lunson's film, titled
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man,
was first screened in September 2005 at the Toronto International Film Festival. That same month, Leonard was awarded a plaque on the Canadian Folk Music Walk of Fame. Leonard, as had become his custom, sent his thanks and his apologies and stayed home in L.A.

Leonard flew to Montreal in January 2006 for a very different kind of ceremony. Irving Layton, at the age of ninety-three, was dead. At the funeral, his big white coffin was wheeled out to the strains of Beethoven's “Ode to Joy,” while around seven hundred people, including ex-wives, former students, family, friends and media, looked on. Leonard, dressed in a thick overcoat with a fur collar and a crushed cap, slipped into the chapel quietly, taking a seat at the back, where he tapped his toe to the music. In his eulogy Leonard said, “What happened between Irving and me is between us and doesn't bear repeating. But what does bear repeating, and will be repeated, are his words.” He read Layton's poem “The Graveyard,” which ended with the lines “There is no pain in the graveyard, or the voice / whispering in the tombstones / ‘Rejoice, rejoice.' ” Layton was “our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry,” Leonard said. “Alzheimer's could not silence him, and neither will death.” When Leonard tried to slip out just as quietly, he was requisitioned as a pallbearer. Layton, Leonard thought to himself, smiling, would have heartily approved of the whole event.

It felt good to be back in Montreal, even in midwinter, and even for an occasion such as this. Leonard was going stir-crazy in L.A. For some time he had been thinking—as he often did—about moving back to Montreal, and Anjani seemed to agree that it was a fine idea. Leonard had recently hired a Canadian manager, Sam Feldman, whose clients included Joni Mitchell and Diana Krall. When, five months after his last Canadian award, Leonard was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in February, at Feldman's urging, since there were a new album and a new book both scheduled for release in May, Leonard agreed to attend.

“I'm not really drawn to these kind of events,” Leonard said. “It's a very tricky occasion, being honoured. In one sense, it feels like an obituary and you don't really feel [that] about yourself.”
2
The gala featured yet more tributes from artists performing Leonard's songs onstage—Rufus Wainwright once again; Willie Nelson, dressed for the occasion in a suit; and k. d. lang, whose rendition of “Hallelujah” moved Leonard to tears. There were more tears when Adrienne Clarkson, the former governor general, presented the award. “One of the reasons one avoids these things is because they summon some really deep emotional responses,” Leonard told the
National Post.
“This happens to an artist or a writer very rarely, where you have in front of you the unconditional acceptance of your work.”
3
In his acceptance speech he said, “We shuffle behind our songs into the Hall of Fame.”
4
Leonard, Clarkson said in her speech, “changed all of our lives with the complexity of his sadness, the breadth of his love. . . . He gets inside your brain, your heart, your lungs. You remember him, you feel him, you breathe him. He is our connection to the meaning of ecstasy, our access to another world we suspected existed but which he puts into song.” She thanked the millions of her fellow countrymen who failed to buy his early poetry books and novels, “because without that he might not have turned to songwriting.”

In the various interviews he gave in Canada, Leonard appeared upbeat and lighthearted, even on the unavoidable question of his ex-manager and his missing money. There was no vitriol or attacks, just some self-reprobation for not reading his bank statements and that line about its being enough to put a dent in his mood, to which he added “Fortunately it hasn't.”
5
Among these interviews was one with
CARP
magazine, the publication of the association for Canadian retirees. At Leonard's apartment journalist Christine Langlois found the septuagenarian who could not afford to retire sitting in a sunbeam at the kitchen table with Anjani, smiling and eating bagels. Surprised at such a picture of domestic bliss, she asked how it squared with his reputation. “Everything changes as you get older,” Leonard said. “I never met a woman until I was sixty-five. Instead, I saw all kinds of miracles in front of me.” In the past, he had always viewed women through his own “urgent needs and desires,” he said, and “what they could do for me.” But in his midsixties—which roughly coincided with Leonard leaving the monastery and his depression starting to lift—“that started to dissolve and [he] began to see the woman standing there.” Anjani, laughing, pointed out, “I was the one standing there when that idea occurred to him.” By this point she and Leonard had been together seven years. Leonard was quoted as saying that “old age” was the “best thing that ever happened to me.” Despite the business with Kelley Lynch, he felt light and peaceful. “The state of mind I find myself in is so very different than most of my life that I am deeply grateful.”
6

B
ook of Longing,
Leonard's first new volume of poetry in twenty-two years, was published in May 2006 and dedicated to Irving Layton. Like
Dear Heather,
it is something of a scrapbook: a 230-page miscellany of poems, prose pieces and artwork. There are as many drawings as there are poems—among them sketches of Roshi and Leonard's fellow monks; of Irving Layton and Pierre Trudeau; of women, more often than not undressed; and several self-portraits, in which his expression ranges from hangdog to glum, and which are accompanied by wise, comic, morbid and/or mordant marginalia:

    
I never found the girl

    
I never got rich

    
Follow me

or elsewhere,

    
taxes,

    
children

    
lost pussy

    
war

    
constipation

    
the living poet

    
in his harness

    
of beauty

    
offers the day back to g-d.

(Throughout the book, Leonard, in the respectful Jewish tradition, uses “g-d” in place of “God,” and also hyphens in place of sexual expletives.)

The literary content is wide-ranging, from formal to pop cultural, from long, lyrical ballads to short, whimsical doggerel, prose pieces to songs, or poems that became songs—the quite different words of both the poem “Thousand Kisses Deep” and the song “A Thousand Kisses Deep” set side by side on opposing pages. Many of the poems—particularly those written on cold, dark nights or in snatched moments in a mountain monastery—are about death: anticipated, contemplated, mourned and recalled. “Who Do You Really Remember” catalogs various deaths—his dog, his uncles and aunts, his friends—that occurred between his father's death, when Leonard was nine, and his mother's, when he was forty-three. The prose poem “Robert Appears Again” describes a conversation with the ghost of a dead friend, conducted while Leonard was on the twenty-year-old speed he'd found in the pocket of an old suit. In “I Miss My Mother,” Leonard wishes he could take Masha to India, buy her jewelry and tell her that she was

    
right about everything

    
Including my foolish guitar

    
And where it got me . . .

    
She'd pat my little head

    
And bless my dirty song

Often on Friday nights, when he lit the candles to mark the Sabbath and Adam, Lorca and Anjani came over for dinner, Leonard would imagine that his mother was there too and her reaction to “seeing how I've finally stabilised my life.”
7

But it is the
Book of Longing,
not the book of the dead, and these losses are only one of the “various forms of longing: religious, sexual, just expressions of loneliness,” that Leonard addresses.
8
He berates himself for his failings as a Buddhist monk, from his inability to understand his teacher (“Roshi”) to the “enormous hard-on” he has under the robes when he dresses for the morning meditation (“Early Morning at Mount Baldy”). In the abbreviated, six-line version of his poem “Not a Jew” he asserts that he remains unswervingly Jewish. In “One of My Letters” he signs off not with “L. Cohen” but with his Jewish and his Buddhist names, Jikan Eliezer.

He addresses the decline of his powers with age and his failures as an artist (“My Time”) and as a ladies' man (“Never Once”). In the honest and erotic “The Mist of Pornography,” he discusses his relationship with Rebecca De Mornay and why it had to end. In “Titles” he writes,

    
I had the title Poet

    
and maybe I was one

    
for a while

    
Also the title Singer

    
was kindly accorded me

    
even though

    
I could barely carry a tune . . .

    
My reputation

    
as a Ladies' Man was a joke

    
It caused me to laugh bitterly

    
through the ten thousand nights

    
I spent alone.

But despite these protestations, in “Other Writers,” having extolled the virtues of his poet friend Steve Sanfield and of Roshi, he brags, “I prefer my stuff to theirs,” and describes a sexual encounter with a young woman in the front seat of his jeep. Irving Layton, Leonard recalls in “Layton's Question,” would always ask him: “Are you sure you're doing the wrong thing?” Layton would have been proud.