I write this with my eyes misted over by a love story that spanned 50 years. Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ilhen met on the sunny island of Hydra in Greece. He asked her to join him outside the store she was shopping at - and that sort of linked his fate to hers. Marianne and her son Axel became a part of the singer, songwriter, poet and author’s tumultuous life.
This documentary drops on Netflix when we’ve been saturated with tales of arranged marriages and murders in quiet towns and period dramas in foreign languages where fighting men are brought down by a woman professing love as revenge. And I loved the whole thing. It’s hard to believe that someone could have a permanent place in another’s heart and soul without ever losing that intensity…
Leonard Cohen says that he lived six months of the year with his woman and her child and the rest of the year he left to be educated in the ways of the world. Hard to imagine that by living with his muse, as he wrote and wrote and wrote, he would want to go out into the world and do something with his books and songs.
It’s hard to like what you’re seeing because you wants your heroes to love and live monogamously. But it was the 1960s, see, and Leonard Cohen admits to the cameras that he had an appetite to please women, and he was happiest because the promiscuous '60s gave him plenty of opportunities to explore that side of him.
What did his six months away from Marianne do to Marianne? She was a free spirit when she met Leonard, and that I guess remained. But that one part of her which had become Leonard’s was hurt every time her song was sung and she became the girl in that song during his concerts. She did not like what he had become. One part of her wanted to cage him so he could write and another knew she wouldn’t.
Marianne’s biographer shares that most important quality of Marianne with us: she really listened. She had that endearing nurturing quality to her which attracted so many people to her, but as Irving Layton (who Leonard thought was the ‘real thing’ the most important poet) asked Leonard, ‘Are you sure you are doing the wrong thing?’
The archival footage that gives us a glimpse into what Leonard and Marianne were like together is sure to make you feel like an interloper, a voyeur into the life of your hero.
But you will fall in love with the mystery that was Marianne, and you will, like I did, at a point be jealous of all the people she met and loved on that beautiful Greek island.
Her involvement with Leonard gave us one of his most unforgettable songs, and even though he’s saying, 'I hope you’re here, I know you are here,’ in his drug fuelled concerts before he sings ‘So long, Marianne’, you wish he had stayed true to his love and had not involved himself with so many women…
But that’s me being ridiculously prudish and judgemental, and this documentary tells us like it was then. Leonard Cohen had to write and rewrite everything because there were so many versions of him. He loved Marianne and her son Little Alex so much that he sent her a telegram (when he’s reasonably famous) that he ‘has house’, and wants ‘his woman and her son to live with him’. I sighed happily at this point.
But as the lives of all great artists go, the moment he articulated his need to live with Marianna and Alex, that part of his life was over. His need to seek himself and his songs and concerts took him away from Marianne who had left sunny Hydra for a cold continent.
I cried into my coffee when I watched their lives fall apart. At least Leonard had his legions of fans and concerts (days of tripping on acid, his partner shares) to lose himself…
His quest took him to a monastery and he discovered a very different side to him. Marianne finally listened to her mother and moved back to Oslo, found an ordinary, steady life with a very nice man. The documentary is rather unkind to Leonard Cohen’s ‘second love’ Suzanne Verdal, labelling her manipulative and likening her to a spider who spun a web around Leonard, and he fell headlong into her web…
I wished this were a series, because how Leonard reinvented himself after years in the monastery and then coming back to a life where his manager Kelly Lynch had embezzled all his money, would have been amazing. But I suppose watching his concert videos on YouTube must suffice until someone makes that documentary.
That on her deathbed Marianne receives a letter from Leonard and how she reacts to that letter is very moving.
The man who loved Marianne, for all his sins, died three months later. Leonard Cohen remains one of the finest songwriters and poets that has ever lived.
The next time you go to New York, go to the Village and perhaps visit the Village Vanguard Jazz Club that is still working. Leonard Cohen discovered himself here. And yes, The Flamingo Club in London shut down in 1969, but you can get a picture taken by the blue memorial plaque on Wardour Street. This is where Leonard Cohen actually tasted the freedom of expression which was denied him when he was growing up in Montreal.
As I hear these words penned by Leonard to his Marianne, I too wish we discover loves that make us thus utterly mad about one another… ‘And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I only want to wish you a good journey. Goodbye, old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.’