After seeing "Leonard and Marianne: A Love Story," the new Nick Broomfield documentary about Leonard Cohen and his muse, Deb and Jake and I went out for a drink. These are our stories.
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Jake: What a dick.
Deb: What a pig.
Me: What a poet! Helle Goldman [translator of the source book by Kari Hesthamar] gets it right -- some women stick with a genius like that BECAUSE they want the trouble. And the same goes for some men, I guess.
Deb: That doesn't excuse the genius for being a pig. And anyway, Leonard was no Dylan.
Jake: Marianne loved him. But she also knew him.
Me: Yeah, she knew him well enough not to bother telling him she was aborting his baby. She knew he couldn't deal.
Deb: At least we got to see gorgeous old island footage from Hydra, where they lived. And I was at that Cohen show at the Isle of Wight in 1970. Times were different then -- hitchhiking around Europe, free love, drugs and all.
Me: Tell me about it. Or don't.
Jake: People do react differently with famous people. I accidentally met Ringo Starr one time at Musso's in '78, and he walked off in a huff when I said "Midnight Express" was racist. I wouldn't have remembered if it was somebody else, but it was Ringo!
Deb: Cohen wasn't even that famous, just a nebbishy boy who should have grown up long before. But he used women, and got away with it because they thought he was shy and insecure.
Jake: Women weren't the only ones he used. How about that producer, John Lissauer, who started making an album with him, then didn't hear from him for what, six years? Then Cohen calls him back to resume, but drops him again when he has a chance to make "Death of a Ladies' Man" with Phil Spector, of all people.
Me: I love that album. A couple of legends get loaded and make huge cabaret music with echo chambers and clarinet solos.
Deb: A couple of misogynists, you mean, one of whom stuck a gun in Cohen's neck and is now in prison for shooting a woman to death. That song "Iodine"? Bitter, self-absorbed shit.
Me: What, a dude's not allowed to be bitter?
Deb: Not when he's the one dishing out the poison.
Jake: To be fair, people used Cohen too. His manager stole all his money -- I hope she stole that pretentious safari jacket, too. And how about the guru he had up on Mt. Baldy? Cohen cleaned the guy's toilet like a chambermaid.
Me: It was great to see that late guru, Joshu Sasaki Roshi. He looked like a sour old wastrel.
Deb: An alleged serial sex abuser of his students.
Me: Anyway, Marianne comes off as a tragic figure, a lovable victim of love, although she does marry happily at last. She has to commit her son to an asylum, and dies far from Leonard after tagging after him for half her life. It was nice what he wrote to her at the end, though, about following her soon to the other side.
Jake: Naw. Completely banal and inadequate.
Deb: Didn't take him five minutes.
Me: Come on, the poor guy was in hospice and died months later! I've valued his music since my girlfriend gave me his first album half a century ago, and I still play his records at 2 a.m. I interviewed him once at his place; he treated me like family. Just to make me feel at home, he did the whole interview with his pants draped over a chair.
Deb: Too bad you weren't a woman. The pants would've been just the beginning.