Authors: Ira B. Nadel
De Mornay had been in the movie business for almost ten years before she became a star with
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle
, appearing in
Risky Business, And God Created Woman
, and
Backdraft
before earning attention from her role as the disturbed and violent nanny in the 1992 hit. Previously involved with Tom Cruise, De Mornay had also been married for a short time to a Los Angeles screenwriter. Cohen’s fans were startled to see him escorting De Mornay to the 1992 Academy Awards and his name suddenly appearing in numerous gossip columns. De Mornay accompanied him on his travels and video shoots and observed his recording sessions. She was eager to please, although many in Cohen’s inner circle felt she was always scrutinizing Cohen’s actions and behavior with his friends, especially his female friends. He credited her as co-producer of one song on his 1992 album,
The Future
, and he dedicated the album to her as Rebecca “coming forth,” referring to a passage from Genesis. “
Leonard is one of the most down-to-earth
people I’ve ever met,” De Mornay has said. “He never feels the party is somewhere else.”
In an uncharacteristically cute celebrity moment, Cohen interviewed her for
Interview
magazine:
De Mornay:
Do you want to know what the best thing is about you interviewing me?
Cohen: No.
De Mornay: It’s …
Cohen: I guess I do.
De Mornay:… that you’re the only interviewer who won’t ask what the exact nature of my relationship is with Leonard Cohen.
Cohen: I would like to know. Let’s start with that question.
When Cohen was later asked about the contradictions of his brooding lifestyle and his involvement with a high-profile actress, he answered, “
Solid-gold artists would
kill
for this kind of anguish.” By November 1993, however, their relationship had changed; he told a journalist earlier that summer that “
Rebecca got wise to me and I’m not with her anymore … but Rebecca and I will always be friends in some kind of way. We were engaged but we’re not engaged anymore.”
Through his bouts of depression, Cohen retained a sense of humor. Perla Batalla sent him a personal ad from a San Francisco weekly that asked for a man who could combine the passion of Leonard Cohen with the rawness of Iggy Pop. Cohen had recently met Pop at a recording session, and when he showed him the ad, they decided to send a photo of the two of them to the female inquirer with their phone numbers.
Cohen’s business arrangements by this time were complicated, partly because his lawyer lived in New York, while he was living in Los Angeles. For a time he rented out the downstairs of his house and lived upstairs in a sparsely furnished flat. Nearly ten years after buying the house, Cohen decided that he was ready to furnish it. He gradually acquired some rugs, tables, and chairs, a sign that he at last was feeling settled. In 1991 Kelley Lynch, a former legal assistant to Marty Machat, moved to Los Angeles and soon became Cohen’s manager, as he shifted his business affairs to California following the death of Machat. The proximity of his
business did not interfere with the completion of his new album, although the word chaos often described the situation around him as he prepared for a 1993 tour as part of the album’s promotion.
His office, like his home, is furnished sparely, though it is suffused with light, which pours through large curved windows on the second floor and falls on the whitewashed wooden floors and large wooden tables. Greek or oriental rugs are scattered on the floors, but each of the four principal rooms has only a worktable, chair, and phone. The walls are white and bare. One office has a series of filing cabinets, and the fax and typewriters are tucked into a former pantry. Cohen’s own office at the back is equally spare, remarkable only in the contrast between the large wooden table/desk and his high-tech, ergonomic chair. On the first floor, an untuned piano sits alone in the former living room. On the wall is a large gold, red, and yellow banner with four brown squares, representing the four noble truths of Buddhism. Cohen designed the banner for Roshi’s eighty-fifth birthday.
————
COHEN’S SONGS
were enjoying a renaissance, covered by other artists and being used in movie soundtracks. The Neville Brothers had a hit with “Bird on a Wire” in 1990, the year that Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson starred in a comedy of the same name. “Everybody Knows” and “If It Be Your Will” appeared in the movie
Pump Up the Volume
, starring Christian Slater. Concrete Blonde sang “Everybody Knows” for the movie. A tribute album entitled
I’m Your Fan
featured a series of alternative bands performing Cohen’s songs. The House of Love sang “Who by Fire,” The Pixies did “I Can’t Forget,” rem performed “First We Take Manhattan,” and Nick Cave sang “Tower of Song.” The project had been initiated by Christian Fevret, editor of the influential French rock magazine
Les inrockuptibles
. Cohen was flattered by the attention and impressed with the original arrangements. They presented his songs to a younger generation of listeners.
Others could more lyrically convey his melodies, although not necessarily his substance. Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Neil
Diamond, Diana Ross, Jennifer Warnes, and Johnny Cash had all covered his songs. Suzanne Vega has repeatedly acknowledged his influence on her work. The release of a third tribute album,
Tower of Song
, further confirmed his influence as a songwriter.
On March 3, 1991, Cohen was inducted into the Juno Hall of Fame, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys. “
I am trying to stay alive and raw to the voices that speak to me,” he stated after the presentation by his friend and founder of MuchMusic, Moses Znaimer. “If I had been given this attention when I was twenty-six,” Cohen said, “it would have turned my head. At thirty-six, it might have confirmed my flight on a rather morbid spiritual path. At forty-six, it would have rubbed my nose in my failing powers and have prompted a plotting of a getaway and an alibi. But at fifty-six—hell, I’m just hitting my stride and it doesn’t hurt at all.”
In April 1991, he was honored with an even more prestigious award, appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada. At his investiture on October 30, 1991, he was celebrated as:
one of the most popular and influential writers of his generation whose work has … made Canadian literature familiar to readers abroad. Images of beauty, despair, outrage, and tenderness are found in his lyrical poetry and prose, whose themes of love, loss and loneliness touch a universal chord in us all.
That same month, Cohen was a surprise guest at a salute to Irving Layton that took place at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. His appearance was a well-guarded secret because he did not want to upstage Layton. When he appeared, Cohen told the audience that “
exposure to [Layton’s] work moves us. … This is the tonic, the elixir. I salute the aching and triumphant impeccability of your life.” Lay-ton complimented Cohen on his fabulous timing. Three years later he admitted that Cohen’s songs could still make him cry—not because they moved him but because he knows he will never write anything so beautiful. Cohen, Layton emphasized, “
has never been disloyal to his genius.”
C
OHEN COULD
see the flames from South Central Los Angeles reflected in his kitchen. The 1992 riots skirted his life, destroying the grocery store, musical supply store, and electronics store that he patronized. “
From my balcony I could see five great fires. The air was thick with cinders [but] having been writing about such things for so long, it was no surprise.” Los Angeles has always seemed an odd city for Cohen. He had grown up in the tight urban community of Montreal and spent time in seclusion on Hydra; L.A. offered the advantages of neither. It was a disembodied sprawl with a gift for the superficial and a civic amorality. The air was bad and the film industry had spread its corrupt charm, but the winters were mild. Jack Kerouac had described the city as a place where “
those soft California stars … are lost in the brown halo of the huge
desert encampment L.A. really is.” But it had certain advantages; there were musicians and studios. And there was Roshi.
Cohen lived close to the Cimarron Zen Center. There, and at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, Cohen continued his study of what he called “
a training in self-reform.” Cohen redefined himself to suit his context. “
It’s very dangerous for someone to describe themselves as a poet. I just think I’m a songwriter living in L.A. and, as Serge Gainsbourg said of himself, I’m kind of a pseudo-poet. I like that.”
In a recent poem, “The Mist of Pornography,” Los Angeles served as a backdrop:
When you rose out of the mist of pornography
with your talk of marriage and orgies
and I was a mere boy of 57 trying to make a fast buck in the slow lane
and it was ten years too late when I finally got the most beautiful girl
on the Hollywood hill
to go with her lips to the sunless place
and the art of song was in my bones
and the coffee died
for me and I never answered any phone calls
and I said a prayer for whoever called and didn’t leave a message
and this was my life in Los Angeles[.]
In an earlier poem, “
My Life in Art,” he had a similar feeling about the city’s gift for destruction. “Six-fifty. Ruined in Los Angeles. I should start smoking again. I want to die in her arms and leave her.”
In the
Los Angeles Times
Cohen described himself as a committed songwriter who rarely ventured out into the maelstrom of the city, although he observed it constantly and found in it a healthy level of discomfort. He thought the incongruities of the city were fascinating: through Zen and the Cimarron center, L.A. was the source of his spiritual life; through the music and record business, it was the source of his popularity.
Geologically and politically unstable, Los Angeles was the harbinger of the next millennium, a perfect backdrop for his album
The Future
, Cohen’s first in four years. Originally titled “Busted,” the record was to be recorded in Montreal, but when he started to work in Los Angeles with
Jennifer Warnes again as a backup vocalist for “Democracy,” he saw the value of staying there to do the entire album. Musicians from the 1988 tour contributed, notably Bobby Metzger, Steve Meador, and Bobby Furgo.
“Democracy” was culled from more than eighty verses that had been written over the past several years. Don Henley performed the song at the MTV ball in Washington celebrating the January 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton. “Closing Time,” with its hoedown feel, received radio play, but had the same difficult genesis. Cohen had recorded another version of the song, the result of wrestling with the verses for over two years, but he came “
to the painful decision that I hadn’t written it yet.” He put down several tracks but felt he “couldn’t get behind the lyric.” He dumped the tracks and started over in March 1992 with a new melody and verses.
“Anthem” was borrowed from Kabbalistic sources, especially the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria. It was one of the most difficult songs Cohen had ever written, taking almost a decade to complete. He recorded it three times, with one version for
Various Positions
and another for
I’m Your Man
, mixed with strings, voices, and overdubs. It was finished, he explained, “
but when I listened to it there was something wrong with the lyric, the tune, the tempo. There was a lie somewhere in there, there was a disclosure that I was refusing to make. There was a solemnity that I hadn’t achieved.” Only when he reworked it for
The Future
did he “nail it.” Songwriting begins for him not in the form of an idea, but in the form of an image. He explained:
the way I do things is that I uncover the song and discern what it’s about through the actual writing of it. Every song begins with that old urgency to rescue oneself, to save oneself. And it’s quite a powerful gnawing at the spirit. It’s not at all evident at the beginning of the process what it [the song] is about.
Shaping the album is a darkening view of the political and moral developments of contemporary history, broadening the usual focus from his own despair. The title song, “The Future,” was originally called “If You Could See What’s Coming Next” and underwent extensive revision, occupying almost sixty pages in Cohen’s notebooks.
The album sold over one hundred thousand copies in Canada in its first four months, earning platinum status, and the video for “Closing Time” won a Juno award for best rock video of 1994. It featured a boozy Cohen in a honky-tonk club, Toronto’s Matador, singing:
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it’s once for the Devil and it’s once for Christ
but the Boss don’t like these dizzy heights
we’re busted in the blinding lights
of Closing Time
Rebecca De Mornay partly directed and re-edited the video.
Cohen worked hard to promote the album, giving interviews, sharing his anguish over the songs with journalists and the public. At the Toronto launch party for the album, he signed a white leather shoe offered to him with his name and words borrowed from
Beautiful Losers:
“magic is afoot.” In the video accompanying “The Future,” Cohen was filmed standing in water which rises past the knees of his well-tailored suit. “
A pessimist is someone who is waiting for it to rain,” he has said. “But I’m already soaked to the skin.” On March 21, 1993, Cohen won another Juno, this time for best male vocalist. In accepting Cohen said, “
Only in a country like this with a voice like mine could I receive such an award.”
In April of that year, after six weeks of rehearsals on the large sound stage at The Complex in Los Angeles, Cohen toured to support the album, playing twenty-eight concerts in Europe. Unlike the ’88 tour, Cohen played larger halls, often stadiums or ice rinks, which created sound and recording problems. Soundchecks were problematic and the audiences often didn’t fill the vast halls. Cohen was also suffering neck and shoulder pain which made traveling and performing more difficult. De Mornay joined him for part of the tour.