The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘I wanted to put him in a cage, lock him up and swallow the key’
Marianne Ihlen on life with, and without, Leonard Cohen
She was the inspiration behind many of his songs, his muse and lifetime love, yet the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen was often chaotic and filled with heartache. As a new documentary brings their lives to the big screen, Mick Brown reports on their poignant story
One day in March 1960, walking in the East End of London, a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen got caught in a torrential rain storm. Cohen, who was 25, was travelling in Europe. Stepping into a bank to shelter from the rain, he noticed that the cashier was sporting a glowing suntan. He told Cohen he had recently come from Greece, where the weather at this time of year was perfect. The next day, Cohen bought a ticket.
On a sunny day in April he set foot for the first time on the tiny island of Hydra. Within a few days he had met a young Norwegian woman named Marianne Ihlen, who would become the love of his life. The inspiration for several of Cohen’s songs, from the timeless and beautiful So Long, Marianne ,and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, to Bird on the Wire, she is pictured on the back of his 1969 album Songs From a Room, seated at a desk in the home they shared on Hydra.
When, in 2016, the 81-year-old Ihlen lay on her deathbed, Cohen wrote a farewell letter to his erstwhile lover: ‘Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon...’, it was reported around the world. Three months later,
Cohen too, was dead. When, last month, a collection of more than 50 letters from Cohen to Ihlen, which had been put on sale by her estate, were auctioned at Christie’s, they fetched £692,190.
Now comes a new documentary, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, directed by English filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who, in a career spanning 40 years, has made documentaries on Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, rock icons Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Sarah Palin and, most recently, Whitney Houston.
Through a mixture of new interviews with friends, associates and former band members, archive interviews with Cohen and Ihlen, and evocative, unseen archive footage of them, the film presents a glowingly elegiac portrait of a romance and friendship. At its heart is Ihlen, a woman who seemed to enrapture everyone who knew her – including Broomfield himself, who in 1968, as a young student travelling in Greece, had a brief affair with her on Hydra, and who remained in touch with her until her death. Marianne & Leonard then is, Broomfield says, ‘the most personal film I’ve ever made’.
Like many of his generation, Broomfield grew up enthralled by Cohen’s songs, ‘I was very much brought up, with Marianne, almost in the shadow of this brilliant man. And that these two people, who had been so instrumental and inspirational in my life, should have suddenly died within three months of each other, I just felt on a very personal level that I wanted to know more, and to explore my own feelings about the two of them.’
Born into a conservative, middle-class Norwegian family, Ihlen had come to Hydra two years before Cohen, after shocking her family by running away with a brilliant but mercurial novelist named Axel Jensen.
In 1958 they married, and Jensen bought a house on the island. But the marriage was shortlived. In January 1960, Ihlen travelled to Oslo to give birth to a son, also named Axel; returning to Hydra a few months later to be told by her husband that he was in love with an American painter, Patricia Amlin. Jensen and Ihlen continued to live together until, shortly afterwards, Amlin was badly injured in a car accident. Jensen was so incapacitated by shock that Ihlen was obliged to step in and tend to Amlin in hospital in Athens until she returned to the US.
This was the situation that greeted Leonard Cohen when he arrived on Hydra. At that time, the island was a redoubt for an émigré community of bohemians, artists and lotus eaters. Henry Miller had once lived there, extolling it as ‘a promised land’ that caused him to lose ‘all sense of earthly direction’. Other visitors included Jackie Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas.
One day, Cohen was sitting in a café with a group when he noticed Ihlen, standing in the doorway of a grocery store. ‘Would you like to join us?’ he asked. ‘We’re sitting outside.’ ‘I remember my eyes met his eyes,’ she says in the film. ‘I felt it throughout my whole body. It was incredible.’
Over the summer and autumn of 1960, the affair intensified. Cohen wrote, sang lullabies to her baby son, they swam, basked in the sun and talked and drank late into the night. ‘It was as if everyone was young and beautiful and full of talent – covered with a kind of gold dust,’ Cohen would later write.
Ihlen described herself as ‘his Greek muse’ but seemingly had no ambitions for herself. ‘She was someone who was searching for her identity,’ says Helle Goldman, who lived on Hydra until she was seven and returned for the summers through her youth, and who knew Ihlen and young Axel. She later translated Ihlen’s biography, So Long, Marianne, from Norwegian into English. ‘Hydra was full of people who thought they were brilliant,’ Goldman says. ‘You could reinvent yourself completely; you could say anything and be anybody. “I’m a writer”, “I’m an artist”, “I’m a poet”. Marianne was none of those things. She was a product of 1940s and 1950s Norway, and this general culture of self-effacement: “Don’t stick out, don’t make yourself too different, be like everybody else, and just be nice.”’
‘I remember my eyes met his eyes. I felt it throughout my whole body. It was incredible’
Cohen was struggling to write his first novel, The Favourite Game. Marianne brought food and drink, placing a fresh gardenia on his desk each day. ‘I used to sit on the stairs while she slept,’ he later wrote. ‘They were the most neutral part of the house, and they overlooked her sleeping. I watched her a year, by moonlight or kerosene… and nothing that I could not say or form, was lost.’ Over the next six years, Cohen would come and go from Hydra. Ihlen and Axel moved into his home, Cohen becoming the de facto parent to the boy. But as his long-time friend Aviva Layton observes in the film, ‘Poets do not make great husbands. You can’t own them. You can’t even own a bit of them. And the irony is that a man like that is a man that every woman wants to have and can’t have.’
At first, says Broomfield, it was Cohen who pursued Ihlen. ‘She was splitting up with her first husband, who I think she was very much in love with. Leonard offered solace, support and was very helpful with her son. But I think the balance of power changed, and it became very much her being in awe of Leonard. ’
Hydra was a place of intense sexual manouverings where no relationships remained exclusive for long. ‘There were simply too many beautiful people living there,’ says Helle Goldman. ‘He was having his affairs; she was having her affairs; they were both quite active in that regard. He had a voracious appetite for women. But Marianne left her own trail of broken hearts.’
In 1964, Cohen’s book of poems, Flowers for Hitler, was published, dedicated ‘to Marianne’. That same year, on Hydra, he completed his second novel, Beautiful Losers, written in a fever, on the terrace in the blazing sun, with Cohen tripping on LSD. Drugs were commonplace – Cohen cultivated marijuana on the roof of their home, which Ihlen sprinkled in the meatballs she cooked. LSD, as one friend remembers, ‘allowed him to go into madness’. On completing the book he suffered a breakdown. The reviews were uniformly hostile.
Tired of struggling to make it as a writer, Cohen set out to make a career in music. In 1966, he travelled to New York, where an introduction to the folk singer Judy Collins led to her recording his song, Suzanne. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released the following year to widespread acclaim. It included So Long, Marianne – the song that would immortalise her. In 1967, Ihlen followed Cohen to New York, living with a friend in the Lower East Side. Cohen was living at the Chelsea Hotel, infatuated with the glacial Warhol ‘superstar’ Nico and sleeping with Janis Joplin, about whom he wrote the song, Chelsea Hotel. He kept Ihlen at arm’s length, telling her, ‘This isn’t your scene.’
Cohen would later admit that gaining women’s favour ‘became the most important thing in my life’ – a life that came to resemble ‘a blue movie – but we know that blue movies are not romantic’.
‘I wanted to put him in a cage, lock him up and swallow the key,’ Ihlen says in the documentary.
‘All the girls were panting for him. It hurt so much. It destroyed me’
‘All the girls were panting for him. It hurt me so much. It destroyed me.’ At one point she contemplated suicide.
In 1968, Nick Broomfield was travelling with his father, a photographer, who was lecturing on a Hellenic cruise. Among the other passengers was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. It was Runcie’s wife who suggested that Broomfield should jump ship and make his way to Hydra – ‘one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to in my life,’ he says.
He booked into a pension known locally as the Sin Bin, sleeping in the only available space, the large oven where they had once baked bread. On his first night he met Ihlen in a nightclub, and joined her and a group of friends skinny-dipping. He was 20. She was 33. They embarked on a brief affair. ‘It was kind of like a dream.’
Broomfield had never heard of Leonard Cohen. ‘I’d been to a Quaker boarding school. I was as naive as they come.’ Ihlen played him Cohen’s music, read his poetry, and introduced Broomfield to Hydra’s bohemian circle. ‘It was this whole world opening to me.’
A few months later, Ihlen came to Britain and stayed with Broomfield in the tiny flat where he was living in Cardiff. Her erratic life had made it difficult to look after her son Axel, who was now eight, and she had enrolled him in the co-ed boarding school, Summerhill in Suffolk. ‘Axel was devastated, and so didn’t want to be there,’ Broomfield remembers. ‘But Marianne was going through so many uncertainties in her life and was so determined to see Leonard. It was a very traumatic time.’