leonard cohen, man next door

People who never knew Leonard Cohen have repeated the rumor that I "stalked" him so often it has taken on a life of its own. Lately two women on Twitter started a new smear campaign around this false claim, with nothing to support it but more hot air and envy. It's sad to see women who, had they ever got as close to him as I did, would likely have concluded he was a predatory creep and run the other way. Back in 1977 when I met him in Montreal (he phoned me one night in November out of the blue, or more accurately I guess, out of the dark) many women found him repulsive and dangerous. I was warned to stay away from him and several times had refused to engage when we crossed paths in the street. The fact that I'm 6 feet tall has always been a protection. Leonard was 5'8" - but he could project dominance and a friend who met him at a party said he was sexually aggressive with her to the point that she had to leave to get away. In 1977 he was 43 which seemed pr...

A few days ago I was telling Kelley Lynch about those years before she met Cohen in NY in the late 80s and became his agent while working for Marty Machat-- picking up his flagging career and getting him back on his feet with his comeback album I'm Your Man in 1988. She saved his ass - no question about it - at a time when the hometown crowd was declaring him dead. Back in Montreal his future "stalker" -- me -- had moved in next door and was ensconced on St Dominique. My windfall el cheapo on the second floor overlooked Leonard's back fence and the little courtyard he shared with Hazel. How the universe arranged this is, and was, beyond my understanding but I was a witness to his gargantuan/lilliputian empire moves in a decade when he seemed definitively washed up... He was turning 49 that year which was terminal for a pop star back then. He had made a few ill-advised and embarrassing stabs at theater and movies: Night Magic with Lewis Furey, the Leonard Cohen Sho...

  Tuesday, 17 July 2012 The Unholy Messiah September 21, 1980. I had decided to come back to Hydra and save Leonard. It's difficult to look back at the silly young woman who did all this mainly because she was in love at the time. Also, I had just come into some money, i.e. a Canada Council grant to write a novel. The first thing I did with it was buy a ticket to Greece. A few months earlier my mother had died, of complications from a 15-year battle with arthritis. My father had died of a heart attack six years earlier. I was 29, remarkably naive but also fairly sensitive, and heading into my first Saturn return. Not that these are exactly excuses, but they help me to distance myself from my reckless self of thirty years ago. I was very prone to dreams, back then, and some of my dreams were precognitive. Or rather, I would receive information in them that would later prove accurate. I was also eccentric enough to base some of my decisions and actions on...

FULL TEXT OF MY INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL POSNER FOR HIS BOOK "LEONARD COHEN: UNTOLD STORIES"   --  with corrections added and highlighted in yellow.  A   Did anyone ever mention that he would glitter in conversation? It was like something took him over that was very shiny. Those were the moments I learned to distrust the most. —Ann Diamond ANN DIAMOND: He seemed oppressed by a weight of some sort. He’d entertain you, but you’d sense something burdening him. He’d talk a lot about his depression and how unhappy he felt—this “veil of tears,” this “disaster that we’re living in.” ANN DIAMOND: I had started running into Leonard that summer. He’d stop me and look like he wanted to talk, but I didn’t have a very good feeling about him. The second or third time, I felt bad about it and told Peter Katountas, and he said, “I’ll give him your phone number.” PETER KATOUNTAS: That afternoon, I’m walking home and who’s coming along but Leonard? I said, “Apparently you ...