11/10/2023 0 Comments Leonard cohen muse marianne ihlenHe embarked on a two-year world tour in 2009, aged 74, and immediately reached out to Ihlen, as if wanting her to share his autumnal good fortune. In his song I Can’t Forget Cohen crooned a further cryptic message: ‘I’ve loved you all my life/And that’s how I want to end it’.Īs he entered his 70s, Cohen’s career enjoyed a huge, unexpected upturn, due in part to him having written the universal hit Hallelujah. Yet Ihlen, you sensed, was never far from his thoughts.ĭuring their years apart, precious letters and notes were exchanged by the lovers. Ultimately, they all discovered ‘he couldn’t give himself to them because he couldn’t give himself away’, as a friend put it.Ĭohen on stage in 2013. As he entered his 70s, Cohen’s career enjoyed a huge, unexpected upturn, due in part to him having written the universal hit HallelujahĪ ladies’ man to the last, he remained single. His many conquests would include Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell and actress Rebecca de Mornay. There was no confrontation, no discussion.’Ĭohen was already a womaniser and his new-found status only heightened his legendary appetites. His first album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, released in 1967, was a slow-burn success and professional engagements were beckoning him away from Hydra. ‘There was writing and love-making.’Ĭohen’s seductive way with words was now working for him on the world’s stage. ‘We bathed, we played, we drank, we discussed,’ she reminisced. The back-sleeve photograph on his second album, Songs From A Room, captures the simplicity of their lives: Ihlen sits at a desk in a sparse bedroom clad only in a towel. He wrote to a friend that she was ‘this perfect goddess Cohen recalled feeling that they were ‘covered with a kind of gold dust – everything we did was informed by this glittering significance’. However, the marriage was failing and Jensen had met another woman.Ĭohen offered to drive Ihlen 2,000 miles to Oslo, where she finalised her divorce.īack on Hydra, the lovers would stroll the winding streets, wearing cool white linen. He wrote to a friend feverishly describing ‘this Scandinavian goddess’ as ‘perfect’.īut Ihlen was married to Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen and they had a baby together. ‘Oh, he was beautiful!’ she later exclaimed. Ihlen had been on the island for two years when Cohen appeared, silhouetted by sunlight in a shop doorway. ‘So I’d come back to Canada and make a thousand bucks doing some job or other and then go back to Hydra and write and swim and sail. ‘At that time I could live on Hydra for $1,100 a year and live a good life,’ Cohen told me at his Los Angeles home in 1991.
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