“But I think Leonard always gave her the credit that was her due.” “I suppose being a muse feels like an 18th-century concept because it’s not monetised,” he says. Broomfield is alive to changing mores but feels it would be wrong to “judge the past by today’s morality”. Without making any conscious decision, she effectively became his muse.īy today’s standards of gender equality, and the #MeToo awareness of male abuse of power, the very idea of a muse seems a dubious anachronism. Ihlen took care of Cohen, as he in turn provided for her. Even getting drinking water was an effort.
But, pretty and alluring as the island was, it required labour to live there. She sent her son back to Norway to live with his grandmother, then moved in with Cohen who, on turning 26, bought himself a house on Hydra. Ihlen, still only just 25, was deeply in love. At that time, he had no thought of becoming a musician. In the evening, he played his guitar and sang lullabies to Ihlen’s little boy. Rising early, he would sit on the terrace in the sun and religiously bash out his three pages a day on an old typewriter. This infancy of their affair was blissfully untroubled by the external world. It wasn’t long before Cohen and Marianne began seeing each other, first as friends and then romantically. Watch a trailer for Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love. This is, of course, the feeling of youth, but in the glorious setting of Hydra, all these qualities were magnified.” Everybody had special and unique qualities.
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In the film, the magical sense of possibility this brightly coloured jewel of the Saronic Gulf offered up to visitors is captured in glittering footage from the period.Īs Cohen later recalled: “It was as if everyone was young and beautiful and full of talent – covered with a kind of gold dust. He had fled the grey and damp of London to work on his first novel. Ihlen felt lost and abandoned, but reluctant to return home.Īround that time, in the spring of 1960, a handsome, chivalrously polite Canadian poet joined the growing Hydra artistic community. After one long split, Jensen and Ihlen got back together, married and had a baby (Axel Jnr), only for Jensen to meet another woman and leave shortly after the child was born. It was a common preoccupation among the expat community and not always restricted to the men. The couple had a tempestuous relationship, with the writer determined to reject bourgeois conventions in ways that conveniently coincided with his interest in other women. She was with a young, avant-garde Norwegian novelist called Axel Jensen. Marianne Ihlen had first come to Hydra in early 1958, when the living conditions were primitive and the expat artists could be counted on one hand. Photograph: James Burke/The Life Picture Collection/Getty ImagesĪt the heart of this liberating idyll was a beautiful woman 13 years his senior, the mother of an eight-year-old boy. Leonard Cohen (holding the guitar) with Marianne (looking at him) and friends in Hydra, Greece, October 1960. And her effect on the film-maker was almost as influential as her part in the Canadian poet-musician’s career. They too were lovers for a while during one of the long breaks in Ihlen’s relationship with Cohen. Broomfield is not a disinterested observer. The relationship’s legacy was a catalogue of classic songs – So Long Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Bird on the Wire – a great deal of heartache, but also a lasting sense of the creative power of love.Īll of this the documentary maker Nick Broomfield explores in his tender, funny and hauntingly moving new film Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love. Theirs had been a large and chaotic romance that was in many respects a product of the particular times (the 1960s) and the specific place (the Greek island of Hydra) in which they met. I n November 2016, the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, renowned for his plaintive ballads, died a few months after the woman who inspired many of them, his Norwegian lover and muse, Marianne Ihlen.