"I shot John Lennon because of what he did to you!"
Excerpt from my memoir, Leonard Cohen: the Man Next Door, 2014
15
Postscript to a Never-Ending Story
"Fellow believers, 'There is no safety in the threefold world; it is like a burning house.' – Record of Rinzai
Diana’s life parallels my own. We both met Leonard when we were children, through the classified mind control project known as MKULTRA. As children, both of us were placed in a special program for psychically gifted children. Diana’s secret career in the military began on bases in New Brunswick. Later, she says, her mother moved to Montreal and worked for the Cohen family as a domestic. At 18, at Expo 67, someone introduced her to Leonard, then a rising star and darling of Canadian media. She went on to have a brief career in regional television, back in New Brunswick. By the mid-70s, she had met a number of people in the entertainment business, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, at whose suggestion she moved to in Denver, CO, and got involved in Primal Scream Therapy. Her therapy sessions were unearthing early childhood memories including sexual abuse and military programming.
In early September of 1979, just after the summer on Hydra, around the time I returned to Canada from Germany after saying goodbye to Annu, Diana claims she met Leonard in Denver where he performed in a small club. She doesn’t remember the name of the club, only that man suggested she come to the concert. Later, Leonard would claim it was love at first sight.
Here is where it gets terribly interesting, or just plain terrible. Soon afterwards, another man asked Diana out on a date, took her back to his place, and assaulted her. In the midst of this violent rape, the door to the apartment burst open, and Leonard Cohen walked in with a camera crew. The men began filming a scene that quickly turned into a gang rape. Then she says, Leonard held a gun to her head. “You like to be hurt, don’t you? Say it!” Another man pulled out a pile of bills and told Leonard to “snuff her.” As she was crying and pleading for her life, a little girl was brought in. Leonard told them to “get her out of here – and bring her to me later.”
It had to have all been planned beforehand, with Diana the chosen victim. Snuff films brought in tens of thousands, and Leonard in those days was short of cash. One of his Montreal contacts, involved in the pornography business, had been on Hydra a few weeks earlier, but mysteriously vanished at around the time she encountered the film crew in the Denver apartment.
Leonard refused to pull the trigger. He told the crew to leave, and take the child with them. He and Diana were left alone to spend the night together. They fell in love.
In a further fairytale twist, worthy of Hollywood’s cocaine-fuelled fantasy-factories, the would-be pornographer and his intended victim stared into each other’s eyes and fell deeply in love. A cosmic romance was born that would span more than two decades and unleash a string of Greatest Hits – beginning with Hallelujah, which Leonard began writing that very night. Offers of marriage, a promised house: “What kind would you like?” he asked her. “A wooden one,” she replied, wondering if she even liked him.
This is her story. I didn’t drag it out of her – she told it to me in response to my simple question: “How did you meet him?” It doesn’t much flatter either of them. She says Cohen appeared “clinically depressed” and was on “mind-altering drugs.” His split-second decision to spare her life – if that too was not a setup – probably came with a heavy price tag, but I’m speculating.
To Diana, a free spirit, whose magnificent breasts and tiny waist made her a magnet for male lust, it was obvious almost from the beginning that they were incompatible. Not surprising, considering their first meeting was the result of a criminal rape on the set of a pornography film, later released under the title “The Nazi and the Dog.”
Soon after that first, terrifying encounter in Colorado, and all through their early courtship, she says, he criticized her wardrobe, consisting mostly of lumberjack shirts and jeans. “Why did you have to come to me in the body of a slut?” he complained in between hints that he was soon headed to London to meet the Queen. He suggested she enroll in charm school, so she could accompany him to Buckingham Palace. This was in the autumn of 1979, when he was preparing for the Field Commander Cohen Tour which ended three months later in mid-December on a rainy morning in London where he checked into a posh hotel, a stone’s throw from Marble Arch and the headquarters of the Royal Family. I know, because I was there.
The following evening, December 20, 1979, discredited DJ and notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile was in London, hosting Top of the Pops. Even back then Savile moved in elite circles, and often spent Christmas with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband. It was a little late to introduce the ageing folksinger to his teenaged audience, but did this close friend of Prince Philip and the Queen play a role in connecting Leonard, who was already acquainted with the Rothschild family, to the Windsors and Prince Charles, who would invite him to perform at the Prince’s Concert in 1988?
Meanwhile, he stayed in touch with Diana, who lived nomadically, a traveling Muse, moving to Oakland, then to the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, where she became involved with other stars, notably Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Leonard wrote the songs that would characterize his neo-conservative Middle Period, culminating in I’m Your Man – the album he would dedicate to D.I. – Dominique Isserman – in 1988. Although Diana had made it clear he was not Her Man, she believes many of these songs were written for her. As proof she claims she mailed him a money and plywood violin, for which he thanked her sarcastically in First We Take Manhattan.
Diana recalls a bizarre showdown on the west coast, where Leonard brought Isserman and an older woman friend to confront Diana, once and for all, in what must have been a humiliating scene for all concerned. Leonard was paralyzed by ambivalence while Isserman was getting impatient for commitment. “What do you have that I don’t have?” she demanded in her charmingly French-accented English. Diana, who speaks no French, was embarrassed at this breach of feminist protocol. Bowing out of their ten-year romance, she told them all to go away. Dominique Isserman emerged victorious becoming Leonard’s public love interest, only to break off the relationship a short time later.
The absurd saga of Leonard’s reluctant Muse does not end there, either. Seventeen years later, when he was in his seventies and had allegedly lost all his money to a plundering personal assistant, Leonard Cohen came calling again. This time showed up in a camper which he parked at a homeless people’s camp where Diana was living in a tent. He had driven up from Los Angeles in a last-ditch attempt to win her heart. Well into her fifties by then, and suffering from post-traumatic stress accumulated over a lifetime of abuse, she had long given up hope of ever collecting on the house he promised her back in Denver during the fateful summer of 79. By now “their song,” Hallelujah, was a massive success, a manic-depressive hymn sung at funerals, weddings, and on American Idol -- the most over-covered song of the decade. Leonard by now was a grizzled shadow of himself, chain-smoking in the park all day and looking “just like an old bum.” For the last time, he abjectly proposed, and true to form the principled feminist, now a seasoned street person, once more gave him “da boot.”
Here her story takes a final, bewildering twist. Faced with the ultimate rejection, the desperate singer went down on both knees and pleaded for mercy and understanding. In a fruitless attempt either to gain her sympathy, or to shock some sense into her, he uttered this astonishing confession: “I shot John Lennon because of what he did to you.”
The heavens failed to open, however. La Belle Dame sans Merci withdrew to her tent, and her knight-at-arms went back to his camper and drove back to L.A.
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