The year 1981 - Leonard's lost year on Hydra - would have just faded into the mists of time as people got on with their lives, if not for Alberto Manzano's photos. And two biographies.
Leonard in Hydra. Photo by Alberto Manzano.
Alberto was Leonard's Spanish translator who arrived on Hydra in mid December 1980 and stayed at the house, interviewing and photographing Leonard for a book he was writing.
His photos capture the empty gaze and look of exhaustion that Leonard often wore after his secret trip to Manhattan.
They show a gloomy, haunted, angry-looking Leonard glaring at the camera or looking away from his trusted friend and translator.
Most importantly they destroy the false narrative that Leonard was "somewhere in America" from late November through 1981.
The missing year, 1981, could have faded from memory except for witnesses like Alberto and me, and others on Hydra who saw Leonard often. It would be nearly 30 years before conflicting alibis and timelines began to surface.
Two official Leonard Cohen biographies falsely claim that after his 1980 tour ended in Israel, the singer flew to NY from Tel Aviv in late November and remained "in America" through 1981 not doing much of anything.
The truth is, he was on Hydra but Hydra is barely mentioned. And neither of course is John Lennon's assassination.
Someone needed to scrub everything related to the fact that Leonard popped up in NY during the week Lennon was shot and flew back to Greece a few days later. Otherwise someone would need to explain the purpose of this 9-day trip and why it has remained off the record.
Why, years later, did someone need to promote a fake alibi if nothing important was at stake? It can't be a case of two biographers repeating each other's sloppy error and omitting a whole year, for no reason.
Too much happened in 1981 including the assassination attempts on Ronald Reagan and the Pope, and the end of the Iranian hostage crisis. John Lennon had become a martyr for the sixties' - that decade Leonard claimed he "hated" , along with the Beatles.
Like Lennon's "lost weekend" of 1973, Leonard's "lost winter" of 1980-1 on Hydra was a turning point, and a time of breakdown for the folksinger whose 1970s career model had crashed or was running on empty. The recent Ronald Reagan combed-back hairstyle did nothing for his faltering image -- he could never make it as a neocon heartthrob.
Leonard was now a single father dependent on nannies to help raise his kids. His own mother Masha Cohen had died in 1978, the year Leonard's common law marriage to Suzanne Elrod also broke up.
On Hydra in April Lewis Furey and Carole Laure introduced him to their friend, Paris photographer Dominique Isserman. She would remake his image, turning him into the tailored "man in black" who would stalk the Future in songs and videos like First We Take Manhattan. That image and trademark fedora would stick to him for the next 35 years until his death.
Effectively building on and replacing Diane Laurence's metallic portrait of him on the cover of the 1979 Recent Songs album, the new Leonard would be a sophisticated retooling of Field Commander Cohen, “our most important spy” who at 26 had “parachuted acid” into punchbowls at diplomatic cocktail parties while hanging out in Havana during the days leading up the Bay of Pigs invasion.
In 1961, after saying “so long” to Marianne Ihlen on Hydra, Leonard had flown out on his first mission for the CIA - which ended badly when he got arrested and needed to be rescued by his mother and uncle.
Twenty years had gone by since his Cuban adventure turned into a fiasco. Twenty years on, he was now a hardened operative, a veteran of Israel's 1973 Yom Kippur war, and a skilled assassin.
The lost winter of 1980-1 on Hydra was the turning point in the making of the new Leonard Cohen.
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