Dearest Marianne
Leonard Cohen’s Scandinavian lover inspired his greatest songs – now their passionate romance is a new drama
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- Michael Hodges
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Few love stories have such a moving coda. Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse, Marianne Ihlen, first became romantically involved on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, when they were both 25. In July 2016, long since separated, Ihlen – who was suffering from leukaemia and close to death in her hospital bed in Norway – received an email from Cohen, which was read out to her: “Dearest Marianne, I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand. This old body has given up, just as yours has too, and the eviction notice is on its way any day now. I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more. Safe travels old friend. See you down the road. Love and gratitude. Leonard.”
A version of the email, published by Canadian broadcaster CBC, went viral. A little over three months later, Cohen was also gone, dying in his sleep after a fall at his home in Los Angeles. But Cohen and Ihlen’s relationship, inspiration for a raft of now legendary songs, refuses to leave the public’s imagination and is now the subject of an eight-part drama available on ITVX. So Long, Marianne, starring American actor Alex Wolff as Cohen and Norwegian Thea Sofie Loch Næss as Ihlen, comes after Polly Samson’s 2020 novel A Theatre for Dreamers, set on Hydra in the 1960s, and Nick Broomfield’s 2019 documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love.
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Why are we still so interested? “Because it’s a universal love story and that was reignited by the email,” says Broomfield, who himself had an affair with lhlen after arriving on Hydra as a 20-year-old in 1968, by which time Cohen was spending much of his time in New York. “I know that Leonard never expected those words to Marianne to go viral. He just thought he was sending a note to her. But it so touched people because it was a message of enduring love, and I suppose in our lives, there’s nothing more important than enduring love.”
He never expected his words to Marianne to go viral
Hydra in 1960 was a wine and amphetamine-fuelled Aegean bohemia for impecunious writers, painters and their families. These included Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen (played in the drama by Jonas Strand Gravli), his wife Marianne Ihlen and their baby son, also Axel. When Jensen left Hydra with the American artist Patricia Amlin, Marianne became Cohen’s lover; an encounter that gave us the deathless, chiming opening lines of Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye: “I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm/Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.”
The series goes heavy on the lovemaking but also flashes forward to Ilhen on her deathbed in Norway, presenting it – as they do with Næss and Wolff ’s bedroom scenes – in a dreamy soft focus. In Broomfield’s film, we see the actual moment Cohen’s final message is read out to Ihlen, thanks to footage from her friend, the Norwegian film-maker Jan Christian Mollestad. Far from being dreamy, she is having her feet massaged by a nurse at the time and laughing. “It’s a very wonderful piece of film,” says Broomfield, whose friendship with Ihlen lasted many years. “Marianne always retained an incredible sense of humour and wonder, and you can see she miraculously kept it to the very end.”
Alex Wolff and Thea Sofie Loch Næss in So Long, Marianne ITV
Which version is the truest: the ITV drama or the documentary? Perhaps both. One is a romance we would all like to believe in; the other a more troubling recounting of the relationship’s personal cost and the cultural ramifications for which Marianne, often cast as the Nordic beauty, has still not been given full credit. “She had a massive effect on making Leonard the artist he became,” says Broomfield. “She was the one who was supporting him in those early years. She brought him sandwiches and drinks as he worked, but she was a muse in a very powerful way; she read his stuff, she had something to say about it.”
Although Ihlen’s name isn’t credited on the records, some of the greatest Cohen songs undeniably belong to her as well. Particularly Bird on the Wire, says Broomfield. “Marianne told me that Leonard was incredibly depressed and couldn’t do anything. They’d just brought electricity to Hydra, and birds were sitting on the new wires. She pointed this out and it was incredibly significant because they all felt electricity would spell the end of the simple and primitive Hydra that they loved. The conversation broke Leonard out of his depression, and he started creating again. That is an example of a very direct way in which she had moved his mood and position and galvanised him into moving on, which is what she was so amazing at.”
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By the early 1970s, Cohen has given himself up to the fame the songs written on Hydra had brought him, and his visits to the island became rare. Ihlen eventually moved back to Norway and remarried, yet their connection endured. As Cohen puts it in Bird on the Wire, “I have tried in my way to be free.” Neither of them ever quite managed.
Authors
Michael Hodges
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