Leonard
Cohen lived at Hydra,
Greece, in 1960 with Marianne C. Stang Jensen Ihlen (born in Norway 1935), and
the song "So Long, Marianne" was written to and
about her. Their relationship lasted for most of the 1960s.
Cohen
had a relationship beginning in the 1970s with the Los Angeles artist Suzanne
Elrod, with whom he has two children: a son, Adam, born in 1972, and a daughter, Lorca, born
in 1974 and named after poet Federico García Lorca. Adam Cohen began a
career as a singer–songwriter in the mid-1990s and fronts a band called Low Millions,
while Lorca took part in her father's tour team during the 2008–10 world tour
as photographer and videographer. She also shot Cohen's video for the song
"Because Of" in 2004, while her "Backstage Sketch" was
included on Cohen's 2010 DVD Songs
from the Road. She has directed and shot video clips for The Webb
Sisters and Kamila
Thompson. In 2011 Lorca gave birth to a daughter, with biological
father Rufus
Wainwright. Lorca is raising the child.
Cohen
has said that "cowardice" and "fear" prevented him from
ever actually marrying Elrod. Elrod took the cover photograph on Cohen's Live
Songs album
and is pictured on the cover of the Death of a Ladies' Man album.
She is also the "Dark Lady" of Cohen's 1978 book Death
of a Lady's Man. Cohen and Elrod split up in 1979.
"Suzanne," one of his best-known songs,
refers to Suzanne Verdal, the former wife of a friend, the Québécois sculptor Armand
Vaillancourt, rather than Elrod.
In the
1980s Cohen was in a relationship with the French photographer Dominique
Issermann, who shot his first two music videos for the songs "Dance Me to
the End of Love" and "First We Take Manhattan." Today Issermann
is most famous for her photo sessions with Carla Bruni and
for her fashion photography for magazines such as Elle; in 2010 she was the official
photographer of Cohen's world tour. Her photographs were used for the covers of
his 1993 book Stranger
Music and
his album More Best of Leonard Cohen and
for the inside booklet of Cohen's 1988 record I'm Your Man (which is dedicated to Issermann with
the words "All these songs are for you, D.I.").
In the
1990s Cohen was romantically linked to actress Rebecca De
Mornay. De
Mornay co-produced Cohen's 1992 album The Future, which is also supposedly dedicated
to her with an inscription that quotes Rebecca's
coming to the well from the Book of
Genesis chapter
24 and
giving drink to Eliezer's
camels, after he prayed for the help; Eliezer ("God is my help" in
Hebrew) is Cohen's Hebrew name, and Cohen sometimes referred to himself as
"Eliezer Cohen" or even "Jikan Eliezer".
I'd love to hear a littlew more about what in Cohen's music you find philosophically instructive. The family history, without that context, seems a bit less relevant.
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