BOOKS
Dec 10, 2020
3 minutes
JIMWIRTH
“Leonard was a very good marketeer of pain”
ATORONTO hotel room, some time in the mid-1960s. Canada’s young poetdu-jour Leonard Cohen is being interviewed by journalist and socialite Barbara Amiel (the future Mrs Conrad Black). Unsettled by the sound of a couple having sex next door, Cohen drops a bombshell: “I think I’m going to record myself singing my poems,” he says. Slightly revulsed at the sound of his nasal voice, Amiel replies, “Please don’t.”
shows how this scion of a well-to-do Montreal family stubbornly resisted career advice
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