Secrets, millionaire commissions and falsifications: the judicial fight without quarter for the legacy of Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen kept it all: a scribble on a napkin, letters to his mother, the wine list of the mythical Max's Kansas City in New York on which one night he wrote a poem to a certain Joan... Even the evaluation of the camp in the summer of 1948, perhaps because she was complimentary: "He is very active, a wonderful leader, a good sportsman, and generally a capable camper," the typewritten letter says of the boy.

All these memories, along with photographs, watercolours, sketches, manuscripts, own and others' first editions and digital drawings await in the rooms of the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, in the first exhibition that shows the archive of the Canadian poet and singer-songwriter .

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The material comes from two sources: the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, which received its deposits in four times, the first as early as 1964, and the Leonard Cohen Family Trust, established to manage an archive with , among other objects, 243 notebooks and 8,000 photographs, painstakingly collected over a lifetime.

A Leonard Cohen entry on the menu at Max's Kansas City, 1967. Courtesy © Leonard Cohen Family Trust

Beneath the glittery veneer of the sampler, titled

after the somber 1988 song co-written with Sharon Robinson, lurks an all-out court fight over the composer's legacy.

He faces, seven years after his death in 2016, his children, Adam, 50, and Lorca, 48, with the trustee, Robert Kory, 72, who has been his manager for the last decade and helped

to get back to business.

The musician, born in Montreal in 1934, hired Kory after the scandalous dismissal of his previous manager, under whose direction $5 million of his "retirement" savings vanished while the singer lived in retirement in a Buddhist monastery in California.

The fight for his eternal rest is now being fought in a Los Angeles court, where the musician died and where his children live, the ultimate beneficiaries of the trust.

They filed a lawsuit in March last year, one of the court documents to which EL PAÍS has had access, in which the set is valued at 48 million dollars (just over 45 million euros).

In it, they explain that their "concern about the unrestricted control" that Kory was exercising over the Cohen legacy, in addition to their "lack of transparency", led to "months of negotiations" to review the terms of the agreement.

According to the plaintiffs, Kory promised to keep them better informed of his dealings and to ask their opinion before making decisions, but "it only took weeks" to break that pact by signing the contract to organize the exhibition at the Toronto museum and for the publication of an "unpublished unfinished novel".

'Self Portrait', Leonard Cohen, circa 1975. © Leonard Cohen Family Trust

That novel, the short and early

, was in the archives of the University of Toronto and is a bitter story of physical and emotional violence that was published last fall to good reviews in English, along with 15 short stories and a radio script, all written between 1956 and 1960. At the time, Cohen was a poet in his twenties and his break into song did not come until 1967, at age 35, with his masterful debut for the Columbia label.

Editorial Lumen plans to publish

in Spanish at the end of this month, with the translation by Miguel Temprano García.

In their response to the complaint, Kory's lawyers allege that "the crux of the dispute is Adam and Lorca Cohen's desire to obtain control over the patrimony and inheritance of the father (...), despite the clear wishes of this in life to keep that control out of the hands of their children.

"In fact," the court brief continues, "Leonard not only wanted to prevent that from happening, but for a time he even planned to disinherit them completely, until Kory convinced him otherwise."

At another point, the father is said to have believed Adam and Lorca "did not have a comfortable enough relationship to work together on the intricacies of the artist's estate."

In the papers, they state that their father concluded at the end of his days "that he had made a grave mistake in allowing Kory to meddle in Leonard's affairs and take control of virtually all aspects of finances." and the legacy.

a false document

In a telephone interview with EL PAÍS, Adam Streisand, a famous Los Angeles lawyer who represents Adam and Lorca and is a cousin of Barbra Streisand, explained this Friday that this first lawsuit was followed by another, filed in August of last year.

“Working on the case, we discovered that the document that supposedly appointed Kory as trustee was a forgery.

When we took a statement from Reeve Chudd, who was the singer's attorney and now represents Kory, he had no choice but to confess,” Streisand recalled.

In his testimony, Chuud admitted removing a page from the document and replacing it with another that gave the manager more powers.

In light of that finding, the plaintiffs petitioned the court for their immediate dismissal and an order to hand over the assets of the estate and return the money earned from their work.

'One of Those Days', watercolor drawing in a notebook by Leonard Cohen, 1980-1985.

© Leonard Cohen Family Trust

That's not all, notes Streisand, who has tried other celebrity estate cases in the past, from Michael Jackson to Muhammad Ali: "In July 2016, months before Leonard's death, Kory had his client sign a contract that gave him the right to a 15% commission for the sale of the catalog and/or the archive.

A conflict of interest arises from this, because, as a trustee, your job is to pay the taxes and distribute the assets among the beneficiaries, who are the children, but, paradoxically, what is best for you financially is to sell those assets, so that you can get the commission.

And here comes another source of conflict.

In February of last year, Hipgnosis, a company specialized in acquiring the repertoires of great music legends, bought the rights to the 278 songs by Leonard Cohen.

And that includes immortal compositions like

or

which has been covered more than 300 times, despite the fact that the album that contained it,

, was never released in the United States, because his record company had no faith in him.

Of that sale of the catalogue, valued at 58 million dollars (54.5 million euros) in court documents, Kory took 15%.

The lawsuit also alleges that Cohen signed that agreement when he was "dying and heavily medicated" for the cancer that killed him at age 82.

Kory did not respond to this newspaper's request for an interview.

“The museum knew nothing”

In the catalog for the Toronto show, Kory writes that his "ultimate duty has been to organize and digitize the archive (in all, 550 terabytes), with the intention of making it available for scholars, for exhibition, and for future generations." ”.

A source close to the family, who spoke to EL PAÍS on condition of anonymity, explained that "despite the fact that they had the capacity" Adam and Lorca were never in the mood to "suspend the exhibition or prohibit the sale of their Catalogue";

"To do otherwise would be doing even more damage to the legacy of Leonard Cohen."

“Clearly, the museum knew nothing of all this.

They were deceived, ”explained the aforementioned source.

'Angry at 11 pm' ('Angry at 11 pm'), self-portrait by Leonard Cohen.

Color Polaroids.

© Leonard Cohen Family Trust

The curator of the show, Julian Cox, who is also deputy director and chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, clarified in a telephone interview that the musician "had a very complicated relationship with his children" and that "he was an absent father for most of his upbringing.

“As he got older, that relationship got better in a lot of ways.”

Adam and Lorca, he added, "were not involved in the process of putting together the Toronto show."

"Neither did they do it with the 2018 Montreal [

, which mixed his legacy with the work of contemporary artists]."

Unlike that one, which later traveled to New York, the current one is not expected to end up in other places.

“I think the idea of ​​the trust is to sell the file, preferably to a Canadian university,” Cox said.

(After an initial interview with the curator, EL PAÍS tried unsuccessfully to contact the museum again to verify some of the data collected in the court documents).

Streisand confirms the children's interest in the sale of the archive and also that their clients are okay with the idea as long as they retain control over the operation.

Cohen on Hydra (with typewriter), 1960. Photographer unknown.

© Leonard Cohen Family Trust

The only sure thing at this point is that the destination of that treasure will not be the University of Toronto.

"We no longer buy writers' bequests, although we do accept donations, for which Canadian authors receive tax breaks," Natalya Ratan, an archivist at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, said in an email this week, clarifying that the contribution to the exhibition of the Art Gallery of Ontario of the institution in which he works is limited to the loan of “11 objects”.

The library acquired from a thirty-something Cohen in 1964 and 1966, “for a price that was not made public”, 12 boxes of papers, in which, Ratan confirmed, there is even more unpublished material.

That money helped the young artist to buy time to devote himself to traveling and growing as a writer.

The institution received more material, this time as a gift, in 1999 and 2003, but these deposits, unlike the previous ones, are not available for

The sale of the archives of the sixties speaks of the fame that, already being very young, our man achieved in Canada as a poet.

He also indicates that he was always aware that he was destined for greatness and that if he kept everything it was because he had a feeling that one day the world would want to take a look at his things.

revered as a legend

A visit to

, at the Toronto museum, confirms that hunch was spot on.

Beyond the feud between heirs, the exhibition is a fascinating journey through the life of Cohen, who lost his father at age nine but inherited a leather-bound library of poetry.

The trip begins with his childhood as a member of a wealthy family of rabbis, Talmud students and businessmen, and reaches the videos that say goodbye to the visitor with recordings of the successful world tours in which the old bard, always wearing a hat, he was revered as a legend.

In between, dozens of photographs and self-portraits appear, another obsession, the young poet with extraordinary diction, the years in Greece, the leap into a musical career, life on the road (the four bottles of wine a day and "the Appetite Ceremony"), Nashville Days and Gun Hobbying.

All this gives way to quiet maturity in a beautiful house with a spartan air in the Little Portugal neighborhood of Montreal, which gives no clues about where he could keep so much paper, the move to Los Angeles, the retreat in the Buddhist monastery, the prizes (also the Prince of Asturias) and the return to the road already past the seventy.

Cohen in Mt. Baldy, California, 1995. Photographer unknown.

Instant print (Fuji FP-100C).

© Leonard Cohen Family Trust

The exhibition, which serves as a review of the great themes of his work (love, religion, sex, sacred and profane desire, death or the search for transcendence and freedom) does not waste time with his intimacy, although there are wisps here and there about the women in his life, lovers and friends, like the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, another Canadian, who in a telegram to Greece from Los Angeles tells him: "Hello, Leonard, can you still think of me?"

Tangent stories also appear in passing, such as that of Axel Jensen, son of one of his most stable partners, Marianne Ilhen, who is seen in a black and white photograph taken in 1964 by Cohen himself on the Greek island of Hydra, his private Arcadia in the sixties.

Jensen recently starred in a crude documentary in which he recounted from an Oslo psychiatric hospital what happened after the years of the revolution of the customs of his parents' generation.

The curator justified to EL PAÍS his decision not to delve beyond those sparks into the private universe of the genius, alleging that his work "is not that of a biographer."

"The objects that we exhibit have to guide me."

Cox explained that another of his aspirations was to “shed light” on a little-known aspect of Cohen's work: his art, from the pastels and watercolors on paper of the 1980s to the digital drawings of recent times.

“He was an early convert to Apple technology,” Cox added.

The notebooks are the most interesting part of the journey, which divides a multi-channel video made from interviews in which all of the above is recounted by her consciously seductive voice.

Cohen, we are told, would always leave the house with a notepad or wad of paper to record his various creative interests.

Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah notebook.

1983-1984.

© Leonard Cohen Family Trust

"I never accompanied him to the bathroom, but I'm sure he must have had a few notebooks there as well," British music journalist Sylvie Simmons, author of I'm Your

reference biography on the composer.

“It is an obsession that he had since he was little.

A childhood friend of his once told me that when he was 9 or 10 years old he always carried a notebook with him.

And he lost them constantly.

Much later, in 2012, [the singer-songwriter] spoke to me about the importance of taking note, and how that had helped keep him close to sanity.

It was not a surprise;

already in one of his first songs,

there is a verse that says: 'I hope you're keeping some kind of record'.

Simmons recalled that, despite his obsession with keeping everything, "from the sublime to the ridiculous," his houses in Hydra, Los Angeles and Montreal were spartan, like those of a monk.

“There was never anything hanging on the walls, let alone a gold record.

The file was in the garage."

These boxes, the biographer continued, could contain, without order, magazine clippings, a library loan record, or photographs from different periods of her life.

They also served as the roadmap for her creativity.

For example, when writing the lyrics to her songs, which she could think of for years.

She had the habit of producing many more verses than she later ended up using, as can be seen in an interesting documentary from last year about that practice taken to paroxysm: Hallelujah

(Netflix).

The musician took advantage of his Buddhist retreat to order and index the contents of his notebooks.

Homework helped him focus, he said.

His dedication also gives an idea of ​​the importance that he, without telling almost anyone, gave to the archive as a creative strategy during his life.

In a 1996 interview with one of his early biographers, Cohen left at least one clue when he declared: "The archive is the mountain and the published work is the volcano."

What he could not know then is that, seven years after his death, the object of his efforts is about to erupt among his heirs in a Los Angeles courthouse.