"And she feeds you tea and oranges..."
The Story of Suzanne

From the National February 3, 2006
Reporter: Paul Kennedy
Producer: Alex Shprintsen

Now Suzanne takes you down
to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside…

You would be hard put to find anyone over 40 who doesn't know Leonard Cohen's Suzanne, penned by the Canadian poet and singer-songwriter and recently entered into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.

But what about the woman behind the lyrics? She remains relatively unknown, although her story is as interesting as the song she inspired. Suzanne's tale is less poetic and more complex than you might imagine, even tragic. It speaks of a beautiful young woman, an artist in her own right, who inspires an up-and-coming young poet to write an immortal love song.

They inevitably part ways.

His career takes off.

Her life falls slowly apart.

From Montreal's Mountain Street to Venice Beach, California

Today, Leonard Cohen's muse, Suzanne Verdal, lives in Venice Beach, California.

She finds emotional support in the colourful and eccentric bohemian community that thrives there.

"Venice Beach is an old landmark for the intellectuals, the writers, artists of the 30s and 40s and the free spirits, the free thinkers," Verdal says. "Bohemian life is still alive and well down here. It's not as obvious as before, but it's still here." It's a life Verdal says she cannot live without.

To truly understand what makes Verdal tick, it's important to revisit bohemian life in the streets of Montreal in the early 1960s. Montreal was far and away the most exciting city in Canada back then. The clubs on St. Catherine's Street never seemed to close. Montreal was sexy in both official languages.

At the same time, Leonard Cohen was at the centre of a vibrant group of young poets and artists, including sculptor Armand Vaillancourt.

"He's a friend and I have great respect for this man and his songs, beautiful, you know," Vaillancourt says.

As it turns out, Vaillancourt was married to Suzanne Verdal. "As a young schoolgirl, me, I was just out of high school, meeting this demigod as it were," Verdal says. "And then we started to go together, and we went for quite a time," recalls Vaillancourt. "I don't know how long we were together. It's vague in my head. We accomplished many things while we were together. Travelling, having fun."

It was then, in the full swing of the 1960s, that Verdal and Cohen met.

Suzanne, the song, was born out of that encounter in a Montreal Mountain Street coffee house called Le Bistro.

Cohen remembers the occasion in a yet-to-be-released documentary:

"There was a woman named Suzanne who was the wife of a friend of mine, Armand Vaillancourt, who is a great Montreal sculptor, still a friend of mine, and his wife was Suzanne Vaillancourt. She invited me down to her place near the river, and she did serve me constant tea filled with little pieces of orange."

"It was a very private thing that I felt like I had with Leonard," Verdal recalls. "It was kind of like a very 'sympathical' wavelength thing - that we would read each other's minds. We were very in tune with each other. It was kind of strange to have it blossom into this famous song that everyone was singing."

For you've touched her perfect body with your mind…

Leonard Cohen was always a bit of a lady's man. From his perspective, he's never spent a lot of time trying to discourage this reputation. He's a sexy guy, like the city he grew up in. But on the record, he's said he didn't want his relationship with Suzanne to be, as he put it, "compromised by carnality."

Here's how he explained himself during an interview in the mid 90s:

"It's not just the copulation. It is the whole understanding that we are irresistibly attracted to one another, and we have to deal with this. We are irresistibly lonely for each other, and we have to deal with this, and we have to deal with our bodies and with our hearts and souls and minds, and it's an urgent appetite."

At least that's how he puts it. For her part, Verdal says:

"I was the one that put the boundaries on that because Leonard is actually a very sexual man and very attractive and very charismatic. And I was very attracted to him, but somehow I didn't want to spoil that preciousness, that infinite respect that I had for him, for our relationship, and I felt that a sexual encounter might demean it somehow." That precious relationship produced a great piece of art.

Judy Collins was the first to have a hit with Suzanne in English. But it soon went around the world. Pauline Julien sang it in French. A pre-Abba Frida sang it in Swedish. There's even a Polish version.

In fact, the song has been covered hundreds of times, although it's impossible to ignore the original. Even Leonard Cohen himself can't hide his pride. "It's a good song; seems to have lasted. To place a song into the air and have it last 20 years, it's a wonderful feeling," he says.

By the time Suzanne made the hit parade, the muse was no longer in contact with Leonard Cohen.

Verdal worked initially in Montreal as a dancer and choreographer at Expo '67. She danced for CBC for a while, then left for San Francisco, the south of France, Texas, New York… Her path eventually crossed Cohen's again in the late 1970s. "I saw him in Minnesota, Minneapolis, I think after a show. I was living there at the time, and I went backstage to see him after the show. There was so many people around him, reporters and journalists and so forth, and he spied me in the crowd and … I went over to him and I said 'Hi' and 'Great show,' and he said, 'You gave me a beautiful song, girl.'

"It was a nice moment and I left after that. I didn't have a chance to talk one-on-one."

"I came here with high goals…"

In the early 1980s, after wandering around the world, Verdal found herself back in Montreal. She opened up a dance studio and snagged some gigs on TV. Professionally things were pretty good, but her personal life was in shambles. She was a single mom with three kids by three different fathers; she still found it impossible to put down roots.

In 1992, Verdal built herself a mobile wooden camper and headed west. Soon she was back in California again driving around L.A. trying to get work as a choreographer for music videos. Just as things were beginning to go almost as well as anyone would have wanted, disaster struck. Verdal had a terrible fall from a ladder, severely injuring her back and wrists.

Unable to dance, Verdal found herself with no money and increasingly depressed.

"When I broke my back, to be honest with you, I had some very dark moments of despair where I was suicidal," she says. "I have been homeless for three years because of my financial circumstances; I'm technically disabled, and you cannot find a place to live on disability."

For the past few years, Verdal has been driving every day to a dead-end street in an industrial subdivision where she parks her truck and spends the night. It's where she sleeps and cooks and eats.

But she's not alone. Verdal has always known how to find help from her friends.

There's Raj, an astrologer and aspiring screenwriter who met her at his booth on Venice Beach. "She is a very giving and nurturing soul, and I think that people need that. If she had a house out here, she'd still take you down and feed you oranges, I believe that."

Then there's a guy called Jingles, who has newfound respect for Verdal after learning about her connection to Cohen: "That's really beautiful. Wow, that's real special… I love Leonard Cohen, I worship the ground he walks on. I love his music and his voice, his songs, his poetry."

Despite new friends like Jingles, and despite former friends like Leonard Cohen, there's nothing easy about being homeless. Suzanne Verdal has to drive around town just to find a place to shower or use the bathroom. She credits her collection of stray cats with saving her life as much as she's saved theirs.

"Suzanne is one of these rare souls who is actually sincere and cares about life and people and sees the world in terms of beauty," says her friend Raj. "A lot of people say that, but she's one of these people who actually lives it."

Verdal likes to say she's made an art out of homelessness: "To live in a crawl space with a back in my condition with five rescued animals is no small deal. I'm a little weary, and the housing costs are absolutely astronomical."

It takes more than poverty and a painfully broken back to keep Verdal from dancing. Every Sunday, there's a drum circle in Venice Beach. She goes there with her friends. Dancing, she says, helps her to focus on where she's been and where she's going: "You know, what's kind of bittersweet and poignant is I came here with high goals and I didn't achieve much of those goals."

"And she leads you to the river…"

Verdal's new goal is to write her memoirs, a task which recently brought her back to Montreal, where she revisited a past full of pleasures and disappointments. Her old apartment, where Leonard Cohen came to visit her many times, has been turned in to an upscale boutique hotel.

"When he came, he was quite impressed to see, how shall we say, the frugal quality of my life at the time, but poetic nonetheless," she says. " I was raving about how beautiful - 'Look at the waterfront! Look at the view!' - and I guess he took notice of that and wrote a poem about it."

Entering room 202 is a bit like seeing the movie after reading the book - it is exactly the spot where Suzanne fed tea and oranges to Leonard Cohen. There ought to be an historical plaque, though the hotel doesn't even charge extra for the room.

Just down the street from her place near the river sits Montreal's Place Jacques-Cartier. In the 1980s, Suzanne used to dance there alongside other buskers. "I always gravitate towards water," she says.

It's also the somewhat painful place where the poet last confronted his muse.

"Leonard Cohen came up to me. I saw him in the crowd and I went up to him and I curtsied to him, and after the dance was done, he walked away," she recalls. "I didn't understand. There was no acknowledgment from Leonard, and I did think about that for quite a while, actually. It was rather upsetting."

"Success does things to people - 'success' like fame," Verdal says. "It could be that Leonard was intimidated by the fact that I stayed true to the 60s. I stayed true to those values, as it were, and he became a big star. Maybe it was embarrassing to him to see me still in my simplicity and my humility while he was … I don't know. I'm trying to understand these things, the mechanics of why we didn't connect anymore."

"That happens to the best of lovers"

At John Abbott College in Montreal, Ed Palumbo considers Cohen to be one of the uplifting segments of his Canadian literature class.

"Is the muse expendable?" Palumbo asks. "Perhaps. I think in the case of Suzanne, it appears she really is - or was. On the other hand, the muse is bigger than the poet, at least in the mythology. The muse is the source of what there is, the inspiration. Does the muse have a claim on anything more than that role? My instinct tells me no."

Verdal's first husband and Leonard Cohen's long-time friend, Armand Vaillancourt, remains unsure: "I don't know if Suzanne fell in love with him. I think Leonard is like a, you know, you walk in the bush, you look at one tree, but you don't spend the rest of your life there. You move ahead, you have another place to go, and it's surely like that."

Verdal, it seems, is always moving ahead - or at least along. In fact, she's on the road again. It just didn't work out in Canada this time, so she's gone back to L.A., at least for the time being. "It's sad … that happens to the best of lovers or friendships. [They] go different ways and you don't really know why, just the energy is polarized. It leaves you with some kind of empty feeling."

It's hard to describe the feeling of meeting a fully certified genuine muse like Suzanne.

Leonard Cohen met her in Montreal in the early 60s.

He wrote a song.

Forty years later, it's still possible to see what inspired the poet to write his song about Suzanne, but not even the perfect mind of a poet could ever hope to imagine where his muse has been in the meantime.