I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: suzanne verdal

  • Suzanne (Part II) Stop! In the Name of Love


    Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river

    She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters

    And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor

    And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers

    There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning

    They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever

    While Suzanne holds the mirror.

    And you want to travel with her and you want to travel blind

    And you know that you can trust her

    For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

    —– Leonard Cohen

    Okay.  Let me define TMI for you, TMI as in Too Much Information.  The Great Spirit of Cyberspace giveth, and The Great Spirit of Cyberspace taketh away.  I’m not kidding you.

    In the summer of 1965 a very young, beautiful free-spirited woman named Suzanne Verdal moved into an apartment along the waterfront of the St. Lawrence River with her daughter Julie.  She was recently separated from her husband Armand who was a sculptor as well as her dance partner.  She was very much a part of the cultural scene in Montreal at the time.  The time was the 60s and the poetry was called Beat and the music was called folk.  Evidently Suzanne was so hot she became the muse for many of the Beat Poets and folk singers in Canada.

    Leonard Cohen was one of her frequent waterfront visitors in the summer of ’65. A year later he published a poem about their summer together – a poem that Judy Collins fell in love with – and the rest, as they say, is history.  Leonard Cohen became a  legendary  poet and songwriter as a result of the song’s success and went on to fame and fortune and a ton of awards.   I love happy endings.

    Why couldn’t I leave it at that?  No, that would be too easy.  I had to wonder what happened to the beautiful mysterious woman who was the bohemian inspiration for the poem and yes, it is possible to find out anything about anyone in cyberspace.  Beep, beep, beep – danger, danger.  Keep away from Suzanne and Leonard.  They didn’t stay in touch much.

     Through my research I learned that the tea of “tea and oranges” was Constant Comment Tea.  Seriously?  Constant Comment Tea?  I remember it well.  It was the tea in gift packages I got for Christmas in the 60s from people who didn’t know I never drank any tea brand other than Lipton.  It was a fancy tea all right because it came in tiny little expensive decorated boxes with only six bags and not the super size I usually bought of Lipton with at least twenty-four bags.

    And the “oranges that came all the way from China” and are indirectly responsible for my posts about the song were Mandarin oranges.  Duh.  Of course.  But here’s the difference between most of us who write and Leonard Cohen.  Leonard transformed la-tea-dah Constant Comment and ordinary oranges into exotic words that stirred our imaginations and became a part of the incredible beauty of a  love song that haunts a generation of lovers to this day nearly fifty years later.

    Suzanne was also an early recycling activist and really did make her clothes and her daughter’s clothes from pieces of cloth she bought at the Salvation Army in Montreal. She never reaped any financial rewards from her association with the song that bore her name, but she said in a BBC radio interview in 1998 she knew it was about her and that summer of 1965 in Canada.  She described her memory of the physically unconsummated spiritual relationship with Cohen and their subsequent lack of communication as now bittersweet but thought of it as a tribute to her youth.

     In one of life’s great ironies  Suzanne lived a few miles away from the Mt. Baldy Zen Monastery in California in 1998.  Yes, indeedy, the same monastery where Leonard lived for five years  from  1994 through 1999 and became a Buddhist monk.  I mean, they were just right down the road from each other and didn’t speak.

    Please don’t let me read any more, I said to myself but kept right on reading.  I  discovered to my horror that Suzanne’s later real life became a tragedy of looking among the “garbage and the flowers” when she suffered an injury in 1999 from a fall and became a homeless person living on the streets of Santa Monica.  Her career as a dance teacher and choreographer that had supported her in the years after she left Montreal was over – and so was my research.

    In 1966 when I heard Judy Collins sing Suzanne at the UT concert in Austin, I didn’t know anything about Suzanne Verdal and was just becoming aware of Leonard Cohen.  I didn’t care.  I only knew it was the most beautiful folk love song I’d ever heard and I memorized the lyrics and learned to play it on my tenor guitar and proceeded to sing it to girls I was trying very hard to impress with my romantic sense and sensibilities.  Those efforts were unsuccessful but it wasn’t the song’s fault.

    I confess my favorite song in 1965 was Stop! In the Name of Love by Diana Ross and The Supremes.  I belted that song out over and over in the privacy of my parents’ living room every time I was home from college.  I turned the stereo up full tilt and filled in for Diana Ross as The Supremes backed me up.  I never sang it to impress anyone other than myself.

    So two borders away (the US and Texas borders) from Suzanne and Leonard strolling along the St. Lawrence River of life in 1965, I was blissfully unaware that a song I will always love was being born and that the stories behind it are the life stories of us all.

    P.S. Luckily for you all, I skipped the second verse.

  • Suzanne (Part I)


    Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

    You can hear the boats go by, you can stay the night beside her

    And you know that she’s half-crazy, but that’s why you want to be there.

    And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her,

    She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

    Then she gets you on her wave-length and lets the river answer

    that you’ve always been her lover.

    And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind

    And you know that you can trust her,

    for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.

    ————- Leonard Cohen

    Alrighty then.  Why Suzanne?  Why Leonard Cohen?  All I can tell you is that my friend Donna and her partner Jenn served delicious fruit as a healthy dessert choice to go with the German chocolate cake unhealthy choice at their home two nights ago.  The fruit was partially seasoned by fresh-squeezed orange juice, they told us, and it was delicious.

    The mind is a mysterious meandering maze of memories.  Somehow from that offhand reference to oranges, I have been singing the first lines of Leonard Cohen’s poem turned song that I heard Judy Collins sing at a UT concert in Austin in 1966.  Luckily, I have confined my singing to myself in my mind and haven’t annoyed Teresa with the repetitious melody in our shower or elsewhere. No matter how haunting I might feel it to be, I fear the possibility of getting on her last nerve.

    The singer in my head is as good as I think it was in 1966 when I memorized those lines to Suzanne and strummed along on my tenor guitar, but the out-loud singer today has a strange vibrato and erratic cracking sound so I rarely use it.

    Anyhow, I immersed myself this morning with the life and loves of Leonard Cohen.  It’s taken a while because he began writing poetry in his teens and is still giving concerts at the age of 79.  He is a prolific musician, singer-songwriter, poet and novelist who was born in Canada in 1934.  His personal life mirrors the life of most of us lesser mortals.  His financial fortunes have been won – and lost through a crooked trusted agent whom he sued and from whom he never recovered his money – and then changed for the better in his later life.

    Mr. Cohen apparently never suffered from a lack of female companions.  As the decades of his life came and went, so did the women he loved and lived with.  Despite his successes in the music world and the realm of literature and his long-term relationships, he struggled all of his life with depression.  Many of my favorite songs written by Leonard Cohen reflect that struggle.

    In 1994 he began a five-year seclusion at the Mt. Baldy Zen Monastery outside of Los Angeles, and he was ordained as a monk two years later.  He credited that time as a tremendous healing experience but never renounced his Judaism by becoming a Buddhist.

    That must’ve been a long, long way from his touring Europe and Israel in 1972 with Charlie Daniels in a band nicknamed “The Army” and an even LONGER distance from his Beat Poet days in Montreal in the early 60s when he met the young woman who would inspire the poem that transformed his life.

    Suzanne Verdal was something else.

    I’ll save her for next time.