I'm Your Man Read online

  The summer of 1948, the bridge between leaving Roslyn Elementary and starting at Westmount High, was once again spent at summer camp. Among the mementos from Camp Wabi-Kon in Leonard’s archives are a swimming and water safety certificate, and a document written in a neat, child’s hand and signed by Leonard and six other boys. A schoolboy pact, it read: “We should not fight and we must try to get along better. We should appreciate things better. We should be better sports and we should have more spirit. We shouldn’t boss each other around. We must not use foul language.”7 They had even devised a list of penalties, ranging from missing supper to going to bed half an hour early.

  The boyish earnestness and idealism had an almost Enid Blyton–like innocence to it. Back home in his bedroom on Belmont Avenue, though, Leonard was thinking about girls—cutting pictures of models from his mother’s magazines and gazing out of the window as the wind whipped up the skirts of the women as they walked through Murray Hill Park or plastered them deliciously to their thighs. In the back pages of his comic books he would study the Charles Atlas ads that promised puny little boys like himself the kind of muscles it takes to woo a girl. Leonard was small for his age; a new use the adolescent had found for Kleenex was to wad it up and put it in his shoes to make lifts. It bothered Leonard that he was shorter than his friends—some of the girls in his high school class were a head taller—but he started to learn that girls could be won around “by stories and talk.” In The Favorite Game his alter ego “began to think of himself as the Tiny Conspirator, the Cunning Dwarf.”8 In Rona Feldman’s recollection, Leonard in fact was “extremely popular” with the girls in their class, although, due to his height, “most girls thought he was adorable more than a hunk. I just remember him being very sweet. He had that same kind of grin that he has now, a little bit of a half grin, kind of shy, and when he smiled it was so genuine, it was so satisfying to see him smile. I think he was very well liked.”

  Since the age of thirteen Leonard had taken to going out late at night, two or three nights a week, wandering alone through the seedier streets of Montreal. Before the Saint Lawrence Seaway was built the city was a major port, the place where all the cargo destined for central North America went to be offloaded from oceangoing freighters and put on canal boats and taken up to the Great Lakes or sent by rail to the West. At night the city swarmed with sailors, longshoremen and passengers from the cruise ships that docked in the harbor, and welcoming them were countless bars, which openly flouted the law requiring that they close at three A.M. The daily newspapers carried notices for shows on Saint Catherine Street that started at four in the morning and ended just before dawn. There were jazz clubs, blues clubs, movie houses, bars where the only thing they played was Quebecois country and western, and cafés with jukeboxes whose content Leonard came to know by heart.

  Leonard wrote about his night ramblings in an unpublished, undated piece from the late fifties titled “The Juke-Box Heart: Excerpt From a Journal.” “When I was about 13 yrs old I did the things my friends did until they went to bed, then I’d walk miles along Saint Catherine street, a night-lover, peeking into marble-tabled cafeterias where men wore overcoats even in the summer.” There was a boyish innocence to his description of his early wanderings: peering into the windows of novelty shops “to catalogue the magic and tricks, rubber cockroaches, handshake buzzers.” As he walked he would imagine he was a man in his twenties, “raincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences [ . . . ] loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him.” He might have been describing a character from one of the comic books he read or from one of the private eye movies he had seen; Leonard was by this time already a cinephile. But, after throwing a quote from Baudelaire into the mix, he was enough of a self-critic to add, “This writing embarrasses me. I am humorist enough to see a young man stepping out of Stendhal, given to self-dramatization, walking off a comfortless erection. Perhaps masturbation would have been more effective and less tiring.”9

  Leonard walked slowly past the working girls on the street, but in spite of the need and longing in his eyes the hookers looked over his head, calling out to the men who passed, offering them what Leonard had begun to want more than anything. The world of Leonard’s imagination must have grown enormously during that time, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, but also a sense of isolation, an awareness of the blues. Says Mort Rosengarten, who after a time would join his friend on his late-night adventures, “Leonard looked young, and I did too. But you could get served in bars—girls at thirteen. It was very open back then and also very corrupt. A lot of these bars were controlled by the Mafia, you had to pay someone off to get a license, and it was the same with taverns, which were bars that sold only beer and only to men, no women allowed, and there were lots of those because they were the cheapest place to drink. At six in the morning you could go in and it would be full of people. Leonard didn’t have to sneak out of the house; we both came from homes where nobody really worried about that or where we were. But the Westmount Jewish community was quite small and a very protected environment, with a very strong sense of group identity, these young people who all knew each other. So he went to Saint Catherine Street to experience what we had never seen or been allowed to do.”

  While this was going on, Leonard’s musical boundaries were also starting to expand. At his mother’s encouragement he had started taking piano lessons—not because he had shown any special interest or talent in that area but because his mother encouraged Leonard in almost everything and piano lessons were what one did. Piano was not Leonard’s first musical instrument—in elementary school he had played a Bakelite Tonette, a kind of recorder—and he did not stick with it for long. He found practicing the exercises that his teacher, Miss MacDougal, sent him home with a dull and solitary business. He preferred the clarinet, which he played in the high school band alongside Mort, who had escaped his own piano lessons by taking up the trombone. Leonard was involved in a number of extracurricular school activities. He had been elected president of the student council and was also on the executive of the drama club, as well as on the board of publishers responsible for the high school yearbook, Vox Ducum—a periodical that might claim to have been the first to publish one of Leonard’s stories. “Kill or Be Killed” appeared in its pages in 1950.

  Rosengarten recalls, “Leonard was always very articulate and could address groups of people.” A report from Camp Wabi-Kon dated August 1949 noted that “Lenny is the leader of the cabin and is looked up to by all members of the cabin. He is the most popular boy in the unit and is friendly with everyone [and] well-liked by the entire staff.”* At the same time, school friends remembered Leonard as a shy boy, engaged in the solitary pursuit of writing poetry, someone who deflected attention more than courted it. Nancy Bacal, another close friend who has known Leonard from boyhood on, remembers him during that period as “someone special, but in a quiet way. That seeming contradiction: he moves into leadership naturally, except that he remains invisible at the same time. His intensity and power operates from below the surface.” A curious mix, this public and private nature, but it appears to have been workable; certainly it stuck.

  The Big Bang of Leonard, the moment when poetry, music, sex and spiritual longing collided and fused in him for the first time, happened in 1950, between his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. Leonard was standing outside a secondhand book shop, browsing through the racks, when he happened upon The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca. Leafing through its pages, he stopped at “Gacela of the Morning Market.”10

  The poem made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Leonard had felt that sensation before, hearing the power and the beauty of the verses read aloud at the synagogue—another repository of secrets. Lorca was a Spaniard, a homosexual, an open anti-Fascist, who was executed by t
he Nationalist militia when Leonard was two years old. But “the universe he revealed seemed very familiar” to Leonard, his words illuminating “a landscape that you thought you alone walked on.”11 Part of that landscape was loneliness. As Leonard tried to explain more than three years later, “When something was said in a certain kind of way, it seemed to embrace the cosmos. It’s not just my heart, but every heart was involved, and the loneliness was dissolved, and you felt that you were this aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos, and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way that you embraced the sun and the moon.” He was, in his own words, “completely hooked.”12

  Lorca was a dramatist and a collector of old Spanish folk songs as well as a poet, and his poems were dark, melodious, elegiac and emotionally intense, honest and at the same time self-mythologizing. He wrote as if song and poetry were part of the same breath. Through his love for Gypsy culture and his depressive cast of mind he introduced Leonard to the sorrow, romance and dignity of flamenco. Through his political stance he introduced Leonard to the sorrow, romance and dignity of the Spanish Civil War. Leonard was very pleased to meet them both.

  Leonard began writing poems in earnest. “I wanted to respond to these poems,” he said. “Every poem that touches you is like a call that needs a response, one wants to respond with one’s own story.”13 He did not try to copy Lorca—“I wouldn’t dare,” he said. But Lorca, he felt, had given him permission to find his own voice, and also an instruction on what to do with it, which was “never to lament casually.”14 Over the subsequent years, whenever interviewers would ask him what drew him to poetry, Leonard offered an earthier reason: getting women. Having someone confirm one’s beauty in verse was a big attraction for women, and, before rock ’n’ roll came along, poets had the monopoly. But in reality, for a boy of his age, generation and background, “everything was in my imagination,” Leonard said. “We were starved. It wasn’t like today, you didn’t sleep with your girlfriend. I just wanted to embrace someone.”15

  At the age of fifteen, at around the same time he discovered the poetry of Lorca, Leonard also bought a Spanish guitar for twelve Canadian dollars from a pawnshop on Craig Street. He found he could play some very rudimentary chords almost immediately on the top four strings, thanks to having previously owned (like the hypnotized maid in The Favorite Game) a ukulele. Leonard had taught himself to play ukulele—much as he had taught himself hypnosis—from an instruction manual, the famous 1928 book by Roy Smeck, the so-called “Wizard of the Strings.” “I think I had mentioned it to cousin Lazzy, who was very kind to me after my father died—he would take me to the baseball games at the Montreal ballpark, the Montreal Royals, which was the first team that Jackie Robinson played in. He said, ‘Roy Smeck is coming to El Morocco,’ a nightclub in Montreal. ‘Would you like to meet him?’ I couldn’t go hear him, because a child wasn’t allowed in a nightclub, but he brought me to Roy Smeck’s hotel room and I met the great Roy Smeck.”16

  In the summer of 1950, when Leonard left once again for summer camp—Camp Sunshine in Sainte-Marguerite—he took the guitar with him. Here he would begin playing folk songs, and discover for the first time the instrument’s possibilities when it came to his social life.

  You were still going to summer camp at age fifteen?

  “I was a counselor. It was a Jewish Community Camp for kids that really couldn’t afford the expensive summer camps and the director they had hired, an American, accidentally happened to be a Socialist. He was on the side of the North Koreans in the Korean War, which had just broken out. The Socialists at that time were the only people who were playing guitar and singing folk songs; they felt that they had an ideological obligation to learn the songs and repeat them. So a copy of The People’s Songbook appeared. Do you know it? A great songbook, with all the chords and tablature, and I went through that book many, many times during that summer, with Alfie Magerman, who was the nephew of the director and had Socialist credentials—his father was a union organizer—and a guitar. I started learning the guitar, going through that songbook from beginning to end many many times during that summer. I was very touched by those lyrics. A lot of them were just ordinary folk songs rewritten—“His Truth Goes Marching On” was transformed by the Socialists into ‘In our hands is placed a power / Greater than their hoarded gold / Greater than the might of Adam / Multiplied a million-fold / We will give birth to a new world / From the ashes of the old / For the union makes us strong / Solidarity Forever / Solidarity Forever / Solidarity Forever / For the union makes us strong.’ There were a lot of the Wobbly songs—I don’t know if you know that movement? A Socialist international workers union. Wonderful songs. ‘There once was a union maid / Who never was afraid / Of goons and ginks and company finks / And deputy sheriffs that made the raid . . . No you can’t scare me I’m stickin’ with the union.’ Great song.”

  If one can tell a man’s enthusiasm by the length of an answer, Leonard was clearly enthused. Some fifty years after his stay at Camp Sunshine he could still sing the songbook by heart from beginning to end.* In 1949, 1950, a guitar did not come attached to the immense iconography and sexual magnetism it would later acquire, but Leonard learned quickly that playing one did not repel girls. A group photograph shot at summer camp shows the teenage Leonard, though still short, slightly plump and wearing clothes no man should ever wear in public—white shorts, white polo shirt, black shoes, white socks—with the blondest, coolest-looking girl sitting next to him, her knee touching his.

  Back home in Westmount, Leonard continued his investigations into folk music—Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Canadian folksingers, Scottish border ballads, flamenco. He says, “That’s when I started finding the music I loved.”17 In Murray Hill Park one day, he happened upon a young, black-haired man standing by the tennis courts, playing a lonely-sounding Spanish melody on an acoustic guitar. A cluster of women had gathered about the musician. Leonard could see that “he was courting them” with his music, in some mysterious way.18 Leonard was also captivated. He stayed to listen and at the appropriate moment asked the young man if he would consider teaching him how to play. The young man, it turned out, was Spanish and did not understand English. Through a combination of gestures and broken French, Leonard gained the phone number of the boardinghouse downtown where the Spaniard was renting a room, and a promise that the Spaniard would come to 599 Belmont Avenue and give him a lesson.

  On his first visit, the Spaniard picked up Leonard’s guitar and inspected it. It wasn’t bad, he said. Tuning it, he played a rapid flamenco progression, producing a sound on the instrument unlike anything Leonard had ever thought possible. He handed the guitar back to Leonard and indicated that it was his turn. Leonard had no desire after such a performance to play one of the folk songs he had learned and declined, professing that he did not know how. The young man placed Leonard’s fingers on the frets and showed him how to make some chords. Then he left, promising to return the next day.

  At the second lesson, the Spaniard started to teach Leonard the six-chord flamenco progression he had played the day before, and at the third lesson Leonard began learning the tremolo pattern. He practiced diligently, standing in front of a mirror, copying how the young man held the guitar when he played. His young teacher failed to arrive for their fourth lesson. When Leonard called the number of his boardinghouse, the landlady answered the phone. The guitar player was dead, she told him. He had committed suicide.

  “I knew nothing about the man, why he came to Montreal, why he appeared in that tennis court, why he took his life,” Leonard would say to an audience of dignitaries in Spain some sixty years later, “but it was those six chords, it was that guitar pattern, that has been the basis of all my songs, and of all my music.”19

  In Montreal in 1950, Leonard’s home life had taken a new turn. His mother had remarried. Her new husband was Harry Ostrow, a pharmacist, “a very sweet, ineffectual man, a nice guy,” as Leonard’s cousin
David Cohen recalls him, with whom Leonard seemed to have little more than a pleasant but distant relationship. By coincidence Masha’s second husband would also be diagnosed with a grave illness. With his mother preoccupied with the prospect of nursing another sick man, and his sister, twenty years old now, with other things on her mind than her adolescent brother, Leonard was left to his own devices. When he was not in the classroom or involved in some after-school activity, he was in his bedroom, writing poems, or, increasingly, out cruising the streets of Montreal with Mort.

  Sixteen and legally old enough to drive, Mort took one of the family’s two Cadillacs and cruised down the hill to Leonard’s house. “One of our favorite things was at four in the morning we would drive the streets of Montreal, especially the older part of Montreal, along the harbor and out to the east end where the oil refineries were,” says Rosengarten. “We were looking for girls—on the street at four o’clock in the morning, these beautiful girls we thought would be walking around, waiting for us. Of course there was absolutely nobody.” On nights when the snow was heavy and the streets were empty they would still drive, the heater on, heading east to the Townships or north to the Laurentians, the Cadillac with Mort at the wheel cutting a black line through the deep snowdrifts like Moses practicing for his trick with the Red Sea. And they would talk about girls, talk about everything.