Marianne Ihlen’s role as Leonard Cohen’s ‘muse’ was utterly demoralising – thank God women aren’t interested today

I saw the documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love by director Nick Broomfield last night. The film, sadly, isn’t quite as good as it very nearly is. It has too many loose ends and underdeveloped backstories. It also weirdly lacks passion when the story itself is about just that, however, it’s still fascinating and I’m really glad I’ve seen it.

For those who aren’t Leonard Cohen fans, Words of Love charts the meeting of Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen on the Greek island of Hydra, back in the 1960s. At the time, Cohen was a 30-something middle-class, Jewish writer of indecipherable fiction – while Ihlen was an abandoned wife and the mother of a small, sweet-faced, blonde boy. In true Sixties style, Cohen and Ihlen get it on, and soon her sweet-faced son fades out of the picture when he is shunted off to boarding school aged eight so that Ihlen can dedicate more time to being Cohen’s muse. Cohen wrote the infamous song “So Long Marianne” for Ihlen, although, as she commented in the film, her name was actually phonetically pronounced Marianna! She also features, young and lovely and wrapped in a white towel on the back cover of his 1969 LP Songs From a Room.

Watching the film, it struck me how muses seem to be a dying breed; I mean, what young woman in her right mind would apply these days? The hours are terrible, there’s no job security and no one ever mentions a pension. Plus, I think you also have to really like giving oral sex; it’s a very subservient role, really.

For Ihlen, a sunkissed Scandi-blonde, being Cohen’s muse was more or less a full time job for a number of years. This is demonstrated in a fabulous amount of old black and white footage when she appears endlessly smiling with her hair in her face and the sea sparkling behind her.

So what does it take to be a muse in the first place? In Ihlen’s case, she was pretty, but only as pretty as hundreds of girls who swam off Greek beaches over 50 years ago, when the world was in experimental mode and women were tasting a sexual freedom that for many came with a bitter aftertaste.

Ihlen aborted Cohen’s baby because she didn’t want to inconvenience him; I think this is something muses have to be prepared to do. That he loved her, I don’t doubt. But it seems you don’t settle down with your muse, you don’t take out a mortgage in joint names. However, you do send her concert and flight tickets from the other side of the world whenever the fancy takes you and you are not being given oral sex by someone else.

Muses need patience; theirs is a waiting game, literally. While Cohen was writing in Hydra, Ihlen waited on him, bringing him lunch provisions and always being available and happy to do what her muse master required: laughing, swimming, drinking and listening, while no doubt sitting at his feet adoringly. This is one of the reasons why I would make a dreadful muse; I don’t think I could ever be so adoring as to listen to someone “strum” a guitar for more than three minutes.

Muses need to be devoted, although Ihlen did dally with other men, including Broomfield (the director of the aforementioned documentary) when he was a young man, which adds an uncanny spin to the production. But one senses it was only when her years as Cohen’s muse were truly over did she go back to Norway and marry a man who never wrote her a song but remained with her until she died.

Muses ultimately need to realise it’s probably all going to end in tears. For Ihlen, time was really up when Cohen’s new woman and mother of his son came to the house on Hydra and asked when she was going to move out. It seems there is always another muse waiting in the wings and the whole business is fraught with unhappiness, but then, “twas ever thus”.

Some of the world’s most famous muses, mostly to great artists, came to much stickier ends than Ihlen. Camille Claudel, Auguste Rodin’s muse, spent the last 30 years of her life in a mental asylum, whilst Dora Maar (Piccasso’s muse) also suffered a mental breakdown before turning to religion, famously saying: “After Picasso, only God”. And poor little Edie Sedgwick (Warhol’s muse) overdosed on heroin after having been shunned by the artist.

In Ihlen’s case, most of the psychological damage involved her son, the sweet-faced blonde boy who, according to the documentary, went to India as a teenager, took too many drugs, (apparently with his birth father’s blessing) and, as a result, has lived in psychiatric institutions in Norway ever since. He is my age. “Little Axel”, as he was known, is not mentioned in either his mother or his father’s Wikipedia entries. No wonder I wept at the end of the film.