Tel Aviv
November 1980
I never wanted this to be true for two main reasons: 1. no one would believe me. They would say “She's just another scorned woman after revenge.” Later they said “she stalked him.”
I was the sole witness to Leonard leaving Hydra on December 5 and returning on December 14, physically and mentally changed. How I happened to be at the scene both times is one of those questions: what made me get out of bed at midnight and run over to check on him on the night of December 4? Or decide to take my afternoon walk just as he happened to be getting off the Flying Dolphin 9 days later? I'm sure he wondered, too. “Annie, you're in the channels” is how he once put it.
So I just happened to witness both ends of his ultra secret trip to Manhattan — but I never asked where he'd been and wouldn't know for another 15 years that he had stayed at the Algonquin Hotel on 7th Avenue during the week John Lennon was shot. The biographies agree about that, and there is apparently a record, and some lyrics written on hotel stationery, the first verses of “If It be Thy Will”
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And 2: It took me another 15 years to begin piecing it together: that he had been to New York during a world- shattering event and never mentioned it. Like not remembering where you were when JFK was assassinated - it's just not possible. It's also odd that neither biographer thought to question him about that week and simply parroted the line that he was buying Hanukkah candles, on the day Hanukkah ended, to celebrate the holiday with his kids.
He was a few blocks from the Dakota as New York mourned the death of a beloved Beatle - surely he felt something if only a twinge of empathy for another pop star? But the coincidence of his being there then is not even mentioned.
A few weeks later, around New Years, I saw him and his kids at the house on Hydra. On the table in one of the rooms was a large black handgun. I recoiled at the sight of it: “What's this for?” Never thinking to connect it to Lennon because why would I? I noticed the change in Leonard over that winter — sullen, reclusive, paranoid and spouting unfamiliar right-wing rhetoric. It never occurred to me that he was an assassin, even if he seemed to think Lennon's death was a good thing. A positive step toward maturity for my generation.
Money was much on his mind. He had found these new friends in Los Angeles who could help his career which was in the doldrums since the Phil Spector fiasco.
Over that winter he told me in so many ways that I misinterpreted or ignored. He was a mess and I thought his anxieties were mostly financial. He was broke and washed up from his second European tour in two years, only this one had ended in Israel. On Hydra he was drinking heavily with a small club of intelligence cronies- mercenaries, gamblers, prostitutes --and at home surrounded himself with women who took care of his children. I found him gloomy, anxious, volatile- no fun to be around.
I had given him the idea of spending winter on Hydra. In Tel Aviv after the concert I said I was planning to rent a room and write my novel there. He warned me winters in Greece are tough - and then he said “Maybe I'll go there too.”
I was happy at the thought of having company but it turned out differently than I expected.
If you put the timelines side by side, his and Mark Chapman's - the travel dates coincide perfectly. Tel Aviv to athens to New York and back to Athens and the tiny island of Hydra --we called it the Alcatraz of the Aegean.
And having flown to NYC from Honolulu via Chicago, Chapman never went home to Hawaii and has spent the last 44 years in prison.
There but for fortune.
As for the Motive: a patsy acting under hypnotic control must be seen to have a clear motive for traveling thousands of miles and murdering his idol - thus condemning himself to life in prison.
The official story states that Chapman was "obsessed with Lennon" and wanted to be famous as his lone assassin. Actually I have heard Chapman was more "obsessed" with singer Todd Rundgren- collecting his albums and combing his lyrics for clues and triggers that led him to Lennon -- I'll try to find that reference if it still exists.
David Whelan finds it suspicious that the judge denied the cops' first attempt at a warrant to search Chapman's hotel room. He thinks this is because the spooks needed time to set up the "display" in the room to show Chapman wanted the world to know of his Lennon obsession. He wanted to be as famous as his prey who once bragged of being more famous than Jesus. There's your motive. A mixture of fantasy, envy, religious outrage that helped cover up the confusion Chapman must have felt on learning he was the lone gunman, when he was not.
Whelan thinks the display was planted there by the spooks who recruited Chapman, back in the summer of 1978 when they sent him on an around-the-world tour that ended in Tel Aviv ... and Switzerland ... via Iran. Then on to London.
So, Israel. He spent three days there. It's not clear where he went of what he did or if he met with anyone before moving to the last stop in his whirlwind tour of the planet, paid for by whom?
We know this trip was planned and managed by his new girlfriend Gloria Abe, a Japanese American living in Hawaii. The Japanese connection. Whelan notes that Chapman's world tour started out at Mount Fuji in July 1978, at the very same time John and Yoko were visiting. That's funny...
Could Yoko and Gloria have been in touch with each other- is that too wild a speculation? Given that Leonard that summer was staying with his kids at Mount Baldy, and practising Zen with his Japanese Roshi who, a few years later (March 1983) in a talk I was present at, announced "I will let Leonard Cohen buy me a gun." I think he was joking...
For people who are trying to find the Leonard they knew and loved in this narrative: it has taken me the best part of 44 years to work up the certainty.
I had the hardest time imagining what that trip to NY on December 5 1980 would have looked like.
David Whelan's Substack finally pushed me to look at his itinerary including the map of Manhattan and the straight line from Leonard's room at the Algonquin Hotel to Chapman's at the Sheraton leading right to the Dakota -- it smacks of a plan drawn up for ease and efficiency. It brings the two gunmen together and allows them to spend 3 days resting and getting to know each other before setting off on their mission on the night of December 8.
The Leonard I knew would have likely agreed to be the assassin's spook handler. A backup player in the operation where the patsy was already chosen. Trained and skilled at hypnosis from his early days, Leonard could have got Chapman in and out of trance - I've seen him do it. He did it to me. Leonard could put a whole audience under his hypnotic command. He did it at the Isle of Wight in 1970. I saw him do it in Hamilton, Ontario in 1975.
If I were to guess what happened, I would say they went out to lunch, then back to the hotel to test their weapons, maybe some target practice and a visit to the Dakota to check out the site.
As the second shooter and master of mind control, Leonard probably felt confident Chapman would take Lennon out near the entrance - but Chapman's shots missed. Maybe he intended them to miss. Maybe that's why he stood in place reading Catcher in the Rye and waiting to be arrested - a way to signal nonchalance at having changed his mind at the last minute.
This put the second shooter in the unpleasant position of having to unload his weapon into the victim. He probably didn't want to be the real Killer but as Lennon ran into the building he had no choice but to finish the job.
And that's why the Leonard who came back to Hydra on December 14 was a much darker and grimmer individual than the one who had waited for the phone call with (I would even say) anticipation. He could no longer pretend to be the good guy, on the side of the angels. He was now the cold blooded murderer who shot down a culture hero, for the money.
I read somewhere that a typical amount paid to a hit man for an assassination is about $500k - or probably more than Leonard made on his last two tours (1979-80) combined.
But the Aftermath was hell.