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

The hours are terrible, the pension arrangements appalling, and then there’s the constant expectation of giving oral sex. How on earth did the likes of Edie Sedgwick, Dora Maar and Camille Claude survive?

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.