Personal effects belonging to the late Canadian musician and poet Leonard Cohen, who died in November 2016, went up for sale on Friday in what the auction house advertised as the “largest group of privately held collections” of his works.
A personal composition notebook containing 76 pages of poems and lyrics was the highest priced item, selling for $120,650 US ($171,400 Cdn). Other items ranging from symbolic (a skeleton key to Cohen’s home in Greece), to personal (a locket containing his hair), to strange (a faxed erotic drawing) sold for lower prices, although still above asking.
The pieces were among more than 150 items up for sale by Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles and were collected from multiple sources. Some were from Cohen’s long-time friend Aviva Layton, who met Cohen through her former partner, the late Canadian poet Irving Layton.
Others came from editor Cork Smith and longtime friend and editor Nancy Bacal, as well as some from musician and former partner Anjani Thomas.
The top-priced item was from Thomas’s collection, and was also the auction’s highest valued: Cohen’s avocado-green composition book was expected to sell for between $120,000-150,000 US ($170,000-213,000 Cdn).
The notebook, dated Jan 21, 2007, contains drafts for multiple Cohen works. There were two pages of drafts for the song Treaty from the 2016 album You Want it Darker, as well as seven pages of drafts for Thanks for the Dance‘s track It’s Torn. It also contained unpublished poems, notes and bets with Thomas — bets, Thomas wrote, that were ridiculously high, but never collected on.
“We’d bet on things like whether or not Phil Spector would go to jail, and I said he would,” Thomas was quoted as saying on the auctioneer’s website.
“This is the only notebook of Leonard’s in private hands outside of the Cohen Family Trust Archives, and I imagine those will never be available for purchase.”
Along with corrections to his book The Favourite Game, unpublished poems and his “magic” fisherman’s cap that supposedly helped him write, were ephemera less academically inclined. A gilded locket containing a lock of Cohen’s hair (originally a birthday gift to Thomas) sold for $5,080 US ($7,200 Cdn) — roughly 10 times above its estimated sale price.
A key to Cohen’s house in Hydra — where Cohen moved in the 1960s and got his start as a self-sustaining writer and musician — sold for $19,500 US ($27,700 Cdn), roughly four times above asking. Two mezuzahs (a traditional Jewish item meant to be placed on door posts) sold for $7,800 ($11,000 Cdn) — more than 10 times above estimates.
And a “faxed explicit digital artwork” from Cohen fetched $1,170 US ($1,650 Cdn). The cartoonish, erotic drawing was reportedly sent personally to Layton. It is unsigned, only bearing the words “Finger F–k!”. It had an estimated price of $100-150 US ($140-215 Cdn).
Legal battles
Cohen famously suffered from financial strain after discovering his former manager, Kelley Lynch, embezzled large amounts of his savings in 2005. He embarked on a whirlwind comeback tour to cushion the blow, leading to a revitalized career and fame. Lynch was later convicted and jailed for harassment.
The auction comes amid protracted legal jousting between Cohen’s children and another former manager, Robert Kory. Children Lorca Cohen and Adam Cohen have alleged their father’s law firm covered up “malfeasance” by Kory, the Los Angeles Times reported. Friday’s auction was able to go ahead as it is from private collections instead of from the Leonard Cohen Family Trust, which controls the majority of Cohen’s memorabilia.
As reported by the Globe and Mail, that legal dispute has put a major Cohen archival project in jeopardy. As planned, it would see unreleased recordings and items from the trust showcased across the Art Gallery of Ontario, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, McGill University and National Music Centre in Calgary. The ongoing legal action have prevented it from being realized, biographer and project adviser Ira Nadel told the Globe,
Julien’s Auctions specializes in celebrity auctions. It previously held sales containing items from Bob Dylan, Olivia Newton-John, Princess Diana and more.
