For five years or so (accounts, as they tend to do, vary) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Leonard Cohen and Rebecca De Mornay were in a relationship that progressed through a phase “a press officer call[ed] ‘an exclusive dating situation'”1 and into an engagement that was eventually broken off. Leonard describes the liaison and its aftermath:
When I met Rebecca [De Mornay], all kinds of thoughts came into my mind, as how could they not when faced with a woman of such beauty? And they got crisscrossed in my mind. But she didn’t let it go further than that: my mind. Except it did. And finally she saw I was a guy who just couldn’t come across… in the sense of being a husband and having more children and the rest. And she was right, of course. But she was kind enough to forgive me. I had breakfast with her the other day, and I told her, ‘I know why you forgave me. Because I really, really tried.’ And she said, ‘Yes.’2
Leonard Cohen
Photo of Leonard Cohen & Rebecca De Mornay taken in Berlin by Gerrit Terstiege (1993).
I am republishing selected posts from my former Leonard Cohen site, Cohencentric, here on AllanShowalter.com (these posts can be found at Leonard Cohen). This entry was originally posted Feb 18, 2018.
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- The Joking Troubadour of Gloom by Tim Rostron. The Daily Telegraph, April 26, 1993 [↩]
- Leonard Cohen Unplugged By Pico Iyer (Buzz: April 1998). Accessed at LeonardCohenFiles. [↩]