The artist Leonard Cohen crowned as “the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen”
Most obviously, Leonard Cohen had a way with words. But it really said something about the star command of one particularly beautiful woman that she managed to completely sweep him off his feet.
The year was 1966, and Cohen had just arrived in New York City as an as-yet unknown wannabe star, when he happened to fall into The Dom bar one evening and was struck by the most stunning vision he had ever seen: the woman who was singing on stage was already stratospheric, but she also served to open the songster’s visions far beyond his Canadian roots.
It was the one and only Nico, the woman who blazed her way through The Velvet Underground and, at this point in time, was just starting out on her own solo ventures, where she was set to brush every starlet in the city with her Midas touch. The moment was seminal, but not least for the sheer spectrality of the image Cohen was struck by.
“When I first came to New York – I guess it was around 1966 – Nico was singing at The Dom, which was an Andy Warhol club at the time on 8th Street,” he recalled. “I just stumbled in there one night, and I didn’t know any of these people. I saw this girl singing behind the bar. She was a sight to behold. I suppose the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up to that moment. I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside.”
In many ways, he made it all sound too easy: he started writing songs for her, and she introduced him to Lou Reed as a mutual exchange. Yet it soon transpired that Nico was a far tougher nut to crack than Cohen first anticipated; she was not one to be wooed by his Canadian, poetic air. He wrote her the song ‘Take This Longing’, but indeed, she would never take him up on the offer.
This goes part of the way to explaining why, in the same breath, the songwriter also said: “Nico was very strange.” But could there also have been a hint of lust lingering in there? Legend has it that Nico and Cohen were romantically involved in some capacity, however, this was a rumour he was keen to shut down.
“Somehow I managed to meet her. And within five minutes of our conversation, she told me to forget it, because she was only interested in young men. But she said, I’d love to be a friend of yours – and we became friends,” Cohen said. He was shot down in flames with a stake in the heart to boot. But then again, Nico was no easy woman to capture.
The enigma that she presented, as well as the many star-crossed connections she created throughout her life, could have proved to put up a bit of a shield between Nico and the brutality of the outside world. But with Cohen by her side, even if only in a platonic and friendly capacity, somehow you got the impression that her perception of reality was all the better for it.
The pair were ultimately never set to work out as a couple, but the story of their fateful first meeting simply goes to show the power and allure that the spectacle of New York held at that time, and while it was a bustling city like any other, at its heart, a true artistic energy was crackling in the air.
