So long, Marianne: Profoundly moving story behind the death of the beauty who inspired some of Leonard Cohen's greatest songs...

Old and failing, too, he would soon be reunited with her, he told his muse of decades past, the Norwegian beauty Marianne Stang Ihlen

Viewers in cinemas across the country wept openly when W. H. Auden’s moving Funeral Blues was recited in the film Four Weddings And A Funeral.

The poignant poem about stopping the clocks, packing up the Moon and dismantling the sun became a staple of funeral services.

Now, we have a new ode to the passing of a loved one that will surely be added to the canon of memorable farewells.

When he heard from one of her close friends that his former lover lay dying of leukaemia thousands of miles away in Oslo, the response from the singer Leonard Cohen was heartfelt and immediate.

Old and failing, too, he would soon be reunited with her, he told his muse of decades past, the Norwegian beauty Marianne Stang Ihlen.

‘It only took two hours and in came this beautiful letter from Leonard to Marianne,’ her friend Jan Christian Mollestad recalled. ‘We brought it to her the next day and she was fully conscious and was so happy that he had already written something for her.’

Mollestad said he read the letter to Marianne before she died a week ago, aged 81 — she was the same age as Cohen.

He read out Cohen’s words: ‘Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

‘And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and for your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey.

‘Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.’

Mollestad said that when he read the line ‘stretch out your hand’, Marianne stretched out her own in response. Two days later — on July 29 — she lost consciousness and died.

He read out Cohen’s words: ‘Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon'

In a touching letter back to Cohen, Mollestad said that in her final moments, he had hummed Bird On A Wire — a song the musician wrote about Marianne — because ‘that was the song she felt closest to’. He then kissed her on the head and left the room, saying only ‘So long, Marianne’, which is the title of a second famous Cohen song about her.

A spokesman for Cohen acknowledged that the death of his former lover — whom many of his fans knew only as his muse or didn’t even realise was a real woman — had ‘evoked an overwhelming response’.

But it’s that heartfelt final letter from the musician to Marianne, acknowledging the history they shared and the end that neared for them both, that has touched such a chord with so many people.

In those few brief but immensely touching sentences, Cohen — who wrote poems and novels before he composed songs — revealed the brilliance that made beautiful women fall for this notorious ladies’ man throughout his career.

But what of that relationship, which ended nearly a half-century ago, that had such a profound impact on him?

The couple met in 1960 on the Greek island of Hydra, a long-established, hedonistic bohemian colony patronised by writers and artists as well as the likes of Jackie Onassis and Princess Margaret.

The couple met in 1960 on the Greek island of Hydra, a long-established, hedonistic bohemian colony patronised by writers and artists as well as the likes of Jackie Onassis

Cohen and Marianne, then 25, had fled the rain and cold of northern Europe — he had been living in London while she had left Oslo with her writer boyfriend, Axel Jensen.

On Hydra, she and Jensen stayed in a house at the top of a hill above Cohen’s whitewashed home.

Their relationship was turbulent. During the stay, Jensen, a violent drunk, would climb up a high statue in the middle of Hydra’s port and dive off the top.

They had dalliances with other people — in Marianne’s case, it was a brief affair with a blond and brawny Englishman, Sam Barclay, a member of the banking family, whom she met after his yacht dropped anchor at Hydra.

Marianne and Jensen later married, but when their son was just six months old, he left her for another woman. Marianne and their child stayed on Hydra.

Just as Cohen, then 26 and still a struggling writer, had fallen in love with the island, he was instantly smitten by the Nordic beauty when their paths crossed. She was ‘perfect’, he wrote to a friend. Others agreed. ‘She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known,’ says Steve Sanfield, a long-time friend of Cohen’s.

‘I was stunned by her beauty and so was everyone else. She just glowed, this Scandinavian goddess with this little blond boy, and Cohen was this dark Jewish guy. The contrast was striking.’

For her part, Marianne never forgot her first meaningful encounter with him, in May 1960. She was shopping when a figure appeared, framed in the shop doorway with the sun behind him so she couldn’t tell who he was.

‘Would you like to join us? We are sitting outside,’ he asked her.

She came out to find Cohen at a table with friends. Marianne was immediately attracted to the erudite Canadian.

‘He looked like a gentleman, old-fashioned,’ recalled Marianne, who — believing that marriage was for life — still held out hope that her husband would return to her.

But he didn’t, and her romance with Cohen started slowly. When they went out, he hardly drank and happily watched the gregarious Scandinavian goddess indulge her passion for dancing. After Cohen drove her back to Oslo — a journey of more than 2,000 miles — to arrange a divorce from Jensen, she ‘understood this was something more than friendship’.

He gave her a round silver mirror, telling her he’d never seen a human face that had given him such joy.

Cohen was particularly attracted by Marianne’s immense kindness and modesty. ‘One never got the sense that she played on her looks; it was as if she wasn’t aware of how good she looked,’ he said.

Despite later working as a model, she insisted she was nothing special — bemoaning her flat-chestedness and a round face of which she was so self-conscious, she would walk around staring at the ground.

Eventually, Cohen had to return to Canada to earn money but, crediting her with giving him the courage to write, he soon begged Marianne to join him.

On Hydra they lived a simple, quiet life. Cohen rose at dawn each day from their ornate Russian wrought iron bed to write until lunchtime

As succinct as ever, he sent a telegram, saying: ‘Have a flat. All I need is my woman and her child.’ She packed two suitcases and flew off, the three of them staying in Canada for a year before returning to Hydra.

There they lived a simple, quiet life. Cohen rose at dawn each day from their ornate Russian wrought iron bed to write until lunchtime.

Marianne kept house, tending the marijuana plants they kept in an outhouse (she used the leaves in meatballs) and relying on water delivered by a donkey.

Though she was Cohen’s first and arguably greatest muse, she had little to do with his writing process. He rarely shared his work with anyone before he was finished and, besides, her English wasn’t good enough. He would produce novels and poetry, as well as songs.

At night, however, he would play his guitar to her as they sat alone on their terrace. He acknowledged she provided him with the stability — not to mention the regular meals — he needed to write.

But Cohen didn’t want to get married, which compounded the fretful Marianne’s worries about the future. Her lover gradually became restless and creatively constrained by their simple existence on Hydra.

Claiming he wrote better when travelling, he would frequently go to London, the U.S. or Canada.

He had an eye for women and, charming and darkly handsome, he was fawned on by Hydra’s liberated ladies when he was on the island.

Marianne, who was often late to any social gathering because she had to wait for a babysitter, invariably found him in conversation with a beautiful woman. Riven by jealousy, she fantasised about keeping him locked in a cage and swallowing the key.

When a pretty young woman visited Hydra, Cohen disappeared for a day as he took her hiking up a mountain. At home, Marianne spent the day curled in a ball in misery.

In 1964, he dedicated a collection of poems, Flowers For Hitler, to her. But its success meant he travelled even more and, as Marianne stayed at home, their relationship began to crack amid the hedonism of the Swinging Sixties.

‘I wanted many women, many kinds of experiences, many countries, many climates, many love affairs,’ Cohen explained later, saying he saw life as a ‘buffet’ from which to pick experiences.

His singing career began in 1966 when he finally conceded he couldn’t make a living from writing. His subsequent success meant he was travelling continually

Yet at other times he spoke of his love for their relationship. ‘The sunlight, the woman, the child, the table, the work, the gardenia, the mutual respect and honour we gave to each other. That’s what really matters.’

His singing career began in 1966 when he finally conceded he couldn’t make a living from writing. His subsequent success meant he was travelling continually.

Cohen insisted in letters he still wanted to be with Marianne, praising their ‘mysterious enduring love’ even as he enjoyed the free-wheeling life of a musician on the road and she contented herself with the housewife role. Marianne sent her son to Summerhill, the controversially liberal ‘free’ school in Leiston, Suffolk, but he wasn’t happy there. Locked in recording studios, Cohen was unable to provide the father figure the boy desperately wanted.

Two years later, mother and son moved to New York, where Cohen was by then living. But Marianne’s wholesome family values hardly fitted in with Cohen’s new lifestyle of drugs, groupies and partying with friends such as singers Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell, and artist Andy Warhol. ‘This isn’t your scene, Marianne,’ he told her.

A year later — in 1970 — she took the hint and left. Their increasingly turbulent love affair was over, though Cohen supported her financially for years.

Their lives could hardly have diverged more drastically. She moved back to Norway, where she worked in the personnel department of a company that built oil rigs.

She married an engineer, Jan Stang, in the same company and became mother to his three daughters. They remained together for more than 40 years until her death. Cohen went on to have other muses and, of course, other lovers, including the actress Rebecca De Mornay.

Cohen went on to have other muses and, of course, other lovers, including the actress Rebecca De Mornay (pictured)

But he stayed in touch with Marianne. Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised that a rock star who became a Zen Buddhist monk in the mid-Nineties never forgot the joys of the simple life or the woman who shared it with him.

‘People change and their bodies change and their hair grows grey and falls out and their bodies decay and die … but there is something that doesn’t change about love and about the feelings we have for people,’ he said in 1992.

‘Marianne, the woman of So Long, Marianne, when I hear her voice on the phone, I know something is completely intact even though our lives have separated and we’ve gone our very different paths.

‘I feel that love never dies and that when there is an emotion strong enough to gather a song around it, that there is something about that emotion that is indestructible.’

After Cohen’s touching final letter to his old love and muse, surely no one would disagree with him.