Acknowledgements

THE AUTHOR is grateful to the following for their contributions to the research and production of this book: Marta de Lapresle, who started the ball rolling; Nick Gough, who was always around; Professor Austin Gresham, for free professional advice; Mr Thomas and his son Patrick, neighbours of Jim and Pam; Monsieur A. Chastagnol, Jim’s neighbour in Paris and the last man outside of officials to have seen Jim’s body; Richard Chainey, for the feedback; Christopher English at the US Embassy in Paris; Nadine Sim, for her dedication and patience, and her friend Marie-Laure Brilland for collecting the necessary files and paperwork; Capt. Mercier and Lt. Col. Galeraud, in Paris; Dr. Rob Stepney and Dr. Neville Silverston; Barry Miles and Chris Charlesworth for editorial advice; Danny Sugerman in Los Angeles; and finally my wife Patsy who coped in the most desperate of circumstances.

Bob Seymore, January 1991.

CHAPTER ONE

“JIM LEFT FOR Paris right in the middle of mixing ‘LA Woman’. There was really no reason for Jim to be there for the mix. He said, ‘You guys finish up — I’m going to Paris’. We said, ‘OK man, talk to you later.’ I haven’t heard from him since.” — Ray Manzarek, 1981.

“I saw Pam a few months afterwards, and when I looked into her eyes, I felt pretty much that Jim was dead… on the other hand he’s just about the only person I’ve met who was wild enough to pull a fast one like that.” — John Densmore, 1972.

“If Pamela was any indication, then Jim was dead. She wasn’t faking it. This was a woman who was totally broken up. Jim was her total life and she was devastated, so I assume Jim was dead from her reaction and the fact that the coffin was put into the ground, and that no-one else has ever said otherwise. But… who knows?” — Ray Manzarek, 1980.

EVER SINCE I first heard their music, I’ve always loved The Doors. There was an element of menace about them that forced you to sit up and take notice; passivity was out, confrontation, participation, action was in. They were an acquired taste, never really easy on the ears, but once you’d acquired the taste The Doors and their music were wonderful.

The Doors, and singer Jim Morrison in particular, never did anything by halves. They seemed deeply committed to their music and the lifestyle that went with it, and the depth of this commitment was never likely to sit well with the guardians of law and order, the moral majority. Jim in particular found himself at odds with all and sundry during his ascendancy to rock hero status between 1967 and 1970.

From all published accounts it seems that Jim was far from blameless for the wild reputation he earned. Various biographies paint a portrait of an arrogant, selfish and generally rather unpleasant fellow. Even as a youngster there was nothing he liked better than to needle anyone and everyone who came into his orbit, and as he grew older and more threatening this included anyone in authority, absolute total strangers and even the other Doors and their entourage. It seems to be no secret that neither drummer John Densmore nor guitarist Robbie Krieger were on the best of terms with Jim for much of The Doors’ career, while Ray Manzarek, who ‘discovered’ Jim, was only slightly more tolerant, probably because of their mutual interest and backgrounds in avant garde film making. John and Robbie were professional musicians, anxious to offer their best at every show — and reap the substantial rewards that rock stars could expect at the end of the sixties; Jim not only compromised their chances of doing this but couldn’t give a damn most of the time either.

Morrison had no desire for material comforts, nor was he particularly interested in a ‘career’ as a musician. He often slept wherever he happened to drop. Apart from a few books — and the ubiquitous leather pants — he had few possessions, nor did he seek any form of traditional stability or security. More often than not he was drunk, stoned on grass, or both, and he seemed to take pleasure in behaving badly in public in order to embarrass the company he was with.

This last trait he sometimes tried to justify as a form of social experiment; Jim Morrison was not typical as far as rock stars go. For a start, he was exceptionally well educated in the arts, and possessed of a natural curiosity that never took things for granted. He was an avid reader of serious literature, philosophy and poetry since his early teens, an underground film buff (and student) and a man drawn towards deep philosophical arguments and anarchic experiments about human behaviour and the limits of man’s endurance. Estranged from his family — especially his career naval officer father — and given to wild attention-grabbing gestures, he lurched dangerously into Southern California like a loose cannon aboard a storm-tossed warship.

Then came The Doors. He met Ray Manzarek, a classically trained pianist and fellow film student, on the beach at Venice in the summer of 1965, recited some words from a poem he’d written called ‘Moonlight Drive’ and responded immediately to Ray’s suggestion that they form a group and “make a million dollars”. John Densmore and Robbie Krieger were quickly recruited — they had met Ray at a meditation class — and after some chaotic rehearsals, The Doors, named after Aldous Huxley’s quote from William Blake, The Doors Of Perception, began playing week nights at an unfashionable club called the London Fog on Sunset Strip.

After a few false starts Elektra signed them in late 1966 and their future was assured when their stunning début album was released the following year. Twelve months on they were big stars with Jim, the leader, far and away the brightest of their galaxy.

But he was a mass of contradictions, probably schizophrenic, and the heavier the mantle of celebrity the worse his behaviour became and the more he sought to escape. The extrovert and anti-social behaviour on and off stage was the action of a man who considered himself to be a true artist who thought that people were not taking him seriously. The Doors attempted to put across something deeper than just rock and roll music but somehow they found themselves categorised amid the commercial side of the music business and not played on underground (FM) radio as much as they would have liked. Many younger fans who had not seen the group live thought of The Doors as a band who made Top 20 singles like ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘Hello I Love You’ — both number hits in the USA — and not as an album act like The Grateful Dead who never even released singles. The Doors also came from Los Angeles at a time when all the underground music, the music of The Dead and Jefferson Airplane for example, was assumed to come from San Francisco, though Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention were from LA and the Velvet Underground was from New York and this didn’t seem to stop them getting plenty of airplay on underground and college radio stations.

Being a pop star, Jim came to reason, was trivial and unsatisfying; being screamed at by teenage girls was demeaning to his talent and the nature of his art; being handsome and having his handsome face adorn posters on the bedroom walls of his fans for its handsomeness alone was insulting to his work as a writer. He wondered if he could sustain his celebrity if he allowed himself to become a fat, bearded, ugly, bloated, drunken slob. Would his fans still love him if he refused to change his clothes for a month, stopped washing and never combed his matted hair?

How far could he go in this perverse experiment? Would his fans still love him if he were no longer available, if he lived on the other side of the world, away from the madness of Southern California, or even if he was dead?

These dark thoughts were synonymous with the dark brooding music his band tried to play every night above the screams that Jim’s shaman dancing and tight leather pants inspired. The Doors’ music was unlike the kind of sunny fun-filled pop music that Los Angeles musicians had produced before. It was neither sunny nor fun; much of it was threatening, night-time music, in which Morrison’s impressionistic lyrics and intense delivery combined with the unusually eclectic backdrop of Manzarek and Krieger to create a turbulent maelstrom of delicious but poisoned brews.

Morrison drank freely from poisoned brews during his short life. I was living in San Francisco when news of his death filtered back to America from Paris. In those days I was more interested in commercial art — making bright fluorescent posters which I tried to sell in what were called head shops. You’d walk in, there would be a smell of incense, candles were the principal source of illumination and underground music — probably Iron Butterfly playing ‘In A Gadda Da Vida’ — would drone out from a solitary dusty speaker. I used to make posters that glowed under ultraviolet black light, posters of Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and, yes, Jim Morrison. His long black hair curled like snakes aroused by an Arab piper, his eyes glowed from pits deep within his skull and his smile mocked authority with indecent glee.

The dream of the sixties, the Utopian hope of universal love and peace inspired in part by the music of long haired men with guitars, was shattered by the deaths of Brian Jones in 1969 and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970. The final blow came the following year: Jim Morrison, leather clad lizard clown and leader of The Doors, was now dead too.

The press reported that Jim had died in his Paris apartment in the early hours of the morning of July 3, 1971, from a heart-attack suffered while taking a bath. Jim Morrison the singer, Jim Morrison the poet, Jim Morrison, the voice of anti-authority, was dead. Had he crumbled under the pressure of stardom? Had he decided on that ultimate intellectual experiment to determine the truth about the enduring nature of fame? Or had he died from the delicious poisons that flowed too freely in his veins?

At first I just could not believe it. He was an enormously controversial figure who always seemed to be in some kind of trouble or another, and piling up against him in 1971 were various court cases, any one of which could end up with a jail sentence. There were paternity suits from girls of doubtful virtue, and even a trumped up charge of sky-jacking en route to Las Vegas while under the influence of alcohol, an incident which by all accounts amounted to nothing more than a member of Jim’s party attempting to flirt with a stewardess by putting his hand up her skirt. More damning was the indictment for lewd and indecent behaviour likely to cause a riot during a concert at Miami in Florida in July, 1969, the famous incident where he supposedly flashed his audience and simulated masturbation on stage at the Dinner Key auditorium.

The charges were mounting up, the mood of the nation was ugly and there were many right wingers in the administration and judiciary, especially in Southern states like Florida, who thought that a spell in jail, not to mention a prison haircut, would be no bad thing for an uppity rock singer with an attitude problem like Jim Morrison. It looked as if the odds were against him, but at the same time the word was that he’d had enough of the pop scene and wanted to quit The Doors to concentrate on his writing. His first book of poetry, a compendium of two privately published works called The Lords and The New Creatures, had just gone to press in New York and Jim planned to publish more.

To get away from his legal problems and all the pressure of stardom Morrison had decided to join his long-time girlfriend Pamela Courson who was then living in Paris. Morrison arrived in France in March 1971. Only a few friends knew that he was there and most of the time he wasn’t recognized as he strolled around the boulevards and visited book shops on the left bank in the footsteps of earlier American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. He’d shaved his famous unruly beard and taken no steps to lose the considerable weight he’d gained in the years since The Doors started. Only a relatively small number of young French people were into American rock’n’roll because of the language difficulty, so he could walk the streets and drink in cafés just like anyone else. To the French he was just another curious young American tourist.

Several months passed by and he was beginning to relax, though he continued to drink heavily and occasionally use cocaine. He was apparently trying to control his drinking but there were already signs of serious health problems; he had coughed up blood on a couple of occasions and he became out of breath easily after climbing stairs.

Then on July 3, 1971, just after midnight Jim decided to take a bath. Pamela went to bed but woke up sometime around 5:00am and realized that Jim hadn’t returned to bed. She found him lying dead in the tepid water. She called for help and the first to arrive was the fire brigade resuscitation unit followed shortly afterwards by the police but it was too late. Jim was pronounced dead and on July 7, he was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in the company of Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and Molière. It was not until July 9 that the news was released to the world press by The Doors’ acting manager Bill Siddons on his return to Los Angeles from Paris with Pamela.

Siddons had gone to Paris at Pam’s request because she telephoned in a panic to say that something had happened to Jim. She didn’t say what but Siddons obviously feared the worst and flew out at once. It wasn’t the first time that rumours of Jim’s death had floated but this time Siddons decided to take it seriously. When he arrived at the Morrison’s apartment Pam showed him a closed coffin and a death certificate. Siddons never saw the body.