27

by Howard Sounes

  Jim also spent time with Pamela Courson at her new apartment on Norton Avenue, within stumbling distance of Barney’s Beanery. It was remarkably modest, at 450 square feet with a bathroom the size of a closet and an ironing board that folded out of the wall.

  Jim and Pamela had a curious relationship. He was generous with his girlfriend, bankrolling her boutique, Themis, and buying her a Porsche. Pamela thought of Jim as her husband and sometimes referred to herself as his wife (though they never married), and Jim made her the sole beneficiary of his will. Yet the couple argued and were unfaithful to one another, and both were high for much of the time, which made the relationship chaotic. Something of Pamela’s scatty character is conveyed in a story about her flying from LA to New York around this time to see the actor John Phillip Law, with whom she was having an affair. She carelessly left her Porsche in the short-term parking lot at Los Angeles International Airport with a bag of dope inside. ‘So of course it got towed and then they opened it up and there was all this pot, so they arrested her when she came back,’ says her friend Mirandi Babitz.

  Physically Jim was now almost unrecognisable as the teen idol photographed in 1967. ‘It was almost as though he forced himself to become the antithesis of what made him a star, and I don’t think he was very comfortable as a star,’ says poet friend Michael C. Ford. Jim let his hair and beard grow. He put on weight and took to wearing an army surplus jacket. The last time Mirandi Babitz ran into him he was shambling around Hollywood, his beard encrusted with vomit. ‘A disgusting drunk kind of person … He just let himself go.’ Elektra executive Steve Harris hardly recognised Jim. ‘He became paunchy. He got jowly … He didn’t want to be a sex symbol anymore.’ Steve’s wife, Nicole, sensed that something deep down was wrong, something that for all his intelligence Jim was unable to articulate or deal with. ‘Something was bothering him from his youth, I think. I think he had a lot of secrets inside of him,’ she says. ‘Maybe he was abused or something. Nobody will ever know.’

  This was the unhappy man who came to Sunset Sound in December 1970 to record the Doors’ sixth studio album, which, with a live LP and a greatest-hits compilation, would complete their contract with Elektra Records. Producer Paul Rothchild had just finished Janis Joplin’s Pearl in the same studio. In contrast to Janis, whom Rothchild had adored, Jim was difficult to work with, and the producer lost his temper with him and the band during the sessions. ‘I worked my ass off for a week, but it was still just fucking awful,’ Rothchild later complained. ‘I’d go into them and tell them that, hoping that it would make them angry enough to do something good.’ He told the Doors they were making ‘cocktail-lounge music’, hoping that the insult would spur them on to do better. ‘But they just didn’t have the heart anymore …’ So he quit.

  The Doors decided to continue recording without Rothchild at their workshop on Santa Monica Boulevard. Their engineer produced the record. That was how they made the LA Woman album. Surprisingly, it turned out to be their strongest since their 1967 début, the band finding new focus in blues-based songs steeped in the sleazy atmosphere of night-time Los Angeles. ‘Cars Hiss By My Window’ and ‘LA Woman’ were especially evocative of the city of broken dreams, while the album concluded with an instant classic in ‘Riders on the Storm’.

  Jim celebrated his 27th birthday during the sessions by drinking with friends and recording poetry. Three nights later the Doors began a short concert tour with a show in Dallas where they performed ‘Riders on the Storm’ for the first time. It went well. The next night, 12 December 1970, they played New Orleans. Halfway through the show Jim suddenly stopped singing. Ray Manzarek said it was as if Jim’s spirit had departed from his body. It is more helpful to think of this as a key moment in an ongoing nervous breakdown. Jim gave up on the show and sat down on John Densmore’s drum riser. When Densmore asked him what was wrong – or shoved him with his foot, whichever version you believe – Jim picked up his microphone stand and smashed it repeatedly into the stage until he had broken through the wooden boards. Unable to continue, he walked off.

  The tour was cancelled. Densmore, Krieger and Manzarek agreed that they couldn’t perform live with Jim as he was and told him so. Back in LA, Vince Treanor sensed a new ‘hostility’ towards Jim from the others. Densmore in particular was starting to imagine the Doors without Jim Morrison, as Jim was thinking of a life after the Doors.

  A couple of months later, when they were mixing LA Woman, Jim told the band that he was going to Paris. Pamela had flown ahead to find an apartment. He was going to have a sabbatical and write. He didn’t say how long he would be away, or whether he would return to work with the group, but Elektra president Jac Holzman had little doubt that Jim had had enough not only of the Doors but of the rock ’n’ roll business. ‘I did not really think, especially after I said goodbye to Jim, that he would ever come back as a member of any band.’

  Jim flew to Paris on 11 March 1971, when he was on bail pending an appeal in the Miami case. He may have had it in mind not to return to the USA until he knew the outcome of his appeal. He certainly didn’t want to go to jail. ‘When Jim left, he was in tremendous fear of jail,’ says Vince Treanor. ‘That was one of the reasons Jim wanted to get away.’ As it turned out he never came back.

  2

  The contrast with Los Angeles was dramatic. Jim left a modern American city, where molten freeways run through dusty canyons of gimcrack architecture, and arrived in a cool, old-world city of stone. It was glorious to be in Paris in March, the sun bringing the trees into leaf and the flowers into bloom. The façades of the restaurants and bars gleamed invitingly; the museums were filled with treasure. Generations of visitors have fallen in love with Paris in the springtime. As a reader of French literature, Jim was coming to a city that had long been part of his intellectual life, a place where he might fulfil what he saw as his destiny as a poet.

  Pamela had been in Paris for a month. Like many rich Americans she had checked into the George V hotel off the Champs-Élysées. Jim preferred a more Bohemian milieu so they moved into the apartment of an actress friend named Elizabeth Larivière who would be away filming most of the time, giving them the run of the place. The apartment was in an old building at 17 rue Beautreillis in the Marais. Double doors on the street opened onto a courtyard with a concierge. Up the winding stone stairs was Apartment 4, which had three bedrooms, a lounge, kitchen and dining room; spacious rooms with high ceilings, fireplaces, period furniture and tall, shuttered windows. Jim and Pamela slept in the second bedroom near the tiled bathroom.

  Jim began to explore Paris on foot, often walking alone in the morning and at twilight. A short stroll north of the apartment brought him to place des Vosges, a famous old square surrounded by colonnaded buildings in which Victor Hugo had once lived. The park in the middle was popular with mothers and small children. Jim would sit and watch the children play while he tried to write in the 25 cent notebooks he’d brought from America. When he wanted a longer walk he went south to the river Seine, crossing pont de Sully to Île St-Louis. He then walked around the quay to the house where Baudelaire had lived, pausing to watch the boats pass. Typically, he would continue to Île de la Cité, past Notre Dame, crossing to the Left Bank and then strolling to St-Germain-des-Prés where he would stop at Deux Magots, which Jean-Paul Sartre had patronised, or Café de Flore on the next block.

  ‘I saw him every day, for fifteen days, all the time at the Café de Flore,’ says the actress Zouzou, who had last seen Jim backstage at the Roundhouse in London, with Brian Jones, when Jim was still ‘so sexy’. Zouzou was shocked to see him bearded and bloated in Paris, ‘so ugly … he had no neck anymore’. But he seemed happy. He told Zouzou that he was going to the galleries and he loved walking in the city, especially at dusk. Hardly anybody bothered him. The Doors had never toured France and were not particularly well known there. As Jim talked he drank Kronenbourg, tall glasses of beer and many of them. ‘Then around six o’clock Pamela was coming and she was sayin
g, “Come on, Jim. Let’s go home.” And he was saying, “Goodbye, see you tomorrow.”’

  Zouzou was one of several film contacts Jim had in Paris, helping form a connection with an industry he was ambitious to become more involved with. He had brought copies of his experimental films to France hoping to get them screened. He met the director François Truffaut. But nothing tangible resulted, which may have undermined his confidence. There is a sense that Jim’s health and mood deteriorated as spring progressed and the days became longer and warmer. Although he enjoyed Paris, it wasn’t enough to walk and drink and look at art. He tried to write, but the result was poor. His notebook jottings are disorganised, scatological and angry.

  Jim and Pamela took a holiday in April, driving through France and Spain, then crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, a country that had also drawn Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix shortly before they died. The three 27s visited many of the same places, all spending time in Marrakesh. As noted, the availability of drugs in the kingdom was part of the attraction. Hashish is readily obtainable in Morocco, and Pamela could score heroin without difficulty. She was a heavy user, snorting rather than injecting the drug, and Jim was dabbling with it.

  While he was in Marrakesh Jim shaved his beard. His once-chiselled face was revealed as puffy and deathly pale. In fact, holiday snaps taken during his European sojourn tell a story of their own. Sometimes he appears obviously inebriated, clowning and pulling faces for the camera. In other pictures he has the stunned countenance of the hung-over alcoholic, and the flatness of expression common to depressives.

  On their return to Paris Jim and Pamela found that Elizabeth Larivière was using the apartment so they checked into L’Hôtel on rue des Beaux-Arts, where Oscar Wilde died (when the hotel had a different name). Jim almost did the same when he tumbled out of his second-floor window into the street, an extraordinary accident for most people, but not for Jim who had also recently fallen from a roof at the Chateau Marmont in LA. These incidents are usually dismissed as drunken high jinks, but they may have been suicidal gestures, unlikely to prove fatal yet gaining him the solace of attention.

  A couple of nights later Jim went to the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus nightclub on rue de Seine, which had a reputation as a place to score heroin. Jim was so drunk he was thrown out. A student named Gilles Yepremian, a rare French fan of the Doors, happened to recognise him and asked where he was staying. Jim was unable to answer coherently so Gilles decided to take the star with him. He hailed a cab and asked the driver to take them to a friend’s apartment near L’Étoile.

  Jim was very drunk. ‘He was singing and he was crying,’ says Gilles. When their cab crossed the Seine Jim tried to get out, saying he wanted to go for a swim. A late-night dip in the Seine in his condition would have been another suicidal gesture, which may have proved fatal. Gilles managed to restrain him. But Jim was in an obstreperous mood.

  ‘Fucking pigs!’ he shouted, as they passed some police.

  They reached the apartment building of Gilles Yepremian’s friend where their taxi driver asked for a big tip in compensation for Jim’s behaviour. When Gilles explained to Jim, who didn’t speak French, he took out a wad of francs and offered it all to the driver. ‘The taxi man was afraid. He think maybe we are gangsters, or maybe we are mad,’ says Gilles. ‘[He] gives back to Jim the money and he leaves. Funny.’

  The evening was turning into a French farce. Gilles’s next task was to get Jim up five flights of stairs, almost carrying the drunken American, who shushed the student not to wake the neighbours. Finally Gilles rapped on the door of his friend, a music journalist named Hervé Muller. It was late. The household was asleep. A student who was staying with Hervé and his girlfriend assumed it was a police raid and threw her marijuana out of the window.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Hervé asked nervously.

  ‘It’s me, Gilles, with Jim Morrison.’

  Hervé Muller opened his door to find, to his astonishment, that Gilles had indeed brought the lead singer of the Doors to his apartment – dead drunk. Jim stumbled forward, then crashed out on Hervé’s bed, after which there was no waking him. Hervé and his girlfriend spent the rest of the night in a sleeping-bag.

  The following day Jim had no idea where he was, or what had happened. When it was explained to him, he took Hervé Muller and his girlfriend for breakfast at a bar near the George V where he drank so much he started to weep.

  Over the next few weeks Hervé Muller and Gilles Yepremian saw Jim several times. When he was sober, he was pleasant and subdued. When he was drunk, Gilles says that ‘It was like speaking to the Devil.’ The Frenchmen learned that Jim disliked talking about the Doors, though Hervé elicited that he had received a copy of LA Woman and was pleased with the album. The dominant impression was of a man with a serious drink problem that dramatically affected his mood. ‘When he was drunk, he was really depressed. He cried,’ says Gilles. ‘But when he was [sober] he was OK.’ He says that Jim seemed much older than 27.

  One day Hervé hosted a luncheon for Jim, Pamela and Gilles at which he served Corsican wine. The Americans enjoyed the wine so much that they set off for an impromptu holiday in Corsica. It was the kind of impetuosity Jim was rich enough to indulge in. He also popped over to London briefly. Like any tourist, he wrote ‘wish you were here’ type postcards home from the places he visited and he made at least two telephone calls to Los Angeles. In one he spoke to a buddy named Frank Lisciandro. ‘He sounded lonely and distant, as if it wasn’t panning out for him …’ Jim also called the Doors’ workshop where John Densmore picked up. The sound of Jim’s voice put Densmore on edge; they’d never got along.

  Jim asked how LA Woman was doing. John said the reviews were good, and the Doors were in the charts with the single ‘Love Her Madly’.

  Jim seemed pleased. ‘Well, maybe we should do another one?’ he said.

  It is difficult to know whether Jim was serious about making another Doors album. John didn’t tell him that he, Robby and Ray had already started to rehearse without him and that, personally, John didn’t want him back. But he knew that if Jim decided to return they would probably have him, such was the power of a lead singer. He asked Jim nervously when he was thinking of returning. Jim said it would be a few months yet. Densmore was relieved when he rang off.

  Jim may well have gained the impression from this conversation that he was not wanted in LA. If Ray Manzarek had answered the phone it would have been a very different conversation. As it was, he never spoke to the band again. ‘I think that [call] was that infamous straw that breaks a camel’s back,’ says Vince Treanor. ‘He wanted to come back, to get back into [music], but John was very brutal … there was a coldness there – unreceptive.’

  It was now summer in Paris. Jim had made a reel-to-reel tape of himself singing drunkenly with two buskers he met on boulevard St-Germain and wanted to have the tape transferred to cassette, which was then coming into use. He asked Elizabeth Larivière’s boyfriend, Philippe Dalecky, if he would dub the tape. Philippe had met Jim a few times and found him unpredictable, depending on how much he had drunk. ‘I think he was fed up with everything,’ says Philippe, who noticed that one of the few things that lifted Jim’s spirits was watching children play. Their joie de vivre took him out of himself. Interestingly, Amy Winehouse derived solace from the company of children when everything turned sour in her life.

  Jim went to Philippe’s apartment to have the tape dubbed. Just after he had departed, Philippe noticed that he had left his carrier bag behind, with one of his notebooks inside. He ran after him.

  ‘Hey, Jim, you forgot this!’

  ‘It’s all right, keep it,’ replied the American. ‘See you. ’Bye!’

  It is unusual for a writer to abandon his notebook, indicating that Jim may have been so far gone with drink that he didn’t know what he was doing, or that he had given up on his ambitions to write and, by extension, possibly on himself. Much of the verse he had written in the notebook (which Philipp
e Dalecky kept and sold years later to a collector) was nonsensical. But it wasn’t something a writer would simply discard. When Philippe looked through the book he found three words towards the end that struck him as significant.

  Jim had written: ‘I’m finally dead.’

  In three weeks he would be.

  3

  In June a friend from UCLA, Alain Ronay, came to stay with Jim in Paris, and spent almost every day with him during the last weeks of his life. The men took long walks together through the city. During a stroll on Friday, 2 July, Jim turned the conversation to suicide, specifically to what Nietzsche had written about it. This was something he had discussed with other friends recently.

  Nietzsche can be read as an advocate of suicide. ‘The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night,’ is the philosopher’s epigram on the subject. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his Dionysian prophet preach that it is important to choose the time of one’s death:

  Many die too late, and some die too early. The teaching sounds strange: ‘Die at the right time!’

  Nietzsche also has Zarathustra address those who crave fame, into which category a rock star would fall. Such people had to learn to ‘honour and practise the difficult art of – going at the right time’. That is, every performance ends as all lives end; the close of the stage curtain is a rehearsal for the final curtain. Know when to leave the stage.

  Despite Jim’s gloomy preoccupations, Alain Ronay insists that Jim was in better shape than is often supposed during his last weeks, arguing that his friend was not depressed, that he had lost weight and cut back on drinking. ‘Jim was not fat,’ he says, though photographs he took of Jim a week before he died show the singer with a distinctly fat face. ‘[He] was anything but despondent, and had stopped drinking – almost …’ There is a beer bottle in front of Jim in these last pictures. Still Alain is determined to look on the bright side. ‘Truly he was not melancholy,’ he insists. ‘[He] probably spent the happiest days of his life [in Paris] before his death. And, by the way, his career wasn’t over at all. He had decided not to go back to rock, but his record was [selling well].’