Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

  Not quite. The relative failure of The Soft Parade got the Doors back into the studio within six months, where Jim pulled out his final bag of tricks. Critics raved about Morrison Hotel Hard Rock Cafe. Rock magazine said, “Morrison isn’t sexy anymore, you say; he’s getting old and fat. Well, you can’t see a potbelly on record, but you can hear balls … .” Jim claimed much of the album, including “Roadhouse Blues,” was written for Pam. He loved her but was also involved with a writer from New York, Patricia Kennealy, a white witch. When the Doors played a four-night stint at the Felt Forum, Jim spent his afternoons with Pam and his evenings with Patricia.

  Worries about the Phoenix “skyjacking” allegations were put to rest when, on April 6, the flight attendant changed her testimony, and Jim’s appearance was rescheduled. On the twenty-seventh Jim was acquitted of the charges. “They were just trying to hang me because I was the one that had the well-known face,” Jim said. “The trouble with these busts is that people that don’t like me like to believe it because I’m the reincarnation of everything they consider evil. I get hung both ways.”

  After the Morrison Hotel tour, Jim took the master tapes for the new live Doors album back to New York and stayed with Patricia Kennealy Although his relationship with Patricia was as haphazard and unpredictable as all the rest, on June 24 the couple were married in an ancient Celtic pagan ritual at Patricia’s apartment. A high priest and priestess performed the Wicca wedding, in which Jim and Patricia took vows and a few drops of their commingled blood were mixed with consecrated wine. Jim fainted after the ceremony, said Patricia, because of the huge amount of energy created inside the magical circle, and not because of the ritual bloodletting.

  “What Pam and Jim had was a total love affair,” Paul Ferrara told me. “But there were those days when he disappeared. I’ve heard homosexual stories, I’ve heard everything. There were so many weirdos throwing themselves at him. Who knows? If they had the right drug at the right time—‘Hey Jim, let’s step in the alley and get off.’ I married one of Jim’s girlfriends. I slept with Pam. We were fairly liberal with our girlfriends. The night she took me home, she said, ‘Well, he’s with somebody else!’ Jim found out about it, but it wasn’t talked about. Maybe he cared, but he didn’t show it. He was with somebody else!”

  After a three-week jaunt to Paris, Jim waited several edgy days in Dade County, Florida, for Judge Goodman to finally begin the trial. The state’s first witness was a tiny teenage girl, Colleen, her hair in a ponytail. “He pulled down his pants,” she said, appalled, “and … stroked it … . It was disgusting.” She clutched her hanky and whined that she had been “shocked.” Colleen’s boyfriend confirmed her testimony, then Mom hit the stand and agreed that her daughter had been “visibly upset” when she arrived home from the concert. The shocking audio evidence was played for a solemn jury. Two different people testified that Jim had exposed himself for “five to eight seconds.” Then somebody refuted their testimony, saying he had seen no oral copulation or exposure. On and on it went, like a Mad magazine nightmare, with Jim Morrison in the role of spoof scapegoat. Initially Jim took an interest in the workings of the law, copiously filling notebooks as the trial progressed. By the last few days he was amusing himself by giving the jurors nicknames.

  While the trial dragged on, Patricia Kennealy called Jim in Florida with the news that she was pregnant. He asked her to join him, but after their first evening together avoided her for the next two days. When she showed up in the courtroom, Jim was forced to deal with the situation, telling Patricia that a child would ruin their relationship, ultimately convincing her to have an abortion. Patricia says that she and Jim both cried, and he promised to be with her when the time came. But he didn’t even call.

  Due to Doors gigs, the trial plodded on for a month. The 150 photographs displayed as evidence showed no exposure of any kind. When Jim finally took the stand, for four hours he was calm, eloquent, and gracious, all the while insisting that he didn’t expose himself or simulate oral copulation on Robby. After deliberating for two and a half hours, the jurors handed down a mixed verdict: innocent of lewd behavior and drunkenness, guilty of indecent exposure and profanity. (Jim had exposed himself, but it wasn’t lewd!?) Released on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond, Jim told the press that the verdict would do nothing to alter his lifestyle because he had done nothing wrong. The Doors had lost over a million dollars in bookings, and Jim now had to await sentencing.

  During the trial Jimi Hendrix died, two weeks later Janis Joplin OD’d, and Jim’s imbibing increased. Ominously he told his friends, “You’re drinking with number three.” He and Pam fought so ferociously that she went to Paris, where Jim later heard that she had taken up with a French count. He became more and more morose and disillusioned.

  On October 30, Jim faced Judge Goodman, who handed down the stiffest sentence he could—sixty days of hard labor at Dade County jail for each count, followed by two years and four months’ probation as well as a five-hundred-dollar fine. Jim’s lawyer filed an appeal. Jim drove back to L.A. after the sentencing, stopping in New Orleans, where he dashed off a postcard—“The Sacrifice of the Divine Lamb”—to the Doors’ office: “Don’t worry; the end is near, Ha Ha.”

  Elektra released 13, a Doors greatest-hits package, and Jim and the Doors went to work, writing new songs for a new album, L.A. Woman, which included the anagram for his own name, “Mr. Mojo Risin’,” and the eerie “Riders on the Storm.” But Jim was very unhappy. There was a bright spot when he recorded more of his poetry, but at a gig in New Orleans Ray Manzarek claims that he could see Jim’s spirit leave him. “He lost all his energy midway through the set. He hung on the microphone and it just slipped away. You could actually see it leave him. He was drained.” In defiance, Jim pounded the microphone stand into the stage, over and over until the wood splintered, then sat down on the drum riser. The rest of the tour was canceled. The last song Jim Morrison sang onstage was “Light My Fire.” The Doors never performed in public again.

  Todd Schifman had gotten Jim together with MGM head Jim Aubrey, who Todd says was a “stone believer” in Jim. “We negotiated a contract with Jim that was unbelievable,” Todd said. “It gave Morrison the right to three pictures at MGM, to direct, produce, write, star, write the music—unbelievable artistic control. He set up offices and started writing, but his self-destructiveness wouldn’t allow him to really make what he should have out of the deal. After the first year nothing was accomplished, so Aubrey wouldn’t pick up the option.”

  Demoralized and at his lowest ebb, Jim started snorting piles of cocaine, on the prowl for a woman who would stretch the limits with him. While he was staying at the Chateau Marmont, he spent a few wild nights with a buxom neighbor, instigating three-ways and once waking up in a tangle of bloody sheets after they shared champagne glasses of each other’s blood. As if on cue, Pam returned from Paris. Patricia Kennealy arrived soon afterward, and the two women took their turns with Jim, actually encountering each other one mad, stoned night. After a couple of months, however, Jim was spending most of his time with Pam, and Patricia went back to New York.

  When asked to do an antidrug “Speed Kills” radio spot for the Do It Now Foundation, Jim surprisingly agreed, screwing up every take until the representative fled in abject frustration. Jim couldn’t seem to help himself. “I never did a song on speed. Drunk, yeaaahh … Shooting speed ain’t cool, so snort it … . Don’t shoot speed, you guys. Christ, smoke pot! … Please don’t shoot speed, try downers … .”

  Jim worked hard on the L.A. Woman album, and according to many of his friends, he then quit the Doors and quietly made the decision to leave for Paris, where he would pursue his life as a poet. Some of Jim’s friends say he was enthused and excited about the move; others, like Patricia Kennealy, disagree. She spent a week with him in L.A. while Pamela searched for an apartment in Paris. “I took one look at him and knew he wasn’t going to be around very much longer,” she said. “It seemed not to be him anymo
re; the dark side was taking over.” He walked the streets, sleeping with a different girl every night, smoked three packs of Marlboros a day, coughed blood, and mixed tequila, vodka, whiskey, and gin until he was violently ill. Another one of his girlfriends had an abortion. At barely twenty-seven, Jim told Michael McClure that he felt forty-seven. In a note to Creem’s Dave Marsh, Jim closed with “I am not mad. I am interested in freedom. Good luck, Jim Morrison.”

  L.A. Woman was garnering raves and the single “Love Her Madly” was the Doors’ first Top Ten hit in two years, but instead of the usual chaotic touring, Jim was cramming his poetry notebooks with reflective, scathing insights, trying to put some order back into his disorderly life. For a very brief time, at 17 rue Beautrellis on the Right Bank in Paris, it seemed as if Jim might be able to make some sense of it all. He lost weight, shaved his unruly beard, didn’t drink as much, and wrote daily, telling people he’d finished one book and was beginning another about the Miami trial. He and Pam seemed to be living inside a gentle truce, but wicked habits die hard—or not at all. Creativity soon fled, and Jim sat for hours in front of an empty page. There was a new set of drinking buddies, sleazy, unexplored nightclubs to fall down in at four A.M. But on July 1, 1971, Jim once again resolved to overcome the battle with his old demon, alcohol. On July 3 he was dead.

  The statement that Pam gave police the day Jim died says that she and Jim returned from a Robert Mitchum movie about one A.M. Jim watched some home movies while she washed dishes, then they listened to some records and fell asleep about two-thirty. Jim’s noisy breathing awakened her about an hour later, and after pacing the room a few times, Jim told her he didn’t feel well and wanted to take a warm bath. While he was in the tub, Jim felt nauseated and Pam brought him a pot from the kitchen and he threw up. When he threw up a second time, Pam noticed some blood, but Jim said, “It’s over,” he was feeling better, and not to call a doctor. Pam woke up a while later and found that Jim was still in the tub. She said his head was tilted to one side, his eyes were closed, and he was smiling. She thought he was joking with her and she told him to stop it, until she noticed blood dripping from his nose and started shaking him. After trying to get Jim out of the tub, she called some friends, Alain Ronay and Agnes Varda, saying, “I can’t wake him up, I think he’s dying.”

  When the police arrived and confirmed that Jim was dead, Pam told them his name was “Douglas James Morrison” and that he was “a poet.” The official cause of death was listed as “natural causes.” The doctor decided that Jim must have had “coronary problems” that were exacerbated by heavy drinking, complicated by a lung infection, which caused “myocardial infarction”—a heart attack.

  It wasn’t until July 5 that the rest of the Doors found out that Jim was gone. Bill Siddons was the first to get the call about rumors that Jim had died, and finally reached Pam, who confirmed the horrible truth. When Bill arrived in Paris the following morning, Jim’s body was in a casket, still in the apartment with Pam. He was buried on July 8 at the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, exactly where he had told Pam that he wanted to be—close to Balzac, Chopin, and Oscar Wilde, near the grave of Moliere. Only a few people attended, and there was no service.

  But did Jim Morrison really die that way? Was he dead at all? Back in 1967 Jim proposed faking his death as a publicity stunt. He had once spoken to Rolling Stone about someday turning up with a whole new identity Nobody wanted to believe Jim was dead, and the rumors flew.

  According to a dealer in Paris, Jim scored some heroin that was too pure, snorted it in the men’s room of the Circus club, and was carried to his flat, where he later died. Friends insist that Jim preferred cocaine to heroin. A cocaine overdose? What if Jim had found Pam’s stash of heroin and she told him it was cocaine? Or maybe he had been killed as part of an elaborate conspiracy aimed at the dangerous hippie counterculture? Jim had worked on a screenplay about someone disappearing into a jungle. Had he perpetrated an elaborate hoax, just so he could finally disappear and get a little peace?

  “This is the end, beautiful friend.” (LOUISE DECARLO)

  In a story told to Paris Match magazine by Alain Ronay and Agnes Varda in 1991, something close to the truth finally emerged. Ronay says that while the doctors examined Jim’s body, Pam pulled him aside and told him that she and Jim had been snorting heroin for two days, heroin that she had supplied. Racked with guilt, she went on to tell Ronay that Jim had been listening to the first Doors album when he took one more hit, and they both nodded out. She did awaken to Jim’s heavy breathing and, concerned, got him into the bathtub, then went back to bed and fell asleep. She woke up later and panicked when she realized Jim wasn’t in bed with her. She found him in the tub, his nose bleeding, and he threw up three times into the pot, telling her he felt better and to go back to bed. Then he died. “Jim looked so calm,” Pam told Ronay. “He was smiling.”

  In 1969 Jim had named Pam his sole heir, but the will was tied up in court for the next two years. Pam believed she was Jim’s common-law widow, demanding an advance on the estate, and when Jim’s lawyer authorized a loan, she promptly bought a mink coat and a VW Bug. It has been reported that she worked as a prostitute, partly because Jim predicted it would be so. Pam never stopped grieving and continued her heroin use. She sometimes sat by the phone, waiting for Jim to call. Just when the final accounting of Jim’s estate was being made, Pam died of an overdose. She would have gotten half a million dollars immediately, and a quarter of everything the Doors would make in the future, which would have added up to many millions. In a grotesque twist, in 1975 Jim’s share of the Doors’ earnings was split equally between Jim’s parents and Pamela’s parents. The antiauthority rebel now supports a retired admiral and a retired high-school teacher.

  “A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them,” Jim told Circus magazine. “Obviously that can only work at moments. It can’t be a lasting thing. That’s not saying that people shouldn’t keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease, and war. I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown.”

  RICK NELSON

  Some People Call Me a Teenage Idol

  Ricky Nelson brought the devil’s music into the homes of millions of Americans every week in crisp, clean black and white. He was neat and tidy. He had good manners. He was drop-dead handsome yet winsomely nonthreatening. And his proud parents, Ozzie and Harriet, were always in the audience, grinning their approval as he rocked. Teen idol Ricky Nelson made rock and roll palatable and wholesome, something the average nuclear family could enjoy together every Tuesday night in their very own living room.

  As part of radio and then television’s “America’s Favorite Family,” the “irrepressible Ricky” spent three cloudless, blissful decades parading through ideal domestic events that never took place in his real life. Sometimes Ozzie and Harriet were his real parents, sometimes his fictional “Mom and Pop,” and the rest of the time his ever-watchful employers.

  By the time Ozzie and Harriet Nelson became parents of their second son, Eric Hilliard Nelson, in 1940, they were an established big-band couple, settling in Hollywood when offered a slot on Red Skelton’s “Raleigh Cigarette Program.” Their good-natured humor helped make the show a runaway success, and two years later “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” hit the airwaves to much acclaim.

  Every Saturday stolid David and his mischievous younger brother, Ricky, would dress up in their cowboy outfits and take the Hollywood Boulevard streetcar to the movies, where they fired their cap guns at the bad guys on the screen. The boys walked to Gardner Street School, two and a half blocks from home, coming back each day to their delighted English setter, Nicky. It seemed like the flawless family suburban dream, but every growing pain, every argument behind the closed doors on Camino Palmero, became fodder for the radio show. And in 1948, when David and Ricky were twelve and eight, producer Ozzie ad
ded his sons to the cast. “We knew David could handle it,” said a writer for the series, “but we weren’t sure if Ricky was old enough.” From the first day, irrepressible Ricky stole the show with his high-pitched voice and knowing smirk. David played a passive character, setting up his younger brother for the laughs, but if resentment was brewing, the older boy kept it inside.

  With twenty years of show biz under his belt, Ozzie demanded and received more control over family projects, cowriting Here Come the Nelsons, a lightweight, lighthearted film romp that did surprisingly well at the box office. Skinny eleven-year-old Ricky, with his brush cut and braces, had a ball in front of the cameras, excitedly viewing each day’s footage with the grown-ups. The following adventures of Ozzie and Harriet would take place on the small screen—for 435 charming, sanitized episodes.

  Young Ricky Nelson—wholesome, tortured teenage TV idol. (AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

  The TV Nelsons lived in a timeless, nameless neighborhood. The Honeymooners’ Ralph Kramden drove a bus; Lucy’s hubby, Ricky Ricardo, played bongos and sang “Babalu,” but the viewing audience never found out what placid Ozzie Nelson did for a living, even though he would sail into the house with his lunch pail and announce, “Harriet, I’m home!” Nothing from the frightening headlines ever found its way into the pristine, sparkling pad on Rodgers Road, Anywhere, U.S.A.

  Within his domain, Ozzie was the big boss, expecting perfection from everyone, especially his kids. David was rarely unprepared, but Ricky was having too much fun to take it all too seriously, often arriving without his lines memorized. He started planting his dialogue around the set, peeking into the cookie jar and opening drawers during scenes. The boys addressed their parents at home the same way they did on the show: “Yes sir,” “No sir,” “Yes ma‘am,” “No ma’am.” “Ozzie ruled with an iron hand,” said one of Rick’s first girlfriends. “He was an extremely domineering, intimidating person and expected an awful lot from Ricky and David. They didn’t want to let him down.”