Mr Mojo (15 page)

Kennealy was just too demanding, and Morrison was in no condition to offer anything. To everyone's relief, particularly Morrison's, the band finished recording
LA Woman
during January 1971. Then, on Valentine's Day, Courson flew to Paris to look for an apartment. It was all going according to plan. Kennealy, back in LA after a brief sojourn in Manhattan, stayed with Morrison for a week, seven days of idyllic drunkenness. ‘The last week I spent with him,' she said, ‘he was charming, a real delight. But the very last time I saw him he was a pig, and the other half took over, so I guess it made it easier in the long run.'

On their final day together, Kennealy and Morrison spent the afternoon in a bar, drinking tequila with beer chasers. Practically paralytic (she remembers having fourteen drinks, and knows she was way behind Morrison) and accompanied by the girl with whom Kennealy was staying, they stumbled over to Poppy Studios, where the rest of the band were mixing the album. Kennealy's room-mate, overawed by being in the presence of such a star, made a successful pass at Morrison, and a while later Patricia discovered them outside on the lawn. A fight broke out.

‘It was a stupid fight,' said Kennealy, ‘but if I hadn't left I think I would have killed her. It made me so angry that he was making me do this. That was a kind
of disengagement, too. I really knew then that I was never going to see him alive again. That was it.'

Morrison's drinking buddy Tom Baker returned from an eight-month sabbatical in London, and with Courson and Kennealy gone, the two of them took to the town, drinking themselves stupid night after night. In the final week before leaving for Paris he slept with a different girl every night. But considering his intake at this point – rumoured to be three bottles of Scotch a day – it is doubtful whether he managed to have sex with any of them.

This was to be the last stage of Morrison's journey into self-inflicted purgatory.

‘It consumed him completely at the end,' said Kennealy. ‘It was convenient at first, but it overtook him. His persona was ruling his life at the end, and that's why he ran away. That's why he went to Paris.'

For Morrison, Paris was a city of dreamers, of romantics, of poets; his mind raced with thoughts of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Céline, of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and Gertrude Stein; he imagined the Paris of the 1920s, of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter, a Paris of the mind, driven by noble, artistic fervour. It was March, 1971, and this was to be the last stage of Morrison's journey into hell.

Sometimes with Courson, sometimes alone, he'd wander the city, sightseeing, shopping and stopping at dozens of bars. Bar culture in Paris is infinitely better
than it is in Los Angeles, and Morrison was in his element. And though he was without his LA buddies, he still managed to attract drinking partners, either fellow expatriates or young, fascinated Parisians. He gained some anonymity, yet his lifestyle hadn't really changed, his scribbled notes being intended now as poems rather than songs. He felt relieved, but also lost and alone, as though he was waving to a crowd that had long since moved on. He walked around Paris in a sweet fog: ‘He was drunk a lot . . . that's not to say I never saw him sober, but it usually didn't last,' remembers his biographer Hervé Muller. ‘I don't think he was doing anything . . . He had his notebooks and things with him and he was making notes, but I didn't see him working.'

This new life was turning out to be nothing more than an extension of the old one . . . and the binges continued. During this period he only called home twice: once to tell Bill Siddons he'd be staying in Paris longer than the expected six months, and once to John Densmore, just to say hello. To escape from Paris, and his rapidly spreading notoriety, Courson and Morrison hired a car in April and drove down through France to Spain and Morocco, and then in May they flew to Corsica for a ten-day holiday. But back in Paris, the debauchery continued. The end seemed inevitable.

On Friday 2 July, after Morrison had dined with Courson and a friend called Alan Ronay, he took
Courson home, and went alone to the cinema to see
Pursued
, Raoul Walsh's noir Western of 1947, starring Robert Mitchum.

This is where the confusion begins. After the film he is said to have gone to a nightclub, the Rock'n'Roll Circus, and then: (a) overdosed on heroin in the club toilets and been carried back to his apartment, where he passed out in the bathroom; (b) gone back to the apartment, where he complained of being tired and suffered a heart attack in the bath; (c) cruised a few bars before returning home, where he found Courson snorting heroin, joined her, immediately overdosed, the combination of heroin and alcohol proving fatal, and was placed in the bath; or (d) returned home, snorted or injected heroin, then went to lie in a hot bath to savour the full effect. Courson said that he returned home and, after complaining of breathing problems and coughing up a little blood, took a bath. She then went to bed, waking at 5 a.m. to find him still in the bath, dead, with a trickle of blood dripping from one nostril. Due to the intricacies of French law an autopsy was never performed. Though a heart attack was given as the official cause of death, it is now assumed that Morrison almost certainly died from an overdose of heroin. It was to be his final night on the town.

It took a while for the news to reach America, Morrison's death being announced first by the national
press in Britain. A UPI statement dated 9 July reads: ‘Jim Morrison's death was announced in Los Angeles and confirmed by the American Embassy in Paris. He died last Saturday, 3 July 1971, in Paris. He was staying at 17 Rue Beautreillis with a girlfriend. He complained of feeling sick after a bath and she found him unconscious and called the police physician. He arrived within a few minutes but found Jim dead. The physician announced the death was due to natural causes. He was buried on Wednesday of this week (7 July) at Père Lachaise Cemetery. It is the oldest cemetery in the center of Paris.' Morrison's family having disowned him, Père-Lachaise was Courson's easiest solution.

Immediately, people began to wonder what had really happened. There had been no autopsy, and no one has ever been able to find the doctor who signed the death certificate. No one apart from Courson and the physician saw Morrison placed in the coffin, and Bill Siddons, who flew over to Paris on 6 July after being told of Morrison's death, was confronted with a signed death certificate and a sealed coffin. Because the death was surrounded by controversy, rumours soon began to fly around, mainly about Morrison staging his death and disappearing to North Africa or South America.

It doesn't matter how Jim Morrison died, however, because he really died of self-indulgence. In Paris he had hoped to rise from the ashes of his own humiliation, but he found only self-absorption and, ultimately, death.
The attempt had lasted four months. Jim Morrison's movie was finally over.

Back in the States, Jim Morrison was doing fine with the public – the collection comprising
The Lords
and
The New Creatures
was going into paperback,
LA Woman
was on its way to earning a gold disc, and ‘Love Her Madly', taken from it, was the band's biggest hit in two years. But now it was all over, and Morrison had left the theatre. Now it became easier to take him seriously. The twenty-seven-year-old leather man had drunk himself to death, pushed over the finish line by a silly experiment with heroin.

There was nothing else left for him. ‘I don't know what would have happened if he'd have come back from Paris,' said Patricia Kennealy. ‘He said he was going to come to New York that fall, to concentrate on the films and the poetry, but the Doors say they were convinced he was going back to LA to record another record. He was reaching so desperately at that point for something to hold onto, he could have done anything.'

‘It would have been very hard for him to go from being a pop star to a poet,' said Danny Fields. ‘He would have been the darling of the poetry world, and he could have been at every poetry reading, published in every little poetry book, because of who he was, but who knows what he could have written? He had such a super-human intelligence, there's no telling what he
might have done. That, mixed with maturity and some sense of wisdom, and some freedom from the prison of stardom, might have led to something extremely interesting. But we'll never know.'

Ironically, it was only in death that his biggest wish was realised: his death certificate read: James Douglas Morrison, poet.

As soon as news of Morrison's death hit Los Angeles, various impostors appeared – on the beach, on the radio, at nightclubs, checking into hotels and cashing cheques in his name, even walking into regional newspapers offering exclusives on the disappearance. All this quickly added to the Morrison mystique, the questions about whether or not he was dead, about where he was buried, about how exactly he had died. A web of intricate, interlocking conspiracy theories was rapidly spun, some of which persist to this day.

With Morrison gone, the remaining Doors were unsure about what to do next. At first they were going to call it a day, but soon realised that this would cast Morrison as the only creative element in the group. ‘We were insecure,' said Ray Manzarek, ‘but we decided to keep on. There was no sense letting it fold up and fall apart. We had too many ideas.'

But, on the strength of their post-Morrison work, this was obviously an untruth.

There was also an air of desperation about the band. Robby Krieger said at the time: ‘The reason we're doing
it over again is not for the money. It's because what else could we do? It's what we like to do and what we've always done and it's our life. It's just a question of figuring out how to do it.'

So the husk of the band staggered on, releasing two mediocre LPs –
Other Voices
and
Full Circle
– and touring to support them. But without Morrison the music was lifeless. Shocked by his death, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore turned their back on the dark side of life, and their material became light-hearted and sloppy, as though they were telling themselves that they were human after all. The band shook off their perpetual cloak of fatigue and began smiling in their publicity pictures. ‘We've all been down there in the darkness with the heebie-jeebies for the last few years,' said Manzarek, ‘and now we finally see the light.' The mood of a Doors concert had previously been intense and austere, but not any more; now the band wore manic, inane grins, as they merrily sauntered through their new material.

It seemed impossible that these were the same men who had been responsible for all that dark, satanic rock – the new music was a strange hybrid of ineffectual jazz-rock and jaunty rock and roll, with no spark. On
Other Voices
and
Full Circle
the band were shown to be the bunch of flyweights they really were, emphasising once again how essential Morrison had been. The public felt the same way, as by themselves,
the remaining Doors couldn't get arrested, and their records languished in the lower reaches of the charts. At the end of 1972, inspiration eluding them, and deprived of their single most important element, the band broke up, perhaps finally realising the absurdity of their task.

‘We were over in England when we decided to pack in the group,' Manzarek told
Melody Maker
in October 1973. ‘Everybody just decided they wanted to pursue their own musical ideas instead of staying together. We went over to England to try and get some new ideas and new blood into the band, be it a new singer, new bass player, new guitarist or whatever, but it didn't happen. It just wasn't right.'

Krieger and Densmore then formed the relatively successful Butts Band, while Manzarek immersed himself in solo work. The Doors once said that trying to replace Morrison would be like trying to replace Jesus: ‘It wouldn't have been right. The four of us were so close, the vibrations wouldn't have been right.' But this is what effectively happened when Manzarek drafted Iggy Pop into the ranks.

In 1974 Iggy was in a state of flux; he had moved to Los Angeles after finishing the third and last Stooges album
Raw Power
, and because of his drug problems had split with David Bowie's management company, Mainman. He was alone in LA with no home, no money and no group. Manzarek's manager, Danny
Sugerman, openly wooed Iggy, becoming his manager and convincing him he should work with Manzarek, and eventually the rest of the band. Because of his financial situation, Iggy didn't have a lot of choice, and anyway, Jim Morrison was his hero, the reason he became a singer in the first place. ‘Jim Morrison was my idol – if he were alive today, I'd die for him,' he said at the time.

Nothing much came of their collaboration apart from a few impromptu concerts, notably at the LA Palladium and the Whisky a Go Go. At the Whisky gig, on 3 July, the third anniversary of Morrison's death, Iggy went onstage with his hair dyed black, wearing a Jim Morrison T-shirt, and a pair of Morrison's black leather trousers supposedly given to him by Manzarek. He performed a perfunctory set of Doors songs, including ‘LA Woman', to which Iggy added these lyrics: ‘Jim Morrison died today, Jim Morrison was more beautiful than any girl in this town, and now he's dead, now I cry.'

Iggy once said he was given a trunk full of Morrison's clothes, including many pairs of trousers and the hat Morrison wore at the fatal Miami concert. He showed how much he cared about the Morrison legacy by apparently selling the lot for methadone.

On 25 April 1974 Pamela Courson Morrison died from a heroin overdose, shortly after becoming the legal heir to the Morrison fortune. It probably came
as a welcome relief to her: since Morrison's death her days had been overloaded with pain and despair, full of drugs and one-night stands, and she stalked the nightclubs of Los Angeles lost in a twilight world of narcotics and distorted reverie. People were warned not to talk about Morrison in her presence, as she would cry at the very mention of his name. She never seemed to recover from the nightmare of Paris.