Mr Mojo (7 page)

There will always be rumours, but there is little to suggest that Morrison was in any way gay. In
Rock Dreams
, the 1973 picture book written by Nik Cohn and illustrated by Guy Peellaert, a pouting, muscular Morrison is depicted as a gay icon, a leather queen in tight black pants and a string vest. In a crowded bar he perches on a stool, surrounded by rent boys, sailors and drag queens, in a scene reminiscent of the photograph on the gatefold sleeve of
Morrison Hotel
. Standing behind him is Roy Orbison, one of the original leather boys. Nik Cohn said this was an obvious portrait of Morrison, if a little perverse: ‘At the time he was so much the most beautiful boy in the world. He was the ultimate idol, for girls and boys alike. But he wasn't drawn that way [by Peellaert] because of his personal habits.'

‘I think he found it uncomfortable being adored by men, because he was so sexy,' said Danny Fields. ‘On the other hand, he would have complained if it had stopped.'

Writing only two years after Morrison's death, Cohn already had a handle on his enduring success: ‘At first Morrison seemed no more than a marvellous boy in black leathers, made up by two queens on the phone. Later on, however, he emerged as something
altogether more solemn. Not just a truck-stop rocker, nor even a golden stud, but a poet and a thinker, stuff full of profundities. Forthwith he embarked, like a rock and roll Bix Beiderbecke, full speed ahead on the American route to romantic martyrdom.'

Jim Morrison was instant myth.

By now Morrison was turning into a furious and indiscriminate drinker. He liked alcohol because it fitted in with his particular slant on the Dionysian myth – getting drunk and picking up (or being picked up by) women. His macho code was also influenced by Norman Mailer, and his chosen drug, alcohol, helped him to see this through. By drinking beer (or anything else) he didn't have to rely on anyone – no sycophantic dealers or wealthy women: he could walk into any bar and get his prescription, right there and then. ‘I hate the kind of sleazy sexual connotations of scoring from people,' he said, ‘so I never do that. That's why I like alcohol; you can go down to any corner store or bar and it's right across the table . . . It's traditional.'

‘It's like gambling somehow,' he said another time. ‘You go out for a night of drinking and you don't know where you're going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It's like the throw of the dice.'

Morrison liked places that were noisy and beery and cloudy with grease. He wouldn't have known how to behave in anywhere smart, not that anywhere smart
would have tolerated his behaviour. The singer wasn't born feral, but that's what he had become. He would be so drunk he listed, swaying from side to side until he staggered back to wherever it was he was staying, his face covered in crazyhouse drool.

Odds on, his nights turned out disastrously. Slumped over a wipe-clean bar, he'd drink himself paralytic, maybe forcing a fellow drunk into a long philosophical discussion, perhaps reading his poetry, or trying to pick up a passing waitress or stripper, and then throwing the inevitable bottle or chair before being thrown out. Morrison was the ultimate barstool philosopher.

The days could be disastrous, too. Once, on a shopping spree in LA, he walked into a jeans store to buy some leather trousers. Completely drunk, he undressed and asked for a pair which were way too small for him. He hardly ever wore underwear and stood there half naked while the assistant tried to persuade him to get dressed. He didn't, but just demanded to see more jeans. He tried on a pair with lace-up flies, but was so far gone he had to ask the assistant to tie them for him. He liked the trousers, but paid the assistant $500 to replace the fly with a zip, even though there was an identical pair with a zip on the rail behind him.

Pop genius but amateur human being, Morrison was already losing his equilibrium. While he was starting to be seen as a rock god, his real life couldn't quite live up to the myth.

There were other nights: on 3 August 1966, the night Lenny Bruce died, David Crosby was, for no apparent reason, attacked by Morrison at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. He harangued Crosby, and accused him of hiding behind his sunglasses, though Crosby was wearing shades only because he was strung out on acid. This behaviour was typical: in his autobiography
Long Time Gone
, Crosby remembered Morrison as having ‘a masochistic bent; he sublimated it. He'd go out and get monumentally trashed – drunk, high, and really polluted – and pick a fight with someone who would beat him up. He did it repeatedly.'

Crosby remembered a party where Morrison got into a fight with Janis Joplin: ‘Jim tells Janis she can't sing the blues, which does not make her happy. Her first reaction was to run out of the room, crying. Then, being the spunky bluesy bitch she was, Janis picked up a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon (the square one with the sharp corners) and, instead of taking a drink, took the bottle back into the room with Morrison, where she broke it on his forehead.

‘Jim went down onto the rug, but not completely out of it. He had enough consciousness left to puke into the shag carpet around his face.'

Jim Morrison found it easy being a star. Easy for him, difficult for everyone else; everyone, that is, with whom he came into contact. Both in public and in private, he could treat those around him with unbridled
contempt. He would push relationships – with friends, lovers and fans – to the brink, just to watch them break. He wanted to see just how far he could go. But the success of the Doors had been so quick, his fame so accelerated, that he soon became appalled at how easy all this was, and was especially disgusted with the public's seemingly unrelenting masochism. He pushed his ‘live performance' self to the limit, insulting and assaulting the audience, only to have them love him in return. He realised he could push himself even further than he originally thought, so his already highly theatrical persona quickly descended into self-parody.

Almost from their first success, Morrison acknowledged the limitations of the Doors; he was not content, like Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore, to sit back and ride the gravy train.

He became taciturn and difficult, sometimes even violent. Onstage he would throw lighted cigarettes into the audience, and jump into the pit to chastise fans; he would try to scare them by suddenly stopping singing halfway through a song, only to stare at them with his smug grin, defiant in his silence. At parties he would throw ice cubes and bottles at girls who annoyed or ignored him. He was playing the tortured artist now, the frustrated phantom. It was impossible to get him to do anything he didn't want to. When the band appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
on 17 September 1967, Sullivan asked them to omit the word ‘higher'
from ‘Light My Fire'. Morrison agreed, but then sang it anyway.

Night after night he trundled from bar to bar along Sunset Strip, sometimes picking up a girl, sometimes befriending a group of drunks before stripping naked in the street and maybe scaling a hotel wall, or playing the matador with cars on the freeway. And he slept where he fell. God help anyone who tried to help him.

‘You never went to criticise Jim face-to-face,' said Danny Fields, ‘you just didn't do it. Paul [Rothchild] would obviously order him about in the studio, but I would never say, “Why don't you shave, or lose ten pounds, or use a deodorant?” It never occurred to me, or anyone else. The rest of the band worked around him. I never saw anyone treat him like anyone but Elvis Presley.'

But Fields had quickly fallen out with Morrison, who resented the press officer's attempts to help his career . . . as well as saving his life. This happened in July 1967, when Fields had, in Morrison's eyes, tried to kidnap him. Distressed by the kind of girls Morrison was surrounding himself with (mainly down-at-heel circuit groupies), Fields tried to elevate his taste in women – firstly by introducing him to Nico, the former model and chanteuse with the Velvet Underground, the East Coast's answer to the Doors. ‘I thought they would make a cute couple,' said Fields. ‘They were both
so weird and icy and mysterious and charismatic and poetic and deep and sensitive and wonderful.'

Nico was in LA staying with Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol girl, at the Castle Hotel in the Hollywood Hills, a huge fake 1920s Spanish mansion which had recently become a popular rock and rollers' haunt, frequented by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan and Warhol himself. ‘I rounded him up and persuaded him to follow me to the Castle in his car,' said Fields. ‘You could tell how nasty he was then, because he really wasn't trying to keep up – falling back and being a real pain in the ass – so I'd have to keep stopping and waiting for him. He played those kinds of games, tried to get you in his power. So, we got there, and after I introduced them they just stood and stared at each other for hours. They stood in doorways and stared at the same spot on the floor.

‘Then we got incredibly stoned. I travelled with a lot of drugs in those days – everyone did – and we took just about everything I had – everything, that is, that hadn't been taken by Edie Sedgwick. I had hidden most of my drugs underneath the mattress of a bed in a room that wasn't being used, but she still managed to find them. There was acid, hash, uppers, downers, and a bottle of vodka. I split most of this with Jim, although he had far more than I did – he had a much greater capacity for narcotics than anyone I knew. It was amazing. I didn't know how anybody drunk, smoked
and swallowed so much stuff and still stayed up. But he did. He was up on the roof, naked, climbing all over it, completely stoned.'

‘He took Nico up in a tower, both naked,' said Paul Rothchild, ‘and Jim, stoned out of his mind, walked along the edge of the parapet. Hundreds of feet down. Here's this rock star at the peak of his career risking his life to prove to this girl that life is nothing.'

‘Him and Nico got into this fight,' said Fields, ‘with him pulling her hair all over the place – it was just this weird love-making, between the two most adorable monsters, each one trying to be more poetic than the other. Then he started asking for his car keys, and of course I was afraid that he was so drunk he'd kill himself, so I told him no and hid the keys. The worst situation in the world for him was to be out of control, to be in the thrall of other people. He hated that.'

Morrison snarled and shouted and an argument broke out. Unable to win, he crawled to bed. The next day, still drunk, still drinking, Morrison again begged for his car, which again Fields denied him, eventually agreeing to drive Jim downtown to his own car.

‘Whilst we were gone,' said Fields, ‘the group had been to the Castle looking for him, because he was due at a rehearsal. When we came back we found all the chairs on the table – this was their way of expressing anger. They were all scared of him, all very, very afraid of him. They loved him, but they hated him as much
as they loved him. They knew that he was everything. Before they'd gone they'd written on the back of a still from the
Chelsea Girls
movie which was hanging up in the lobby: “Jim, you'd better get back, your ass is mud.”

‘A little while later, after he'd sobered up, I put his keys back in the ignition, telling him they were there all the time. He hated me from that moment on. He thought I was being sneaky and treacherous, and I was, but I was also being protective. I didn't care if he got killed, but the record company would have lost their biggest star and I would have lost my job.

‘And that one very intense night we spent together, taking all those drugs and talking all night long, it was so incredible. It was a very intense experience, probably the most intense I've ever had. I can't remember what was said, because we were on acid, but you know, it was deep. You'd think that some kind of bond would remain after that, so at least you acknowledge that there had been some kind of intimacy, even if it's embarrassing for you to recall, but he never did. It's like if you slept with someone once, as much as you don't want to say anything about it, or nudge or wink or whatever, something is always there. Not that we slept together . . . but it was so close.'

Nico later dyed her hair because she'd heard that Morrison liked redheads: ‘I was so in love with him that I made my hair red after a while. I wanted to please his taste. It was silly, wasn't it? Like a teenager.'

As Danny Fields said, ‘It wasn't a gratifying experience working for Morrison, it was always kinda frustrating. He never really did what I wanted, but I was naive too – it was my first job as a legitimate publicist and people don't do what you want them to do. He had his own idea of how he wanted his image projected, and he was right. He was the custodian of his own creation. I flattered myself that I could manipulate it, but he was a much better manipulator than anyone.

‘I wanted him to do a photo session with Nico, but he refused to do it. He'd never say no, but he'd never turn up. Nico would be waiting at the location and Morrison was always nowhere to be seen. He didn't want to pose with a woman, and I don't blame him – his instincts were right. Posing with a woman would have diffused his image, and he wanted to remain aloof.'

Fields had other plans for the group, figuring that they should broaden their popularity by exploiting the teen market, a huge portion of which was buying the Doors' records anyway. He wanted to introduce Morrison – whom he saw as the archetypal new-wave teen icon – to Gloria Stavers, the editor of
16
magazine. Fields flew from New York to Los Angeles with the express purpose of getting Morrison to place a call to her.

Stavers was a powerful woman at the time, controlling the hearts and minds of nearly every fourteen-year-old girl in America, and she asked for and received a great deal of deference from the music industry. Morrison, though, was hardly the kind of fawning pop star she was used to. She consequently became intrigued by, and then obsessed with, the singer.