Post by darkstar3 on Apr 12, 2011 17:22:04 GMT
Danny Sugerman:
Truth About Jim Morrison's Death (1989)
JERRY HOPKINS ESS. JIM MORRISON Page 169-
Before I tell you what I believe really happened, let me explain why No One Here Gets Out Alive ended so ambiguously, hinting strongly that Jim might have engineered a hoax and was still alive. At the time I wrote the book, I really wasn’t sure how Jim died, although I was satisfied that he was dead. When Herve Muller presented the Rock n Roll Circus scenario, somehow I doubted it. (Although, to this day, Herve stands by the story.) It just didn’t feel right and of all the variations in Pam’s story which emerged once she was back in the United States and confiding in friends, none ever mention the Circus or this band of mysterious junkies.
While writing No One Here Gets Out Alive, I was also picking up other stories, right, left and sideways. Jim had been stabbed to death, or killed by someone sticking pins in a voodoo doll. One story had his death part of a serpentine conspiracy connecting the deaths of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Kent State Five, and several Black Panthers. Each was more ridiculous than the last.
I had to finish the book. I didn’t believe the official story for a minute and I didn’t feel comfortable with Herve Muller’s carefully research nightclub toilet overdose. So I reported the many scenarios, a long list that included the possibility that Jim wasn’t dead at all, but merely living out an elaborately conceived and brilliantly executed hoax. I believed that this was something that, with Pamela’s help Jim could have pulled off.
Certainly it was something he could have conceived. In college he had explored, intellectually, the possibility that Jesus Christ’s death was a hoax. Jim also had joked about faking his own death even before the band had it’s first hit record. In his interview with me for Rolling Stone, Jim talked about the possibility that at some time in the future he could appear with a different identity, wearing a suit and tie. With a Hollywood screenwriter he had devised a plot about someone who disappeared into the jungle in search of ‘absolute zero.’
I decided to write two last chapters, one of which had Jim dying of an overdose, the other having him disappear into North Africa, much like his hero, the poet Arthur Rimbaud. I suggested to the publisher that if, say, 10,000 copies of the book were published, 5,000 should end with an overdose caused by the combination of alcohol and heroin, the other 5,000 with the hoax. I asked that the books then be distributed randomly and without comment; let the readers discover the different endings on their own. I still think it was a good idea, but the publisher disagreed, so No One Here Gets Out Alive ended ambiguously, with both final chapters blended into one, leaving the reader uncertain. Of course this served the original purpose, fanning the flames of the rumor that Jim was not dead, but alive somewhere.
The years passed and while I remained convinced that Jim was dead, I still didn’t know what happened. At the same time, I came to believe that I might have neglected, or at least underestimated and misunderstood, Pamela’s role in Jim’s life and I began to consider writing a second, smaller book, or perhaps a screenplay, focusing on their romance.
I re-interviewed some of my earlier subjects, among them Diane Gardiner. After Jim was buried and when Pam returned to the U.S. Pam moved into Diane cottage in Sausalito, California. Diane, who was then working as a publicist for the Jefferson Airplane, had been one of Pam’s closet confidantes in Los Angeles and I figured that if anyone knew what happened, or at least knew what Pam sad happened, it was Diane.
Diane apologized for not telling me more interviews she gave me when I was researching No One Here Gets Out Alive. She said she promised Pam not to reveal anything, about Jim’s death at the time. Pam was still alive, so Diane said she felt bound to her pledge. Now – ten years later after Jim’s death – Diane told me that when Pam returned from Europe, ‘she was a real case, just devastated’. Diane said that for several months Pam walked around talking to herself, rambling and making no sense, and when she did make sense, she blamed herself for Jim’s death.
“I’ve never seen anyone feeling so guilty,” Diane told me. “She had tried to devote her whole life to one person. That was it. That was her life. Her whole life was him. And to have that kicked out from under you…”
As Diane and Pam spent more time together, fragments of the story came together, forming a believable scenario, explaining the source of Pam’s guilt.
Apparently, Jim and Pam had stopped at one or more sidewalk cafes on the way home from the movie, where Jim consumed several drinks. (This explains the arrival home at 1am, quite late for returning from a movie theatre.) At home, Jim mixed another drink as Pam lined up some white powder on a table top.
At this point, Diane is a bit vague. Jim had known about Pam’s heroin use, but most agree that apparently, he didn’t know how frequently she used it. Diane told me that Pam seemed unable to use it on a daily basis for a while, then merely stop, suffering rarely from withdrawal. And, Diane said, to her knowledge, Pam never used heroin with Jim or in his presence, at least until now. Jim disapproved of heroin. This was confirmed by everyone I talked to. Danny Sugerman, the 14 year old high school student who hung out at the Doors’ office and then years later helped me get No One Here Gets Out Alive published, said Jim actually lectured him about the evils and horrors of heroin’.
So, Diane told me, when Jim saw Pam bent over a line of white powder, it is possible he thought it was cocaine. Jim liked cocaine. There is no reason to think he would have done anything but smile and join Pam on the couch and inhale the next line of powder.
On the other hand, he could also have sensed, or realized that it was heroin. Diane told me that, according to Pam, the talk about Jim’s depression was real. The past year or so, many projects had been started or discussed – a screenplay with Michael Mc Clure, a poetry album with John Haeny, a stage show with Fred Myrow, a book about the Miami trial, an opera, on and on. None had been completed. Most were still born. In addition, Jim was overweight, alcoholic, and impotent ( a side effect from his alcoholism.)
The constant drinking only aggravated the depression. Jim had written a few lines in one of his notebooks that said, “Leave the informed sense in our wake/you be the Christ on this package tour/Money beats soul/Last Words, last words, out”. Later, tow of Jim’s biographers would use these lines to support a theory that his death was likely a suicide.
Diane doesn’t dismiss that theory, at least not entirely. She told me that when Jim saw the powder lined up so neatly on the table top, he may have known it wasn’t cocaine, but heroin, and knew what dangers lay in its use, especially in combination with alcohol. (When two central nervous system depressants, in this case alcohol and heroin, come together synergistically, they create a knockout punch: one plus one equals six!).
Danny Sugerman told me a slightly different version of the same story. I now know that when Danny edited No One Here Gets Out Alive in the late 70’s, he knew that Jim had died of an overdose, but he never told me. But later Danny told me that he and Pamela had shared both heroin and sex after Pamela left Diane Gardiner’s home and returned to Los Angeles. Danny said, that when Pamela talked about Jim’s death to Danny she also pledged him not to tell “Hopkins”, who then was trying to interview her. Danny was the one who merged the books two last chapters into one, which gave him an opportunity to tell the truth. But he remained loyal to Pamela rather than tell what he knew, even though Pam was dead.
I re-interviewed Danny about the same time I talked to Diane Gardiner in 1981. No One Here Gets Out Alive was, by then a huge success and Jim had been dead for more than ten years, so Danny talked more candidly. (Although he has never yet admitted to me that he had withheld the true story of Jim’s death while working on the manuscript.) In our recorded conversation, he told he had asked Pam about Paris and heroin. At first she told him that Jim would never use heroin. At the time of this conversation, Danny said, both he and Pam were stoned on heroin. “If he were alive today,” she said, “he’d kill both of us Danny.”
Danny told me, “That didn’t answer my question. You couldn’t confront Pam on this,” he said. “It was the most painful moment of her life.”
I asked Danny, “She never said anything about heroin being a part of his death?”
Danny said, “I seem to remember her saying something. In a real stupor , when you’re nodding out, you don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t even know if you’re talking, and I feel not unqualified to tell this story, bit I feel not awfully secure in its reportage, because I was awful high, too. But I do remember a conversation regarding her guilt, and her getting really down on herself…something to the effect: she was busted, Jim found it (the heroin.)
“What’s this!” Jim said. (As Danny recalled the conversation.)
“It’s coke!”
Jim dumped a quantity on the table, deftly pushing it into long, thick lines, probably with the edge of a paper matchbook or a credit card. He inhaled the first line.
Pam said, “Jim, don’t do too much. Jim don’t do too much!”
Danny again, “…rather than say, “Jim, it’s smack.” Because she had been hiding it from him, and she knew damned well he did not do that. And he did not want her to do it. He saw what heroin did to friends like Tim Hardin. (Another singer-songwriter who died of a heroin overdose.) He know the hazards of it.
‘So I remember a guilt feeling, and an implication…that Jim had discovered her stash and Pam said, “Oh Kim, it’s just coke,” which he really wasn’t into at that point anyway, and Jim said, “Let’s do some.” He put it out and snorted it like it was coke.”
Danny insisted that he didn’t know the true story, because this was only one of many that Pamela told, and the one she told most consistently was the “official” version, of a heart attack in the bathtub. It is, however, the story he believes.
It is the story that was told by Alain Ronay and Agnes Varda to Paris Match 1991, twenty years after Jim’s death, that makes this story most real.
Pam took Ronay’s arm in the Paris apartment as the doctor was examining Jim’s body. Pam said she and Jim had been snorting heroin for two days. Pam said they snorted heroin the night before and again that afternoon, after Jim had taken his walk with Ronay and before he went out to dinner alone. When they returned home from the movie and the bistro, the heroin came out again. In this version, Pam did not mention washing dishes, or say Jim watched home movies. Now Pam said Jim stated playing the Doors’ recordings, including the first album, which contained the song, “The End”. She said Jim got out of bed and snorted some more heroin, so she added Jim actually consumed more than she did. She said that one of the Doors’ records was playing when they nodded off to sleep.
Ronay quoted Varda as asking, “Who had the heroin? Was it you?”
Pamela said, “Of Course…”
Pamela said she woke up to Jim’s heavy breathing. This matched the story she told police. She said that when Jim failed to awake when she shook him, she screamed, and began slapping him ‘very, very hard’. Finally, he opened his eyes, but he didn’t seem to know where he was. She said she helped him to walk to the bathroom and assisted him into the tub.
Agnes asked her who had run the water in the tub. Pam said she couldn’t remember.
Pam to Ronay she returned to the bedroom, fell asleep, waking sometime later. When she found Jim missing from their bed, she went to the bathroom and saw him in the tub with blood running from his nose. He started vomiting, she said, so she ran to the kitchen, returning with an orange cook pot. Three times Jim vomited and each time Pam said she cleaned the pot, returning to bed once more when assured by Jim that he was feeling better.
Varda patted Pam’s hand and told her that Jim died at least an hour and half before the firemen arrived; there was nothing she could do.
Pam said, “Jim looked so calm. He smiled, “She was in shock.”
Varda continued to reassure Pam.
Pam suddenly produced a piece of paper that said she said was a marriage application she and Jim had taken out in 1967 in Colorado, but never acted on. She asked her friends if they thought the Paris police would accept it as proof that she and Jim were married.
As the day brightened, the fiction grew. Alain Ronay said he didn’t want Jim’s death and burial to become the circus that had attended the recent deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. As Pam and Ronay and Varda – and soon, Robin Wertle – devised a plan for handling Jim’s burial, the “official” version of the death took its final form.
Part of the cover-up was to avoid mentioning anything, if another one telephoned. The first call – forgetting the one from the Count – was from a male friend of the woman from whom Jim and Pam leased the flat. He had seen Pam a few times before Jim joined her in Paris and he wondered if she was free that night to go out with him. She said, no, she was going to stay with Jim. The next time the phone rang, Ronay took it. It was Herve Muller, who hadn’t seen Jim in three weeks and was calling to say hello, maybe make some plans. Ronay told Muller that Jim and Pam were away for the weekend.
By now, the news of Jim’s death was traveling along the Paris underground and that night, (Saturday) about Midnight it reached the ears of Cameron Watson, an American expatriate who was then working as a disc jockey in the discotheque called Le Bulle. Two drug-dealers entered Watson’s glass enclosed booth.
“Hey,” said one, “I just scored three thousand francs of “H” for Marianne Faithfull and she was crying. She said Jim Morrison is dead.”
Watson knew that Marianne was an addict and that she had been to Paris that week. He did not know that Pam’s friend the Count was with Faithfull when the Count called Pam, but Watson believed what Faithfull told him. He stopped the music and said, “Jim Morrison was found dead this morning.” He made an announcement first in English and then in French.
Jean-Bernard Hebey, who had a radio show on Radio Luxembourg, was at the Le Bulle and he took the story to work with him, announcing the death on his own show on Sunday. The story now had a large audience and by Monday morning the national newspapers in England were calling the London office of Elektra Records for confirmation.
Clive Selwood, who ran the office, called Elektra’s Paris office. The Paris office didn’t even know Jim was living in the French capital. Clive then called the American Embassy and the Paris police. Both agencies had no knowledge of the death.
The Lizard King – The Essential Jim Morrison –
By: Jerry Hopkins
VI – The Exile
Page 159
Pam was the first to talk about Paris. According to Diane Gardiner, she fell in love with a French Count, variously identified as Jaime de Bretaille and Jean DeBretti. For more than a year, they had been sharing heroin along with fantasies.
Diane Gardiner:
“Pam was fascinated by the idea of royalty,” “Now I don’t know if he really was a Count, but Pam and Jim were fighting and she told me, ‘The time has come. I’ve outgrown Jim and it’s time to move on. I have this French Count who is just dying to be with me.”
She talked about him all the time. He was so very rich. He and his friends were terribly bored and they took a lot of heroin. He’d tell her, “We’re the last of the dinosaurs” – the aristocracy was dying out.”
Pam left California first and Jim followed.
Page 160-161
Jim and Pam – whose Count by now had left Paris –drove to the south of France and into Spain, then took a ship to Tangier, where they rented another car and drove to Casablanca. Another time they spent a week in Corsica.
Jim went to the theatre. He developed a friendship with 2 French film makers Agnes Varda and her husband Jacques Demy. For 4 months there were no incidents.
Jim called California rarely. He old John Densmore that he was writing again and the material was the best he’d ever done – apparently a lie, based on what others said and entries in a fragmentary journal he had begun to keep. He told some of the people he met in Paris that he was writing an opera. The truth is, he spent hours sitting with his notebooks open in front of him, staring for hours at the blank page without writing a word.
He got depressed. Enormously depressed, said one friend who saw him in the final days. By mid-June 1971, his Friend from LA, Ronay, was living in the flat with Jim and Pam. At the end of the month he moved into the home of Agnes Varda.
Page 161-164
Jerry Hopkins 1972 (London researching for NOHGOA)
(
Stories about the R&R Circus Death Theory)
Herve Muller, French Journalist
Junkies are generally not know for their reliability. Usually they are anxious to say anything they think the listener wants to hear, in exchange, they hope for enough money to score another bag for relief. None of the sources with whom Herve talked was paid for information beyond the cost of coffee at some sidewalk café. Nor was any ulterior motive apparent, at least to Herve or me. Junkies generally don’t look for publicity and there is little status to be gained amongst other junkies, or anyone else, to say you shared heroin with Jim Morrison the night he died of an overdose.
Of course, there’s always a chance that some nut made up the whole story and that it started going around, building up, becoming more elaborate as it traveled. But the lack of contradiction on the basic points of the story is impressive.
Jim was familiar with the junkie underground, or at least aware of it, not because of Pamela’s sporadic use of the drug, but because of the dives in which he chose to drink. The most notable of these in Paris was the Circus.
Rock and Roll music was still played, but most of the action wasn’t on the dance floor it was in the toilets. Occasionally, the place was raided by police and that would precipitate an exodus that related to the junkie’s version of Jim’s death.
According to information gathered by Herve Muller, one of the dealers on the scene in the summer of 1971 was a Chinese called, “Le Chinoise.” Supposedl, he had a laboratory for making heroin in Marseille, which explains why he happened to have such unusually potent heroin to sell, running to about 30 per cent “pure” instead of the customary 5 to 10 percent. The way the story goes, “Le Chinoise” who was not known to use heroin himself, sold a quantity to a second level dealer named Michel, who in turn sold a smaller quantity to someone called “Le Petit Bernard”, charging him $100. Bernard then sold that packet to Jim for about $200 warning him of the potency.
“That’s ok,” Jim reportedly said, “I’m used to it.” All sources says Jim seemed nervous and upset.
All sources told Herve Muller that the final transaction took place in the men’s room of the Circus, where Jim snorted the heroin, then slumped into a comatose state. The junkies present heaved him to his feet between them, guiding him back into the night club, then through the adjoining kitchens to the Alcazar, and in to a cab on the street.
At this point, it is generally agreed that Jim was still alive. This is reasonable. In most heroin overdoses, the victim generally dies after one or two hours of lethargy, stupor and coma. The way the story ends, Jim was returned to his flat and dumped into a bath tub full of cold water in an attempt to revive him, standard treatment for an overdose, although there is some question about its practicality. That was one version of how Jim died.
Insert “Official Version” here
Page 165
In interviews she (Varda) and Ronay have to Paris Match 1991, both he and Varda say that when they arrived, they saw firemen on the street. Ronay asked, “Is he okay?” and was told to ask his questions upstairs. Ronay and Varda went upstairs to the second floor apartment.
There is a contradiction in the Ronay and Varda stories at this point. Varda remembers clearly that when they arrived, Jim was still in the tub, surrounded by firemen. On the other hand, Ronay says that Jim was already on the bed and that he never saw the body. Varda’s accurate description of the death scene in the bathroom gives credence to her story over Ronays.
Fire Lt. Alain Raisson and his men responded to the call.
(During the conversation between Jacques Manchez (French police officer) and Alain Ronay the text states that Max Vassille, medical examiner enters the room. There is no indication that this man showed up at 6:00pm that evening as in this reference he arrived in the morning at the time the firemen/policemen were in the apt.)
Their conversation (Manchez & Ronay) was interrupted by the arrival of Dr. Max Vassille, a physician on the staff of the Paris Medical University. He was called by the office of Police Superintendent Robert Berry in accordance with the penal procedure code. Manchez told Ronay that the doctor’s finding would determine whether or not the police would open an investigation into the death.
When Vassille emerged from the bedroom, he asked Pamela if Jim used drugs. Ronay answered for her. He said Jim drank, but never used drugs; he never even smoked marijuana in Los Angeles, where it was as freely available as cigarettes.
The doctors official statement filed later that day ruled the death was due to natural causes.
(Previous sources/references have stated that Dr Max Vassille asked for someone to accompany him to the bedroom as he examined the remains. In this text we have the Dr doing the examination alone. There is also reference to the doctor filing his report (death by natural causes that day, July 3 1971. This information corresponds with the information on both reports of Death Of American Citizen dated July 15 & Aug 11 1971.)
The doctor’s official statement filed later that day ruled that death was due to natural causes.
While the doctor made his examination, the telephone rang. It was Pamela’s friend, the Count. Pam took the phone into another room and told her friend that Jim was dead. The Count was with the British pop star, Marianne Faithfull at the time of the call, a fact that, later, would explain how the story of Jim’s death began to leak out. Apparently, Pam never told anyone what she and the Count said and the Count died a few years later of a heroin overdose.
After hanging up the phone, Pam returned to Ronay and Varda. Ronay said, “Tell me, quickly, how he died. Pam told him. Ronay and Varda agreed they had to keep it quiet. (The text gives no explanation of the story that Pamela told Ronay and Varda. The story is noted in previous references which also state Pamela related her story to Ronay and Varda after the apt was free of authority figures.)
At 3:40pm Ronay and Pamela go to the police station to give their depositions.
The following day, (July 4 1971) Police Superintendent Robert Berry filed the last official report, summarizing the statements of the fire brigade, the local police precinct, Dr. Vassille, Pamela and Ronay. This was a formality required in the filing of the burial certificate, part of closing the case.
“Nothing suspicious was noticed on the spot either in the apartment of on the body, which bore no trace of blows, lesions or needle marks,” Berry wrote. With no signs of “foul play,” no autopsy was required and Pam was given permission to proceed with the funeral arrangements.
END.
Truth About Jim Morrison's Death (1989)
JERRY HOPKINS ESS. JIM MORRISON Page 169-
Before I tell you what I believe really happened, let me explain why No One Here Gets Out Alive ended so ambiguously, hinting strongly that Jim might have engineered a hoax and was still alive. At the time I wrote the book, I really wasn’t sure how Jim died, although I was satisfied that he was dead. When Herve Muller presented the Rock n Roll Circus scenario, somehow I doubted it. (Although, to this day, Herve stands by the story.) It just didn’t feel right and of all the variations in Pam’s story which emerged once she was back in the United States and confiding in friends, none ever mention the Circus or this band of mysterious junkies.
While writing No One Here Gets Out Alive, I was also picking up other stories, right, left and sideways. Jim had been stabbed to death, or killed by someone sticking pins in a voodoo doll. One story had his death part of a serpentine conspiracy connecting the deaths of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Kent State Five, and several Black Panthers. Each was more ridiculous than the last.
I had to finish the book. I didn’t believe the official story for a minute and I didn’t feel comfortable with Herve Muller’s carefully research nightclub toilet overdose. So I reported the many scenarios, a long list that included the possibility that Jim wasn’t dead at all, but merely living out an elaborately conceived and brilliantly executed hoax. I believed that this was something that, with Pamela’s help Jim could have pulled off.
Certainly it was something he could have conceived. In college he had explored, intellectually, the possibility that Jesus Christ’s death was a hoax. Jim also had joked about faking his own death even before the band had it’s first hit record. In his interview with me for Rolling Stone, Jim talked about the possibility that at some time in the future he could appear with a different identity, wearing a suit and tie. With a Hollywood screenwriter he had devised a plot about someone who disappeared into the jungle in search of ‘absolute zero.’
I decided to write two last chapters, one of which had Jim dying of an overdose, the other having him disappear into North Africa, much like his hero, the poet Arthur Rimbaud. I suggested to the publisher that if, say, 10,000 copies of the book were published, 5,000 should end with an overdose caused by the combination of alcohol and heroin, the other 5,000 with the hoax. I asked that the books then be distributed randomly and without comment; let the readers discover the different endings on their own. I still think it was a good idea, but the publisher disagreed, so No One Here Gets Out Alive ended ambiguously, with both final chapters blended into one, leaving the reader uncertain. Of course this served the original purpose, fanning the flames of the rumor that Jim was not dead, but alive somewhere.
The years passed and while I remained convinced that Jim was dead, I still didn’t know what happened. At the same time, I came to believe that I might have neglected, or at least underestimated and misunderstood, Pamela’s role in Jim’s life and I began to consider writing a second, smaller book, or perhaps a screenplay, focusing on their romance.
I re-interviewed some of my earlier subjects, among them Diane Gardiner. After Jim was buried and when Pam returned to the U.S. Pam moved into Diane cottage in Sausalito, California. Diane, who was then working as a publicist for the Jefferson Airplane, had been one of Pam’s closet confidantes in Los Angeles and I figured that if anyone knew what happened, or at least knew what Pam sad happened, it was Diane.
Diane apologized for not telling me more interviews she gave me when I was researching No One Here Gets Out Alive. She said she promised Pam not to reveal anything, about Jim’s death at the time. Pam was still alive, so Diane said she felt bound to her pledge. Now – ten years later after Jim’s death – Diane told me that when Pam returned from Europe, ‘she was a real case, just devastated’. Diane said that for several months Pam walked around talking to herself, rambling and making no sense, and when she did make sense, she blamed herself for Jim’s death.
“I’ve never seen anyone feeling so guilty,” Diane told me. “She had tried to devote her whole life to one person. That was it. That was her life. Her whole life was him. And to have that kicked out from under you…”
As Diane and Pam spent more time together, fragments of the story came together, forming a believable scenario, explaining the source of Pam’s guilt.
Apparently, Jim and Pam had stopped at one or more sidewalk cafes on the way home from the movie, where Jim consumed several drinks. (This explains the arrival home at 1am, quite late for returning from a movie theatre.) At home, Jim mixed another drink as Pam lined up some white powder on a table top.
At this point, Diane is a bit vague. Jim had known about Pam’s heroin use, but most agree that apparently, he didn’t know how frequently she used it. Diane told me that Pam seemed unable to use it on a daily basis for a while, then merely stop, suffering rarely from withdrawal. And, Diane said, to her knowledge, Pam never used heroin with Jim or in his presence, at least until now. Jim disapproved of heroin. This was confirmed by everyone I talked to. Danny Sugerman, the 14 year old high school student who hung out at the Doors’ office and then years later helped me get No One Here Gets Out Alive published, said Jim actually lectured him about the evils and horrors of heroin’.
So, Diane told me, when Jim saw Pam bent over a line of white powder, it is possible he thought it was cocaine. Jim liked cocaine. There is no reason to think he would have done anything but smile and join Pam on the couch and inhale the next line of powder.
On the other hand, he could also have sensed, or realized that it was heroin. Diane told me that, according to Pam, the talk about Jim’s depression was real. The past year or so, many projects had been started or discussed – a screenplay with Michael Mc Clure, a poetry album with John Haeny, a stage show with Fred Myrow, a book about the Miami trial, an opera, on and on. None had been completed. Most were still born. In addition, Jim was overweight, alcoholic, and impotent ( a side effect from his alcoholism.)
The constant drinking only aggravated the depression. Jim had written a few lines in one of his notebooks that said, “Leave the informed sense in our wake/you be the Christ on this package tour/Money beats soul/Last Words, last words, out”. Later, tow of Jim’s biographers would use these lines to support a theory that his death was likely a suicide.
Diane doesn’t dismiss that theory, at least not entirely. She told me that when Jim saw the powder lined up so neatly on the table top, he may have known it wasn’t cocaine, but heroin, and knew what dangers lay in its use, especially in combination with alcohol. (When two central nervous system depressants, in this case alcohol and heroin, come together synergistically, they create a knockout punch: one plus one equals six!).
Danny Sugerman told me a slightly different version of the same story. I now know that when Danny edited No One Here Gets Out Alive in the late 70’s, he knew that Jim had died of an overdose, but he never told me. But later Danny told me that he and Pamela had shared both heroin and sex after Pamela left Diane Gardiner’s home and returned to Los Angeles. Danny said, that when Pamela talked about Jim’s death to Danny she also pledged him not to tell “Hopkins”, who then was trying to interview her. Danny was the one who merged the books two last chapters into one, which gave him an opportunity to tell the truth. But he remained loyal to Pamela rather than tell what he knew, even though Pam was dead.
I re-interviewed Danny about the same time I talked to Diane Gardiner in 1981. No One Here Gets Out Alive was, by then a huge success and Jim had been dead for more than ten years, so Danny talked more candidly. (Although he has never yet admitted to me that he had withheld the true story of Jim’s death while working on the manuscript.) In our recorded conversation, he told he had asked Pam about Paris and heroin. At first she told him that Jim would never use heroin. At the time of this conversation, Danny said, both he and Pam were stoned on heroin. “If he were alive today,” she said, “he’d kill both of us Danny.”
Danny told me, “That didn’t answer my question. You couldn’t confront Pam on this,” he said. “It was the most painful moment of her life.”
I asked Danny, “She never said anything about heroin being a part of his death?”
Danny said, “I seem to remember her saying something. In a real stupor , when you’re nodding out, you don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t even know if you’re talking, and I feel not unqualified to tell this story, bit I feel not awfully secure in its reportage, because I was awful high, too. But I do remember a conversation regarding her guilt, and her getting really down on herself…something to the effect: she was busted, Jim found it (the heroin.)
“What’s this!” Jim said. (As Danny recalled the conversation.)
“It’s coke!”
Jim dumped a quantity on the table, deftly pushing it into long, thick lines, probably with the edge of a paper matchbook or a credit card. He inhaled the first line.
Pam said, “Jim, don’t do too much. Jim don’t do too much!”
Danny again, “…rather than say, “Jim, it’s smack.” Because she had been hiding it from him, and she knew damned well he did not do that. And he did not want her to do it. He saw what heroin did to friends like Tim Hardin. (Another singer-songwriter who died of a heroin overdose.) He know the hazards of it.
‘So I remember a guilt feeling, and an implication…that Jim had discovered her stash and Pam said, “Oh Kim, it’s just coke,” which he really wasn’t into at that point anyway, and Jim said, “Let’s do some.” He put it out and snorted it like it was coke.”
Danny insisted that he didn’t know the true story, because this was only one of many that Pamela told, and the one she told most consistently was the “official” version, of a heart attack in the bathtub. It is, however, the story he believes.
It is the story that was told by Alain Ronay and Agnes Varda to Paris Match 1991, twenty years after Jim’s death, that makes this story most real.
Pam took Ronay’s arm in the Paris apartment as the doctor was examining Jim’s body. Pam said she and Jim had been snorting heroin for two days. Pam said they snorted heroin the night before and again that afternoon, after Jim had taken his walk with Ronay and before he went out to dinner alone. When they returned home from the movie and the bistro, the heroin came out again. In this version, Pam did not mention washing dishes, or say Jim watched home movies. Now Pam said Jim stated playing the Doors’ recordings, including the first album, which contained the song, “The End”. She said Jim got out of bed and snorted some more heroin, so she added Jim actually consumed more than she did. She said that one of the Doors’ records was playing when they nodded off to sleep.
Ronay quoted Varda as asking, “Who had the heroin? Was it you?”
Pamela said, “Of Course…”
Pamela said she woke up to Jim’s heavy breathing. This matched the story she told police. She said that when Jim failed to awake when she shook him, she screamed, and began slapping him ‘very, very hard’. Finally, he opened his eyes, but he didn’t seem to know where he was. She said she helped him to walk to the bathroom and assisted him into the tub.
Agnes asked her who had run the water in the tub. Pam said she couldn’t remember.
Pam to Ronay she returned to the bedroom, fell asleep, waking sometime later. When she found Jim missing from their bed, she went to the bathroom and saw him in the tub with blood running from his nose. He started vomiting, she said, so she ran to the kitchen, returning with an orange cook pot. Three times Jim vomited and each time Pam said she cleaned the pot, returning to bed once more when assured by Jim that he was feeling better.
Varda patted Pam’s hand and told her that Jim died at least an hour and half before the firemen arrived; there was nothing she could do.
Pam said, “Jim looked so calm. He smiled, “She was in shock.”
Varda continued to reassure Pam.
Pam suddenly produced a piece of paper that said she said was a marriage application she and Jim had taken out in 1967 in Colorado, but never acted on. She asked her friends if they thought the Paris police would accept it as proof that she and Jim were married.
As the day brightened, the fiction grew. Alain Ronay said he didn’t want Jim’s death and burial to become the circus that had attended the recent deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. As Pam and Ronay and Varda – and soon, Robin Wertle – devised a plan for handling Jim’s burial, the “official” version of the death took its final form.
Part of the cover-up was to avoid mentioning anything, if another one telephoned. The first call – forgetting the one from the Count – was from a male friend of the woman from whom Jim and Pam leased the flat. He had seen Pam a few times before Jim joined her in Paris and he wondered if she was free that night to go out with him. She said, no, she was going to stay with Jim. The next time the phone rang, Ronay took it. It was Herve Muller, who hadn’t seen Jim in three weeks and was calling to say hello, maybe make some plans. Ronay told Muller that Jim and Pam were away for the weekend.
By now, the news of Jim’s death was traveling along the Paris underground and that night, (Saturday) about Midnight it reached the ears of Cameron Watson, an American expatriate who was then working as a disc jockey in the discotheque called Le Bulle. Two drug-dealers entered Watson’s glass enclosed booth.
“Hey,” said one, “I just scored three thousand francs of “H” for Marianne Faithfull and she was crying. She said Jim Morrison is dead.”
Watson knew that Marianne was an addict and that she had been to Paris that week. He did not know that Pam’s friend the Count was with Faithfull when the Count called Pam, but Watson believed what Faithfull told him. He stopped the music and said, “Jim Morrison was found dead this morning.” He made an announcement first in English and then in French.
Jean-Bernard Hebey, who had a radio show on Radio Luxembourg, was at the Le Bulle and he took the story to work with him, announcing the death on his own show on Sunday. The story now had a large audience and by Monday morning the national newspapers in England were calling the London office of Elektra Records for confirmation.
Clive Selwood, who ran the office, called Elektra’s Paris office. The Paris office didn’t even know Jim was living in the French capital. Clive then called the American Embassy and the Paris police. Both agencies had no knowledge of the death.
The Lizard King – The Essential Jim Morrison –
By: Jerry Hopkins
VI – The Exile
Page 159
Pam was the first to talk about Paris. According to Diane Gardiner, she fell in love with a French Count, variously identified as Jaime de Bretaille and Jean DeBretti. For more than a year, they had been sharing heroin along with fantasies.
Diane Gardiner:
“Pam was fascinated by the idea of royalty,” “Now I don’t know if he really was a Count, but Pam and Jim were fighting and she told me, ‘The time has come. I’ve outgrown Jim and it’s time to move on. I have this French Count who is just dying to be with me.”
She talked about him all the time. He was so very rich. He and his friends were terribly bored and they took a lot of heroin. He’d tell her, “We’re the last of the dinosaurs” – the aristocracy was dying out.”
Pam left California first and Jim followed.
Page 160-161
Jim and Pam – whose Count by now had left Paris –drove to the south of France and into Spain, then took a ship to Tangier, where they rented another car and drove to Casablanca. Another time they spent a week in Corsica.
Jim went to the theatre. He developed a friendship with 2 French film makers Agnes Varda and her husband Jacques Demy. For 4 months there were no incidents.
Jim called California rarely. He old John Densmore that he was writing again and the material was the best he’d ever done – apparently a lie, based on what others said and entries in a fragmentary journal he had begun to keep. He told some of the people he met in Paris that he was writing an opera. The truth is, he spent hours sitting with his notebooks open in front of him, staring for hours at the blank page without writing a word.
He got depressed. Enormously depressed, said one friend who saw him in the final days. By mid-June 1971, his Friend from LA, Ronay, was living in the flat with Jim and Pam. At the end of the month he moved into the home of Agnes Varda.
Page 161-164
Jerry Hopkins 1972 (London researching for NOHGOA)
(
Stories about the R&R Circus Death Theory)
Herve Muller, French Journalist
Junkies are generally not know for their reliability. Usually they are anxious to say anything they think the listener wants to hear, in exchange, they hope for enough money to score another bag for relief. None of the sources with whom Herve talked was paid for information beyond the cost of coffee at some sidewalk café. Nor was any ulterior motive apparent, at least to Herve or me. Junkies generally don’t look for publicity and there is little status to be gained amongst other junkies, or anyone else, to say you shared heroin with Jim Morrison the night he died of an overdose.
Of course, there’s always a chance that some nut made up the whole story and that it started going around, building up, becoming more elaborate as it traveled. But the lack of contradiction on the basic points of the story is impressive.
Jim was familiar with the junkie underground, or at least aware of it, not because of Pamela’s sporadic use of the drug, but because of the dives in which he chose to drink. The most notable of these in Paris was the Circus.
Rock and Roll music was still played, but most of the action wasn’t on the dance floor it was in the toilets. Occasionally, the place was raided by police and that would precipitate an exodus that related to the junkie’s version of Jim’s death.
According to information gathered by Herve Muller, one of the dealers on the scene in the summer of 1971 was a Chinese called, “Le Chinoise.” Supposedl, he had a laboratory for making heroin in Marseille, which explains why he happened to have such unusually potent heroin to sell, running to about 30 per cent “pure” instead of the customary 5 to 10 percent. The way the story goes, “Le Chinoise” who was not known to use heroin himself, sold a quantity to a second level dealer named Michel, who in turn sold a smaller quantity to someone called “Le Petit Bernard”, charging him $100. Bernard then sold that packet to Jim for about $200 warning him of the potency.
“That’s ok,” Jim reportedly said, “I’m used to it.” All sources says Jim seemed nervous and upset.
All sources told Herve Muller that the final transaction took place in the men’s room of the Circus, where Jim snorted the heroin, then slumped into a comatose state. The junkies present heaved him to his feet between them, guiding him back into the night club, then through the adjoining kitchens to the Alcazar, and in to a cab on the street.
At this point, it is generally agreed that Jim was still alive. This is reasonable. In most heroin overdoses, the victim generally dies after one or two hours of lethargy, stupor and coma. The way the story ends, Jim was returned to his flat and dumped into a bath tub full of cold water in an attempt to revive him, standard treatment for an overdose, although there is some question about its practicality. That was one version of how Jim died.
Insert “Official Version” here
Page 165
In interviews she (Varda) and Ronay have to Paris Match 1991, both he and Varda say that when they arrived, they saw firemen on the street. Ronay asked, “Is he okay?” and was told to ask his questions upstairs. Ronay and Varda went upstairs to the second floor apartment.
There is a contradiction in the Ronay and Varda stories at this point. Varda remembers clearly that when they arrived, Jim was still in the tub, surrounded by firemen. On the other hand, Ronay says that Jim was already on the bed and that he never saw the body. Varda’s accurate description of the death scene in the bathroom gives credence to her story over Ronays.
Fire Lt. Alain Raisson and his men responded to the call.
(During the conversation between Jacques Manchez (French police officer) and Alain Ronay the text states that Max Vassille, medical examiner enters the room. There is no indication that this man showed up at 6:00pm that evening as in this reference he arrived in the morning at the time the firemen/policemen were in the apt.)
Their conversation (Manchez & Ronay) was interrupted by the arrival of Dr. Max Vassille, a physician on the staff of the Paris Medical University. He was called by the office of Police Superintendent Robert Berry in accordance with the penal procedure code. Manchez told Ronay that the doctor’s finding would determine whether or not the police would open an investigation into the death.
When Vassille emerged from the bedroom, he asked Pamela if Jim used drugs. Ronay answered for her. He said Jim drank, but never used drugs; he never even smoked marijuana in Los Angeles, where it was as freely available as cigarettes.
The doctors official statement filed later that day ruled the death was due to natural causes.
(Previous sources/references have stated that Dr Max Vassille asked for someone to accompany him to the bedroom as he examined the remains. In this text we have the Dr doing the examination alone. There is also reference to the doctor filing his report (death by natural causes that day, July 3 1971. This information corresponds with the information on both reports of Death Of American Citizen dated July 15 & Aug 11 1971.)
The doctor’s official statement filed later that day ruled that death was due to natural causes.
While the doctor made his examination, the telephone rang. It was Pamela’s friend, the Count. Pam took the phone into another room and told her friend that Jim was dead. The Count was with the British pop star, Marianne Faithfull at the time of the call, a fact that, later, would explain how the story of Jim’s death began to leak out. Apparently, Pam never told anyone what she and the Count said and the Count died a few years later of a heroin overdose.
After hanging up the phone, Pam returned to Ronay and Varda. Ronay said, “Tell me, quickly, how he died. Pam told him. Ronay and Varda agreed they had to keep it quiet. (The text gives no explanation of the story that Pamela told Ronay and Varda. The story is noted in previous references which also state Pamela related her story to Ronay and Varda after the apt was free of authority figures.)
At 3:40pm Ronay and Pamela go to the police station to give their depositions.
The following day, (July 4 1971) Police Superintendent Robert Berry filed the last official report, summarizing the statements of the fire brigade, the local police precinct, Dr. Vassille, Pamela and Ronay. This was a formality required in the filing of the burial certificate, part of closing the case.
“Nothing suspicious was noticed on the spot either in the apartment of on the body, which bore no trace of blows, lesions or needle marks,” Berry wrote. With no signs of “foul play,” no autopsy was required and Pam was given permission to proceed with the funeral arrangements.
END.