Post by darkstar2 on Jul 31, 2008 21:26:03 GMT
THE END
By: Albert Goldman
Penthouse Magazine – April 1991
Republished in The Doors Companion (1997)
Pages 144-158
Jim Morrison’s death – in Paris on July 3, 1971 – was kept so quiet that it took two days for even a rumor of the event to reach his manager in Los Angeles. When the phone awoke Bill Siddons and he got the word from London, he didn’t take it seriously. Why should he? Reports of Morriosn’s death were as common as UFO sightings. One day he was rumored blind or dead of OD; the day he had been killed in car crash or locked up on a lunatic asylum or was in a hospital with both legs amputated. Those were the terrifying disasters his dangerous aura suggested, and the aura was reinforced by the way he lived, always dead drunk or wildly high, constantly falling out of windows or cracking up his car or proclaiming in so unmistakable fashion that he was hell bent on dying. Yet as Siddons rolled over to go back to sleep, he found himself troubled by a worrisome impulse that finally compelled him to call the apartment in Paris where his star had been living for the past four months. Pamela Courson, Morrison’s girlfriend, offered no explanations, but she told the manager, as if he lived around the corner, to come over immediately.
Three days later, Siddons addressed Morrison’s fans in a prepared statement released through a public relations firm, “I have just returned from Paris,” he announced, “where I attended the funeral of Jim Morrison. Jim was buried in a simple ceremony, with only a few close friends present. The initial news of his death and funeral was kept quiet because those of us knew him intimately and loved him as a person wanted to avoid all the notoriety and circus like atmosphere that surrounded the deaths of such other rock personalities as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Were the deaths of Joplin and Hendrix surrounded by a “circus like atmosphere”? Not really. There was a shock and horror, grief and curiosity, but the “notoriety” that enveloped those deaths was something again. It was engendered by their common cause – drug abuse. If the 27 year old Jim Morrison had died as the press release asserted – “peacefully of natural causes…with his wife Pam,” after seeing a doctor about a “respiratory problem” – why should there have been any fear of notoriety?
The truth is that there was a lot more to the death of Jim Morrison than could be inferred from Siddon’s bland statement; in fact, nobody with any brains has ever believed that Jim Morrison died peacefully in his sleep from natural causes. Yet even today, nearly 20 years after the event we still don’t know exactly what happened. Though Morrison is currently enjoying one of those electric resurrections that have given many old rock stars a second life, though his albums are selling better than ever and his legend is being told and retold in a steady stream of new articles and books and he has now been enshrined in a major motion picture by Oliver Stone, we have yet to hear a convincing account of how he died. Nor is his death a matter of little consequence in comparison with his life; in fact the two are one and the same thing., for no figure of the counterculture either in Jim’s lifetime or before him had ever lived with the image of death fixed so firmly in his mental gaze.
From the beginning to the end of his brief but brilliant career, Jim Morrison wrote about death, talked about death, sang about death, and enacted death onstage. His masterpiece, the weird, shamanistic spirit voyage titled, “The End”, is entirely about death and its associations in his mind: patricide, maternal incest, drugs, love, and the end of the world.
Death not only looms up from his lyrics, but it sends its chilling breath out through the spooky music of the Doors, which often resembles a rock n roll dance of death. Everybody knew Morrison recognized that he was bound for an early grave, and this constant anticipation of his death finally translated itself into a wire dispatch March 7, 1968, while the band was at the height of its fame. That day a news service flashed, “Jim Morrison dead – more later.
Morrison had a lot of reasons for his death obsession, and he was at pains to articulate them. Basically, he viewed life as struggle to escape the deadening clutches of mindless and insensibility, the numbing effect of the routines into which we all sink after childhood. He found in the defiant and risky lives of such underground poets as Baudelaire and Rimbaud and in the nihilistic philosophy of Nietzsche chapter and verse for his instinctive conviction that the only way to break through to passion, illumination, and ecstasy was to live dangerously. One is free to accept his arguments as either courageous convictions backed by the authority of intellectual and artistic genius or as neurotic rationalizations for a self destructive mania whose roots lay in his ill reported childhood or perhaps in some anomaly of his biochemistry. The only thing that really matters is the recognition that Jim Morrison’s life and art entailed a continuous dialogue with death, hence, the absurdity of treating his death, as some writers have done, as an unimportant or uninteresting event. The fact is that not knowing how Jim Morrison died is exactly like having a tragedy who final act consists of nothing but rough sketches for a half dozen possible endings.
This problem impressed itself strongly on Morrison’s only authentic biographer, pop journalist Jerry Hopkins. His widely read book, No One Here Gets Out Alive (which bears the name of Danny Sugerman as co author), was designed originally to be printed in two alternate versions, one concluding with Morrison’s death, the other with his escape after staging a fake demise, these being the basic alternatives. Naturally, the publisher rejected such a preposterous scheme, which was simply a gimmick for making a virtue out of failure in research.
The result is a biography that concludes in a hopeless welter of rumors and cockeyed speculations. Hopkins labeled the most plausible of these tales in “official” version without explaining what exactly makes it official. Apparently, this was the story that Pamela Courson told in a few years that intervened between Morrison’s death and her own.
According to this account, Jim spent the early part of the evening of Friday, July 2, having supper on the terrace of a restaurant near his apartment with Pamela, his companion of five years – a pretty, freckled, innocent-looking girl from Orange County, California, with a bad heroin habit. They were accompanied by an old friend, Alan Ronay, a Paris born film technician who lives in Los Angeles but was staying at the time with two well known French filmmakers, Jacques Demy (director of The Umbrellas of Cherourg) and his wife, Agnes Varda. After dinner Morrison went off alone to see a film that Ronay had recommended, Raoul Walsh’s 1947 picture Pursued, a film noir treatment of the traditional Hollywood western, starring Robert Mitchum.
When Morrison returned to the flat late that night, he vomited a little blood. Pamela was not unduly concerned, because this had happened before without ill consequences. When he announced that he was going to take a bath, she went to sleep. At five in the morning, she awoke and found him in the tub, “his arms resting on the porcelain sides, his head back, his long, wet hair matted against the rim, a boyish smile across his clean shaven face.” At first Pamela thought he was playing one of his macabre jokes, but then she called the fire department’s resuscitation unit.
Jerry Hopkins also possessed a far different and more interesting account to which he merely alludes, probably because he didn’t place much faith in it. This reconstruction was the work of Herve Muller, a French pop journalist who spent some time with Morrison in the last months of his life and actually phoned his apartment on the morning of his death, only to be told by Alan Ronay that the couple had gone out of town for the weekend. Subsequently, Muller published a book about Morrison, but he refrained from going to the details of his hero’s death; not until March of last year did his findings appear, in the French magazine Globe.
According to Muller, Morrison had been waiting during the days that preceded his demise for a delivery of heroin from Marseilles (head-quarters of the “French Connection” – i.e., the Corsican Mafia). Jim had bankrolled this buy, which was costly but justified by the fact that the dealer, whose nom de dope was “le Chinois,” dealt only in the purest China White (highly refined heroin from Hong Kong). After the usual delays – accompanied doubtless by a lot of excuses from the connection’s bag dealers in Paris and a lot of paranoia in the Morrison household – word came through that the smack could be picked up at Jim’s customary hangout, the Rock n Roll Circus.
The Circus was a vaulted cave at 57 Rue de Seine in the student quarter of St. Germaine. Decorated with huge blowups of rock stars dressed in circus costumes, it was meant to capture the atmosphere of trendy British clubs, like the Bag O’Nails. It’s clientele was “restricted,” it’s hours mid-night till way past dawn, its cuisine American soul food, the décor of its super exclusive smoking room Moroccan, and its entertainment – apart from dancing to records – spontaneous jam sessions by visiting rock stars who wanted to stretch after hours.
The former manager, Sam Bernett, recalls that Morrison came in every night. “He was always high or drunk, in an abnormal state.” Few people recognized him because he had grown so fat that he appeared to be 40. One night he got rowdy and the bouncers, not knowing who he was, threw him out into an alley, where he was rescued by a French rock fan who carried him off to a friend’s garret. After spending the night, Jim took everyone out to breakfast the next day at an expensive sidewalk restaurant. Another night Morrison tried to mount the stage at the Circus but was too drunk to perform. In his last days, he spent most of his time in the men’s room, where the principal activity was scoring drugs.
It was in the men’s room, according to Muller, that Morrison met on his last night a drug runner named “le Petit Robert.” When Robert handed over the scag, he warned Jim, “This is very strong stuff.” Jim promptly took a toot and collapsed in a coma. A couple of “Pam’s friends,” perhaps two of the clubs husky bouncers, hauled Morrison out of the toilet (located upstairs in a quiet area) and through an adjacent fire exit that led into the kitchen of a glitzy transvestite cabaret, the Alcazar, which had shut down for the night. They carried him out of this club’s entrance, which was on the opposite side of the block at 62 Rue Mazarine. Here they put him into a car and carried him back to his apartment, where they immersed him a tub of cold water in an attempt to revive him.
Muller concedes when pressed that he is not totally persuaded of the accuracy of his account because his sources were shadowy junkies and small time dealers with no reputation for honesty. Yet his story contains nothing inherently implausible. Though Morrison was not a junkie, he often bought heroin for Pam. (Scoring smack was a “mans job”.) Michel Auder, former husband of Viva, the Andy Warhol “superstar,” recalls encountering Jim on more than one occasion at the rooms of a heroin dealer in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, American disc jockey Cameron Watson recollects that a couple of weeks before Jim’s death, he observed him sitting on the terrace of the Café de Flor with a photographer, who got up and approached Watson, whispering, “Jim Morrison wants to buy some smack. Do you know where he can get some?
That Morrison himself would take a hit of something he had been warned against is perfectly in character. He would not have injected the drug, because he had a dread of needles. He would have sniffed it. And a couple of good snorts could have killed him, because nonusers lack the protective tolerance of the junkie. Though Muller’s tale is not well founded, it could be true, because it is true to “the life.”
Confronted by two irreconcilable accounts of the same event, a biographer instinctively seeks a third source on which he can place greater reliance. But who would it be in this case? Clearly, there are a number of former intimates of Jim Morrison who know more about his death than they have ever divulged, but it is naïve to assume they would start talking after all these years, unless they could be offered an inducement that would appeal to them, like the opportunity to appear in a major motion picture.
Lacking the ability to offer this resource, I decided to go after the files of the French police. Ostensibly, these reports are confidential and available only to family members or their authorized representatives, but past experience suggested that there might be some way to slip past the bureaucratic barriers.
Before I made the attempt, however, I decided to ask Jerry Hopkins what he thought of the approach. He assured me that there were no official records because no autopsy had been performed. This was clearly nonsense, because nobody can die in a city like Paris without the police making a record of the event. On the other hand, there was the possibility that the death of Jim Morrison had been covered up by the police for some mysterious reason, and in that case, there would be no record, but its value would be nothing.
As it turned out, retrieving the files from the archives was not so difficult as I had assumed. After going through the usual bureaucratic rigmarole and sweating out a period of anxious uncertainty, my Paris researchers, Martha Legace and Anne Sohrada, succeeded in extracting the relevant documents: the dossier of the criminal investigation department of the French police and the report of an emergency rescue team in the archives of the fire department.
The police report consists primarily of the transcript of an inquest held at the Arsenal police station on the afternoon following Morrison’s death. Testimony was taken from the fire department lieutenant commanding the rescue unit, the officer of the criminal investigation department who inspected the premises ( and who presided over the hearing); medical examiner who viewed the body; and the two chief witnesses, Pamela Courson and Alan Ronay.
Courson’s testimony demands to be considered first because it offers what purports to be a complete account of Jim Morrison’s last night. (Ronay acted as interpreter, which means that the police did not question one witness independently of the other.) In the translation that follows, the word ami is rendered as “friend,” although, of course, it can also mean “lover.”
“I am the friend of Mr. Morrison,” Pamela declared. “I lived with him as his wife for five years. I arrived in France with my friend last March… He was a writer, but he lived on a private income. Before coming to love at (17) Rue Beautreillis (in the Marais district), we stayed for three weeks at the Hotel de Nice on the Rue des Beaux Arts. There my friend became ill. He complained of having trouble breathing, and he also had coughing fits at night. I called a doctor, who arrived at the hotel and prescribed pills for asthma. My friend didn’t like to go to doctors, and he never took care of his health. I can’t say who the doctor was who looked after my friend, and I didn’t keep the prescription. At the time of an earlier stay in London, my friend already had this same illness.
“Last night….my friend went alone to have dinner in a restaurant, undoubtedly in the neighborhood. When he returned from the restaurant, the two of us went to the movies to see Pursued. The movie house is near the Pelletier metro ( in a sleazy commercial district in the ninth arrondissement). It’s called, I think, Action Lafayette.
“We returned from the movies (at) about one in the morning. I did the dishes and my friend showed home movies. He seemed to be in good health and very happy. But I must say that he never complained – it wasn’t in his nature. Afterward, we listened to records in the bedroom. We listened lying together on the bed. I think we went to sleep around 2:30, but I can’t say exactly. The record player stopped automatically.
“No we didn’t have sex last night.”
“Around 3:30, I think – there wasn’t any clock in the bedroom and I wasn’t concerned about the time – I was awakened by the noise my friend was making breathing…I had the impression he was suffocating. I shook him and slapped him several times in order to wake him up. I asked him what was wrong. I wanted to call a doctor. My friend said that he felt fine and that he didn’t want to see a doctor. He got up and walked around the room. Then he said that he wanted to take a warm bath.
“When he was in the bath, he called me and said the was nauseated and wanted to vomit. As I went toward the bathroom, I tool from the kitchen an orange pot. (He vomited in this pot.) It looked to me as though there was blood in his vomit. I emptied the pot. Then he vomited again into the pot – this time it was all blood. Then he vomited a third time, bringing up some blood clots. Each time I emptied the pot into the sink and rinsed it.
“Then my friend said that he felt “bizarre”, but he said to me, ‘I’m not ill. Do not call a doctor. I feel better. It’s over.’ He said to me, ‘Go to sleep,’ and added that when he ahd finished bathing he would rejoin me in bed. At this moment, it did seem to me that my friend was getting better, because since he had vomited, the color had come back into his skin. I went back to bed and fell asleep immediately, because I felt reassured.
“I don’t know how long I slept. I woke with a start and saw that my friend was not next to me. I ran into the bathroom and I saw that he was still in the bath tub. His head was not in the water. He appeared to be sleeping. His head was resting on the edge of the tub. There was a little blood under his nostrils. I thought I could wake him. I thought that he was ill and unconscious. I tried to take him out of the tub, but I couldn’t. At this moment I telephoned Mr. Ronay, another American, to ask him to call an ambulance.
“About half hour later, Mr. Ronay came to my place. When Mr. Ronay arrived with his friend, Madame Agnes (Varda) Demy, they called, I believe, either the firemen or the police.”
Ronay’s testimony, predictably, corroborates Courson’s in every detail save one:
“I have known Mr. Morrison since 1963. He is one my friends. This morning around 8:30, I was awakened by a telephone call from Miss Courson, who asked for my help. She told me to come right away. She was crying. She said that her friend had lost consciousness. I got up and went at once to the Rue de Beautreillis in the company of my friend, Madame Demy. (Jacques Demy was in London.) When I arrived, I saw the firemen in the street. I asked them what was happening. They didn’t tell me. I went up to the apartment. I saw Miss Courson…who told me that her friend was dead…He had already been removed from the bathroom and laid on the bed.
“My friend Morrison drank a lot and did not hold his liquor well. I am certain that my friend never used drugs. He often spoke about the folly of young people who used drugs and considered this a very grave problem.
“I saw Mr. Morrison yesterday afternoon around 6 P.M. I thought that he looked ill and told him. He replied that everything was going well. But in any case, he never complained. I took a walk with him yesterday afternoon. He told me that he was tired. In the course of our stroll, he had an attack of hiccups. This spell lasted, I think for about an hour. At one point he closed his eyes, and I noticed that his skin was gray. He told me that he had closed his eyes to concentrate on getting rid of his hiccups. We also carried up to his apartment some logs that were in the courtyard. My friend was extremely tired by this exertion.”
First, it will be observed that these statements differ at many points from those in the so called “official” version published in the Hopkins-Sugerman biography. Second, there is a contradiction in Ronay’s and Courson’s testimony. Ronay says that the firemen were at the building when he arrived. But Courson, in her statement, translated by Ronay, says that he and Varda summoned the firemen after they arrived. Assuming Ronay’s account is true, who then, did summon the firemen?
The most valuable professional testimony offered at the inquest was provided by Lieutenant, now Colonel, Alan Raison, commander of the fire department rescue unit – ten men in a big truck – who were the first people to come to Courson’s aid. The lieutenant reported that he was summoned at 9:20 by a report of an “asphyxia”, a person in a state of suffocation. At 9:24 (the fire station was around the corner) he was met at the door of the fourth floor flat by a young woman whose nightgown was damp and who did not speak French. She led him to the bathroom, where he discovered a fat, naked man lying in the tub with his head reclining on a pad and his right arm extended along the rim. The pale pink tinged water in the tub was warm, as was the body, which was still supple.
As a hot tub will not retain any noticeable heat for more than two or three hours, it is clear that Jim Morrison drew the bath in which he died at dawn, not in the middle of the night as Pam related. Nor could she have discovered him dead at five o’clock.
The firemen removed the body from the tub and laid it on the bedroom floor to obtain the hard, unyielding surface required for heart massage. Soon they abandoned their efforts and, as the police arrived, they left the premises at 9:47.
Upon their return t Sevigne Barracks, they filed a terse report. It states that Morrison had become ill at 5L30 but had decided to take a bath to make himself feel better. (“A neighbor” – i.e. Ronay – translated for Courson.) His “wife” then fell asleep and did not awaken until 9:15, when she discovered him in the tub. She described Morrison as “Writer, Singer.” Clearly, it was after the authorities had left and she had had time to discuss her predicament with Ronay and Varda that Pamela changed her tune and described Morrison as a writer living on a private income.
When quizzed about these events, Varda offered two explanations: (1) “It was not as a rock star that I loved him. Why should French policemen know that he was a famous rock star?” (2) “You have to be very careful when a foreigner is involved.”
The report of the police investigator, Jacques Manchez, is interesting primarily for its misconceptions. After conferring with his colleagues from the fire department and after inspecting the body and the bathroom – where he measured the tub and the depth of its water – he went into the living room, where a patrolman introduced him to Courson, Ronay and Varda. He was told – and the error went into the records – that all three were Americans and that only Ronay spoke French. Not only did he mistake an established French filmmaker for a foreigner, but – evidently because she gave the same home address as Ronay, on the Rue Daguerre in Montparnasse – he described her as the latter’s “concubine,” the same term that he applied to Courson.
The most disappointing testimony was that furnished by the medical examiner, Dr. Max Vasille. He did not arrive at the apartment until six in the evening. The pertinent portion of his report, offers no insight into the cause of death. “I note,” the doctor attested, “that the body does not show, apart for the lividness of death, any suspicious signs of trauma or lesions of any kind. A little blood around the nostrils. The history of Mr. Morrison’s condition, such as it was described to us by a friend on the premises (Ronay?), can be summed up thus: Mr. Morrison had been complaining for a few weeks of precordial (over the heart) pains with dyspnoea (difficulty breathing). It was evidently coronary problems, possibly aggravated by abusive drinking. One can imagine that on the occasion of a change in outside temperature ( a puzzling remark) followed by a bath, these troubles were suddenly aggravated, leading to classical myocardial infraction (blockage of a coronary artery), causing sudden death. I conclude from my examination that death caused by heart failure (natural death).”
Under Article 47 of the French Penal Procedures Code, where there is “no crime or flagrant misdemeanor, the state prosecutor can charge a medical expert with the power of making an inquiry.” When the doctor delivered his implausible but preemptive opinion that the deceased had died of natural causes, Capitan Robert Berry, commander of the Arsenal Precinct, closed the case and signed the report. Permission to bury the dead was granted.
The next steps were routine. During the afternoon, someone – most likely Alan Ronay, who describes himself at the conclusion of his deposition as being busy with the funeral arrangements – called a funeral home, Pompes Funebres Bigot at 8 Rue du Cloitre Notre-Dame. The director, Michel Gangernepain, made out the death certificate, and an undertaker was dispatched to the apartment. He cleansed the body, placing it in dry ice to prevent decomposition. It was then placed in an expensive oak casket lined with canvas. Bill Siddons saw the closed coffin when he arrived the following Tuesday. (It was the fact that Siddons did not see the corpse that gave rise to the rumors that the casket was empty and Jim was living happily in Africa, free of the burdens of fame.) Courson went, most likely with Ronay, to Pere Lachaise Cemetery – which Jim had visited recently to view the graves of the great – where she bought a double plot (one body laid atop another) for a moderate sum. No other kind of grave was available. The price of a funeral was controlled in those days by the government. The total cost, including four pallbearers and a hearse, was only 4,600 francs, about $830.
The funeral was held on Wednesday afternoon. No family members were invited, nor were any clergy involved. Those present were Pamela Courson, Alan Ronay, Agenes Varda, Bill Siddons, and Robin Wertle – a young Canadian woman who had acted as Jim and Pam’s secretary in Paris. They read some verses and threw flowers on the coffin when it was lowered five meters into the earth.
That same day Courson filed the death certificate at the office of the American Consul. The following day she and Siddons flew back to Los Angeles. Only then was the public notified of Morrison’s death in a carefully contrived statement designed to quell suspicion.
On April 25, 1974, Pamela Courson, age 27, was found dead in her Hollywood apartment of a heroin overdose, shortly after receiving $20,000 in royalties as Jim Morrison’s sole heir. She had celebrated by buying herself a yellow Volkswagen convertible, a monogrammed mink scarf and an ounce of China White.
The testimony at the inquest and the statements – public and private – issued subsequently by Pamela Courson and Bill Siddons combine to create the impression that Jim Morrison died of a grave illness whose symptoms he stubbornly ignored. Yet when the basis for this opinion is sought, it all turns on the word of one drug addicted woman with a notorious penchant for what is politely described as “fantasy.”
Jim Morrison had no history of either heart disease or asthma before he left for Europe. He had done a lot of drinking and tried a lot of drugs, but he had never been seriously ill nor had he exhibited any symptoms to anybody else, save for a heavy cough, doubtlessly aggravated by dragging deeply on three packs of cigarettes a day.
He had punctured a lung, however, early in March in a fall from the second floor of a Hollywood hotel. This is a self healing injury from which he should have long since recovered. Even if he did vomit blood on his last night (note, by the way, how the violent hemorrhaging of the inquest shrinks to “a little blood” in the story that’s quoted by Hopkins), the most likely explanation is that, like many drinkers, he had developed an ulcer that stated bleeding when he started vomiting. He could have been nauseated because of something he ate for supper – or from snorting heroin.
Even a tiny amount of heroin can produce nausea in a nonuser, as Bill Siddons related when he returned from Morrison’s funeral. He told the surviving members of the band, "Once, while alone in the living room (of Morrison's apartment), I opened a carved box on the coffee table and found white powder in a clear envelope. Pam was in the kitchen, so I decided to try a little and see what it was. It wasn't coke. Soon afterward I became nauseous and felt very sick. It sure was something that I'd never tried before."
The fact that Morrison insisted there was nothing wrong with him and that he did not want to see a doctor that night suggests he knew perfectly well what was wrong with him – and that it was not disease, but dope. His suggestion that Courson go to sleep while he remained in the bathroom as well as the smile reported to have been on his face in the Hopkins biography, are further evidence that heroin was the cause of his death. People who die of myocardial infarction, which produces pain in the heart, do not die smiling.
Likewise, the behavior of Pam and her friends in concealing from French authorities the real identity of James Douglas Morison suggests that they had a reason to fear the effects of such a disclosure. Clearly, if the police had know that the young man they had found dead at 17 Rue Beautreillis was an internationally famous American rock star, they would have examined his death carefully and , suspecting it was due to drugs, ordered a post-mortem. If the autopsy had demonstrated the presence of heroin in his body, the investigation would have broadened to include Courson and her acquaintances. The police might have found her stash or they might have nailed her suppliers. Undoubtedly, the police had their eye on the Rock n Roll Circus (which closed down shortly there after), where Jim and Pam probably scored some smack on the night of his death. Clearly, it was very important that Pamela Courson deceive the French police and get out of the country as quickly as possible.
When Capt Robert Berry, now 76, was quizzed recently about his involvement in the case, he confirmed that the police knew nothing of Jim Morrison's true identity. Asked if he thought that heroin could have been the true cause of death, he considered the question carefully and replied, "It is highly possible." Alan Ronay’s vigorous denial that Jim Morrison ever took drugs shows where the shoe pinched. When Herve Muller sought to question Agnes Varda about her role in ;’affaire Morrison, she threatened to sue him.
That heroin was the cause of Jim Morrison’s death is confirmed by information that has been available for 4 years but was published only recently in John Densmore’s Riders On the Storm. When the Doors drummer raises the questions of Morrison’s death, he remarks that he has known the truth since 1986, when he was interviewed on PBS by Rodger Steffens, a well known radio personality in Los Angeles. Steffen’s had objected to the widespread fantasy that Jim Morrison is still alive, remarking that he knew the people who had discovered his dead body. They were pop star Marianne Faithful (who know denies ever having had any contact with Jim Morrison) and Jean DeBreteuil, the playboy son of a French count who until his demise owned most of the French newspapers in North Africa.
According to Steffens, on the night of Jim Morrison’s death, Pam had called DeBreteuil, who was one of her lovers (Jim and Pamela had an “open” relationship), and told him, “Jim is in the bathroom. The door is locked. I can’t get him out. Will you come over immediately?” DeBreteuil and Faithful arrived shortly thereafter and managed to open the door. When they caught sight of Morrison stretched out dead in the tub, they went into shock. Both were heroin addicts and in Jim’s death, they foresaw their own. They were still agitated two days later when they recounted the story to Steffens and his wife of that time, Cynthia Cottle, a Vietnam War correspondent.
Prompted by this revelation, I got in touch with Steffens and Cottle intent on putting the anecdote in context. Steffens told me that in 1971 he and his wife were living in Marrakech, where they had become aquatinted with DeBreteuil through his widowed mother.
Jean had cut into the most closely guarded celebrity circles by handing out costly drugs as if they were party favors. He imported whole kilos of the finest Moroccan hashish via diplomatic pouch and had become a boot and shoot junkie – which was the bond that attached Pam to him. He had reached the apogee of his career as a superfan when he got tight with the Rolling Stones while working as a production consultant on a French TV show about the band.
Jean was staying at Keith Richard’s flat in London when he fell in with Marianne Faithfull. The one time pop star was so washed up by this point that she was virtually on the street. Naturally, she took up with elegant young, Jean, who was soon to inherit his deceased father’s title and well endowed with the medicine for all her ills. On their first day together they bought a Bentley –and totaled it that night. Then they decided to get off the scene by shifting to Paris.
They had only just reached the city when they received Pam’s desperate call. They described the scene in the bathroom with the floor littered with whiskey bottles.
That heroin was the cause of death is further substantiated by Danny Sugerman’s account in Wonderland Avenue of a night spent snorting Brown Sugar (Mexican heroin) with Pamela after her return to Los Angeles. She is quoted as saying, “I killed him. It was my dope…He found out I was doing dope, and of course, you know Jim, he just had to try it. And I gave it to him! He’d never done it before and I gave it to him. Then she said he didn’t feel well….I should have gone and checked on him, but I nodded out…When I woke up at dawn…I went into the bathroom and there he was in the tub…He was smiling…and I thought he was putting me on.”
Clearly, DeBreteuil and Faithful could not possibly have summoned the police. The scandal of two junkies – one bearing an aristocratic name, the other an international pop star – discovered at the site of another star’s death of a drug overdose who have immediately enveloped them. They decided instead to flee the apartment and get out of the country fast.
The next day they flew to Tangier, and on Monday night, so stoned that they were weaving back and forth, they told their story to the Steffenses. Steffens recalls Marianne Faithful dropped her lit cigarette on her skirt three times and each time he had to beat out the fire as she stared at him with a startled expression that said, “Why is this man hitting me?” (The lesson of Morrison’s death was wasted on Jean; a year later in Tangier, he, too died of an overdose.)
Clearly the gentlemanly Jean could not have left Pamela Courson in the lurch that morning on Rue de Beautreillis. He and she must have racked their addled brains to come up with a convincing story. He and she must have agreed to blame everything on Jim’s health, the next task would be summoning the authorities. Jean would want to get clear away of any traces of drink and drugs, to hide her stash and get in touch with somebody respectable like Varda and Ronay, who could aid her in her forthcoming confrontation with police – a frightening prospect. It’s a safe bet that a lot of panicky work and worry went on that morning before anyone dialed 18, the emergency number, and reported a man having trouble breathing.
When Jean and Marianne left the Morrison flat, they must have gone straight to their connection and babbled out the story of Jim’s death. Just before closing time at La Bulle, the hip new disco on Montaigne St. Genevieve, where deejay Camerson Watson was watching his last customers fade from the floor, two respectably dressed dope dealers walked up to his booth and one of them thrust his face into the observation window to confide, “Jim Morrison just snuffed it.”
Watson switched on his P.A. mike and announced to the virtually empty club, “Jim Morrison est mort!”
END.
By: Albert Goldman
Penthouse Magazine – April 1991
Republished in The Doors Companion (1997)
Pages 144-158
Jim Morrison’s death – in Paris on July 3, 1971 – was kept so quiet that it took two days for even a rumor of the event to reach his manager in Los Angeles. When the phone awoke Bill Siddons and he got the word from London, he didn’t take it seriously. Why should he? Reports of Morriosn’s death were as common as UFO sightings. One day he was rumored blind or dead of OD; the day he had been killed in car crash or locked up on a lunatic asylum or was in a hospital with both legs amputated. Those were the terrifying disasters his dangerous aura suggested, and the aura was reinforced by the way he lived, always dead drunk or wildly high, constantly falling out of windows or cracking up his car or proclaiming in so unmistakable fashion that he was hell bent on dying. Yet as Siddons rolled over to go back to sleep, he found himself troubled by a worrisome impulse that finally compelled him to call the apartment in Paris where his star had been living for the past four months. Pamela Courson, Morrison’s girlfriend, offered no explanations, but she told the manager, as if he lived around the corner, to come over immediately.
Three days later, Siddons addressed Morrison’s fans in a prepared statement released through a public relations firm, “I have just returned from Paris,” he announced, “where I attended the funeral of Jim Morrison. Jim was buried in a simple ceremony, with only a few close friends present. The initial news of his death and funeral was kept quiet because those of us knew him intimately and loved him as a person wanted to avoid all the notoriety and circus like atmosphere that surrounded the deaths of such other rock personalities as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Were the deaths of Joplin and Hendrix surrounded by a “circus like atmosphere”? Not really. There was a shock and horror, grief and curiosity, but the “notoriety” that enveloped those deaths was something again. It was engendered by their common cause – drug abuse. If the 27 year old Jim Morrison had died as the press release asserted – “peacefully of natural causes…with his wife Pam,” after seeing a doctor about a “respiratory problem” – why should there have been any fear of notoriety?
The truth is that there was a lot more to the death of Jim Morrison than could be inferred from Siddon’s bland statement; in fact, nobody with any brains has ever believed that Jim Morrison died peacefully in his sleep from natural causes. Yet even today, nearly 20 years after the event we still don’t know exactly what happened. Though Morrison is currently enjoying one of those electric resurrections that have given many old rock stars a second life, though his albums are selling better than ever and his legend is being told and retold in a steady stream of new articles and books and he has now been enshrined in a major motion picture by Oliver Stone, we have yet to hear a convincing account of how he died. Nor is his death a matter of little consequence in comparison with his life; in fact the two are one and the same thing., for no figure of the counterculture either in Jim’s lifetime or before him had ever lived with the image of death fixed so firmly in his mental gaze.
From the beginning to the end of his brief but brilliant career, Jim Morrison wrote about death, talked about death, sang about death, and enacted death onstage. His masterpiece, the weird, shamanistic spirit voyage titled, “The End”, is entirely about death and its associations in his mind: patricide, maternal incest, drugs, love, and the end of the world.
Death not only looms up from his lyrics, but it sends its chilling breath out through the spooky music of the Doors, which often resembles a rock n roll dance of death. Everybody knew Morrison recognized that he was bound for an early grave, and this constant anticipation of his death finally translated itself into a wire dispatch March 7, 1968, while the band was at the height of its fame. That day a news service flashed, “Jim Morrison dead – more later.
Morrison had a lot of reasons for his death obsession, and he was at pains to articulate them. Basically, he viewed life as struggle to escape the deadening clutches of mindless and insensibility, the numbing effect of the routines into which we all sink after childhood. He found in the defiant and risky lives of such underground poets as Baudelaire and Rimbaud and in the nihilistic philosophy of Nietzsche chapter and verse for his instinctive conviction that the only way to break through to passion, illumination, and ecstasy was to live dangerously. One is free to accept his arguments as either courageous convictions backed by the authority of intellectual and artistic genius or as neurotic rationalizations for a self destructive mania whose roots lay in his ill reported childhood or perhaps in some anomaly of his biochemistry. The only thing that really matters is the recognition that Jim Morrison’s life and art entailed a continuous dialogue with death, hence, the absurdity of treating his death, as some writers have done, as an unimportant or uninteresting event. The fact is that not knowing how Jim Morrison died is exactly like having a tragedy who final act consists of nothing but rough sketches for a half dozen possible endings.
This problem impressed itself strongly on Morrison’s only authentic biographer, pop journalist Jerry Hopkins. His widely read book, No One Here Gets Out Alive (which bears the name of Danny Sugerman as co author), was designed originally to be printed in two alternate versions, one concluding with Morrison’s death, the other with his escape after staging a fake demise, these being the basic alternatives. Naturally, the publisher rejected such a preposterous scheme, which was simply a gimmick for making a virtue out of failure in research.
The result is a biography that concludes in a hopeless welter of rumors and cockeyed speculations. Hopkins labeled the most plausible of these tales in “official” version without explaining what exactly makes it official. Apparently, this was the story that Pamela Courson told in a few years that intervened between Morrison’s death and her own.
According to this account, Jim spent the early part of the evening of Friday, July 2, having supper on the terrace of a restaurant near his apartment with Pamela, his companion of five years – a pretty, freckled, innocent-looking girl from Orange County, California, with a bad heroin habit. They were accompanied by an old friend, Alan Ronay, a Paris born film technician who lives in Los Angeles but was staying at the time with two well known French filmmakers, Jacques Demy (director of The Umbrellas of Cherourg) and his wife, Agnes Varda. After dinner Morrison went off alone to see a film that Ronay had recommended, Raoul Walsh’s 1947 picture Pursued, a film noir treatment of the traditional Hollywood western, starring Robert Mitchum.
When Morrison returned to the flat late that night, he vomited a little blood. Pamela was not unduly concerned, because this had happened before without ill consequences. When he announced that he was going to take a bath, she went to sleep. At five in the morning, she awoke and found him in the tub, “his arms resting on the porcelain sides, his head back, his long, wet hair matted against the rim, a boyish smile across his clean shaven face.” At first Pamela thought he was playing one of his macabre jokes, but then she called the fire department’s resuscitation unit.
Jerry Hopkins also possessed a far different and more interesting account to which he merely alludes, probably because he didn’t place much faith in it. This reconstruction was the work of Herve Muller, a French pop journalist who spent some time with Morrison in the last months of his life and actually phoned his apartment on the morning of his death, only to be told by Alan Ronay that the couple had gone out of town for the weekend. Subsequently, Muller published a book about Morrison, but he refrained from going to the details of his hero’s death; not until March of last year did his findings appear, in the French magazine Globe.
According to Muller, Morrison had been waiting during the days that preceded his demise for a delivery of heroin from Marseilles (head-quarters of the “French Connection” – i.e., the Corsican Mafia). Jim had bankrolled this buy, which was costly but justified by the fact that the dealer, whose nom de dope was “le Chinois,” dealt only in the purest China White (highly refined heroin from Hong Kong). After the usual delays – accompanied doubtless by a lot of excuses from the connection’s bag dealers in Paris and a lot of paranoia in the Morrison household – word came through that the smack could be picked up at Jim’s customary hangout, the Rock n Roll Circus.
The Circus was a vaulted cave at 57 Rue de Seine in the student quarter of St. Germaine. Decorated with huge blowups of rock stars dressed in circus costumes, it was meant to capture the atmosphere of trendy British clubs, like the Bag O’Nails. It’s clientele was “restricted,” it’s hours mid-night till way past dawn, its cuisine American soul food, the décor of its super exclusive smoking room Moroccan, and its entertainment – apart from dancing to records – spontaneous jam sessions by visiting rock stars who wanted to stretch after hours.
The former manager, Sam Bernett, recalls that Morrison came in every night. “He was always high or drunk, in an abnormal state.” Few people recognized him because he had grown so fat that he appeared to be 40. One night he got rowdy and the bouncers, not knowing who he was, threw him out into an alley, where he was rescued by a French rock fan who carried him off to a friend’s garret. After spending the night, Jim took everyone out to breakfast the next day at an expensive sidewalk restaurant. Another night Morrison tried to mount the stage at the Circus but was too drunk to perform. In his last days, he spent most of his time in the men’s room, where the principal activity was scoring drugs.
It was in the men’s room, according to Muller, that Morrison met on his last night a drug runner named “le Petit Robert.” When Robert handed over the scag, he warned Jim, “This is very strong stuff.” Jim promptly took a toot and collapsed in a coma. A couple of “Pam’s friends,” perhaps two of the clubs husky bouncers, hauled Morrison out of the toilet (located upstairs in a quiet area) and through an adjacent fire exit that led into the kitchen of a glitzy transvestite cabaret, the Alcazar, which had shut down for the night. They carried him out of this club’s entrance, which was on the opposite side of the block at 62 Rue Mazarine. Here they put him into a car and carried him back to his apartment, where they immersed him a tub of cold water in an attempt to revive him.
Muller concedes when pressed that he is not totally persuaded of the accuracy of his account because his sources were shadowy junkies and small time dealers with no reputation for honesty. Yet his story contains nothing inherently implausible. Though Morrison was not a junkie, he often bought heroin for Pam. (Scoring smack was a “mans job”.) Michel Auder, former husband of Viva, the Andy Warhol “superstar,” recalls encountering Jim on more than one occasion at the rooms of a heroin dealer in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, American disc jockey Cameron Watson recollects that a couple of weeks before Jim’s death, he observed him sitting on the terrace of the Café de Flor with a photographer, who got up and approached Watson, whispering, “Jim Morrison wants to buy some smack. Do you know where he can get some?
That Morrison himself would take a hit of something he had been warned against is perfectly in character. He would not have injected the drug, because he had a dread of needles. He would have sniffed it. And a couple of good snorts could have killed him, because nonusers lack the protective tolerance of the junkie. Though Muller’s tale is not well founded, it could be true, because it is true to “the life.”
Confronted by two irreconcilable accounts of the same event, a biographer instinctively seeks a third source on which he can place greater reliance. But who would it be in this case? Clearly, there are a number of former intimates of Jim Morrison who know more about his death than they have ever divulged, but it is naïve to assume they would start talking after all these years, unless they could be offered an inducement that would appeal to them, like the opportunity to appear in a major motion picture.
Lacking the ability to offer this resource, I decided to go after the files of the French police. Ostensibly, these reports are confidential and available only to family members or their authorized representatives, but past experience suggested that there might be some way to slip past the bureaucratic barriers.
Before I made the attempt, however, I decided to ask Jerry Hopkins what he thought of the approach. He assured me that there were no official records because no autopsy had been performed. This was clearly nonsense, because nobody can die in a city like Paris without the police making a record of the event. On the other hand, there was the possibility that the death of Jim Morrison had been covered up by the police for some mysterious reason, and in that case, there would be no record, but its value would be nothing.
As it turned out, retrieving the files from the archives was not so difficult as I had assumed. After going through the usual bureaucratic rigmarole and sweating out a period of anxious uncertainty, my Paris researchers, Martha Legace and Anne Sohrada, succeeded in extracting the relevant documents: the dossier of the criminal investigation department of the French police and the report of an emergency rescue team in the archives of the fire department.
The police report consists primarily of the transcript of an inquest held at the Arsenal police station on the afternoon following Morrison’s death. Testimony was taken from the fire department lieutenant commanding the rescue unit, the officer of the criminal investigation department who inspected the premises ( and who presided over the hearing); medical examiner who viewed the body; and the two chief witnesses, Pamela Courson and Alan Ronay.
Courson’s testimony demands to be considered first because it offers what purports to be a complete account of Jim Morrison’s last night. (Ronay acted as interpreter, which means that the police did not question one witness independently of the other.) In the translation that follows, the word ami is rendered as “friend,” although, of course, it can also mean “lover.”
“I am the friend of Mr. Morrison,” Pamela declared. “I lived with him as his wife for five years. I arrived in France with my friend last March… He was a writer, but he lived on a private income. Before coming to love at (17) Rue Beautreillis (in the Marais district), we stayed for three weeks at the Hotel de Nice on the Rue des Beaux Arts. There my friend became ill. He complained of having trouble breathing, and he also had coughing fits at night. I called a doctor, who arrived at the hotel and prescribed pills for asthma. My friend didn’t like to go to doctors, and he never took care of his health. I can’t say who the doctor was who looked after my friend, and I didn’t keep the prescription. At the time of an earlier stay in London, my friend already had this same illness.
“Last night….my friend went alone to have dinner in a restaurant, undoubtedly in the neighborhood. When he returned from the restaurant, the two of us went to the movies to see Pursued. The movie house is near the Pelletier metro ( in a sleazy commercial district in the ninth arrondissement). It’s called, I think, Action Lafayette.
“We returned from the movies (at) about one in the morning. I did the dishes and my friend showed home movies. He seemed to be in good health and very happy. But I must say that he never complained – it wasn’t in his nature. Afterward, we listened to records in the bedroom. We listened lying together on the bed. I think we went to sleep around 2:30, but I can’t say exactly. The record player stopped automatically.
“No we didn’t have sex last night.”
“Around 3:30, I think – there wasn’t any clock in the bedroom and I wasn’t concerned about the time – I was awakened by the noise my friend was making breathing…I had the impression he was suffocating. I shook him and slapped him several times in order to wake him up. I asked him what was wrong. I wanted to call a doctor. My friend said that he felt fine and that he didn’t want to see a doctor. He got up and walked around the room. Then he said that he wanted to take a warm bath.
“When he was in the bath, he called me and said the was nauseated and wanted to vomit. As I went toward the bathroom, I tool from the kitchen an orange pot. (He vomited in this pot.) It looked to me as though there was blood in his vomit. I emptied the pot. Then he vomited again into the pot – this time it was all blood. Then he vomited a third time, bringing up some blood clots. Each time I emptied the pot into the sink and rinsed it.
“Then my friend said that he felt “bizarre”, but he said to me, ‘I’m not ill. Do not call a doctor. I feel better. It’s over.’ He said to me, ‘Go to sleep,’ and added that when he ahd finished bathing he would rejoin me in bed. At this moment, it did seem to me that my friend was getting better, because since he had vomited, the color had come back into his skin. I went back to bed and fell asleep immediately, because I felt reassured.
“I don’t know how long I slept. I woke with a start and saw that my friend was not next to me. I ran into the bathroom and I saw that he was still in the bath tub. His head was not in the water. He appeared to be sleeping. His head was resting on the edge of the tub. There was a little blood under his nostrils. I thought I could wake him. I thought that he was ill and unconscious. I tried to take him out of the tub, but I couldn’t. At this moment I telephoned Mr. Ronay, another American, to ask him to call an ambulance.
“About half hour later, Mr. Ronay came to my place. When Mr. Ronay arrived with his friend, Madame Agnes (Varda) Demy, they called, I believe, either the firemen or the police.”
Ronay’s testimony, predictably, corroborates Courson’s in every detail save one:
“I have known Mr. Morrison since 1963. He is one my friends. This morning around 8:30, I was awakened by a telephone call from Miss Courson, who asked for my help. She told me to come right away. She was crying. She said that her friend had lost consciousness. I got up and went at once to the Rue de Beautreillis in the company of my friend, Madame Demy. (Jacques Demy was in London.) When I arrived, I saw the firemen in the street. I asked them what was happening. They didn’t tell me. I went up to the apartment. I saw Miss Courson…who told me that her friend was dead…He had already been removed from the bathroom and laid on the bed.
“My friend Morrison drank a lot and did not hold his liquor well. I am certain that my friend never used drugs. He often spoke about the folly of young people who used drugs and considered this a very grave problem.
“I saw Mr. Morrison yesterday afternoon around 6 P.M. I thought that he looked ill and told him. He replied that everything was going well. But in any case, he never complained. I took a walk with him yesterday afternoon. He told me that he was tired. In the course of our stroll, he had an attack of hiccups. This spell lasted, I think for about an hour. At one point he closed his eyes, and I noticed that his skin was gray. He told me that he had closed his eyes to concentrate on getting rid of his hiccups. We also carried up to his apartment some logs that were in the courtyard. My friend was extremely tired by this exertion.”
First, it will be observed that these statements differ at many points from those in the so called “official” version published in the Hopkins-Sugerman biography. Second, there is a contradiction in Ronay’s and Courson’s testimony. Ronay says that the firemen were at the building when he arrived. But Courson, in her statement, translated by Ronay, says that he and Varda summoned the firemen after they arrived. Assuming Ronay’s account is true, who then, did summon the firemen?
The most valuable professional testimony offered at the inquest was provided by Lieutenant, now Colonel, Alan Raison, commander of the fire department rescue unit – ten men in a big truck – who were the first people to come to Courson’s aid. The lieutenant reported that he was summoned at 9:20 by a report of an “asphyxia”, a person in a state of suffocation. At 9:24 (the fire station was around the corner) he was met at the door of the fourth floor flat by a young woman whose nightgown was damp and who did not speak French. She led him to the bathroom, where he discovered a fat, naked man lying in the tub with his head reclining on a pad and his right arm extended along the rim. The pale pink tinged water in the tub was warm, as was the body, which was still supple.
As a hot tub will not retain any noticeable heat for more than two or three hours, it is clear that Jim Morrison drew the bath in which he died at dawn, not in the middle of the night as Pam related. Nor could she have discovered him dead at five o’clock.
The firemen removed the body from the tub and laid it on the bedroom floor to obtain the hard, unyielding surface required for heart massage. Soon they abandoned their efforts and, as the police arrived, they left the premises at 9:47.
Upon their return t Sevigne Barracks, they filed a terse report. It states that Morrison had become ill at 5L30 but had decided to take a bath to make himself feel better. (“A neighbor” – i.e. Ronay – translated for Courson.) His “wife” then fell asleep and did not awaken until 9:15, when she discovered him in the tub. She described Morrison as “Writer, Singer.” Clearly, it was after the authorities had left and she had had time to discuss her predicament with Ronay and Varda that Pamela changed her tune and described Morrison as a writer living on a private income.
When quizzed about these events, Varda offered two explanations: (1) “It was not as a rock star that I loved him. Why should French policemen know that he was a famous rock star?” (2) “You have to be very careful when a foreigner is involved.”
The report of the police investigator, Jacques Manchez, is interesting primarily for its misconceptions. After conferring with his colleagues from the fire department and after inspecting the body and the bathroom – where he measured the tub and the depth of its water – he went into the living room, where a patrolman introduced him to Courson, Ronay and Varda. He was told – and the error went into the records – that all three were Americans and that only Ronay spoke French. Not only did he mistake an established French filmmaker for a foreigner, but – evidently because she gave the same home address as Ronay, on the Rue Daguerre in Montparnasse – he described her as the latter’s “concubine,” the same term that he applied to Courson.
The most disappointing testimony was that furnished by the medical examiner, Dr. Max Vasille. He did not arrive at the apartment until six in the evening. The pertinent portion of his report, offers no insight into the cause of death. “I note,” the doctor attested, “that the body does not show, apart for the lividness of death, any suspicious signs of trauma or lesions of any kind. A little blood around the nostrils. The history of Mr. Morrison’s condition, such as it was described to us by a friend on the premises (Ronay?), can be summed up thus: Mr. Morrison had been complaining for a few weeks of precordial (over the heart) pains with dyspnoea (difficulty breathing). It was evidently coronary problems, possibly aggravated by abusive drinking. One can imagine that on the occasion of a change in outside temperature ( a puzzling remark) followed by a bath, these troubles were suddenly aggravated, leading to classical myocardial infraction (blockage of a coronary artery), causing sudden death. I conclude from my examination that death caused by heart failure (natural death).”
Under Article 47 of the French Penal Procedures Code, where there is “no crime or flagrant misdemeanor, the state prosecutor can charge a medical expert with the power of making an inquiry.” When the doctor delivered his implausible but preemptive opinion that the deceased had died of natural causes, Capitan Robert Berry, commander of the Arsenal Precinct, closed the case and signed the report. Permission to bury the dead was granted.
The next steps were routine. During the afternoon, someone – most likely Alan Ronay, who describes himself at the conclusion of his deposition as being busy with the funeral arrangements – called a funeral home, Pompes Funebres Bigot at 8 Rue du Cloitre Notre-Dame. The director, Michel Gangernepain, made out the death certificate, and an undertaker was dispatched to the apartment. He cleansed the body, placing it in dry ice to prevent decomposition. It was then placed in an expensive oak casket lined with canvas. Bill Siddons saw the closed coffin when he arrived the following Tuesday. (It was the fact that Siddons did not see the corpse that gave rise to the rumors that the casket was empty and Jim was living happily in Africa, free of the burdens of fame.) Courson went, most likely with Ronay, to Pere Lachaise Cemetery – which Jim had visited recently to view the graves of the great – where she bought a double plot (one body laid atop another) for a moderate sum. No other kind of grave was available. The price of a funeral was controlled in those days by the government. The total cost, including four pallbearers and a hearse, was only 4,600 francs, about $830.
The funeral was held on Wednesday afternoon. No family members were invited, nor were any clergy involved. Those present were Pamela Courson, Alan Ronay, Agenes Varda, Bill Siddons, and Robin Wertle – a young Canadian woman who had acted as Jim and Pam’s secretary in Paris. They read some verses and threw flowers on the coffin when it was lowered five meters into the earth.
That same day Courson filed the death certificate at the office of the American Consul. The following day she and Siddons flew back to Los Angeles. Only then was the public notified of Morrison’s death in a carefully contrived statement designed to quell suspicion.
On April 25, 1974, Pamela Courson, age 27, was found dead in her Hollywood apartment of a heroin overdose, shortly after receiving $20,000 in royalties as Jim Morrison’s sole heir. She had celebrated by buying herself a yellow Volkswagen convertible, a monogrammed mink scarf and an ounce of China White.
The testimony at the inquest and the statements – public and private – issued subsequently by Pamela Courson and Bill Siddons combine to create the impression that Jim Morrison died of a grave illness whose symptoms he stubbornly ignored. Yet when the basis for this opinion is sought, it all turns on the word of one drug addicted woman with a notorious penchant for what is politely described as “fantasy.”
Jim Morrison had no history of either heart disease or asthma before he left for Europe. He had done a lot of drinking and tried a lot of drugs, but he had never been seriously ill nor had he exhibited any symptoms to anybody else, save for a heavy cough, doubtlessly aggravated by dragging deeply on three packs of cigarettes a day.
He had punctured a lung, however, early in March in a fall from the second floor of a Hollywood hotel. This is a self healing injury from which he should have long since recovered. Even if he did vomit blood on his last night (note, by the way, how the violent hemorrhaging of the inquest shrinks to “a little blood” in the story that’s quoted by Hopkins), the most likely explanation is that, like many drinkers, he had developed an ulcer that stated bleeding when he started vomiting. He could have been nauseated because of something he ate for supper – or from snorting heroin.
Even a tiny amount of heroin can produce nausea in a nonuser, as Bill Siddons related when he returned from Morrison’s funeral. He told the surviving members of the band, "Once, while alone in the living room (of Morrison's apartment), I opened a carved box on the coffee table and found white powder in a clear envelope. Pam was in the kitchen, so I decided to try a little and see what it was. It wasn't coke. Soon afterward I became nauseous and felt very sick. It sure was something that I'd never tried before."
The fact that Morrison insisted there was nothing wrong with him and that he did not want to see a doctor that night suggests he knew perfectly well what was wrong with him – and that it was not disease, but dope. His suggestion that Courson go to sleep while he remained in the bathroom as well as the smile reported to have been on his face in the Hopkins biography, are further evidence that heroin was the cause of his death. People who die of myocardial infarction, which produces pain in the heart, do not die smiling.
Likewise, the behavior of Pam and her friends in concealing from French authorities the real identity of James Douglas Morison suggests that they had a reason to fear the effects of such a disclosure. Clearly, if the police had know that the young man they had found dead at 17 Rue Beautreillis was an internationally famous American rock star, they would have examined his death carefully and , suspecting it was due to drugs, ordered a post-mortem. If the autopsy had demonstrated the presence of heroin in his body, the investigation would have broadened to include Courson and her acquaintances. The police might have found her stash or they might have nailed her suppliers. Undoubtedly, the police had their eye on the Rock n Roll Circus (which closed down shortly there after), where Jim and Pam probably scored some smack on the night of his death. Clearly, it was very important that Pamela Courson deceive the French police and get out of the country as quickly as possible.
When Capt Robert Berry, now 76, was quizzed recently about his involvement in the case, he confirmed that the police knew nothing of Jim Morrison's true identity. Asked if he thought that heroin could have been the true cause of death, he considered the question carefully and replied, "It is highly possible." Alan Ronay’s vigorous denial that Jim Morrison ever took drugs shows where the shoe pinched. When Herve Muller sought to question Agnes Varda about her role in ;’affaire Morrison, she threatened to sue him.
That heroin was the cause of Jim Morrison’s death is confirmed by information that has been available for 4 years but was published only recently in John Densmore’s Riders On the Storm. When the Doors drummer raises the questions of Morrison’s death, he remarks that he has known the truth since 1986, when he was interviewed on PBS by Rodger Steffens, a well known radio personality in Los Angeles. Steffen’s had objected to the widespread fantasy that Jim Morrison is still alive, remarking that he knew the people who had discovered his dead body. They were pop star Marianne Faithful (who know denies ever having had any contact with Jim Morrison) and Jean DeBreteuil, the playboy son of a French count who until his demise owned most of the French newspapers in North Africa.
According to Steffens, on the night of Jim Morrison’s death, Pam had called DeBreteuil, who was one of her lovers (Jim and Pamela had an “open” relationship), and told him, “Jim is in the bathroom. The door is locked. I can’t get him out. Will you come over immediately?” DeBreteuil and Faithful arrived shortly thereafter and managed to open the door. When they caught sight of Morrison stretched out dead in the tub, they went into shock. Both were heroin addicts and in Jim’s death, they foresaw their own. They were still agitated two days later when they recounted the story to Steffens and his wife of that time, Cynthia Cottle, a Vietnam War correspondent.
Prompted by this revelation, I got in touch with Steffens and Cottle intent on putting the anecdote in context. Steffens told me that in 1971 he and his wife were living in Marrakech, where they had become aquatinted with DeBreteuil through his widowed mother.
Jean had cut into the most closely guarded celebrity circles by handing out costly drugs as if they were party favors. He imported whole kilos of the finest Moroccan hashish via diplomatic pouch and had become a boot and shoot junkie – which was the bond that attached Pam to him. He had reached the apogee of his career as a superfan when he got tight with the Rolling Stones while working as a production consultant on a French TV show about the band.
Jean was staying at Keith Richard’s flat in London when he fell in with Marianne Faithfull. The one time pop star was so washed up by this point that she was virtually on the street. Naturally, she took up with elegant young, Jean, who was soon to inherit his deceased father’s title and well endowed with the medicine for all her ills. On their first day together they bought a Bentley –and totaled it that night. Then they decided to get off the scene by shifting to Paris.
They had only just reached the city when they received Pam’s desperate call. They described the scene in the bathroom with the floor littered with whiskey bottles.
That heroin was the cause of death is further substantiated by Danny Sugerman’s account in Wonderland Avenue of a night spent snorting Brown Sugar (Mexican heroin) with Pamela after her return to Los Angeles. She is quoted as saying, “I killed him. It was my dope…He found out I was doing dope, and of course, you know Jim, he just had to try it. And I gave it to him! He’d never done it before and I gave it to him. Then she said he didn’t feel well….I should have gone and checked on him, but I nodded out…When I woke up at dawn…I went into the bathroom and there he was in the tub…He was smiling…and I thought he was putting me on.”
Clearly, DeBreteuil and Faithful could not possibly have summoned the police. The scandal of two junkies – one bearing an aristocratic name, the other an international pop star – discovered at the site of another star’s death of a drug overdose who have immediately enveloped them. They decided instead to flee the apartment and get out of the country fast.
The next day they flew to Tangier, and on Monday night, so stoned that they were weaving back and forth, they told their story to the Steffenses. Steffens recalls Marianne Faithful dropped her lit cigarette on her skirt three times and each time he had to beat out the fire as she stared at him with a startled expression that said, “Why is this man hitting me?” (The lesson of Morrison’s death was wasted on Jean; a year later in Tangier, he, too died of an overdose.)
Clearly the gentlemanly Jean could not have left Pamela Courson in the lurch that morning on Rue de Beautreillis. He and she must have racked their addled brains to come up with a convincing story. He and she must have agreed to blame everything on Jim’s health, the next task would be summoning the authorities. Jean would want to get clear away of any traces of drink and drugs, to hide her stash and get in touch with somebody respectable like Varda and Ronay, who could aid her in her forthcoming confrontation with police – a frightening prospect. It’s a safe bet that a lot of panicky work and worry went on that morning before anyone dialed 18, the emergency number, and reported a man having trouble breathing.
When Jean and Marianne left the Morrison flat, they must have gone straight to their connection and babbled out the story of Jim’s death. Just before closing time at La Bulle, the hip new disco on Montaigne St. Genevieve, where deejay Camerson Watson was watching his last customers fade from the floor, two respectably dressed dope dealers walked up to his booth and one of them thrust his face into the observation window to confide, “Jim Morrison just snuffed it.”
Watson switched on his P.A. mike and announced to the virtually empty club, “Jim Morrison est mort!”
END.