Post by darkstar on Jan 26, 2005 14:11:48 GMT
Rock Wives by Victoria Balfour 1986 – Patricia Kennealy/Jim Morrison Pages 139-154
In 1969, Patricia Kennealy, a young rock journalist for a magazine called Jazz and Pop, was assigned to interview the Doors. Patricia had heard some outrageous stories about Jim Morrison, the lead singer
for the group and former UCLA film school grad student who had become something of a cult hero with fans because of his provocative onstage posing (nearly always in leather pants!) and his offstage reputation
as a heavy-drinking mad poet. But when Patricia found herself actually face to face with Morrison, she was impressed with his charming good manners and intelligence. After her interview with him and the other three members of the Doors came out in the magazine,
Jim sent Patricia a letter saying how much he liked the article. A friendship was struck: From time to time Jim would call Patricia at the magazine or send letters, or they would get together for dinner when he came to New York.
Eventually, the friendship evolved into romance. Patricia was twenty- two; Jim, twenty-five. "We were just babies," Patricia says now. "And I was this total convent flower. It was all as inevitable as a fairy
tale – like falling in love with King Arthur, or maybe it was more like falling in love with Darth Vader. He was a lover and an adversary."
But complications set in rather quickly. For one thing, Jim was still seeing his longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson, and his behavior was becoming increasingly self-destructive. The affair, which had started
so promisingly, ended rather badly. Patricia sums up what went wrong in this way: "It was like starting to make a bridge from two different ends, and then when you got to the middle, they didn't meet.
Jim Morrison was found dead – of heart failure, as the story goes – in a bathtub in Paris in 1971. His girlfriend Pamela, who was with him when he died, would herself die of a heroin overdose three years later.
Patricia Kennealy is excited. Her first book, which she describes as science-fiction fantasy, is about to be published, and work on her second book is already well underway. Still, she is a little worried that in the interview she might come across as sounding like her life stopped after Jim Morrison. "The last thing I want is to come across like some sort of rock-era Miss Havisham, sitting in her cobwebbed room with her dusty memories and her old Fillmore programs," she
says. Well, certainly judging from the décor of Patricia's
east Village apartment – sort of medieval gothic – it does not appear that she has been doing much mooning. Granted, there are one or two
Morrison posters, but for the most part the place is crammed with swords, chalices, crowns, masks, and even a high backed carved bishop's chair. All of, coupled with Patricia's rather Old World looks – fair, fair skin and a mass of thick red hair, and a black cape – makes Patricia seem ligh-years away from being in any way
remotely connected to the rock world, let alone Jim Morrison.
But the fact is back in 1967, as a writer/editor for Jazz and Pop, Patricia, at a very young age, was interviewing major groups like the Jefferson Airplane. Jazz and Pop, it seems, was a well-respected
magazine run totally by women – "Rather unusual for that time." say Patricia. "Pauline Rivelli, who started it, was an extremely tough cookie. But it was really strange; the women writers a lot of times
got tarred with the groupie brush when they would go and talk to people. The musicians were used to being pursued on the road, with groupies throwing themselves at them from all directions. So they
figured you were a total slut." Robert Plant she remembers, was a prime example, "I was backstage at the Fillmore, and God, he was unbelievably rude. I had a lace pantsuit on – perhaps" – Patricia
says with a smile – "he might have had a reason for thinking me a person of easy virtue. He said, "Hey, you in the lace nighttie-come over here and sit on me lap!" We always got propositioned. You had to have a hook of some kind to get people to take you seriously." Indeed, Patricia was so incensed by musicians' treatment of women writers that she censed by musicians' treatment of women writers that
she spoke out against it in a column entitled, "Rock Around The Cock." She wrote "…I tire even more of going out to do an interview and being genteely condescended to as not much more than a
particularly well-connected groupie…and then…having to watch the interviewee male drop his drink at a perfectly ordinary remark as to, oh, the influence of eighteenth-century Irish-Scottish ballads on his
work…"
Needless to say, Patricia did not develop any great respect for musicians. "I just had incredible contempt for them. They were idiots, they were morons. They are totally irresponsible. Musicians she'd met through her work, there was no one who sparked a personal interest in her. "There just never seemed to be anybody who was bright and interesting enough."
Until she met Jim Morrison. Patricia had been a fan of the Doors ever since she had seen them at a performance in Forest Hills in 1967.
("They were second on the bill to Simon and Garfunkle.") But up until the time she was assigned to interview the Doors at the Plaza Hotel in 1969, she'd never heard anything particularly good about Jim
Morrison as a person. "It was like Byron-he's mad, bad and dangerous to know." On the day of the interview, Patricia's expectations of Jim were reinforced, when, on her way up to his suite, she overheard some
groupies telling stories "about how he would stick a needle in his eye – the point was that he was doing so much acid that his pupils were so dilated that it didn't hurt." So imagine, then, Patricia's surprise when she entered the suite and Jim rose to his feet. "He had
such good manners," she remembers. "I was knocked out, `cause you don't really meet good manners among rock and roll people. And then, when we shook hands, there were just sparks! He loved it. It was just
perfect."
Good manners were all well and good, but what really astonished Patricia was the fact that Jim took her very seriously as an interviewer. "He seemed to treat most people who came to talk to him like that. You didn't have to prove anything to him; he accepted
you as you were." She also discovered during the course of the interview that Jim was highly intelligent (his reported IQ of 149 was `not as high as mine, but high enough," she says wryly). "He was extremely
well read. We talked about music and about literature and writing."
After Patricia's interview came out in Jazz and Pop, Jim sent her a thank you note, which Patricia produces from a box. It reads as follows:
Dear Pat
I want to thank you for the fine article which I consider the most brilliant witty and amusing. (sic) You should write fiction ( I don't mean than as a slam) (Honest) Let me here from you sometime. Please.
Yours Truly
J. Morrison
In 1969, Patricia Kennealy, a young rock journalist for a magazine called Jazz and Pop, was assigned to interview the Doors. Patricia had heard some outrageous stories about Jim Morrison, the lead singer
for the group and former UCLA film school grad student who had become something of a cult hero with fans because of his provocative onstage posing (nearly always in leather pants!) and his offstage reputation
as a heavy-drinking mad poet. But when Patricia found herself actually face to face with Morrison, she was impressed with his charming good manners and intelligence. After her interview with him and the other three members of the Doors came out in the magazine,
Jim sent Patricia a letter saying how much he liked the article. A friendship was struck: From time to time Jim would call Patricia at the magazine or send letters, or they would get together for dinner when he came to New York.
Eventually, the friendship evolved into romance. Patricia was twenty- two; Jim, twenty-five. "We were just babies," Patricia says now. "And I was this total convent flower. It was all as inevitable as a fairy
tale – like falling in love with King Arthur, or maybe it was more like falling in love with Darth Vader. He was a lover and an adversary."
But complications set in rather quickly. For one thing, Jim was still seeing his longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson, and his behavior was becoming increasingly self-destructive. The affair, which had started
so promisingly, ended rather badly. Patricia sums up what went wrong in this way: "It was like starting to make a bridge from two different ends, and then when you got to the middle, they didn't meet.
Jim Morrison was found dead – of heart failure, as the story goes – in a bathtub in Paris in 1971. His girlfriend Pamela, who was with him when he died, would herself die of a heroin overdose three years later.
Patricia Kennealy is excited. Her first book, which she describes as science-fiction fantasy, is about to be published, and work on her second book is already well underway. Still, she is a little worried that in the interview she might come across as sounding like her life stopped after Jim Morrison. "The last thing I want is to come across like some sort of rock-era Miss Havisham, sitting in her cobwebbed room with her dusty memories and her old Fillmore programs," she
says. Well, certainly judging from the décor of Patricia's
east Village apartment – sort of medieval gothic – it does not appear that she has been doing much mooning. Granted, there are one or two
Morrison posters, but for the most part the place is crammed with swords, chalices, crowns, masks, and even a high backed carved bishop's chair. All of, coupled with Patricia's rather Old World looks – fair, fair skin and a mass of thick red hair, and a black cape – makes Patricia seem ligh-years away from being in any way
remotely connected to the rock world, let alone Jim Morrison.
But the fact is back in 1967, as a writer/editor for Jazz and Pop, Patricia, at a very young age, was interviewing major groups like the Jefferson Airplane. Jazz and Pop, it seems, was a well-respected
magazine run totally by women – "Rather unusual for that time." say Patricia. "Pauline Rivelli, who started it, was an extremely tough cookie. But it was really strange; the women writers a lot of times
got tarred with the groupie brush when they would go and talk to people. The musicians were used to being pursued on the road, with groupies throwing themselves at them from all directions. So they
figured you were a total slut." Robert Plant she remembers, was a prime example, "I was backstage at the Fillmore, and God, he was unbelievably rude. I had a lace pantsuit on – perhaps" – Patricia
says with a smile – "he might have had a reason for thinking me a person of easy virtue. He said, "Hey, you in the lace nighttie-come over here and sit on me lap!" We always got propositioned. You had to have a hook of some kind to get people to take you seriously." Indeed, Patricia was so incensed by musicians' treatment of women writers that she censed by musicians' treatment of women writers that
she spoke out against it in a column entitled, "Rock Around The Cock." She wrote "…I tire even more of going out to do an interview and being genteely condescended to as not much more than a
particularly well-connected groupie…and then…having to watch the interviewee male drop his drink at a perfectly ordinary remark as to, oh, the influence of eighteenth-century Irish-Scottish ballads on his
work…"
Needless to say, Patricia did not develop any great respect for musicians. "I just had incredible contempt for them. They were idiots, they were morons. They are totally irresponsible. Musicians she'd met through her work, there was no one who sparked a personal interest in her. "There just never seemed to be anybody who was bright and interesting enough."
Until she met Jim Morrison. Patricia had been a fan of the Doors ever since she had seen them at a performance in Forest Hills in 1967.
("They were second on the bill to Simon and Garfunkle.") But up until the time she was assigned to interview the Doors at the Plaza Hotel in 1969, she'd never heard anything particularly good about Jim
Morrison as a person. "It was like Byron-he's mad, bad and dangerous to know." On the day of the interview, Patricia's expectations of Jim were reinforced, when, on her way up to his suite, she overheard some
groupies telling stories "about how he would stick a needle in his eye – the point was that he was doing so much acid that his pupils were so dilated that it didn't hurt." So imagine, then, Patricia's surprise when she entered the suite and Jim rose to his feet. "He had
such good manners," she remembers. "I was knocked out, `cause you don't really meet good manners among rock and roll people. And then, when we shook hands, there were just sparks! He loved it. It was just
perfect."
Good manners were all well and good, but what really astonished Patricia was the fact that Jim took her very seriously as an interviewer. "He seemed to treat most people who came to talk to him like that. You didn't have to prove anything to him; he accepted
you as you were." She also discovered during the course of the interview that Jim was highly intelligent (his reported IQ of 149 was `not as high as mine, but high enough," she says wryly). "He was extremely
well read. We talked about music and about literature and writing."
After Patricia's interview came out in Jazz and Pop, Jim sent her a thank you note, which Patricia produces from a box. It reads as follows:
Dear Pat
I want to thank you for the fine article which I consider the most brilliant witty and amusing. (sic) You should write fiction ( I don't mean than as a slam) (Honest) Let me here from you sometime. Please.
Yours Truly
J. Morrison
)