Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Feb 10, 2005 9:03:18 GMT
Take out a Subscription to the Resurrection: Jim Morrison
PÈRE-LACHAISE CEMETERY is bizarre enough in itself — 100,000 sepulchres crowded into a busy Paris suburb and rolling down hillsides like an invading army from Hades. But nothing prepared me for Jim Morrison’s resting place in division six. Not even the warning of Danny Sugerman, Morrison’s biographer, who told me the week before my visit that it was "pathetic and we’re embarrassed by it and there is nothing we can do".
The grave is not difficult to find. For Ff10 you can buy un plan du cimetière on which the final destination of Morrison — one of 200 celebrity departees — is indicated. The company he keeps these days is impressive. He is two blocks from Chopin and Bellini, a short stroll from Wilde, Stein, Piaf and Ernst. Two weeks before his death Morrison, as an American tourist, had visited some of these graves.
Without a map you can locate the plot either by following anyone young with a black leather jacket and a camera or by watching out for the graffiti arrows and "Morrison Hotel" scrawls on other people’s memorials.
Arriving at Morrison’s grave, set one row back from the narrow pathway, is like stumbling across an illicit drinking party or a meeting of the Dead Poets’ Society. Young fans in jeans and trainers, none of whom would have known Morrison as a living, singing, member of the Doors, sit on the ground or sprawl nonchalantly on nearby tombs. Most of them are drinking wine or beer. Empty bottles litter the ground and have been dumped inside gaping holes in the grave next door.
Here, all traditional notions of respect and reverence are deliberately flaunted. The headstone itself and all available flat surfaces in the vicinity are daubed with fan messages. Someone had attached a cigarette stub to the last letter "o" in the inscription "Jim Morrison 1943—1971". The only flowers are jammed into wine bottles and an empty Holstein can.
The fans themselves — around twenty from France, America and New Zealand — appear aimless. To them there is no incongruity in remembering a man’s life by discharging the debris of a consumer culture on his grave. They sit in the dirt and dampness looking at nothing and waiting for nothing.
The remaining members of the Doors have tried to erect a proper memorial. Last summer, Danny Sugerman came to Paris on their behalf to see what could be done but discovered that their "hands were tied". Only the estate of Jim Morrison can make such arrangements and the senior Morrisons have consistently avoided anything that would perpetuate the myth of the son who hated everything they stood for.
Jim Morrison arrived in Paris in March 1971. He partly wanted to escape his identity as a rock’n’roll star by regaining his anonymity and by writing poetry rather than songs. He partly wanted to dry out. At the age of 27 he was a terrible alcoholic whose celebrated wild behaviour was now more by accident than design.
Paris was a good place to shake off his celebrity. He dressed down, let his hair grow wild, put on weight and pounded the streets unrecognised. But Paris was not a good place to dry out, especially when you have arrived with a head full of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
"Jim was very aware of the literary romanticism, of Henry Miller in Paris and of Hemingway’s ‘moveable feast’," says Sugerman. "He was aware of writers and writing in Paris but also of Paris, writers and drinking. Eventually he lived that tradition to its fullest."
The Morrison trail begins at the Hotel George V at 31 Avenue George V, just off the Champs Elysées. This is where he joined Pamela Courson (together, right), his long-time girlfriend, who was already enjoying the city with a circle of rich junkie friends. The five-star hotel, with seventeenth-century tapestries, antique furniture and marbled bathrooms did not appeal to Morrison though. "It’s like a New Orleans whorehouse," he said.
So they rented a third-floor apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis. This long narrow street runs south from rue St Antoine near Place de la Bastille in the less attractive end of le Marais.
Like so much of Paris, rue Beautreillis has been desecrated by spray-can vandals but, interestingly, there are no Morrison slogans beside the large green doors that front No. 17. Inside is a broad flagstoned passageway with entrances to 17 and 19 off to the left and right. There are pigeonholes for more than thirty residents. At the far end is a courtyard that Morrison would look over as he wrote.
Michael McLure, a San Francisco poet who became a close friend of Morrison, is one of the few people to see almost everything he wrote in Paris.
"He was mostly writing poetry," he recalls. "His ambition was to write for the theatre. I don’t think he had any prose ambitions. I’ve seen things of Jim’s which I am afraid are now lost. A major work of his was lost."
It was while living on rue Beautreillis that he stumbled into the life of Hervé Muller (together, left), then a 22-year-old economics student. Very early one morning in May 1971, Muller was asleep with his girlfriend in their top-floor apartment at 6 place Tristan-Bernard, in the l’Etoile district, when there came a loud knock at the door.
"It was a friend of mine called Gilles Yepremian," remembers Muller, "and he said he was with Jim Morrison. It was pretty strange. Morrison was absolutely drunk and had been carried up the six flights of stairs. He had his washed-out fatigue jacket on and looked like a hippy tourist."
He had been discovered by Yepremian on the pavement of the rue de Seine after having been ejected from the Rock’n’Roll Circus, a club that would later play a significant role in the rumours surrounding his death.
*
"He just managed to wave his hand and say ‘Hi everybody’ and then he crashed on our bed near the door and went to sleep. I was baffled! I was thinking: this is Jim Morrison and he’s asleep at the foot of my bed?"
He woke up at eleven o’clock with no recollection of the events that had led him there and decided to take his new-found friends out for a meal at the Bar Alexandre, 53 avenue George V, where he was already known to waiters who had learned to tolerate his loud behaviour. They took a table outside and Morrison sat looking towards the Champs-Elysées.
Here Muller began taking some of the only photographs of Morrison in Paris. In one of the shots he gazed dull-eyed into the camera, in another he had wrapped a serviette around his face like a cowboy mask. In two months of knowing him Muller regrettably shot only one roll of black and white film, and nothing in colour.
"We had a great time," says Muller, "but then he started to get weird. He was paranoid. It was obvious that he was very lonely and very lost. When he was drunk, all his problems came out. One moment he was asking Yvonne to get a woman for him and the next he was crying on her shoulder.
"After we left he sat on a bench and wouldn’t move. We got him back to our apartment but at the third-floor he started getting aggressive again. It was as though he was fighting demons. He sat on the stairs and shouted racist remarks. It was because of his behaviour that day that I eventually lost my apartment."
The Bar Alaxandre recently closed when Japanese developers bought the corner. It retains its distinctive wood-panelled exterior and red awning, but the doorway is barred by a grille, the pavement outside is forlornly empty and the glass of the four large windows has been painted white. On the corner of the pane someone has written: "Jim was here".
PÈRE-LACHAISE CEMETERY is bizarre enough in itself — 100,000 sepulchres crowded into a busy Paris suburb and rolling down hillsides like an invading army from Hades. But nothing prepared me for Jim Morrison’s resting place in division six. Not even the warning of Danny Sugerman, Morrison’s biographer, who told me the week before my visit that it was "pathetic and we’re embarrassed by it and there is nothing we can do".
The grave is not difficult to find. For Ff10 you can buy un plan du cimetière on which the final destination of Morrison — one of 200 celebrity departees — is indicated. The company he keeps these days is impressive. He is two blocks from Chopin and Bellini, a short stroll from Wilde, Stein, Piaf and Ernst. Two weeks before his death Morrison, as an American tourist, had visited some of these graves.
Without a map you can locate the plot either by following anyone young with a black leather jacket and a camera or by watching out for the graffiti arrows and "Morrison Hotel" scrawls on other people’s memorials.
Arriving at Morrison’s grave, set one row back from the narrow pathway, is like stumbling across an illicit drinking party or a meeting of the Dead Poets’ Society. Young fans in jeans and trainers, none of whom would have known Morrison as a living, singing, member of the Doors, sit on the ground or sprawl nonchalantly on nearby tombs. Most of them are drinking wine or beer. Empty bottles litter the ground and have been dumped inside gaping holes in the grave next door.
Here, all traditional notions of respect and reverence are deliberately flaunted. The headstone itself and all available flat surfaces in the vicinity are daubed with fan messages. Someone had attached a cigarette stub to the last letter "o" in the inscription "Jim Morrison 1943—1971". The only flowers are jammed into wine bottles and an empty Holstein can.
The fans themselves — around twenty from France, America and New Zealand — appear aimless. To them there is no incongruity in remembering a man’s life by discharging the debris of a consumer culture on his grave. They sit in the dirt and dampness looking at nothing and waiting for nothing.
The remaining members of the Doors have tried to erect a proper memorial. Last summer, Danny Sugerman came to Paris on their behalf to see what could be done but discovered that their "hands were tied". Only the estate of Jim Morrison can make such arrangements and the senior Morrisons have consistently avoided anything that would perpetuate the myth of the son who hated everything they stood for.
Jim Morrison arrived in Paris in March 1971. He partly wanted to escape his identity as a rock’n’roll star by regaining his anonymity and by writing poetry rather than songs. He partly wanted to dry out. At the age of 27 he was a terrible alcoholic whose celebrated wild behaviour was now more by accident than design.
Paris was a good place to shake off his celebrity. He dressed down, let his hair grow wild, put on weight and pounded the streets unrecognised. But Paris was not a good place to dry out, especially when you have arrived with a head full of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
"Jim was very aware of the literary romanticism, of Henry Miller in Paris and of Hemingway’s ‘moveable feast’," says Sugerman. "He was aware of writers and writing in Paris but also of Paris, writers and drinking. Eventually he lived that tradition to its fullest."
The Morrison trail begins at the Hotel George V at 31 Avenue George V, just off the Champs Elysées. This is where he joined Pamela Courson (together, right), his long-time girlfriend, who was already enjoying the city with a circle of rich junkie friends. The five-star hotel, with seventeenth-century tapestries, antique furniture and marbled bathrooms did not appeal to Morrison though. "It’s like a New Orleans whorehouse," he said.
So they rented a third-floor apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis. This long narrow street runs south from rue St Antoine near Place de la Bastille in the less attractive end of le Marais.
Like so much of Paris, rue Beautreillis has been desecrated by spray-can vandals but, interestingly, there are no Morrison slogans beside the large green doors that front No. 17. Inside is a broad flagstoned passageway with entrances to 17 and 19 off to the left and right. There are pigeonholes for more than thirty residents. At the far end is a courtyard that Morrison would look over as he wrote.
Michael McLure, a San Francisco poet who became a close friend of Morrison, is one of the few people to see almost everything he wrote in Paris.
"He was mostly writing poetry," he recalls. "His ambition was to write for the theatre. I don’t think he had any prose ambitions. I’ve seen things of Jim’s which I am afraid are now lost. A major work of his was lost."
It was while living on rue Beautreillis that he stumbled into the life of Hervé Muller (together, left), then a 22-year-old economics student. Very early one morning in May 1971, Muller was asleep with his girlfriend in their top-floor apartment at 6 place Tristan-Bernard, in the l’Etoile district, when there came a loud knock at the door.
"It was a friend of mine called Gilles Yepremian," remembers Muller, "and he said he was with Jim Morrison. It was pretty strange. Morrison was absolutely drunk and had been carried up the six flights of stairs. He had his washed-out fatigue jacket on and looked like a hippy tourist."
He had been discovered by Yepremian on the pavement of the rue de Seine after having been ejected from the Rock’n’Roll Circus, a club that would later play a significant role in the rumours surrounding his death.
*
"He just managed to wave his hand and say ‘Hi everybody’ and then he crashed on our bed near the door and went to sleep. I was baffled! I was thinking: this is Jim Morrison and he’s asleep at the foot of my bed?"
He woke up at eleven o’clock with no recollection of the events that had led him there and decided to take his new-found friends out for a meal at the Bar Alexandre, 53 avenue George V, where he was already known to waiters who had learned to tolerate his loud behaviour. They took a table outside and Morrison sat looking towards the Champs-Elysées.
Here Muller began taking some of the only photographs of Morrison in Paris. In one of the shots he gazed dull-eyed into the camera, in another he had wrapped a serviette around his face like a cowboy mask. In two months of knowing him Muller regrettably shot only one roll of black and white film, and nothing in colour.
"We had a great time," says Muller, "but then he started to get weird. He was paranoid. It was obvious that he was very lonely and very lost. When he was drunk, all his problems came out. One moment he was asking Yvonne to get a woman for him and the next he was crying on her shoulder.
"After we left he sat on a bench and wouldn’t move. We got him back to our apartment but at the third-floor he started getting aggressive again. It was as though he was fighting demons. He sat on the stairs and shouted racist remarks. It was because of his behaviour that day that I eventually lost my apartment."
The Bar Alaxandre recently closed when Japanese developers bought the corner. It retains its distinctive wood-panelled exterior and red awning, but the doorway is barred by a grille, the pavement outside is forlornly empty and the glass of the four large windows has been painted white. On the corner of the pane someone has written: "Jim was here".