27

by Howard Sounes

  Despite Alain Ronay’s kindly words, Jim took a turn for the worse that Friday in July. Watching him shopping for a gift for Pamela, Alain gained the impression that his friend was trying to appear happy ‘but really wasn’t happy at all’. The men went for lunch and Jim had a violent attack of hiccups. Jim had been complaining of problems with his chest and breathing recently, including apparently coughing up blood. He had seen a doctor about it. Hiccups were the latest problem. The filmmaker Agnès Varda, a mutual friend of Jim and Alain from UCLA, who was also in Paris, describes Jim’s hiccups as being ‘like a motor car that rattles before breaking down’.

  Around five thirty Alain said he had to go and meet Agnès Varda, with whom he was staying the night. Jim was loath to let Alain go, persuading him to have a drink first on place de la Bastille where the cafés face a column surmounted by a gilded figure of Liberty. Jim knocked back yet another Kronenbourg. Alain was sad to see him drinking heavily again. Suddenly Jim was racked by hiccups. Alain fancied for a moment that he was looking at a dead man. When Jim asked the waiter for another round of beers, Alain excused himself and left Jim sitting at his table.

  4

  In common with Jones, Hendrix, Joplin and Winehouse, Jim Morrison died overnight. As a result there were few witnesses to the stars’ last hours, and in some cases none. Those witnesses who did exist were not always reliable, and many are themselves now dead. In Jim’s case the only person who knew for sure what happened to him during the night of 2–3 July 1971 was Pamela Courson, and her testimony was coloured by an attempt to conceal her drug use from the French authorities. As a result Jim’s death became unnecessarily mysterious, the mystery compounded by the fact that he died in a foreign land where his partner didn’t speak the language.

  What follows is the most likely account of what happened to Jim on the last night of his life based on the best evidence available, which includes Pamela Courson’s police statement, in which she gave a selective account, and interviews Alain Ronay and Agnès Varda gave in 1991, which complete the story. Importantly, Alain Ronay belatedly went on the record saying that Pamela had confessed to him that she and Jim were snorting heroin on the night he died. She gave the impression that they were in the habit of using heroin. But she didn’t tell the police that.

  After Alain left Jim at the café on the evening of Friday, 2 July, Jim and Pamela went to the movies to see Pursued. They then returned to the apartment on rue Beautreillis. ‘When we got there, we started snorting heroin,’ Pamela told Alain. She said they also screened their holiday movies and Jim played all the Doors’ records, which sounds like a suicidal ritual.

  Jim took a lot of heroin that last night, by Pamela’s account. ‘Jim asked me for another sniff and eventually he took more than me,’ she told Alain, saying that Jim had also taken some earlier that day, and they had both snorted the previous evening. He may even have meant to overdose. Like many of the 27s, elements of his behaviour indicate a suicidal mood. No one knows for sure. As with Jones, Hendrix, Joplin and Winehouse, there was no suicide note. But suicides don’t always leave notes. Often they try to make death appear accidental. It is also true that Jim, in common with other 27s, was reckless and immoderate in his habits, introducing the element of accident or misadventure, while John Densmore concludes that Jim ‘committed slow suicide’ by abusing his body over a period of years. This is seen time and again in the 27s.

  Around two thirty on the morning of Saturday, 3 July, Pamela nodded off on the bed. She was woken soon afterwards by Jim’s stertorous breathing, as if he was struggling for breath. This was probably an overdose, and although Pamela panicked she knew what to do. She slapped him hard. Then she took him to the bathroom. A cold bath was a recognised method of reviving somebody who’d overdosed on heroin. It had worked for Janis Joplin’s guitarist Sam Andrew. Crucially, however, Andrew was put into a cold bath, and his friends stayed with him until he regained consciousness. In her police statement Pamela said Jim ‘told me he wanted to take a hot bath’. While a cold bath shocks the system, a hot bath is soporific. It seems that this bath was both hot and full. Jim spilled water over the side when he got in. He said he felt sick. So Pamela fetched an orange Le Creuset casserole dish from the kitchen and he was sick into it. Pamela emptied the pot three times and noticed blood in the vomit. Jim said he felt ‘weird’, but he didn’t want a doctor. He told Pamela to go back to bed, where he would join her shortly.

  When Pamela woke in the morning light she was alone in bed. Jim was still in the bath. In some accounts of his death, it is reported that the bathroom door was locked. Pamela made no mention of this in her police statement, and it would seem unlikely that Jim would lock himself in. It is doubtful that he ever got out of the bath once he had got into it, and Pamela wouldn’t have locked him in.

  She told the police that she simply returned to the bathroom in the morning where she found Jim unconscious in the tub, his head on one side, blood dribbling from his nose.

  Pamela rang Agnès Varda’s apartment and spoke to Alain Ronay. It was shortly after eight o’clock.

  ‘Jim’s unconscious and bleeding. Call an ambulance,’ Pamela cried. She couldn’t make the call herself because she didn’t speak French. ‘Quick, I think he’s dying.’

  Alain asked Agnès to make the call because she was more familiar with the emergency services in Paris. She decided to call the fire brigade because she thought they would get to Jim quickest. Alain asked her not to give them Jim’s real name, just his address. For some reason, he felt they should conceal the fact that Jim was a famous rock star, which was the start of the confusion that ensued.

  Having made the call, Agnès and Alain drove through the busy Saturday morning traffic to rue Beautreillis.

  As she waited for help to arrive, Pamela Courson made another telephone call, to a French playboy friend named Count Jean de Breiteuil. Pamela had had a fling with the count, who supplied her and other users in the rock community with heroin. He was currently dating Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, who had become a heroin user. They were at L’Hôtel. Faithfull recalls in her memoirs that Pamela rang their room that morning and then the count left for Jim’s apartment. He told Marianne that she couldn’t come with him.

  The emergency workers were on the scene by the time Alain Ronay and Agnès Varda arrived at rue Beautreillis. They were allowed upstairs. The apartment door was open. At the end of the corridor, surrounded by firemen and dressed in a white djellaba, stood Pamela.

  ‘Jim is dead!’ she cried. ‘He left us.’

  Agnès looked in the bathroom and saw Jim in the tub, an unforgettable sight. ‘Jim’s head was on the left, leaning on the edge of the white enamel bath, and the dark water covered his body like a cloth,’ she told Paris Match. ‘A trickle of blood had dried flowing from his nose, drawing a diagonal line to the corner of his mouth.’ Agnès was struck by the similarity between the scene and David’s portrait of Marat, who was assassinated in the bath.

  The fire chief said Jim had been dead for at least an hour when they arrived. There was nothing they could do. They lifted the corpse out of the tub and laid it on a bed, leaving the door ajar so Jim’s feet were visible.

  A police inspector arrived. Alain Ronay told the officer that the deceased was an American poet named Douglas James Morrison (switching his first names around to conceal his identity). The policeman couldn’t understand how a young poet could afford to live in such an expensive apartment. Alain said his friend had a private income.

  When they had privacy, Alain asked Pamela what had happened. She readily confessed that she and Jim had been using heroin the night before. She said the first thing she had done when she found Jim dead was flush the evidence down the toilet.

  As they spoke, a call came through from Count Jean de Breiteuil. Then he showed up in person. The count spoke to Pamela briefly, then hurried back to L’Hôtel. ‘He was scared,’ Marianne Faithfull wrote. ‘Jim Morrison had OD’d and Jean had provided the s
mack that killed him.’ The couple packed rapidly and left their hotel.

  A police doctor arrived. He took a cursory look at Jim’s corpse, asked how old the deceased was and whether he had used drugs. As Pamela had no French, Alain Ronay answered. ‘He was 27 years old and never took drugs,’ he told the doctor. He was trying to protect Pamela, and perhaps Jim’s reputation. In his eagerness to portray Jim as drug-free, Alain went so far as to tell the doctor that even in America, where grass was almost as available as tobacco, Jim never touched dope. ‘In fact, just yesterday—’

  ‘That’s enough!’ cried the official, cutting short this cock-and-bull story.

  Pamela went to the Arsenal police station where she gave a statement at three forty p.m. She maintained the subterfuge in her statement, saying that her boyfriend was ‘a writer with a private income’. She described his recent breathing problems, and talked about Jim taking a late-night bath. She described how he had vomited, then told her he felt better and she should go back to bed. When she awoke, she had found Jim unconscious. She did not mention drugs.

  The doctor and police seemed suspicious and not altogether sympathetic, no doubt seeing Pamela as the dissembling junkie she was. But later that day, when she had returned to the apartment, a second doctor arrived. He was friendlier. Dr Max Vassille observed that it was unusual for a young man of 27 to die suddenly of natural causes, but he thought it conceivable that someone who complained of chest pains and had also been drinking heavily in hot weather might suffer a cardiac arrest. This was the conclusion of his report, signed off at six p.m. ‘I conclude that the death was caused by cardiac arrest (natural death).’ Dr Vassille had given Pamela the death certificate she wanted, though it does not seem to tell us what really happened to Jim Morrison. Pamela had successfully covered up Jim’s heroin use and, not insignificantly, her own. No post-mortem was conducted because death was deemed naturelle.

  Still the police were reluctant to allow Jim’s body to be removed from the apartment and Pamela, starting to show signs of being unbalanced, wanted to stay with it. A mortician who resembled Charlie Chaplin arrived. Alain Ronay told him that Pamela intended to sleep with the body. The mortician advised against it. He then packed Jim’s corpse with ice and said he would return at intervals with more ice in an attempt to keep the cadaver as fresh as possible until the funeral could be arranged, but he warned that the warm weather was against them.

  Jim was kept on ice at the apartment all weekend. Pamela slept near the corpse and, unsurprisingly, became increasingly distrait. Alain Ronay talked to her about funeral arrangements. Pamela wanted Jim cremated. Alain explained that burial was customary in France and suggested they try to get Jim into Père Lachaise, the famous necropolis on the east side of Paris. Established in 1804, Père Lachaise was almost full by 1971 with an exclusive cachet due to the fact that many great cultural figures rested there, including the composers Bizet and Chopin, the painters Ingres and Pissarro, and the writers Proust and Wilde, together with many more celebrities. Pamela said it sounded suitable and Alain went to the undertaker’s to see if Jim might be admitted.

  So far Pamela Courson had made no attempt to inform anybody in the United States that Jim was dead. She had no intention of telling his estranged parents, and she didn’t want to speak to the Doors, though she was anxious about how she was going to pay for the funeral without their help. Meanwhile, rumours of Jim’s death began to reach journalists, who contacted Elektra Records for confirmation. The breaking story was impeded because Sunday was Independence Day in the USA, and Monday, 5 July, was also a public holiday. Finally, however, press enquiries reached the Doors’ new manager, Bill Siddons, who called Paris to find out what was going on. Pamela told him that Jim was dead. Siddons told the band, who sent him to France by the first available flight. By the time Siddons arrived in Paris on Tuesday, Jim was in his coffin. The funeral was the next morning.

  ‘I picked the gravesite,’ says Alain Ronay, who told the undertakers that Jim was an American poet. In a land where writers are revered this made all the difference in getting him admitted to Père Lachaise.

  ‘In that case, you are in luck,’ replied the undertaker, offering a plot next to Oscar Wilde. Ronay turned down this prime site in favour of an obscure spot behind some old monuments in a less notable part of the cemetery. ‘I made a point, actually, to make the grave almost inaccessible, and succeeded, I thought. So hard to find. And yet look! It didn’t do any good.’

  Only five people attended Jim Morrison’s funeral on Wednesday, 6 July 1971. They were Pamela Courson, Alain Ronay, Bill Siddons, Agnès Varda and a young woman named Robin Wertle, who had being doing secretarial work for Jim. There was no priest. Everything was done as quickly and quietly as possible. Bill Siddons flew back to the USA the next day and the band released a press statement on Friday, explaining that they had kept everything quiet so far ‘to avoid all the notoriety and circus-like atmosphere that surrounded the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix’. Rolling Stone put the story on its front page, making the 27 link – between Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison – for the first time. Others noted that the letter J kept recurring.

  Jim’s parents found out that their son was dead when they received a call from a reporter, which was an unfortunate end to an unhappy family story. ‘The Doors had him in the ground before they even contacted my parents,’ laments Andy Morrison. ‘They didn’t do a very good job by my parents.’

  5

  Jim Morrison’s death has been the subject of endless debate. This was primarily the fault of Pamela Courson, and those who helped her conceal that she and Jim were heroin-users. Few people now accept that Jim died of natural causes, as the French record states. Andy Morrison points out that the family were unaware of Jim suffering from heart problems, or any significant health problems. It was only years later, when Alain Ronay revealed in Paris Match that Pamela had confessed to him that she and Jim had been snorting heroin the night he died, that it became apparent he had probably overdosed or had a heart attack while under the influence of heroin, which amounts to the same thing, losing his grip on life when Pamela left him alone in a hot bath. It is not unusual for heroin-users to die in the bath. There is another example on the 27 Club long-list, that of Kristen Pfaff (see p 306). Jim may have taken the overdose deliberately; he may have been greedy or careless. In any event it is unfortunate that his companion was someone as flaky as Pamela Susan Courson. As with some of the other 27s, notably Jimi Hendrix, the last witness to Jim Morrison’s life was an unreliable and dishonest person, who was primarily concerned about herself. The fact that Jim’s friends then helped Pamela bury him in what can only be described as furtive circumstances compounded the mystery, giving rise to wild stories about ‘what really happened’.

  After Jim’s death, Pamela returned to Los Angeles where she continued to run her boutique and took to calling herself Pamela Morrison. This was another fantasy. Pamela had always wanted to marry Jim, but he had always refused. All the documents to do with Jim’s life and death describe him as unmarried, including his will and death certificate, while Pamela described herself as Jim’s girlfriend to the French police. Under the terms of Jim’s will, Pamela inherited his estate, but it proved a poisoned chalice, spiked with legal bills and lawsuits. While Pamela fought these battles she received no income, and became an increasingly pathetic figure, dependent on drugs and obsessed with Jim’s memory. One night she telephoned Jim’s brother to suggest they have a Morrison baby – the baby Jim never gave her. ‘This would be late at night when she was all fucked up,’ says Andy Morrison. Eventually Pamela came into her inheritance, receiving $150,000 (£94,339) as part-payment of an estate then valued at around $400,000 (£251,572). One of the first things she did was buy a mink coat.

  Within a year of getting her money, Pamela died of a heroin overdose at home in Los Angeles, on 25 April 1974. Her death certificate records her as a ‘widow’, and her overdose as ‘accidental’, though i
t is doubtful that either is true. She was 27 when she died. ‘I think she seriously wasn’t going to live any longer than Jim,’ says Mirandi Babitz, who believes her friend took her life so she would die at the same age as Jim. ‘She was going to be with him: suicide… I don’t know if part of her death [was] guilt.’ One of the wilder stories about Jim’s death was that Pamela murdered him for his money. Those who knew her find this absurd. Pamela wanted to marry Jim, not murder him. And they were reunited in death when her ashes were interred with his remains at Père Lachaise.

  The cult of Jim Morrison grew posthumously, taking off in 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola used ‘The End’ in the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now. Part of the cult of Jim was the coincidence of him dying at the same age as Brian, Jimi and Janis. The 27 link helped reinforce the idea that Jim had been special; that his death was fated; that there was something weird going on. The fact that Jim’s girlfriend had died at the same age underlined the weirdness of the coincidence. This legend was familiar to everybody with an interest in popular music by 1994 when Kurt Cobain decided to join the club.

  Eleven

  THE SECRET HOUSE OF DEATH

  Then is it sin To rush into the secret house of death Ere death dare come to us?

  Antony and Cleopatra