Behind Closed Doors Page 2

  What Happened When the Singer Died

  — The Update Material That Was Intended for the e-book Edition but Was Halted By the Surviving Doors and My Co-Author’s Widow

  When rumors began to circulate that Jim Morrison might not be dead, he joined a small pantheon of heroic (and sometimes horrific) figures whose admirers (and detractors) preferred to believe those figures lived on. Thus, Hitler lived, as did James Dean and President Kennedy and a few years afterwards, the late Elvis Presley was seen everywhere with a bacon-cheeseburger in hand. Asß time passed many theories were posited and numerous people finally told what they knew and although everything they said pointed irrefutably to Jim’s demise, there remained and probably always will be those who refuse to believe Jim is not still alive.

  Certainly this was true at Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where soon after his reported burial the neighboring tombstones were spray-painted with arrows pointing the way to the grave that was then unmarked save for a hand-made sign, a border of seashells, and the ever-present fans, bearing flowers and incense and poems, mainly young Americans and Europeans who spent the day and night in quiet meditation or drinking, dancing and getting high.

  Pamela returned to California following the funeral and lived for a short while in Bolinas with rock journalist Ellen Sander, then alone in Sausalito for a year before returning to Los Angeles. Diane Gardiner, an old friend who was then working for Jefferson Airplane in San Francisco, told me, much later, that Pamela “was a real case, just devastated.” It shouldn’t be surprising she sought solace and relief in opiates, of which heroin is one of the most potent and, for Pam, another old friend.

  At the same time, she was fighting to be recognized as Jim’s legal wife. At first she thought it would be easy. Jim had had his attorney Max Fink, draft a will in 1969, naming her his sole heir. (In the event of her death before his, Jim’s estate was to be divided equally between his brother and sister; his parents were not mentioned.) In November 1971, she filed a “declaration in support of a widow’s allowance,” asking for a monthly check to be drawn against the estate, then in probate. In that statement, she said she and Jim had satisfied Colorado’s requirements for recognition of common law marriage during a visit there by The Doors in 1967. She testified that since that time, Jim had paid all her expenses and they had lived as husband and wife.

  It turned out not to be that simple. A month after she requested an allowance, Max Fink and Jim’s attorney in Miami filed claims against the estate, seeking financial compensation for unpaid time and services. Distraught, impatient, and broke, Pam hired one attorney after another, each lawyer putting in another claim against the estate, demanding payment of their bills. So for more than two years, the estate was frozen, while Pamela shifted from friend to friend, sleeping on couches, finally moving back to West Hollywood, where she shared a two-bedroom apartment in an okay neighborhood with two male friends.

  A compromise was reached in January 1974 with a final accounting of the estate. Pamela bought a yellow Volkswagen bug and talked about purchasing land in the countryside somewhere, perhaps in Colorado, when The Doors filed a lawsuit asking that $250,000 be paid for money advanced to Jim when recording L.A. Woman, the band’s last album. In April, Pamela died of what police called an accidental overdose of heroin that her longtime psychiatrist said probably was intentional, an effort to rejoin Jim in death.

  Pamela left no will, so her (Jim’s) estate went to her next of kin, her parents, who promptly notified the court of their entitlement. Then Jim’s parents, who were living not far from Pamela’s in Orange Country, California, just south of Los Angeles, and who had been content to respect their son’s bequest to the woman he loved most, now made a move to claim what they considered their fair share. That threw the estate back into the courts until an agreement was reached to in January 1975 to divide Jim’s earnings equally between the two sets of parents.

  This meant the singer’s quarter-share of The Doors’ posthumous earnings was henceforth to be divided between Columbus (Corky) Courson, a retired high school principal, and his wife, Penny, and Morrison’s parents, the recently retired Admiral George (Steve) Morrison and his wife Clara, figures of authority against which Jim had rebelled for most if not all of his short life—a level of irony that would not be admissible even in the most imaginative fiction.

  Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore released two albums as a trio under The Doors name, with the keyboardist and guitarist sharing the vocals, but sales were modest and after that, they pursued individual interests, reuniting in 1977 to score music to poetry Jim had recorded on his twenty-seventh birthday, six months before his death. The resulting LP, An American Prayer, the poems he had self-published in an edition of five hundred copies in 1970, reached No. 54 on the music charts and was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Spoken Word category.

  It was two years later when the cult blossomed, as Francis Ford Coppola, who was only a year or two ahead of Jim and Ray at the UCLA film school, used “The End” in the opening of his film Apocalypse Now. Elektra Records finally released the long anticipated The Doors Greatest Hits, which became the quickest and best selling Doors album to date. When No One Here Gets Out Alive appeared a year later, it quickly rose to the number one position on the New York Times best-seller list, remaining on the list for nine months. No rock and roll biography, not even Hunter Davies’ authorized history of the Beatles, had had that sort of acceptance. With the surprise success of No One Here Gets Out Alive, rock biographies soon became a new category in publishing. The book was followed by a one-hour filmed documentary, The Doors: A Tribute to Jim Morrison.

  Ray by now had recorded two solo albums, The Golden Scarab and The Whole Thing Started With Rock & Roll and Now It’s out of Control. He also produced the Los Angeles punk band X’s first album, while Robby and John set to work forming the reggae-flavored Butts Band. The Doors as a performing entity were retired as the three let the existing catalog speak for itself.

  In the meantime, rock and roll had proven itself in the movie theaters—with the release and heady success (both at the box-office and in soundtrack sales) of Saturday Night Fever, Grease, The Buddy Holly Story, The Rose (inspired by Janis Joplin’s life), and The Blues Brothers. This, in turn, inspired dozens of producers, directors, actors, and screenwriters to compete for the rights to make a film based on Jim’s life.

  Through the Seventies and Eighties, Hollywood repeatedly knocked on The Doors’ door, seeking the rights to the band’s music, considered essential to the making of a film. Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Martin Sheen, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader, and who knows how many others wanted to produce or direct. The list of wannabe Morrisons was another Show Biz Who’s Who, including John Travolta (who actually rehearsed with Ray, Robby and John with an eye toward going on tour), Keanu Reeves, Timothy Bottoms, Harry Hamlin, Michael Ontkean, Michael Hutchence (lead singer of INXS), Jason Patric, Richard Gere, and Tom Cruise.

  The Doors dutifully met with many of those interested—Friedkin went so far as to offer the script-writing task to Ray and me—but nothing came together until Sasha Harari, an Israeli immigrant, offered $50,000 for the rights to No One Here Gets Out Alive and got Grease producer Alan Carr to write the check. The Doors decided Carr didn’t understand Morrison and as for Travolta, he was a nice guy, but Morrison wasn’t nice; said drummer John Densmore, “Jim was scary.”

  Four years later, Harari convinced the three Doors to renew their support and the man who promoted The Doors concerts in San Francisco and New York from the 1960s, Bill Graham, was brought in to assist in negotiations with the Coursons and Morrisons. By the time those talks were complete, the Coursons were promised that their daughter would not be shown in any way to be connected to the singer’s death. In the agreement with the Morrisons, a clause specified that they would not be mentioned in the film at all. Harari then called Oliver Stone’s agent to ask if he’d
be interested in directing. Harari was told he missed Stone by a day; he had just gone to the Philippines to make Platoon.

  The project languished at Columbia from 1985 to 1987 when La Bamba hit big, proving once again that rock biography could work in film (in this case for Richie Valens). More important, 1987 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, a media event that suggested a new psychedelic era might be standing in the wings. United Artists and Warner Bros. now showed interest in the Doors’ story, but Imagine Films Entertainment acquired it and Ron Howard was the first in line to direct. A screenwriters’ strike wrecked Howard’s hopes, however, and unable to make a $750,000 payment to the Doors, the property was picked up by an independent film company called Carolco, known for producing the Rambo movies. The Doors were paid $750,000, thus keeping the likeness, story and songs from reverting to Ray, Robby and John, the Coursons and the Morrisons.

  With his own two-picture deal at Carolco, Oliver Stone was now available. Bill Graham stayed aboard as a producer, Val Kilmer was cast to play Jim, and everyone agreed, finally, that a movie might get made. If Kilmer bore physical similarities to Morrison, Stone’s resemblance ran deeper. They were only a couple of years apart in age and both came from similar establishment backgrounds, Stone being the son of a Wall Street stockbroker. Both also were film school graduates (Stone from New York University) who viewed the world in visual and literary contexts. They also sensed a shared, anarchic intensity. There was a brash daring to experiment, coupled with a fierce determination to find emotional buttons and to push them hard. They liked to give people the finger, to test them. Getting a reaction was important.

  Ultimately, Stone would portray Jim as an alcohol-soaked, self-indulgent jerk. He was that, of course. But he was much more: intelligent, sensitive, generous, charming, boyish, and wry. And however much of a pain in the ass he could be, he didn’t really take himself seriously—at least not as a rock star—and as difficult to work with as he often was, the rewards usually outweighed the liabilities. Much the same could be said of the director.

  When Stone’s earlier film, Born on the Fourth of July, was released, he was criticized for the way he changed the facts of the story of a Vietnam veteran who turned against the war. Now he did the same thing with the history of Jim and the Doors. Meticulous care was taken to recreate the look and feel of the Sixties and Val Kilmer looked and sounded so much like Jim it was eerie (he even sang some of the songs), but characters were merged, chronology was jumbled, and some of the most dramatic scenes in the film were complete fiction, notably those that elevated a woman named Patricia Kennealy to the position of being the “other woman” in Jim’s life when in fact there was never another he ever took seriously.

  Wanting to use Kennealy’s real name in the movie, Stone let Patricia increase her role from negligible to significant, then he cast her as the high priestess who performed what Patricia called a “Celtic pagan handfasting ceremony” in which she had “married” Jim in real life. Only Patricia took the 1970 ceremony to heart, Jim telling everyone he was drunk and it seemed to be a fun thing to do at the time. Eventually Patricia legally changed her name to Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, then started writing a series of rock mysteries under the name Patricia Morrison, and on myspace she called herself “hermajestythelizardqueen.”

  Oliver told her that he had her doing some things in the movie that she didn’t actually do. She said, “That’s okay, so long as they aren’t things I wouldn’t do.” (Making clear the casual nature with which she and Stone regarded fact.) When I had dinner with Oliver and Val, the director looked at his star, who was in full Morrison leather, and said he had a copy of a diary of a groupie’s affair with Jim. “Everything’s in there!” he told Val. “This is a woman who was naked with Morrison many times! He’s so gentle and loving. And then he turns into a complete shit. A complete Jekyll and Hyde.”

  Stone and Kilmer became obsessed with reincarnating Morrison. When they talked about him, it was not only with respect, but awe. They seemed to believe he was a kind of shaman. I asked if this was always the way the director felt. Stone said yes, it was, even when he was in the jungle in Vietnam, fighting in America’s war, listening to the Doors on the radio.

  But Stone drove a wedge between the Doors, who agreed to be consultants. When Manzarek read the script, he balked then walked, objecting to the way Morrison was portrayed. He was angry when he left his first screening, saying he wouldn’t have been in a band with such a person. In time, Robby also turned against it.

  “Oliver Stone set out to make the ultimate ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ exploitation film—and did so at Jim Morrison’s expense,” Joe Russo told the Doors Collectors Magazine. (A vocalist fronting a Doors tribute band called Soft Parade, Joe also served the fans as an articulate commentator during this period.) “What upsets me most about the film is that it’s sealed Jim’s fate as the ‘obnoxious party-animal.’ Why couldn’t they have given his ‘Dr. Jekyll’ side equal time?”

  By the time the film appeared, in the fall of 1990—tripling record royalties for the Doors, according to Densmore and sending No One Here Gets Out Alive back to No. 2 in the New York Times—the media was in full feeding frenzy. Jim’s iconic “young lion” portraits from 1967 adorned dozens of magazine covers and the band’s album sales broke records as new biographies were published by Dylan Jones (Dark Star, 1990) and James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky (Break On Through, 1991), along with memoirs by John Densmore (Riders On the Storm, 1990) and Frank Lisciandro (A Feast of Friends, 1991). Kennealy’s romantic fantasy, Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison, in which she turned Pamela into the wicked stepmother and herself into Cinderella, followed in 1992.

  More effort had been exerted to get Jim’s unpublished poetry into print. The first book, The Lords & The New Creatures, published by Simon & Schuster in 1979, was at the time of the film’s release in its twenty-third printing. The Coursons requested and were given rights to administrate all Jim’s poetry in the court ruling that determined division of Jim’s estate and with their approval and participation, Jim’s photographer-buddy Frank Lisciandro assembled and edited two posthumous collections, gleaned from notebooks returned from Paris with Pamela and in the parents’ possession. Both books, Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison and The American Night: The Writings of Jim Morrison, went onto the New York Times bestseller list in 1988 and 1990 and in the years following would find their way onto university reading lists.

  At the same time, drama seemed a constant in the life of my partner in writing No One Here Gets Out Alive, Danny Sugerman. Elevated from the position of being a sort of paid groupie to becoming The Doors’ actual manager, in 1989 he had published a thinly disguised memoir called Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamor and Excess. Two years later he married Fawn Hall, a stunning blonde who had become famous during the Ronald Reagan years in Washington when, as Colonel Oliver North’s secretary, she was granted immunity for testifying against her boss in Congress in what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

  Following the hearings she escaped to the West Coast where she went to work for and married Danny. Danny took her on an around-the-world honeymoon, visited Jim’s grave in Paris and in Thailand took a room at the infamous Golden Triangle where Danny told me he smoked fifty pipes of opium a day. He later asked me to collaborate with him on a sequel to Wonderland Avenue to be called Heroin Honeymoon. It was not written.

  Instead, Danny produced a large format illustrated history for the band; compiled a Doors book of lyrics that reprinted a number flattering articles about the group and included Danny’s own hagiographic introduction; wrote the liner notes to The Doors: Box Set; and added to The Doors archives every photographic image he could convince photographers to sell, while overseeing the marketing of The Doors catalog and the release of several videos. A book about Guns & Roses and, briefly, management of Iggy Pop, may have been his only outside mus
ical interests. It might also be said that both Iggy and Axl Rose owed much to Morrison, so if Danny was straying or stretching, he wasn’t going far from home base.

  There was also Danny’s long addiction to drugs, chronicled, in part, in Wonderland Avenue. There were many attempts to quit, including stays at rehab hospitals and on the government’s methadone program. (He told me at the time he wanted to write a story called “Zen and the Art of Methadone Maintenance.”) But always he went back and when Fawn learned that Danny had added crack cocaine to his lifestyle, she joined him and soon found herself in a facility in Minneapolis after nearly dying of an overdose.

  Both eventually cleaned up, after being confronted by a group of friends that included Ray, John and Robby and Danny’s brother Joe, a physician. Then Danny was hit with lung cancer and when that went into remission he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He won that fight, as well but the cancer returned, payback for a lifetime of cigarettes.

  By 2002, too sick to work fulltime, he hired Jeff Jampol, a Los Angeles native his own age who had worked in a variety of low-level entertainment positions and who had been his sponsor in drug rehabilitation. Sugerman subsequently had his umpteenth falling-out with Manzarek, was not included in any way in the activities or earnings of the hybrid Doors band then on the road (although it was Danny who introduced Ian Astbury to Manzarek and Krieger), and finally was fired by Manzarek, leaving Jampol in charge.

  Danny died January 5, 2005. He was fifty. Manzarek did not attend the funeral.

  “Ray fired Danny many times,” said Bruce Botnick. “In the end, Danny fired himself. He died.”

  Five years later, Fawn told me she was angry with Danny for “leaving me.” Sometimes, she said, she went to his gravesite and wept; other times she cursed him. She also had a lawyer put a stop to plans at Twentieth Century Fox to make a movie of Wonderland Avenue, although Danny had approved the script.