Behind Closed Doors Read online

  Of course this gave Danny—and Ray, with whom he lived and for whom he served as a sort of publicist—the opportunity to give the manuscript a good wash and, on reading what finally was turned in, I was dismayed not so much by the warts he (they?) had removed, but by the glossy bits that were added, the exultations of reverence and what I suspected were some outright inventions. As for the “Foreword” Danny wrote, I was embarrassed; it was no less than adoring hagiography. When I read, “My personal belief is that Jim Morrison was a god,” I winced. But Danny’s name was on the foreword, not mine. The truth was, I was so glad to finally have a publisher, I shrugged and let it go. People say I was generous in giving Danny so large a piece of the rights and royalties. I don’t feel that way at all. If there had been no Danny, there would have been no book.

  (For the record, Danny added two humorous stories to the manuscript, one recounting Jim’s failure to give an anti-drug organization the commercial message it wanted, the other describing Jim’s chasing Danny’s bosomy sister around Pamela’s store. Why he called himself “Denny” in the book I never knew.)

  The most remarkable change in the manuscript came at the request of Warner Books. Both of the original manuscripts had two “last” chapters. One said Jim was dead and the other said he was alive. I asked that if, say, ten thousand copies of the book were printed, half should end one way, the other half the other way, then the books should be distributed randomly, with nothing said. Warner said that was too complicated, asked us to combine the chapters and leave the cause of death ambiguous, which served the same purpose.

  Danny and I did that for several reasons. First, we really didn’t know how Jim died and although the Paris interviews I had conducted in 1972, one year following his death, probably revealed more of the truth than was turned up elsewhere at the time, there still were too many contradictions and unanswered questions.

  We also believed that it was appropriate. Jim had gone to Paris to get away from fame and notoriety and death was the next logical step, even if it was not the verifiable truth. Plus: we felt Jim would have enjoyed our adding such an ending to the book. He came to detest the mythic image he had created in life…but a posthumous myth, well, now, that as something he didn’t have to live with. And if it helped get the music and the poetry out there, all the better.

  In the winter before publication, I was in New York and arranged to meet our editor, Marcy, who suggested we have drinks at the Algonquin Hotel, onetime cocktail destination for the likes of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. Marcy arrived late, a bundle of energy wrapped in a bulky overcoat and trailing scarves, her arms laden with purchases, her hairstyle in the same neighborhood frequented by Whoopi Goldberg and Bob Marley. Once settled into our first drinks, I asked her what she had done before she became an editor. “Oh,” she said, matter-of-factly, “ten-thousand mikes [micrograms] of acid and two years in a commune in New Mexico.” Now I knew why she had taken the manuscript.

  When the book was published in June 1979, there was a miniscule budget allotted for advertising and promotion. Determined to make the most of this opportunity, Danny went to the popular Los Angeles disc jockey, Jim Ladd, and convinced him to produce a four-hour Doors special for the cities that carried his weekly program, a not insignificant feat inasmuch as Ladd had never given any band more than two hours. Danny’s goal was to have the broadcasts coincide with the book’s release.

  Years later, when the Doors released the four hour-long radio segments on their Bright Midnight label, Danny explained, “All of the participating radio stations gave away copies of the book and complete sets of all of the Doors albums to the lucky winners who correctly answered questions culled from the book. Warner Books bought commercial time on the special and Ladd used the book as the basis for the show he ultimately produced.”

  Danny and I also decided to host a launch party at the Whisky a Go Go, the club on LA’s Sunset Strip where the Doors had staged their own launch. When we said we expected some six hundred guests, the owners of the place agreed to close the club for one night if they got whatever was spent on drinks. We didn’t have a clue how we might pay for those drinks, but we went ahead and, when I arrived that night from Hawaii, where I was then living, I saw our names on the nightclub marquee where The Doors once had theirs. Danny had taken the liberty of putting his name on top.

  It was a great party, a Summer of Love reunion. Danny arranged for some young rock bands to play and the three surviving Doors joined in. I was sitting in a booth with Tim Leary on my right, the ghost of Lenny Bruce on my left. As promised, there were at least five hundred people who, more than a decade after Leary told everyone to turn on and tune in, were now throwing down the booze. How, I wondered, were Danny and I going to get out of this one?

  Now we come to the unbelievable bit. Halfway through the party, a telegram arrived. I read it and laughed all the way to the stage, where I said I had an announcement. I then read the telegram, saying it came from our editor at Warner Books: “Next week, No One Here Gets Out Alive goes onto the New York Times bestseller list at No. 16. We’ll pay the bar bill.”

  The room erupted in a roar and everyone in the place made a dash for the bar to place an order.

  Within two months, the book was No. 1 and I got a note from Marcy. Having experienced publishing’s mountain top, she said she was leaving the business to go to Spain to learn how to play flamenco guitar and I haven’t heard from her since. The book stayed on the New York Times list for nine months, was soon translated into more than a dozen languages, and, when Oliver Stone’s film The Doors came out in 1991, the book went back onto the Times chart, rising to No. 2.

  Flash forward to 2013. Why? Why is this book still in print, with more than two million copies in circulation, published in twenty-five foreign languages and now, at least partially, electronically? Why did it outlast the others? I honestly don’t know, but In 2000, when a leading bookstore chain in London filled its front windows with examples of “CULT WRITING,” No One Here Gets Out Alive was displayed alongside The Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Flies, Brave New World and 1984, Heart of Darkness, Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game. I was both flattered and embarrassed to be in such company, but I’d already accepted the possibility that No One Here Gets Out Alive was a rights-of-passage book; virtually all of my fan mail came from adolescent males or older guys who were adolescents when they first read the book.

  Many have credited (blamed?) No One Here Gets Out Alive, along with Francis Ford Coppola’s artful mix of napalm and “The End” in Apocalypse Now, for bringing the Doors back to life. The book has also been nailed for kick-starting the Morrison dead-or-alive myth. I plead partly guilty. Yes, I threw the facts and theories and fantasies surrounding his death into a blender, thereby obscuring the truth. I did so deliberately.

  In the original draft of the book—the one accepted by Warner—I proposed that there be two final chapters. In one, he died of an overdose of heroin and alcohol in the Paris nightclub and was carried back to his apartment, near death or dead. This is what I was told by several people I interviewed in Paris the year following Jim’s death and what was a story that refused to die, however wrong it might be. As noted in the previous chapter, Agnes Varda and Alain Ronay say the overdose occurred at home, with Jim snorting heroin with Pamela; what would Varda and Ronay have to gain by lying? It is obvious what that Paris nightclub manager has to gain and he, obviously, was lying, at least about his friendship with Morrison. At the same time, didn’t Jim’s friends in Paris confirm the guts of the bar manager’s tale? It goes in circles.

  In the alternative final chapter submitted to Warner Books, I suggested that Jim was still alive, following in the footsteps of his idol, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. I asked Warner books that if, say, ten thousand copies of the book were printed, five thousand should close with one ending, the second five with the other. Then, I said, I wanted the books distribute
d, as randomly as possible, with nothing said. Warner rejected the idea, asking us to merge the endings. Conclude the book ambiguously, we were told, and Danny and I did that, achieving the same effect.

  We did that for several reasons. At the time of the book’s publication, ten years after Jim’s death, the cause was still being debated as others insisted he wasn’t dead at all. Danny and I agreed that this was a silly controversy that Jim might have enjoyed.

  So I plead “partly” guilty because I didn’t start the fire, but I admit that I helped fan the flames. The mystery about Jim’s death was launched when Bill Siddons announced it three days after the burial, leading many to become suspicious. This confusion was furthered by the attending physician’s quick sign-off on Jim’s death, blaming a cardiac arrest, which meant no autopsy was required.

  It would be another nine years before No One Here Gets Out Alive was published, by which time the myth was if not fully formed, at least well launched. My book then gave it something resembling credibility and because it provided the first detailed look at the man and the band, it came to be regarded as “gospel,” even when other biographers ten or more years later corrected many mistakes, didn’t have a Doors employee looking out for The Doors’ interests (Danny), and closed their works less ambiguously. As the old research cliché declares: once something appears in print (or, today, on the Net), it forever may confound or defy the truth.

  What is of more compelling interest is why Jim Morrison has endured. Why is Morrison still relevant to young people in the twenty-first century? Surely there is much more to it than some nonsense about whether or not he’s dead. (As noted above by Jackson Baker.)

  There are many reasons, of course. In his memoir, Riders on the Storm, John Densmore recalled how he felt when he saw a headline in 1981 in Rolling Stone that said, “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, He’s Dead.” The author of the article, a woman who was in kindergarten when The Doors were at their peak, said the most important aspect of Jim’s continuing popularity was that kids of all ages needed “an idol who wasn’t squeaky clean.” What this did, Densmore remarked, was give everyone “permission to party. Well done, Dionysus,” he said.

  There was that, of course. But if young people were looking for such role models, there were many other dissolute rockers from whom to make that choice. And even if you insisted this negative image rang true, it wasn’t the whole of his legacy. Over the years, I heard from too many fans who didn’t start pigging out on drugs and booze when they discovered Morrison, they stopped. I met someone in Salt Lake City who said he was fourteen and hopelessly stoned all the time when he read the book and after seeing the names of the people Morrison read as a student, he read them, too. At the time he told me his story, he was in his thirties, was international sales manager of a large company, an instructor of introductory philosophy at a local university, and an internationally competitive bicycle racer. His was an unusual story, surely, but I’ve heard too many similar ones to consider it exceptional.

  Obviously Jim became not only an heroic figure whose followers deny is entirely mortal—or the drunken poet, usually portrayed as a romantic figure, however mistakenly—but also a symbol of rebellion, alienation, and search, themes that are as universal as they are timeless, especially for the young.

  Jim also epitomized the “generation gap,” people who rejected what was then called “the establishment.” He not only rejected his parents’ ideas and values, he denied their existence, at one point insisting they were dead.

  One of those ideas was the concept of following orders, a notion essential to military discipline and usually a part of every military home. Jim just said no, which was an attractive stance to take for many of his youthful followers, and one that is no less attractive today.

  He also rejected materialism. Many other rock stars of the period gave lip service to living simply, but most bought big cars, big homes, and big drug habits as soon as record royalties and concert receipts made it possible. Jim rarely acquired any property at all. He bought a few cars (including some Porsches for Pamela), but generally he walked or bummed rides with friends. The Doors’ office, the Elektra recording studio, the bars he drank in, and the $10-a-night motel rooms he lived in were within a four-block radius. Usually all he possessed at any given time was enough clothing to last a week and a couple of cartons of paperback books.

  He was decades ahead of Bono and Sting and other environmentalists when he asked what “they” had done to the earth, ravaging and plundering and sticking her with knives.

  It was also about masculinity. Cory Lashever, one of Danny’s successors in managing the Doors legacy, said, “He’s the personification of the American bad-ass. Think James Dean and Marlon Brando, the Mustang and Harley-Davidson. He also invented what it is to be a front man, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, holding the microphone like a man. In the time of the hippie movement, he did something else. He didn’t tell people what to so, he told them to think for themselves.” Or, as Jac Holzman put it so succinctly, “It [The Doors’ music] demonstrated that you could boogie and think at the same time.”

  But more than the image, more than the lifestyle, it was the Doors’ music that centered, and cemented, his immortality.

  He sang of “the end,” snakes and drowning horses in a time when other performers were singing about wearing flowers in their hair and getting high with a little help from their friends. He urged his fans to push personal boundaries, “to break on through to the other side.” He lived on the edge himself, where in true Dionysian and existentialist tradition, he “woke up this morning/got myself a beer/for the future is uncertain/and the end is always near.” He told a generation starved for affection “the music is your only friend.” He spoke directly to the ache of loneliness: “Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?” And: “When you’re strange, no one remembers your name.” He captured the impatience of a generation that was frustrated and angry about the way things were being run, and not run: “We want the world and we want it now!”

  It is not difficult to imagine that there still might be an audience for such messages today.

  “The lyrics and music are timeless,” said Fred Chandler, the head of post-production at 20th Century Fox Films, who wrote a script based on Danny Sugerman’s Wonderland Avenue. “They were a unique band, they don’t get old, they don’t get stale. Even when they were created they had their eye towards the universal impact of what they were doing so that they couldn’t be buttoned as a group of the Sixties. Everybody likes the lyrics, they love the sound, the profound subtext to the meaning of the music and the words and it’s all just timeless.”

  Greil Marcus is accepted as the rock world’s number one egghead, author of nearly twenty thoughtful books about rock’s place in American and world culture. He lives in San Francisco and teaches American Studies at UC Berkeley and he told me it was his commute to class that led him to start work on a book about the Doors.

  “The book came out of my going back and forth across the Bay Bridge once a week last spring, about an hour’s drive all in all, and realizing that during that time, over months and months, while constantly switching stations in the car, I was guaranteed to hear Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ at least three times, Train’s ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ at least twice, and something by the Doors two or three times. And not the one or at most two songs the radio permits to stand for the entire career of a supposedly redundant performer: i.e., ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ for Bob Dylan, ‘Gimme Shelter’ or maybe ‘Satisfaction’ for the Rolling Stones, but on any given day ‘Light My Fire’ (most commonly), ‘Riders on the Storm’ (#2), ‘Love Me Two Times,’ ‘LA Woman,’ ‘Roadhouse Blues’ (maybe that’s #2, actually), ‘Break on Through,’ ‘Soul Kitchen.’

  “So I began to wonder about the staying power of the music, assuming from the start that death and legend and cult simply wouldn’t account for this, that it had to be in t
he music itself—that, and to the extent that death figures into it, just the certainty that we would never hear anything more, that each Doors song was in its way a last word (never mind the endless live releases of the past ten years or so, not to mention that fabulous Boot Yer Butt! set).

  “So do I have anything to contribute? Maybe just this: Put Elvis’s looks together with a tone as smooth at Chet Baker’s, and you can say anything, and for a time that is what The Doors did.”

  Selected Doors Websites

  A majority of the following websites are included in a list compiled by Ida Miller, a Doors fan who updates her own website almost daily (www.idafan.com). I have added several new ones, and while the quality varies, the ardent fan should find something of interest in all.

  Key personality sites

  The Doors’ official site:

  www.thedoors.com

  Robby’s official site:

  www.robbykrieger.com

  Ray’s official site:

  www.raymanzarek.us

  John’s official site:

  www.johndensmore.com

  Manzarek-Krieger Band official site:

  www.rayandrobby.com

  Robby & Ray solo merchandise from Oglio:

  http://oglio.com/krieger-manzarek-store

  Ray & Michael McClure joint site:

  www.mcclure-manzarek.com

  John’s Tribaljazz band site: