The Last Days of Jim Morrison
by STEPHEN DAVIS

A rare look into the rock god's journals

The retired Hollywood lawyer who played golf with Max Fink -- the attorney who defended Jim Morrison on the 1969 Miami obscenity and indecent-exposure charges -- said in 2002 that he believed Fink might have received a warning concerning Morrison about a month before Jim left for Paris, which would have been in early February 1971. According to this attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Fink was given a tip by an associate of Mickey Rudin, the prominent Beverly Hills attorney whose clients included Frank Sinatra and who had ties to the Nixon administration. This retired lawyer was given to understand that Fink was quietly told that his famous client would be neutralized in prison -- murdered or incapacitated -- and should get out of the country before his legal appeals were exhausted and his passport confiscated. France, which has no extradition treaty with the United States for so-called sex crimes, was suggested as a logical place for Jim to take refuge. No direct or documentary evidence for this warning exists, only the unverifiable word of a respected former associate of both Rudin and Fink. Whatever the accuracy of this account, within one month Jim Morrison was in Paris, living incognito as a lodger in an apartment house, under the assumed names of James Douglas and/or Douglas James.

Pamela left for Paris first, on February 14th. The next day she checked into the Hotel George V and hooked up with her sometime boyfriend, Count Jean de Breteuil, a playboy and classy dope dealer -- his hashish and opium supposedly came from a Moroccan chauffeur attached to the French consulate in L.A. The de Breteuil family owned all the French-language newspapers in North Africa. When his father had died a few years earlier, Jean inherited his title of Comte de Breteuil, so he was an actual French count whose lineage went back 700 years.

Jim himself left four weeks later. He didn't pack much. He took prints of his two films, Feast of Friends and HWY; as many notebooks as he could find; the typed manuscripts of his unpublished poetry; the two quarter-inch-tape reels of his solo poetry readings; his Super-8 movie camera; a few copies of his poetry books; his personal photo file (including color transparencies of himself, a recent publicity photo of Joan Baez, pictures from the Miami trial and selected Elektra eight-by-ten-inch promotional glossies of himself); and a few precious books and clothes. He left his library and some files in Pamela's apartment and told the Doors' accountant to pay the rent while they were gone.

Pamela was by now a familiar figure in upscale Saint Germain hangouts like Cafe de Flore, Les Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp as a companion of Count Jean de Breteuil. Her acquaintances included young models and actors, a few diplomats and cafe habitues such as les minets (gay fashion kids) and les michetons (handsome young men, impeccably dressed and groomed, who hung around le Drugstore and were employed as gigolos by fashionable but lonely women of the quarter). Through de Breteuil, Pamela had become friends with the gamine model and starlet Elizabeth Lariviere, known professionally as Zozo. Zozo lived in a large apartment on the Right Bank, and when Pamela learned Zozo had a job coming up in the south, she arranged for Jim to rent the flat while Zozo was away that spring.

Sometime in the middle of March 1971, Jim moved into the second-largest bedroom of a fourth-floor apartment in a handsome nineteenth-century Beaux Arts building at 17 rue Beautrellis, in the Fourth Arrondissement. The slightly shabby flat was furnished with the typically overstuffed antiques of the bourgeoisie. There were elegant marble fireplaces, parquet floors and plaster reliefs on the walls, and the ceiling of the salon was painted with a blue sky and puffy clouds. The leaky bathroom, smelling of old-fashioned French plumbing, had a bidet, a toilet and a narrow tiled wall tub that was equipped with a hand-held shower. (Zozo had padlocked her bedroom while she was away.) Jim's room faced the morning sun, and he moved a leather-covered writing table to the big window. As the day progressed, he would move the table to the other side of the flat, so he could sit in the sun as it warmed the courtyard in the rear of the building. A concert pianist lived across the courtyard, and the sound of her daily exercises seemed to please Jim. On the apartment's lobby mailbox, he taped a handwritten label for the postman: "James Douglas."

Jim cut down on alcohol when he first arrived in France, but after a month he was back at it, and the heavy, compulsive smoking began to take its toll. When Jim coughed up blood in April, Pamela took him to see a doctor at the American Hospital in Neuilly. A physical exam and a lung X-ray turned up nothing obvious, and Jim was told to get some rest in a warm climate, if possible. He wanted to see Spain and more of Morocco, so he and Pamela left Paris in a rented car on April 10th and headed south into the lush and wet European spring.

Their trip lasted around three weeks. On May 3rd, 1971, Jim and Pamela flew from Marrakesh to Casablanca, and then on to Paris. When they got to their apartment, Zozo and some friends were in temporary residence, so Jim and Pamela checked into l'Hotel, an exclusive small hotel on the rue des Beaux-Arts. L'Hotel was famous for its discretion, and many celebrities felt comfortable there. It was also famous because Oscar Wilde had died in one of its rooms. (His famous last words: "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.")

Pamela had a huge problem now, because Count de Breteuil was in London and she wanted heroin. Jim told a friend of Zozo's that he didn't want Pamela scoring on the street, and anyway, he supposedly said, "Scoring is a man's job." Around that time, a Paris-Match photographer saw a friend sitting with Jim at the Cafe de Flore and said hello. A few minutes later, the friend came over to his table, explained that Jim Morrison wanted some heroin, and did he know where they could find some?

The upscale, junk-using denizens of Paris usually ended up at the Rock and Roll Circus, very late at night. The Circus was a big discotheque on the rue de Seine, modeled on the American electric ballrooms of the Sixties. The walls were decorated with large murals of English rock stars (and Jimi Hendrix) dressed as clowns. It was often packed with le jet set and French movie stars, and the new Chinese heroin ("China White") was sold openly in the club's dark corners. One prominent notebook entry of Jim's was published by his literary executors after his death: "The Chinese junkies will get you in the end."

One evening early in June, Jim and Alain Ronay -- a friend from UCLA who'd arrived in Paris in May -- were standing on the top step of the long staircase leading up to Sacre-Coeur, the great white church at the summit of Montmartre in northern Paris. A band of black African musicians was banging away, and Jim stopped to listen a while. Gazing off to the east, Jim asked Ronay about the large green hill he could see, all the way across the city. Ronay explained that it was Pere-Lachaise, Paris' great cemetery. It dated from Napoleon's time and was where honored citizens like Chopin, Balzac and Edith Piaf were buried. Jim insisted they visit immediately, but their taxi took an hour to fight through heavy traffic, and the gates were shut by the time they arrived.

Jim and Ronay returned to the cemetery a few days later. They walked among the impressive monuments of the great artists and the florid nineteenth-century tombs of the stolid bourgeoisie. When Ronay said he found the place a morbid experience, Jim protested that he liked the cemetery's spooky tranquillity in the midst of the city, and that he definitely wanted to be buried in Pere-Lachaise when he died.

Throughout June 1971, Jim Morrison carried a white plastic shopping bag from the Samaritaine department store with him whenever he went out. There were usually one or two spiral notebooks inside, plus a file of Jim's personal photographs, the quarter-inch-tape reel of his 1970 birthday poetry reading, a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, a Bic lighter, two or three ballpoint pens, a photocopy of an interview with Jean-Luc Godard ("Film and Revolution," by Kent Carroll) that had been published in Evergreen Review and an article about the Doors ("Morrison Hotel Revisited") torn from Jazz and Pop. One of the notebooks was titled "Tape Noon." It was filled with death-haunted poems, prayers, obscenities, a version of his poem "American Night" and phrases about the street riots he saw in Paris. One of the final pages bore a single, seemingly desperate line: "Last words, last words -- out." Jim Morrison obviously sensed that his time was nearing its end.

Early in the month, Jim and Pamela flew to London for a few days. Alain Ronay was already in London and reserved a room for them at the Cadogan Hotel, near Sloane Square. Pamela immediately disappeared for a while, probably to Cheyne Walk in nearby Chelsea, where Jean de Breteuil was living in Keith Richards' riverside mansion, doling out heroin to former pop star Marianne Faithfull, who had abandoned her career (and boyfriend Mick Jagger) for the life of a full-time addict.

Faithfull later wrote in her memoirs, "Jean was a horrible guy, someone who had crawled out from under a stone. I met him at Talitha Getty's house. He was her lover, and somehow I ended up with him. What I liked about him was that he had one yellow eye and one green eye -- and a lot of dope. It was all about drugs and sex. He was very French and very social. He was only with me because I'd been with Mick Jagger. In that froggy way, he was obsessed with all that."

One night in London, as Jim and Ronay were riding down the Kings Road in a black cab, Ronay told Jim that Oscar Wilde had been arrested for the crime of sodomy at the Cadogan Hotel and later had died at l'Hotel in Paris. "You better watch out that you don't follow too closely in his footsteps," Ronay teased. "You might end up like Oscar."

Jim didn't laugh, and turned away as if he'd been hurt. Ronay felt like an idiot.

Back in Paris a few days later, unable to concentrate on his writing, Jim again went to see a doctor at the American Hospital. Jim was now heavier than on his previous visit because he was drinking and eating more than usual. Again, Jim was told to stop smoking and cut down on alcohol, and (according to hospital records) was prescribed an antispasmodic medication to curtail the coughing spells. These pills often left him groggy and unable to write. An entire page of one of Jim's Paris notebooks, which possibly dates from this month, was filled with a tortured, repeated scrawl: "God help me."

One day around June 15th, Jim Morrison went out walking. It was high summer in Paris and everything was green, but there was also a brisk northern chill in the air. He crossed over to the "le Saint-Louis, then made his way to the quai d'Anjou. He stopped at the house marked No. 17 and sat on the parapet overlooking the river, making a note about Charles Baudelaire, who had once lived in a garret at the top of the house. Then Jim crossed to the Left Bank and made his way to the Odeon, where he bought a paper. Nearby was a cheap second-floor recording studio that he'd come across on an earlier walk. He went upstairs and hired the studio for an hour so he could listen to his poetry tape, which he was carrying around with him. The studio engineer played back sections of the tape for Jim, some of them twice. Before he left, Jim said he might want to do some fresh recording, and the owner told Jim he could come back anytime.

Jim walked on to the Cafe de Flore, where he sometimes found Pamela and her friends. He went out to the Flore's terrace and proceeded to order straight-up whiskeys until he had gotten his alcohol fix. Noticing an annoying racket nearby, he focused on two young American street musicians who were working the cafes for spare change. The guitarist wore a buckskin jacket, and the singer wore a cowboy hat. They were murdering Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young songs, one after the other. Jim, pretty drunk, loved them immediately. After they performed "Marrakesh Express" and nobody gave them any money, Jim introduced himself and graciously invited them to have a drink. He told them about the nearby recording studio and asked if they felt like walking over with him and doing a session. The two guys couldn't believe it.

"Wait, man, hold on," one said. "You are shitting us, right? Are you really Jim Morrison?" An hour later, they found themselves in the studio. The fifteen-minute tape has survived.

Jim was running real loose. His American accent sounded very stoned and very Southern. The studio people were unhappy that he was obviously drunk. They ran a businesslike operation that usually recorded jingles and classical musicians and told Jim archly that they were very busy and he could have a half-hour maximum with the two freaks he had brought along. Jim spent the first five minutes amiably cajoling the two guys, trying to get a sound out of them. The guitar player, a droll hippie troubadour, was only semicompetent, and the mind-blown singer ("I'm cutting a track in Paris with Jim Morrison!") was hopeless when they handed him a studio guitar. They couldn't even get in tune.

Jim asked the two hippies what they wanted to do. The guitar player suggested three obscure songs, but Jim had his own plan. He said, "Let's try something. I wrote this one myself" -- and launched into an astounding version of "Orange County Suite," the unfinished, unrealized paean to his old lady that had been rejected from at least two Doors albums.

It was a drunken, and mostly ad-libbed, recording. Yet, listening carefully (to one of the bootleg versions of the tape that have since sold thousands of CDs), one hears the authentic last of Jim Morrison, two weeks before he died, as he roars spontaneous verses and imagery about his hard-hearted woman, his anguish and his obsessions, easily deploying a poetic champion's compositional facility for the natural cadence and spontaneous rhyme: "Well, her father has passed over/And her sister is a star/And her mother's smoking diamonds/And she's sleeping in the car."

Jim gave the two hippies all the money he had on him after he paid for the studio time. The engineer handed him the box of quarter-inch tape. In a shaky scrawl, Jim inked in the name of his ad hoc Left Bank street band: Jomo and the Smoothies.

The last notebook Jim Morrison worked in is now in a private collection in Paris. He had obviously started the spiral-bound steno pad before he left L.A., since the first entry is "Cahuenga Auto 466-3268." The first twenty pages of the notebook are full of stanzas and imagery written in Jim's large-lettered handwriting. There are almost no cross-outs, as if the notebook represented a confident and finished sequence of poems.

Several pages are variants of older poems, such as The Ancient Ones, Winter Photography and The Hitchhiker. Other pages contain only one or two lines, but variations in the writing style indicate they may have been thought over for days. The notebook contains both wonderful new poems and scabrous jottings: JERK-BAIT SCROTUM, INC and Fuck Shit Piss Cunt. A previously unknown poem, Impossible Garden, refers to "a beautiful savage like me" and "the most insane whore in Christendom." A new song lyric, "Now You Are in Danger," seems to sum up Jim's Paris idyll: "Let the piper call the tune/March, April, May, June." The next page contains short lyrics for a blues song: "We're two of a kind/We're two of a kind/You want yours, and I want mine."

Page 17 contains one line: "She'll get over it."

Page 18: "What can I say? What can I do? I thought you found my sexual affection stimulating"

Page 19: "UMHM/Glorious sexual cool/I'm finally dead"

Page 20: "In that year we were blessed/By a great visitation of energy."

This notebook was in Jim's plastic bag, along with two tape boxes, Jim's photo file and some random papers, when Jim ran into Philipe Dalecky, Zozo's boyfriend, in the street. Jim thought he had recorded something interesting in "Orange County Suite" but couldn't listen to the tape reel because he only had a cassette player at home.

Dalecky: "I remember that I was walking along rue de Rivoli when I ran into Jim. We had a drink together in a bar, and he said he needed to make a cassette from a reel-to-reel tape he had in his bag. I said I could help him, and we went over to my place [5 rue Chalgrin] near the place de l'Etoile, about a five-minute walk from the bar. I had a little home studio with a Revox [tape recorder] and a K7 [cassette] deck, so I did the job. We had another drink, then Jim quickly left with the cassette, like he was really excited to listen to it. I went back to the studio and noticed Jim's plastic sack on the floor. I ran to the window, but he was already halfway down the block. I shouted, 'Hey, Jim! You forgot this!' He looked back at me, over his shoulder, and he shouted, 'All right -- keep it -- see you later -- bye!' "

Dalecky put the bag in a drawer. The next day he went to Saint Tropez with Zozo, who had a film job. He never saw Jim Morrison again.

No one still alive can say with complete confidence what took place in the fourth-floor apartment at 17 rue Beautrellis on the morning of July 3rd, 1971. Only two people, Pamela Courson and Jean de Breteuil, were fully party to the tragic death of Jim Morrison, and both died soon after. But it is accurate to say that in the frenzied days immediately following July 3rd, an improvised, risky, remarkably skillful and cynical cover-up, abetted by determinedly lax procedures by the local authorities, enabled an American rock star's sordid and potentially scandalous heroin overdose, with obvious but messy criminal implications and enormous financial consequences, to be officially decreed a common heart attack by the City of Paris.

Pamela Courson told several versions of her story: one to the police, one to Alain Ronay and French filmmaker Agnes Varda, and others to friends in California over the next three years. Jean de Breteuil blurted out his story in Morocco, where he felt safe, three days after the events. Parisian rock critic Herve Muller published findings that indicated Jim had really died in the toilet of the Circus a day or so earlier. Taking all of these sometimes dubious, thinly sourced narratives into account, one can construct a speculative timeline that considers all the variants of the painful, heartbreaking final hours of Jim Morrison's life.

Pamela Courson said they went to the movies. On a bright and warm summer's night, they walked through the village Saint-Paul, past the crumbling old city wall, down the narrow passage Charlemagne and found a cab at the Saint-Paul taxi stand. Pursued was director Raoul Walsh's attempt to inject a film-noir sensibility into the standard Hollywood western format. After the movie, they ate some sweet-and-sour Chinese food at one of the late-night restaurants on the rue Saint-Antoine. Jim washed his food down with several beers. At one o'clock, they called it a night and went back to their flat.

Jim was restless. He was sipping whiskey out of the bottle, possibly in pain from his various injuries and ailments. He sat at his desk with an open notepad but couldn't focus. Pamela was cutting lines of heroin on a mirror with a credit card. They both began snorting the drug, using rolled-up money. Jim started threading Super-8 films of their travels into the projector. Pamela said they sang together as they watched their dark, jerky, out-of-focus movies of Spain, Morocco and Corsica on the wall. Jim (according to Pamela in all her narratives) played old Doors records -- even "The End" -- far into the night. Between reels, they broke for lines of the strong Chinese junk.

If the neighbors can be believed, early that morning Jim Morrison became very upset. Raging, he opened the apartment's door and went into the hall before someone dragged him back in and slammed the door. A year later, the woman who lived directly upstairs told Dalecky and Zozo that on the night their friend had died, she had been awakened by a disturbance. She had opened her door with the chain on and had looked out to see "Monsieur Douglas" -- naked and screaming on the staircase.

According to Pamela, Jim started coughing again and had trouble clearing his throat. Pamela eventually told Jim they should go to bed. It was three o'clock on Saturday morning.

Jim asked Pamela for another line, or two, before bed. It was her stuff, bought from de Breteuil, and at home she was the one who doled it out (although she also maintained that Jim had his own stash as well). Jim was still awake when Pamela nodded off in a heroin stupor.

She woke up with a start, maybe an hour later. Jim, lying next to her, was gurgling horribly. It sounded like he was drowning in his own mucus. But she had heard this before and tried to wake him up. She couldn't rouse him. She slapped his face. Nothing. She hit him hard, again and again, until he began to come to.

An awful scene ensued. Rousing himself, in obvious pain, Jim staggered to the bathroom. Someone -- Pamela couldn't remember who -- turned on the water in the tub, and Jim lowered himself in. Pamela went back to bed and passed out again. She awoke, in a cold sweat, to terrible retching sounds. Jim, still in the bath, was now vomiting up chunks of pineapple and vivid clots of blood. Pamela rushed into the kitchen, fetched an orange Le Creuset saucepan and ran back into the bathroom. Jim vomited some more into the saucepan. When the nausea passed, she flushed the stuff down the toilet. She later said she thought she had to empty and wash out the saucepan three times. She said that Jim told her he felt better and to go back to sleep. Sometime around five o'clock, as the sky was turning light, Pamela, overcome with heroin and fatigue, fell back into bed. As she was drifting off, she thought she heard Jim calling out to her, "Pamela -- are you there?"

Perhaps an hour later, Pamela woke up again. Jim hadn't come back to bed. Morning light filtered through the louvers covering the windows. She got up and went to the bathroom. The door was locked from the inside. She shouted at Jim, rattled the heavy door, but there was no response.

At 6:30, Pamela called Jean de Breteuil, who was in bed with Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull was stoned on Tuinals but remembered when the call came in.

"I got to go, baby," de Breteuil said. "That was Pamela Morrison."

That woke Faithfull up. "Jean, listen to me. I've got to meet Jim Morrison."

"Not possible, baby. Not cool right now, OK? Je t'explique later. I'm right back."

He was at the flat within half an hour. Pamela, dressed in her white silk djellaba, was out of her mind and incoherent. The count calmed her down, gently broke a glass pane in the bathroom door, turned the lock and let himself in.

They found Jim Morrison, dead, still in the bathtub. Blood was still drying under his nose and mouth, as if he had violently hemorrhaged. There were two large and lividly purple bruises on his chest. The bath water was dark pink, as if Jim bled out until his heart stopped. Pamela later said that he looked relaxed for the first time in months, his head turned slightly to his left, a small smile on his lips. "He had such a serene expression," Pamela said. "If it hadn't been for all that blood . . ."

Pamela started slapping Jim, talking to him, freaking out. Then she got halfway into the tub with Jim before the count pulled her away and dragged her out of the bathroom. With cool calculation, amid terror and considerable anguish, de Breteuil told Pamela that he was leaving town. (The Paris police had already opened a dossier on his drug-dealing activities.) He and Faithfull would leave for Morocco that night. De Breteuil told Pamela that if she could get to Morocco, where his family had great influence, he would be able to protect her if any legal questions arose. Jim had no track marks on his body. Autopsies were performed in France on suspicion of murder only. De Breteuil told Pamela that police would soon be in the house and to flush any drugs she had. She could tell the medical examiner that Jim had heart disease. Pamela asked de Breteuil what to do next.

"Call your other friends," the count said. "Get them to help you. I will see you again before I leave. I'm sorry, darling. I love you. Goodbye."

De Breteuil left 17 rue Beautrellis around 7:30 on Saturday morning. Pamela padded back into the bathroom to talk things over with Jim Morrison, who had died, miserably and alone, about ninety minutes earlier at the age of twenty-seven.

At an all-night disco called La Bulle, on the rue de la Montaigne-Sainte-Genevieve, there was a weird announcement made over the sound system that morning by the American DJ Cameron Watson. Sometime around eight o'clock, after a word with a couple of dope dealers who had stopped by his booth, and with only a handful of customers left in the club, Watson stopped the music and said, "Jim Morrison died this morning." Then he repeated the news in French.

He was, mysteriously, the first person to announce Jim Morrison's death.

Agnes Varda's phone rang at about 7:30 on Saturday morning. Alain Ronay awoke and answered it. It was Pamela Courson, speaking very softly. Ronay told her to speak up and then heard the fear in her voice. "Jim is unconscious, Alain. . . . He's bleeding. . . . Can you call an ambulance for me? . . . You know I can't speak French. . . . Oh, please hurry. . . . I think he may be dying." Pamela couldn't say anything else because she was sobbing. She hung up.

Ronay dressed and crossed Varda's courtyard to wake her. She immediately called the Paris fire department's emergency line. The rescue squad was the best chance anyone in a medical crisis in Paris had of staying alive. She ordered Ronay to write down Jim's address for her and told him to bring his American passport, because he would need it when the police arrived.

Varda drove them in her old VW Beetle. Ronay was almost pissing himself in fear. Weaving through traffic, Varda finally got them to rue Beautrellis at about 9:30. Fire trucks, an ambulance and a small crowd held back by a police officer were in front of No. 17. When they got upstairs, Pamela was in the apartment's foyer, still dressed in her wet djellaba, surrounded by firemen.

"My Jim is dead, Alain," she said. Then: "I want to be alone now. Please -- leave me alone."

Ronay was stunned. He glanced over at Jim's empty boots in the hallway, one in front of the other, as if he'd just stepped out of them.

When the fire-rescue squad had arrived a few minutes earlier, they had lifted Jim out of the bath and laid him out on the floor. They tried cardiac massage briefly, but the body was already cold. They carried Jim to his bedroom and placed him on the bed. Pamela covered Jim with a blanket.

Varda asked the fire chief if he was sure Jim was dead. With tender courtesy, the chief replied that the resident had been dead for at least an hour before they had arrived. Varda went into the bedroom to be with Pamela. A police inspector arrived and began to grill Ronay. "How did you know Mr. Douglas Morrison?" After establishing that Ronay was an American citizen, he asked about Jim's age, nationality and occupation. What about the girlfriend? Did they use drugs? He turned and asked the paramedics to write a full statement. Ronay then told him, "My friend's name was Douglas Morrison. Douglas James Morrison. An American. He was a poet. He was an alcoholic, but, no, he didn't use drugs."

The inspector was skeptical. Looking around the flat, he remarked that poets don't usually live in such bourgeois surroundings. "If he was really a poet, as you say, how could he afford some place like this?" Ronay replied that Mr. Morrison lived on a private income, then pleaded that he was traumatized and couldn't answer questions. The inspector backed off a bit and said that if the medical examiner's report was satisfactory, the police would certify a death certificate and a burial permit. Otherwise, there would be an inquiry. Then he left.

Pamela assured Ronay that all the dope had been flushed. She went into the bedroom, carrying a pile of papers and copies of his poetry collection An American Prayer, and locked them in Jim's desk. When Varda left that afternoon, Pamela started to burn papers in the fireplace. Anything with Jim's name on it went up in smoke. She also burned some of her own letters, a journal and files relating to Jim's various arrests in Los Angeles. Ronay said he thought the cops would smell the fire, on what was turning out to be the hottest day of the summer, and ask questions. Pamela didn't care. Some of her letters, she explained, were like diary entries about Jim and drugs. She then produced an application for a marriage license from Denver in 1967. She asked, "Will they accept this? Do they know English?" Ronay assured her that it wouldn't work.

Next, Pamela broke into Zozo's padlocked bedroom with the fireplace hatchet and emerged wearing a full-length mink coat. "It's mine now," she told Ronay. "I'm taking it with me. She'll never give me back all the money we paid her in advance." Ronay said later that he convinced Pamela that she was in enough trouble already, and she hung the fur coat back in the closet.

The doorbell rang. It was the doctor, a short, stocky, middle-aged man carrying a black bag. "Where's the corpse?" he asked. Ronay pointed to the bedroom. Following legal procedure, the doctor demanded that Ronay accompany him to lay out the body. Ronay begged off because he didn't want to see Jim. But then Pamela appeared, apparently in a trance. Speaking in an artificial voice, she took the doctor's arm. "This is my very beautiful man, sir," she said as she took him into the bedroom.

The exam was completed in less than five minutes. The doctor came out and asked Ronay to translate Pamela's answers to his questions. He asked Jim's age, and was shocked when he was told twenty-seven. "I was going to write fifty-seven," the doctor told Ronay. He asked if Jim ever used drugs and was told no, never. Ronay tried to tell him about the coughing spasms, but the doctor waved him off. "All right. I understand," he said. He filled out a form and handed it to Ronay with an envelope. "Take this to the civil registry of the Fourth Arrondissement," he said, "and show it to the clerk. They will give you the death certificate." Then he offered his condolences to Pamela and left abruptly. It was now around noon. Ronay said that they went out for something to eat.

Then they went to get the death certificate. The office was closed, so they went back later. The lone woman on duty on a sleepy Saturday afternoon scanned the papers and told them that their request for a death certificate due to natural causes would be denied. She made a phone call and handed the receiver to Ronay. The prefect of police angrily told Ronay to get back to No. 17 within ten minutes.

The police arrived half an hour later. They found Pamela sitting demurely in the bedroom, next to Jim's body. She was holding hands with Jim, talking to him quietly. The inspector, Captain Berry, was brisk and unsympathetic. Jim had been cleaned up, with no traces of blood or any needle marks. The police quickly inspected the apartment and found nothing. The fresh ashes in the fire grate went unnoticed. But Captain Berry was bothered by the scene. He obviously smelled something very wrong, and twenty years later he told an interviewer that he thought Mr. Morrison had overdosed on drugs. He arranged for the senior medical examiner to arrive later to look at the corpse. Finally he told Pamela that if the new doctor found nothing amiss, they would receive the death certificate and burial permit.

Dr. Max Vassille arrived around six o'clock, carrying a black leather bag. Jim had been dead for twelve hours now. Vassille was an older gentleman, relaxed, and he smiled at them. He walked briskly into Jim's room and walked out again within a minute. He had a quick look at the bathtub. In the dining room he told Pamela and Ronay that he thought it strange that so young a man, who seemed to be in good condition, should just die in the bathtub like that. Ronay told Vassille about the heavy drinking and the violent coughing spells he had witnessed.

Vassille stood up. He told them that if their statements were accurate, and could not be immediately proved otherwise, he was inclined to say that Mr. Douglas Morrison had died of a heart attack caused by blood clots in the cardiac artery. He was now going to the Arsenal station to file his report. He advised them to rest for an hour -- "You both look very tense" -- and then join him at the station. After he left, and it looked for the first time that day that they might be in the clear with the authorities, Pamela fell apart and began to cry. Then, when her tears were dry, she had a tantrum. "Valium!" she screamed at Ronay. "I want Valium. Give some to me now." Ronay said he'd flushed his pills down the toilet. Pamela started crashing around the apartment until she found a few that she had stashed herself.

After she calmed down, Pamela said she wanted Jim cremated and his ashes scattered someplace he liked. Ronay said cremation was very rare in France and that an autopsy was always required first. Ronay told Pamela about Pere-Lachaise and suggested they try to bury Jim there, near Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Moliere or Debussy. This seemed reasonable to her. Pamela began going through the pockets of Jim's clothes, collecting about $200 in francs in a glass jar.

Captain Berry received them coolly at the Arsenal station. At 7:30 he handed them the death certificate (backdated to 2:30 that afternoon) and the burial permit.

"What about the body?" Ronay asked.

"Leave him where he is for now," Berry said and picked up the phone.

The doorbell rang at eight o'clock, only a few moments after Pamela Courson and Alain Ronay returned to the flat where Jim Morrison lay dead. Ronay was making tea, so Pamela answered the door. After a commotion, she shouted to Ronay, asking if he had ordered some ice cream. When he went to investigate, he found a small mortician in a dark suit, carrying a plastic bag and twenty-five pounds of dry ice. The police inspector had sent him. Shown into Jim's room, he wrapped the corpse in the bag with the ice. On the way out, he gave his card to Ronay and told him he would visit regularly until the funeral. "Believe me," he said, "I'll do my best. But this heat is against us."

Ronay told him that Pamela wanted to sleep next to the body. The mortician looked pained and said that he strongly advised against it. Ronay left also to get some badly needed rest.

Pamela seemed better when Ronay returned late the next morning. The iceman had already been and gone. Pamela was exhausted but told Ronay that having Jim in the house made her feel secure. She said that if she could do it, they would live like this forever.

The iceman came again, late in the day. He repacked Jim and explained to Ronay that, with the continuing heat wave Paris was enduring, the current situation would become impossible to sustain by Tuesday.

On Monday, after a second night spent lying next to her decomposing boyfriend, Pamela consented to a burial as soon as possible. Ronay walked across the river and found the house of Bigot, the undertaker, in the shadows of the twin spires of Notre Dame Cathedral, where an old monastic cloister had once stood. Mr. Guirard, the director, explained that everyone wanted to rest in Pere-Lachaise, and there were very few spaces left. Ronay pleaded that Douglas Morrison had been a famous young American writer. Guirard brightened. "A writer? I know a space -- in Division Eighty-nine, very close to another famous writer: Mr. Oscar Wilde."

Ronay was shocked. "No, I beg you, not next to Oscar Wilde! Please -- can you find another space?" A small double plot was found, near a memorial to victims of Nazi oppression in Paris, in a less desirable location on the other side of the hill. The funeral was arranged for Wednesday morning, July 7th. On Monday afternoon, the undertakers came to the flat, dressed Jim in a too-large dark suit and stuffed him into a too-small wood-veneer coffin, the cheapest one Bigot offered. Pamela gathered all the pictures of herself that she had and placed them in the coffin. The coffin was then sealed tightly with screws to retard further decay in the hot, dark apartment.

Pamela later said she had never seen Jim in a suit before. She said she thought he looked kind of cute.

From the book "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," by Stephen Davis. (c) 2004 by Stephen Davis. By arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group.


(Posted Jun 16, 2004 at "Rolling Stone" Magazine http://www.rollingstone.com/ )



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