Mr Mojo (12 page)

Humility was a trait which didn't sit well with Morrison, and as soon as the shock of the Miami episode wore off he resumed his self-destruction.

The days were no longer bright, but they were still filled with pain. When he awoke, sick, hungover, with another strange girl straddling his paunch, he could always vindicate himself by slowly repeating William Blake's sagacious words of calm: ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom.' He may have had a gift for writing songs about his emotions, but common sense appeared to elude him.

As Liza Williams has observed, Morrison allowed himself to become a mirror for the ghoulish adoration of his fans, and after a while he became their fantasy. He became a screen onto which the audience projected their own fantasies. But if Morrison's life was just one long movie, it was ultimately a snuff movie, starring himself. ‘With people,' recalled Patricia Kennealy, ‘he
was whatever they expected him to be. Some people said he was almost like a mirror, just reflecting whatever you were. If you were expecting him to be the Prince of Darkness, he would oblige you. I told him once that I thought he was the shyest person that I'd ever met and that he had to create a sensation as a sort of cover-up. He thought that was just incredibly perceptive and very mean of me to say so.'

Kennealy is convinced that the Jim Morrison she knew was the one and only Morrison, but there are countless people with whom he collided who think they knew him too.

‘In almost every case, even his most casual acquaintances firmly believe that they alone were privileged to see “the real Jim”,' said Mick Farren. ‘They all claim that Morrison subjected everyone else but them to the games and experiments. Only with them did he shed the Lizard King armour. We have no way of telling if Morrison, in fact, ever dropped the role. The only thing that's certain is that he took a spoiled child's delight in feeding the fantasies of everyone he met. In so doing he may have lost a great deal of his own personality.'

By the summer of 1969 it was painfully clear to everyone who knew him that Morrison was falling apart, lost in his own weird orbit of fame. His drinking was taking over his life, his pretty-boy looks had gone and he was getting terribly fat: hardly an icon of the new age, he was an overweight soak. His face
was puffy, his hair matted and dank. He hardly ever washed, and wore the same trousers for weeks on end. When the Doors realised his vanity had deserted him, it made them worry because they knew he didn't care any more. And that meant obsolescence. His life was one long bar crawl, beginning when he awoke and ending when he fell over, some fourteen hours later, somewhere in Hollywood, with a beer bottle in one hand and a blonde in the other (when asking for a blow job he'd say, ‘Suck my mama').

Judging from a 1969 interview he gave to the legendary
Village Voice
writer and documentary maker Howard Smith, Morrison was always fairly ambivalent about his size, and while he obviously enjoyed the attention his body drew from his legions of fans, his descent into obesity seems almost deliberate.

‘Why is it so onerous to be fat?' he asked Smith, rhetorically. ‘I remember when I used to weigh 185 pounds. I was the same height that I now am. I was going to college, and I had this food ticket at the cafeteria. And the food is mainly all based on starch – cheap food, right? And so I don't know what it was – I just felt like if I missed a meal, I was getting screwed, right? So I'd get up at 6:30 every morning just to make breakfast. Eggs and grits and sausages and toast. Milk. Then I'd go do a few classes and I'd make it in there for lunch. Mashed potatoes, ahh. Every now and then, they'd put a little piece of meat in something, you know? And
then I'd go to a few more classes and then I'd go to dinner and it was more mashed potatoes.

‘So about three months later, I was 185 pounds, and you know what? I felt so great. I felt like a tank, you know? I felt like a large mammal, a big beast. When I'd move through the corridors or across the lawn, I just feel like I could knock anybody out of my way. I was solid, man. It's terrible to be thin and wispy because, you know, you'd get knocked over by a strong wind or something. Fat is beautiful.'

His performances were no longer cathartic, only a slow form of public suicide. During concerts he would mercilessly taunt the squirming girls in the front rows with screams and torrents of abuse, often spitting at his astonished pupils. His sweat-blurred eyes would burn holes in their faces as he lashed them with his tongue. He'd stalk the stage with an erection plainly visible through his trousers, daring anyone to touch. Backstage he would flick lighted cigarettes at groupies and demand oral sex, regardless of who was watching.

Morrison wasn't a diabolist, and neither was he an adorable monster. Rather he was a fantasist, so convinced of his own talent that he became dismissive of everyone around him. Neither was he especially predatory, and would usually wait for women to approach him. He wasn't particularly choosy, and would often slip away from a party with women who wouldn't normally be considered to be in his league. Morrison
would sit in the band's dressing room before or after concerts, allowing any groupie who had managed to get backstage to kneel in front of him and fellate him, regardless of whether anyone was in the room. He'd just sit there, swigging from whatever bottle happened to be in his hand, as a girl worked away between his legs. His drinking bouts were now so extreme, and his drug intake so huge, that the band were in constant fear for his life. He had turned into a perpetual drunk: abusive and violent, melancholic and tearful. Hustling around the mid-rise scatter of Hollywood, he'd vomit in hallways, out of car windows, in people's apartments, at recording sessions, in bed, on the lavatory, in the bath – Morrison was sick everywhere.

One particularly brattish trick was urinating in public: at a film awards ceremony in Atlanta he emptied his bursting bladder into an empty wine bottle and put it back on the table where it was eventually drunk. Once, at Max's in LA, he pissed in a wine bottle and presented it to the waitress, asking her to take it home as he couldn't finish it himself. One night in New York, in a small club off Columbus Circle near Central Park, drinking Mexican beer with Steve Harris, he turned to the Elektra Vice President and said: ‘You know the difference between me and you? The difference is that I could throw this bottle against that mirror, smash it, and in the morning I wouldn't have any guilt. None.'

‘He was an alcoholic, plain and simple,' said Harris. ‘It wasn't because of the pressure – if times were good he drank, if times were bad he drank. If the sun was shining he drank, if it was raining he drank. It was as simple as that. And yes, he was obnoxious. Some people are sweet drunks, but Jim was a redneck – gross, obnoxious and rude. You couldn't tell him anything; he was a complete sociopath.'

With the band unable to tour, Morrison was free to indulge himself as much as he liked. Pamela Courson was at this point also allowing him an unusual amount of freedom. Ever since the Doors had become stars she had found herself unable to deal with the attention Morrison received – she disliked most of his friends, and was constantly on the lookout for girls trying to worm their way into Jim's affections. Nor could she cope with his increasingly debauched lifestyle, and to compensate had begun dating a number of men. It got to the stage where she would go out with the specific intention of being picked up, solely to annoy him. She felt unfulfilled, and by this time was already using heroin, though she hadn't told Jim yet. He tried to placate her with endless expensive presents, by letting her go shopping in his chauffeured limousine, and even bought her a clothes boutique which she tried to run, but she still couldn't cope. There were constant furious fights between them, after which they usually drove off in separate directions looking
for someone to spend the night with. Recently, though, the fights had been getting worse, and while Courson would wander the bars of the Strip loaded on depressants and heroin, Morrison would trawl the other side of town, looking for his own action. So, instead of staying in with Courson, or going to the many record company meetings, photo sessions and recording sessions, Morrison would spend his days cruising bars and joyriding in the hills outside LA, or dreaming up obscure film projects for himself and his friends. (Morrison now saw film as the only way he could truly express himself, and devoted much of his time to the
Hwy
movie, wary of the Hollywood producers who, he thought, ‘just want to hang my meat on the screen'.) He would drop in to see his new friend Alice Cooper rehearse, often dragging one of Cooper's band out to his car and forcing him to race up to the Hollywood Hills. Once there, Morrison would demand whoever was driving to go as fast as possible while he threw himself out. This was how he liked to top off an evening, by getting involved in some foolish daredevil scheme which would invariably lead to a drunken act of bravery. He drank to build up enough courage to do something stupid, whether it was throwing himself out of a speeding car or picking a fight with someone twice his size. He constantly tried to prove himself, and yet wasn't too upset if he got beaten up. Winning wasn't important,

it was taking part, taking the risk. ‘He was always on the edge of reality,' said Krieger, although he made it sound like a compliment.

Now that Morrison was relinquishing any interest he might have in the real world, Elektra found him impossible to work with. ‘He was such an asshole,' said Danny Fields. ‘But was that his problem, or mine? At the time I wished it had only been his problem. But when you're working for someone, and when they're paying the bills, it becomes your problem.'

‘Of course, there were worries about the way he conducted himself,' said Steve Harris, ‘because at that time FM rock radio had not really come into its own, and the AM stations liked everything and everybody to be hunky dory. After the New Haven bust, all the stations stopped playing “Love Me Two Times”, which was out at the time. But as the LP kept selling, after a while people accepted him for what he was. So we went along with it, we left him alone.'

What Morrison had more than anything was self-belief. He had it deep inside him, real as an organ. Today the world is awash with those who expect to be able to inflict their egos and personality on anyone with a mobile phone or a laptop – be it through a self-published art book, a personalised T-shirt, a bespoke mountain bike, a tweet, a Facebook post or a Pinterest board – although when Morrison first started stumbling around LA, the cult of personality had yet to be
commodified. He had what Orson Welles had always been accused of: ‘excessive showmanship'.

He was the hipster personified, in literary critic Anatole Broyard's words, keeping tabs ‘like a suspicious proprietor, on his environment. He stood always a little apart from the group. His feet solidly planted, his shoulders drawn up, his elbows in, hands pressed to sides, he was a pylon around whose implacability the world obsequiously careered.'

With the world falling about his ears, Morrison sought refuge in the arms of Patricia Kennealy, one of the shrewdest things he ever did. Meeting Patricia Kennealy was the best thing that could have happened to him at this time, and she was probably the most important influence on him during his last years. They came together like colliding trains.

The couple had first met earlier in the year when Kennealy had interviewed him for the East Coast rock magazine
Jazz & Pop
, where she was Editor-in-Chief. She had written extensively on the band before their meeting, and continued to afterwards. But while she was a fan, she was no sycophant, attacking Morrison in print for his verbosity and grandiose mannerisms long before she did it to his face.

Kennealy was extremely attractive, but she had two other qualities which drew Morrison to her: she was his intellectual equal, and she wouldn't take any bullshit – if she thought he was stringing her a line, she told him so.

Kennealy developed something of a reputation with the band and Morrison's record company, and she had a reputation for being a practising white witch, so for years after Morrison's death no one would go near her. As no one had ever interviewed her before – they appeared to be too scared – I began looking for her in New York. I spoke with Elektra Records, and with the thirty or so people I interviewed for this book, in London, New York and Los Angeles, but not only could none of them point me in the right direction, some advised me to steer clear of her completely. ‘She's dangerous,' I was told. ‘She'll eat you alive.' In the end it took me about forty minutes to track her down, simply by looking through the New York phone directory. And she was charm personified.

‘I was knocked out by his manners the first time I met him,' she said. ‘He stood up and shook my hand as I walked into the hotel room for the interview, and a rock star had never done that before. I was obviously overawed because he was already a hero of mine, but I was staggered by how literate he was. I thought rock stars were mostly jerks before I met Jim. Music meant a lot at that point, and it was annoying to discover that the people making it were mostly dumb. Jim definitely had a brain. His songs were sometimes too contrived, but they had a certain quality that was different to everything else. He was funny too: I mentioned to him that at one of his concerts two spotlights had come
together on him and formed a cross. He snapped back, quick as a flash with, “A cross is the cheapest thing to do, man, all you need is two sticks.”

‘He was much funnier when he was sober, but then I guess most of us are. Mostly when he was drunk with me he would get kind of quiet and surly. But he was never at a loss for words.'

It took a while for them to become lovers – theirs was an old-fashioned courtship – but when they finally did, like Morrison and Pamela Courson they became inseparable. ‘It was a very personal thing, and the fact that he was famous didn't seem to intrude upon it at all. I suppose that indicates a kind of ostrich mentality on my part, thinking we could walk around Central Park without anyone noticing. But for me it was as though we existed inside a bubble. Of course it wasn't true.'