He occupies a small, tucked-away corner of a Paris cemetery, but many thousands still seek it out: Fifty years since his death, Jim Morrison remains a fabled presence in the “City of Light.”
The death of The Doors’ frontman on July 3, 1971, was one of the key signs that the optimism of the 1960s was coming to a grim end.
Today, the “Lizard King” lies in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery at the eastern end of the city.
Photo: AFP
Even with Google Maps, it can be tricky to find — a deliberate decision of the family who rightly feared a deluge of fans.
“It’s a cemetery that he particularly loved. He often came walking here,” rock critic and Doors aficionado Sophie Rosemont said.
“He would have wanted to be buried next to Oscar Wilde,” she said, referring to the other famous tenant of the cemetery. “But the spot would have been too prominent.”
The grave’s seclusion has not prevented millions from paying their respects over the decades — the photograph of another rock legend, Patti Smith, posing here is itself iconic.
The headstone is protected by barriers that will no doubt be under threat again this week.
Morrison’s last home was an apartment on the third floor of 17 Rue Beautreillis in the bohemian district of the Marais.
It was owned by model Elizabeth “Zozo” Lariviere, and Morrison moved there with his girlfriend Pamela Courson, hoping to escape the madness of his fame in the US and dedicate himself to writing.
He would survive just three months in Paris.
The official version is that he died in his bathtub of cardiac arrest, aged 27, but on the facade of his old building, someone has left a note: “Jim Morrison didn’t die here,” a sign that another story has long been making the rounds.
Journalist Sam Bernett has investigated the case over the years, and said that the rock legend overdosed in the toilets of a nightclub, the Rock’n’Roll Circus, that he helped run.
“His face was grey, his eyes closed, there was blood under his nose, and white foam around his slightly open mouth and in his beard — he was not breathing,” Bernett writes in The End: Jim Morrison.
Singer and 60s icon Marianne Faithfull backed that story in an interview with Mojo magazine, saying that the fatal dose came from dealer-to-the-stars Jean de Breteuil, her boyfriend at the time.
The club at 57 Rue de Seine — which is long gone — “was a fairly crazy place,” Rosemont said.
“It was frequented by intellectuals, hippies, little thugs, big thugs, bourgeois folks, stars like Mick Jagger,” Rosemont added.
At the site of the club, an American introduced himself.
Pete said that since 1991, he had been regularly going to there around the anniversary of Morrison’s death, and holding meetings with other “friends of Jim” in cafes around the Pere Lachaise Cemetery.
Other stops on a pilgrimage might include Place des Vosges and the book kiosks that line the Seine, where Morrison liked to wander.
Another stop would be the English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company.
“It’s a place that Morrison very quickly became attached to. He didn’t speak very good French, even if he loved Rimbaud, Beaudelaire, Mallarme a lot,” Rosemont said.
That took Morrison regularly to the Left Bank, near the home of his friend, the filmmaker Agnes Varda, and Cafe La Palette, where he liked to drink and where a few glasses will no doubt be raised to his name tomorrow.
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