Chapter 30
The trick is not to bleed ... A baby is born in Bolinas ... A poet dies in Paris ... The song of the Nightbird ... I knew it was gonna happen
ELLEN SANDER: Very early on, when Jac and I were dating, spending most of our time together, he would always ask these big questions. "What do you want out of life?" You ask a twenty-four-year-old woman, "What do you want to leave behind?" I told him my wish list, and it included children.
In 1969 we were driving up the Big Sur coast, staying at the Big Sur Inn, and during the night he took me to Esalen and we sat in the baths and he said, "I want to be the father of your child." He was very ardent about it, and we're sitting naked in these baths on this starry night. It was one of those romantic moments. I'll never forget it as long as I live. I was overjoyed, because until then I didn't know if this was going to be another love affair or the love of my life, and of course I was hoping for the latter.
When we moved into Tranquility, we went to the Westchester antique fair and Jac bought an antique cradle. So the baby was an idea for a year, and then I got accidentally pregnant. I lost that baby, after only a few weeks. I was miserable. Six months later we were ready to try again. We spent the holiday season of 1970 very busy, until one night Jac said, "I think I got you that time. I'd like a son for my birthday."
But as the pregnancy went along, he would be very sharp and critical with me, provoke me into arguments—which was not difficult. I would try to say, "What's the problem? Can we work it out?" But he was just into a mode of being very difficult to get along with, treating me like he didn't like me any more.
JAC: Ellen was very picky, extremely competitive, and it was a constant cat fight. Perhaps it was the pregnancy and, if so, I didn't understand that at the time.
MARTY RICHMOND: There were some times at Tranquility spent tippie-toeing, when either there had just been an incident or there was one about to happen, but I don't recall any real slambanger.
JAC: Unless you count the time that Ellen shied a cookbook at me.
ELLEN SANDER: We got to the point where I said, "Look, you know, I can't stand this anymore, and neither can you."
One day when we were in Los Angeles, he said, "Listen, I don't think it's going to work out with the two of us together." I just got in the car he had rented for me and started driving. I found myself a few hundred miles up the coast, called the rental company to say I was going to keep the car for a while, I didn't know how long, and I drove up the coast to Mendocino and back, and on my way back I made a down payment on a house in Bolinas.
JAC: I gave Ellen enough money to buy the house and start her life anew and, of course, agreed to support our child.
ELLEN SANDER: We went to Mexico, to some very luxurious tennis resort, and tried to reconcile, but I was too hurt. Jac has a way of doing something with finality, and no matter how good an idea it might or might not have been to reconcile at that point, I was unable to overcome my own response to that evening when he took care of business, said he would take responsibility for the child, but he didn't want to be with me anymore.
JAC: My memory of Mexico is that we were really saying our goodbyes to ourselves as a couple.
ELLEN SANDER: We're buying things there, and I saw a plate that you'd hang on the wall, very pretty, painted, and I asked Jac to buy it for me, and we both knew that I was buying it for my new home, it wasn't something that would be in Tranquility, it was a California piece.
So that's how that happened. I don't think either one of us handled it as well as we could have. I moved out in June of 1971.
JAC: That July 4 weekend I was at Tranquility with the usual gaggle of guests, and for some inexplicable reason I began telling all the stories I knew about Jim Morrison. I talked about Jim for hours, in the pool, at dinner, in the living room afterwards.
Jim's grave at Père Lachaise before the commemorative stone was installed
When I returned to the office on Monday morning, I received a call from Max Fink, Jim's lawyer. Max told me that Jim had died in Paris over the weekend and would be buried, as Max put it, in the cemetery of the poets, Père Lachaise. Bill Siddons was already on his way to see to the arrangements and deal with the local authorities.
I was dazed, disordered, and dumbfounded. I sat at my desk staring at the wall, unable to move or say anything. Jim's death affected me more than the death of my dad or my grandparents, who had been along in years. It was more like losing someone whose presence in your life made a profound change after which nothing would ever be the same for you again.
Jim was twenty-seven, the same age as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin when they died. I recalled their deaths and what a circus they had become. Elektra had to do better. We were not going to use this as an opportunity to ship records or any of that kind of sordid nonsense.
My guess was that we might have, at the outside, forty-eight hours to prepare. I called in Bill Harvey, told him the news, and asked him to get on a plane to the West Coast and manage things from that end while I handled New York.
I knew the radio stations and press would be calling and I wanted to avoid interviews or questions to which I didn't have answers. I wrote out a statement in longhand, a personal reminiscence about what Jim's loss meant to me, to all of us at Elektra, to his friends, and to music. The media would get only the statement.
In the meantime we at Elektra had to keep the secret. It was not our place to tell anyone. That right belonged to Jim's family, or Pamela, or the Doors. Our job was keep it from turning into a tabloid craze, and in large measure we succeeded.
That same evening I had a dinner already planned with Carly Simon.
CARLY SIMON: I was to meet Jac at the Algonquin Hotel, and first I met Peter Beard for cocktails, and I had some kind of anxiety attack or something and fainted, and I was brought up to Peter's room and a doctor was called in, and then right after that Jac and I went to eat at a Japanese restaurant near the Algonquin. I was so absorbed in my own story that I went on for fifteen minutes telling him about it. And he said, "Well, I've had a bad day too," and he told me Jim had died.
He was trying to keep it together. I would have been crumpled over in tears and having a fit. Jac's emotional expression takes a very different path from mine. He didn't cancel our dinner. He was controlled. But as much as you can imagine Jac out of control or losing it, he really was—running back and forth to the phone.
JAC: To share the news with Carly lightened the load and I knew I could count on her discretion.
On Wednesday evening I was still pretty upset and while I was listening to Alison Steele, the Nightbird, on WABC, the phone rang. Somehow Alison had found my unlisted home phone number. She asked me point blank if Jim was dead. We had had more than our forty-eight hours, we were ready, and I told her the truth. No details. I said, "Please play "Riders on the Storm," it's all in that song."
PAT FARALLA: Jim had written that death made angels of us all. To me, Jim was a fallen angel. His vision was his torment.
BILL SIDDONS: Jim moved to Paris to find out who he was creatively. He realized he had created a monster in the music world and didn't want to live it out anymore. The audience said, "Give me that again, and again." He didn't want to. He had left the band. He had felt controlled and manipulated by the band for quite a while, and there was a lot of animosity there, although no hostility. So he went to find a different muse.
Now, Jim may have died of a heart attack and he may have died of a drug overdose. He may have died of a heart attack induced by a drug overdose. But he didn't do drugs in the sense that he was an addict—he drank. He bought a drug, he found out what it did, he was done. If he died of a drug overdose it wasn't in the pursuit of pleasure, it was in pursuit of "break on through to the other side." He did everything to excess. It's only logical that this guy would kill himself for drugs if he experimented with them. Once, he bought an ounce of coke and did it in eight days. If he did that with heroin, it would have killed him, and that may be what happened to him. But not because he was a drug addict. If he happened to die of a drug overdose, he happened to die because he did something stupid. And he may have, but I don't know that he did.
ROBBY KRIEGER: For one thing, he was very sick when he went over to Paris. He was coughing up blood, that kind of stuff. So I think it would have been very easy for him, after a night of drinking, to take a snort, or couple of snorts of something and not know what it was. And then go into the bathtub, fall asleep, and drown.
JAC: The last time Jim and I spent private time together was during the sessions for "LA Woman." We were sitting in a small bar near their rehearsal hall and Jim was pushing, trying to get me drunk. I wasn't foolish enough to match him beyond the first two. Jim chided me, "Jac, you've got to be more out there, on the edge." I said, "I understand, Jim, but the trick is to be out there and not to bleed."
BILL SIDDONS: To me, the consistency in Jim's persona was to push you far enough for you to get out of your shell and to become who you really were at the center. That's what he did to everybody. I had conversations with him where I had to get him to stop because he had taken my mind to places I didn't know how to handle.
He could be the biggest asshole in the world. And he could be one of the finest people you'd ever know. The guy who everybody perceived as nuts, arrogant, in fact was one of the most sensitive and highly developed minds I ever knew. There was a gentle, generous human soul there. And one of my more profound memories is his generosity.
FRANK LISCIANDRO: He regularly visited poets in Venice, and he always bought a number of copies of their books, and passed them out to his friends. He contributed money on an ongoing basis to the LA Art Squad, mural painters in Venice and Hollywood. They always needed funds for paint, scaffolding, just to have lunch. They would come to the office, bearded and longhaired, shabby clothes, and Jim would either empty out the petty cash or write them a check.
BILL SIDDONS: We were in a restaurant, some guy comes up, obviously just scratching by, and he's selling these little rings that he made out of the ends of spoons. Jim asked how many he'd sold, and the guy says, "Well, two today," and Jim said, "OK, I'll take the box." He continually did things like that.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: When I heard, I was sitting at home in Laurel Canyon, and Fritz Richmond came in. "Man," he said, "I've got bad news for you. We just heard down at Elektra. Jim died in Paris." And I had no feeling. I was numb. Then my first thought was, "Well, he finally made it over. I hope he's feeling good now."
There's a line from one of his poems I can't get out of my mind: "Out here, on the perimeter, there are no stars; out here we are stoned, immaculate." When you're on the cutting edge, there are no stars, no idols, because out there you're too high from the experience itself.
I think Jim spent every day trying to explore the frontiers. And one of the frontiers was death. Deep psychological explorations of death. He had a morbid curiosity about the other world. In Renaissance literature—and you hear this in old songs a great deal—the euphemism for orgasm, women would say, "I die, I die." Jim gets very deeply into sexual imagery and sexual exploration around the very words, "I die, I die." Playing with the ancient use of the word and bringing it to its new meaning. This again is going over to another world which is only partially reachable by the human mind. To him the exploration of death was another and maybe the ultimate high. 'The End' spells out how total his fascination was with dying. When you listen to that song, it's almost a love song to death. And the message is that this is not a bad thing. "Take comfort, my friend, who I love so much. This is the end of laughter, but also of soft lies." There's peace.
JAC: After the pain and the numbness and the confusion had washed away I was left with Jim's poetry and his songs. The road he was traveling had been mapped out, if only in his unconscious, and when you re-read his lyrics and poetry through the prism of his passing, it made some kind of off-kilter Homeric sense, rather like characters in "The Iliad" who are attracted to death as a passage to immortality. Jim understood this.
JAC: There was no one more into the Doors than Adam, and it was mutual. Jim would remember Adam's birthday, bring him a musical instrument, or just stop by and spend time with him.
NINA HOLZMAN: Adam ate and slept the music life, and Ray and Jim were enormous influences on him. When Jim died, we were very uneasy about the impact on Adam. It was summer, and Adam was away in camp. Jac and I each wrote to him. He didn't respond.
JAC: I was surprised when there was no call, no letter from him.
NINA HOLZMAN: The day came when we picked him up—
JAC:—I asked why he hadn't called because we had been so concerned. He said, "No, I knew it was gonna happen."
NINA HOLZMAN: He knew Jim would never live to get older.
JAC: He said, "It's cool, because Jim's still with me, and I won't ever forget him. He's just gone to the place where he had to go." The wisdom of children.
JAC: Two and a half months after Jim died, and one week after my fortieth birthday, my child with Ellen was born.
ELLEN SANDER: I had a midwife and a Buddhist monk and some friends, and Paul Williams was my end-of-labor coach. While Jac and I were having our problems, Paul visited us at Tranquility. We were both very close to him and told him what was going on. Paul took me aside and said, "I know it's a difficult time. You didn't plan on raising a kid alone, but I know a lot of women who do it very successfully, and I know that you're going to be one of them, and I want to help." I said, "Help me have the baby." And he said, "I'd be pleased to." "Will you stand godfather?" And he said, "Yes."
I had the baby at home. Jac arranged to be in the area around the anticipated birth date. During childbirth he would call. I couldn't talk to him, I was busy. Paul would tell him how I was getting along.
He came the day after Marin was born. I'm lying on the bed with the baby, and Jac walks in the unlocked door and lies on the bed and picks him up, looks at him very carefully, and says, "Hello, pal."
And then he just cried and cried. I talked about this with Paul Rothchild once. "You know, I just never really understood that Jac and I never had a chance." And Paul's eyes filled with tears and he said, "I don't know what I can tell you that you don't already know." Perhaps, as loving as our intentions were, the times were against us in terms of our professional commitments. And our personal differences, he being in command and me being stubborn and defiant. It was difficult for me how authoritarian he was, and it was difficult for him how defiant I was. And neither one of us was always right. But we learned from each other, and we have this wonderful child whom we both adore.
