Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 19

Jim Morrison, the legendary lead singer of psychedelic rock band The Doors, was a troubled man. Swamped by bouts of depression and addicted to a range of dangerous substances, he was certainly not in peak physical condition. But despite his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, it came as a shock to music fans around the world when Morrison died in Paris on Saturday, 3 July 1971. According to the French police, the 27-year-old star had died of natural causes.

The story of Jim Morrison’s death involved two key witnesses. Both told completely different tales and one must have been lying. The problem was that, for many years, there were good reasons to regard both as potentially unreliable sources.

One of these witnesses was Pamela Courson, Morrison’s long-term partner. She spent the evening and night in their rented flat in the rue Beautreillis, where Morrison officially died. Her version of events said that Jim went off to have a bath while she fell asleep, and that she discovered his dead body slumped in the tub the following morning.

The other version came from Sam Bernett. He was a friend of Morrison’s, later a journalist, TV front man and vice president of Disneyland Paris, but at that time manager of the Rock And Roll Circus club in Paris. This was a bar that had seen performances by Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys and Cat Stevens and had been a Parisian haunt of the Beatles, the Stones, Clapton and Hendrix. It was a heavy place – ‘gangsters, nightlife, bad cops, mafia … and a lot of fighting’, according to one ex-employee.

The difficulty with Pamela Courson’s story is that it is implausible. Courson herself was an unstable and heavily addicted heroin user, who killed herself with a massive overdose three years later. Her story of a simple, though tragic, death by natural causes has always seemed hard to accept, especially in view of what followed.

On the morning of 3 July, an incurious French doctor, Max Vassille, carried out a brief examination of the body at the flat and decided there was no reason to suspect foul play and that a full autopsy was not necessary. He signed the death off straight away as being from natural causes, the result of a heart attack. The media scrum, which was always looking to find new stories about the cherub-faced exhibitionist, was not even told he was dead for three days.

Courson’s tale was always an oddly limp and downbeat account, the chief feature of which seemed to be that no one was at fault for anything or in any danger of facing any kind of criminal prosecution.

The key problem with the other version of events, Sam Bernett’s story, was the fact that it took 36 years to emerge.

Apart from that, though it was bizarre, far-fetched and melodramatic and involved hard drugs, threats and suppression of the truth, it seemed to fit the times, the milieu and the people involved rather better.

After his 36-year silence, Bernett finally produced a book in 2007 called The End – Jim Morrison, in which he told how the star died in his club from a severe heroin overdose. He described it all vividly – how it happened, where it happened, exactly who was there and how the people involved set about making sure Morrison’s death wouldn’t be known about until he was found back in his own bathroom the next day.

There was never any way of reconciling these two stories, of course. Either Courson or Bernett was lying. Or could it have been both?

Whispers that Jim Morrison wasn’t really dead arose instantly and kept cropping up for many years. It was the usual sub-Elvis stuff – that he had faked his own death to go off and live a life of peace and meditation in some unknown land, that he was fleeing from gangsters who had vowed to cut him up and auction the pieces, or that he needed five, ten or maybe thirty years of privacy to create his great masterwork.

As with Elvis, the problem was always the body. If you are going to fake your own death on a given day, you need a fresh, warm substitute corpse who looks like you and has a similar medical history, available more or less instantly. That’s unless you choose a faked death, like disappearing in the sea or up a mountain, where providing a body isn’t necessarily part of the equation.

Like him or loathe him – and there are many music fans who believe Morrison always was a strictly second-rate talent, compared with the dead gods of rock – Jim Morrison certainly had the knack of attracting attention, even in death.

His grave lies near those of Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt and Chopin in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and it’s the most visited of them all.

There’s not much doubt that Jim Morrison died and that the body that ended up in the bath in Paris was his. If there was a conspiracy, it was to do with covering up how and where he died and how he came to be in the bathtub the next morning.