Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 20

Everything about the investigation – or lack of it – into Jim Morrison’s death raises question marks and eyebrows.

One of the most recognised faces on the planet drops dead at 27 and the official follow-up lasts a matter of hours. The medical examiner doesn’t see anything worth further investigation in the unchallenged idea of a millionaire 27-year-old running a warm bath, climbing into it and never getting out again. Only in Paris, perhaps…

Rock stars can die young of natural causes. Much fitter specimens – footballers like Cameroon’s Marc-Vivien Foé and Spain’s Antonio Puerta, for example – sometimes drop dead in their twenties. But Jim Morrison had been piling on the weight during his time in Paris and his fitness regime was not calculated to carry him through to a ripe old age.

The thinking girl’s pin-up always took care to muddy the waters about his substance abuse, often pontificating loudly about the evils of drugs. Few people believed for one moment that he was clean. It was a pose, and Morrison had a narcissistic liking for poses that would help him appear deep and confusingly enigmatic.

Jim Morrison was certainly good at cultivating his image and exploiting his bad-boy persona. He was convicted of obscenity for supposedly exposing himself on stage at a concert in Miami in 1969, though there has been controversy ever since about whether this actually happened.

More than 40 years later, in December 2010, Florida’s authorities granted him a posthumous pardon, at the urging of the retiring state governor, a Doors fan. At the time of the pardon, Doors drummer John Densmore told a reporter he had been an eyewitness to nothing. ‘Jim was charged with the wrong thing,’ he said. ‘He was drunk and disorderly, but he didn’t whip it out.’

In the end, the most likely explanation for Jim Morrison’s death seemed to everybody to be the most banal – that he died of a drug overdose, probably accidental, while his heroin-stupefied girlfriend slept in the room next door.

Even this, of course, would have involved an element of conspiracy, as Dr Vassille, Pamela Courson and Morrison’s friends sought to obscure the truth and promote the idea that it was a blameless heart attack that killed him.