Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 21

But the much more colourful truth about Morrison’s death may have been revealed at last in the vivid account offered by nightclub manager Sam Bernett, backed up by a well-known French photographer and a British pop icon of the Sixties.

Vague rumours had rumbled on for years that Jim Morrison had died of an overdose at the Rock And Roll Circus club and that his dead body had been bundled back across Paris and home to the flat – some said rolled up in a carpet.

But Sam Bernett’s 2007 book certainly fleshed out the story, giving details of times, names and places that hadn’t been seen before.

According to Bernett, Jim Morrison walked into the Rock And Roll Circus at around 1am on 3 July 1971.

‘I greeted Jim as I always did. He didn’t look in great form and immediately went to his usual spot at the bar and ordered a bottle of vodka. I was used to talking about everything with him – from Janis Joplin to the beatniks – but that night it was just small talk. He’d come in to pick up heroin for Pam. He was always collecting drugs for her and the club was full of dealers.’

He claims he saw Morrison doing a drugs deal in the club that night with two regular dealers he knew, both young Frenchmen in their twenties.

‘Jim disappeared into the toilets at around 2am. Then, about half an hour later, a cloakroom attendant came up and told me someone was locked in one of the cubicles and wasn’t coming out. I got a bouncer to smash the door down.’

What he saw next, in a cubicle of the women’s toilets, was vivid and unforgettable. In his book, he wrote, ‘I recognised the US Army combat jacket and the riding boots from the Camargue region, which he never took off. It was Jim Morrison, with his head between his knees, his arms dangling. We were mesmerised. Seeing Jim in such a bad way was awful.

‘We were certain he’d been snorting heroin because there was foam coming out of his lips, as well as blood. He was scared of needles, so he never injected drugs. He just snorted them.’

A doctor Sam Bernett knew was at the club and he rapidly examined Morrison’s body. ‘He pushed Jim’s head back, lifted his eyelids, opened his mouth and put his ear to his chest to listen for his heartbeat,’ Bernett said. ‘He looked for marks and bruises on the body and arms. It was a quick and professional examination and his diagnosis was very confident.

“This man is dead,” he said. “He appears to be the victim of a cardiac arrest.”’

The two French drug dealers from the bar who had given Jim Morrison the heroin arrived in the toilet and argued that he had ‘just fainted’ and that they would take care of him.

Sam Bernett says there was a brief disagreement about what should happen next (see bit.ly/sambernett) before the two dealers simply lifted Morrison’s body out of the cubicle, wrapped a blanket round him and carried him through the cloakroom and out of the street door of a neighbouring club.

That was the last Bernett saw of his friend Jim. Word was that he was taken back to the flat, stripped and put in a very hot bath, in the hope of either reviving him or at least warming the body and making it hard for anyone to pinpoint the time of death.

Among those who later admitted helping spirit Jim Morrison’s body away was Patrick Chauvel, now an internationally respected war photographer. ‘We carried him in a blanket and got him the hell out of there,’ Chauvel said. ‘The five or six people who knew – who were there that night – agreed to just forget about it.’

When they got back out to the bar, Bernett claims the right-hand man of the club’s owner, Paul Pacini, made it clear to him that nothing was to go any further. Or else. ‘Since Morrison’s friends want to take him with them, we have nothing more to do with this story,’ he told him. ‘The club has no responsibility for what happens here. It was a sad accident, certainly, but that’s fate. So we saw nothing. We heard nothing. We shut up, OK? It’s what we better do to avoid a scandal.’

Sam Bernett’s book even gave the name – Count Jean de Breteuil – of the man whose heroin killed Jim Morrison. De Breteuil was to die soon of his own heroin overdose. That night, however, he just wanted to get clear of any trouble following Morrison’s death. He left the club and grabbed his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, the English rock princess and ex-partner of Mick Jagger, and the couple flew to Casablanca.

Marianne Faithfull’s testimony, in her autobiography, Faithfull, provided powerful support for Bernett’s version of the Jim Morrison conspiracy. She pulled no punches.

‘Jean was a horrible guy, someone who had crawled out from under a stone. Somehow I ended up with him … it was all about drugs and sex.’

When de Breteuil got a call from Pamela Morrison [Courson] and said he had to go very quickly, Faithfull wanted to go with him. She wanted to meet Jim Morrison but de Breteuil refused to take her and said he’d only be away a couple of hours.

‘He came back in the early hours of the morning in an agitated state and woke me up. Then, for no apparent reason, he beat me up. “Get packed.”

‘“Why? Where are we going?”

‘“Morocco.”

‘He was scared for his life. Jim Morrison had OD’d and Jean had provided the smack that killed him. Now he was a small-time heroin dealer in big trouble.’

Although some of the details of all this have still not been confirmed, the French police were initially impressed enough to consider reopening the case. This hasn’t happened, however, and it would have been extremely unusual under French law, as cases cannot normally be reopened after more than 20 years.

There’s still one question left unanswered. If what Sam Bernett has said was true, why did he wait so long to unveil what must have been the burning secret of his life?

‘I was 26 in 1971,’ he said. ‘Today I’m past 60 and I want to get rid of my heavy burden.’

When cynics pointed out that a brisk-selling book about an iconic and long-dead rock star can form a useful pension contribution for a Frenchman in his early sixties, Bernett just shrugged. ‘I’m not tarnishing anything. I am simply telling the truth. At least everything is now out there to be discussed. I’ve said what I have to say.’