A few years previous to this, I'd been introduced to Bobby Dylan by a journalist in New York. Dylan and I hit it off and went out to dinner together, to a fancy restaurant in the Village. Before we'd been served, Bobby pulled out his guitar to play a song he was working on, and we were promptly ejected from the restaurant—this being before Dylan became famous. We finished dinner at a less upscale place, and then he took me to a basement club where he played and sang “Masters of War,” which had been omitted from his first album. His manager, Grossman, happened to be at the bar in this club and scolded Dylan for performing free, undercutting his manager's work to get him high-paying gigs. What impressed me most was how intensely focused he was on songwriting. He was a workaholic, seemingly oblivious to fame.
        Morrison, by contrast, was keenly aware that he was destined to become a legend—not because he was arrogant, but because he was intelligent and intuitive, and understood the long-range impact The Doors would have. Jim had an uncanny sense of his destiny, and wore it with the same ease he wore his leather pants and boots on stage and off.
        Relaxing at our house in Malibu, Jim talked his version of how The Doors came together and got started, how he wrote some lyrics, Robbie Krieger wrote other lyrics, and the whole group sometimes revised lyrics as they played around with melody ideas, sometimes putting the lyric of one song to the melody of another. I was surprised to learn that guitarist Robbie Krieger had written “Light My Fire.” Morrison's lyrics were more complex, as in “The End” and “The Crystal Ship.” The hauntingly distinctive sound of The Doors was created by keyboardist Ray Manzerack. He and Jim were best friends, the original proton and neutron of the group.
        Our house was in a comparatively isolated location, a couple of miles north of the famed Colony where movie stars live. It was three stories and had eight doors and we usually left some unlocked, as all our neighbors were simpatico. When Jim came to brunch that first time, I didn't know he'd brought a girl with him till we were saying goodbye. She was a groupie who sat patiently in the parked car all the while we were talking and eating inside the house.
        A few days later, as I was working at my typewriter on the third floor, I felt eyes and turned to find Jim's face at floor level of the top deck, grinning at me through the sliding-glass door. He'd chinned himself up to the top deck from the middle deck, and now hung suspended three stories above the beach, legs dangling in midair. With Bev pushing the bottom of his boots from below and me pulling him by the armpits from above, Jim negotiated his way up and over the railing and landed on the top deck. This “entrance” was to become his favorite way of paying us an afternoon visit, although on one occasion I came home to find him sitting at my typewriter, reading what I'd been working on. A couple of times we awoke in the morning to find him asleep on our livingroom couch, having raided our fruit bowl and liquor closet.

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