In Santa Barbara I met a screenwriter and sculptor who had known Jim in the UCLA School of film and had denigrating things to say about him and Manzarek: “A couple of drunks who kept disrupting the class.” To his lights, Morrison was “nothing more than an exhibitionist.”
        In 1981, Creem Magazine published an interview with Jim by Lizze James. She had been a Doors groupie who had become Jim's lover and confidant, and had probed his mind. Her portrait captures both the reckless explorer of sexual freedom and the thoughtful man of ideas that inhabited the physical Jim Morrison.
I asked what he meant by freedom. He said (among other things), "You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him—unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him.”
        Probably the most thorough book about this enigmatic character is Stephen Davis' Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend, published in 2006. Davis researched Jim's childhood and teen years, when he was discovering himself as a social misfit with a voracious curiosity. Davis chronicles Jim's rise to stardom and self-destructive drinking—his trapeze act over the abyss of madness.
        In July of 2007 came word from France that Jim had not really died in that bathtub in his apartment, he'd overdosed on heroin and died in a bathroom stall at the Rock N Roll Circus Nightclub in Paris. To save the nightclub from scandal, his body had been carried out to a car and transported back to his apartment, where he'd been put into the tub already dead. Pamela Courson took the truth with her in 1974 when she overdosed on heroin. In Bernett's version, Jim had gone to the nightclub to buy heroin for Pamela, then decided to sample it himself, and snorted a killer quantity.
Morrison continues to be an enigma. Kris Kristofferson's lyric—
        He's a profit, he's a poet,
        and a problem when he's drunk,
        he's a walking contradiction,
        partly truth and partly fiction
—defines Morrison. And whenever I hear the Eagles singing “Hotel California,” I immediately think of Jim.
        Now in my old age, there are those moments when I'm driving and a Doors song comes on, transporting me back to the sixties and the memory of the young Jim Morrison showing up at my house, the young Jim Morrison astonishing stranding-room-only audiences in concerts, the young Jim Morrison whose charismatic presence delighted rock fans and caused cops paroxysms.
        Now and then I sense him out there in the starry night of collective consciousness, and remember that he was, as a poet, something like Van Gogh was as a painter: Genius sharing a room with madness.

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