The body had been packed in dry ice inside the cheapest coffin money could buy, lying in state for three days in a Paris apartment while the world outside believed James Douglas Morrison was still alive. Only two living souls had ever seen it. The official paper said heart failure. No autopsy was performed. No priest was summoned. And the young woman who found him could not, when pressed, recall the name of the doctor who signed the certificate. He was 27 years old, bearded and bloated, and finally silent. A continent and a lifetime away from the leather-sheathed sex god who had once made 10,000 teenagers howl in a Miami auditorium. The manager who flew across an ocean to bury him would later confess that he never once looked inside that box. For a man who had spent his brief incandescent life turning every stage into a seance, Morrison had arranged, by accident or by design, the most theatrical disappearance of all. A death with no witnesses, no evidence, and no end of rumor. Half a century later, no one has ever fully settled what happened in that Paris bathtub, or whether anything happened there at all. The Lizard King was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida, the firstborn of a Navy family that had long ago perfected the art of getting the heck out of dodge. His father, George Stephen Morrison, was a naval aviator ascending steadily toward the rank of rear admiral. His mother, Clara, had met her future husband in Hawaii, where the two of them had stood on the island on December 7, 1941, and watched the sky over Pearl Harbor blacken with Japanese planes. Jim was the eldest of three, trailed by a sister and a brother, and the household he grew up in ran on the iron logic of the quarterdeck. The Morrisons did not believe in spanking. Instead, they administered discipline by a military rite called dressing down, in which the children were berated and shouted at until they dissolved into tears and acknowledged their failings. By his brother Andy’s account, the ritual never once drew a tear from Jim. He simply absorbed it blank-faced and filed it away. The defining event of his inner life, the one he would mythologize until his last breath, happened on a desert road in New Mexico in 1947, when he was barely four. Driving at dawn, the family came upon the aftermath of a highway accident. A truckload of Pueblo Indian workers strewn and bleeding across the asphalt, some of them dying. The adults remembered a grim but tragically ordinary roadside scene, and one they quickly passed. The young Jim remembered a revelation. He returned to it again and again in songs and in spoken interludes, intoning the image of Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding, and insisting with absolute conviction that the soul of one of those dying men had leaped across the morning air and lodged itself permanently inside him. His family, he noted with a shrug, did not recall it happening the way he described, but accuracy was never his medium. He had discovered astonishingly early the gulf between what is true and what is useful, and he chose the useful every time. A childhood spent following the fleet from base to base is an education in impermanence, and Morrison learned the lesson cold. He was a ferocious, indiscriminate reader, the sort of adolescent who makes his teachers nervous. When he graduated from George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia, in June 1961, he carried a measured IQ of 149 and a reading list so feverish and obscure, heavy on Nietzsche and Rimbaud and Blake and 16th-century treatises on demonology, that one intimidated English teacher actually enlisted a colleague headed to the Library of Congress to verify that the books Jim claimed to have devoured actually existed. They did. There were dutiful but utterly listless stints at St. Petersburg Junior College and Florida State, where in 1963 he picked up his first arrest for drunken rowdiness at a seminal football game, a small early flare of the appetite that would one day engulf him. Then in January 1964, he went west to study film at UCLA, and the move felt to him like a release of nearly physical force. He described the leaving as the feeling of a bowstring being pulled back for 22 years and suddenly being let go. At UCLA, he made strange but ambitious student films, sat in on a class devoted to the deranged French theater prophet Antonin Artaud, and outread everyone in the room. Morrison was a genius, one classmate marveled. He knew more than the teacher. His student film work circled obsessively around hitchhikers and open highways, the same restless imagery he would chase for the rest of his life. He graduated in 1965 and pointedly skipped his own commencement, drifting down instead to the bohemian squalor of Venice Beach, where he lived on the rooftop of a friend named Dennis Jacob on a diet of canned beans and LSD, growing lean, growing his hair long, and composing in his head the songs he had no instrument to play. There had already been one consuming love. Mary Werbelow, a dark-eyed dancer he met on a Clearwater beach in 1962 and followed all the way to California, was the girl he would later claim haunted the first three Doors albums in their entirety. She ended it in 1965, just before he became somebody else altogether. She was Jim’s first love, Ray Manzarek said years afterward. She held a deep place in his soul. The somebody else was already waiting for him out on the sand. One blazing afternoon in July 1965, Manzarek, a classically trained keyboardist and fellow UCLA film student, ran into Morrison on Venice Beach and asked what he had been up to. Morrison said he had been writing songs. Asked to perform one, he sat down in the sand, closed his eyes, and delivered the opening lines of Moonlight Drive. Let’s swim to the moon, let’s climb through the tide. Manzarek heard whole cathedrals rising behind the words. That’s it, he said. We need to get a rock and roll band together. Morrison answered, Ray, that’s exactly what I had in mind. They were, Manzarek decided then and there, going to make a million dollars, which turned out to be a vast underestimation. They named the group The Doors, after Aldous Huxley’s mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception, which had in turn lifted the phrase from William Blake’s promise that if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it truly is, infinite. They drafted Robby Krieger, a flamenco-schooled guitarist with a serpentine bottleneck slide, and John Densmore, a jazz drummer Manzarek knew from a meditation class. Crucially, there would be no bass player. Manzarek anchored the bottom end with his left hand on a keyboard bass, lending the Doors their floating, bottomless, faintly sinister sound, like a carnival heard through a wall. They served a rather bleak apprenticeship in 1966 at a Sunset Strip dive called the London Fog, often performing for almost no one at five dollars a head, before finally graduating to the storied Whisky a Go Go. It was at the Whisky, on August 21, 1966, that Morrison first detonated the song that would both define and damn him. Stretching the closing number The End into a swirling Oedipal psychodrama, he reached a passage of pure provocation and shrieked, Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to fuck you, before dissolving into a primal scream. The club’s management fired the band on the spot. It hardly mattered though. Jac Holzman of Elektra Records had been sitting in the room and he had already resolved to sign them. Beneath all the spectacle lay a darker creed. You never know, Morrison told Pamela Courson one near empty night after hurling his microphone stand to the floor, when you’re giving your last performance. The self-titled debut, released in January 1967, arrived almost incidentally complete. Break On Through, the 11-minute The End, and a Krieger composition called Light My Fire that climbed to number one on the American charts for three weeks that summer and became Elektra’s first chart-topper. Overnight, the bookish film student was repackaged as the most carnal object in American pop….
