Original subtitles

[ambient music playing]

[man] I've spent nearly 40 years

attempting to bring Jim Morrison, the human being, to light.

I worked for a decade creating this independent docuseries

while interviewing hundreds of people who are connected to Jim.

And I did so because I believe Morrison was far more

than the one-dimensional narcissist whose historic legacy has largely been reduced

to Hollywood marketing and advertising.

[woman] He was so complex.

He wasn't just the Lizard King.

He wasn't just the guy in the-- In the leather pants and no shirt

stumbling down Sunset Boulevard.

[man] Since 1985, I've asked myself why next to no one has stepped up

to question the official story, that is, the controlled narrative.

Hey, Jeff, so I did the research you asked me to do regarding Jim's social security number,

and I think you're gonna be surprised by what I found.

[Jeff] What is it?

[Bombaugh] Well, Jim Morrison's social security number, apparently, is still active.

[Jeff] Okay.

[Bombaugh] Jim's social has been current as of 2014 in Rochester, New York,

less than an hour from where you are now.

[Jeff] Holy shit.

[Bombaugh] I don't know how to explain it. You could really be on to something.

[Jeff] I was born in February 1967 in Chicago,

just weeks after The Doors' debut album was released.

Some of the earliest music I remember

is from when I was 4 or 5 years old.

Now legendary Doors songs like "Light My Fire," "People Are Strange,"

"L.A. Woman," and "Riders on the Storm."

As a little kid, I referred to these eerie classics as Halloween music.

Like the eight phases of the moon,

that was phase one of my indoctrination

into Jim Morrison's endless night.

Ten years later,

as I carpooled home to Downers Grove, Illinois, from a swim meet in Wisconsin,

I heard a song that cracked open my teenage brain.

"Break on Through [To the Other Side]."

I was hooked,

and I've been searching for the mysterious and misunderstood Morrison

ever since.

With this docu-mystery,

I've reverse-engineered a half-century of factoids, PR spin, and suppression,

which have built up around Jim like a shroud.

Jim has long been like a face on the Mt. Rushmore of rock.

But who was the actual person?

Who was the flesh-and-blood human being?

And who, or what exactly, drove him to such extremes

during the already chaotic era of the late 1960s?

It's time the world finally knew the real truth about the real Jim Morrison.

[Jeff] Now, were you, like, a competitive swimmer?

A what?

Did you ever swim on the swim team?

No. Well, there was a time I... Wait.

No, I was never a competitive swimmer. No.

[Jeff] Check that out again.

Frank X seems to recall a distant memory of having been on a swim team,

but then catches himself and freezes like a deer in headlights.

A what?

Did you ever swim on the swim team?

No. Well, there was a time I... Wait.

Well, there was a time I... Wait.

No, I was never a competitive swimmer. No.

[Jeff] The reason I asked Frank about swimming

was because Jim had been a competitive swimmer

during his freshman year at Alameda High School in California.

[suspenseful music playing]

[ominous music playing]

Alameda is when I really started to understand I had an older brother.

And I don't know, you've been-- Seen the house in Alexandria,

the house in Alameda was real nice.

But it was like an old Victorian three-story house,

and some other people rented out the bottom floor,

and there was a stairway up to the second floor.

Well, Jim had his own apartment as he had in the basement in Alexandria.

He had the top floor that had its own little kitchen,

and it was like a turret, the old style.

It was an interesting one.

So he's 15 years old, and he's going through a coast-to-coast

major geographic and cultural change

and I could imagine how in the late '50s,

it was at least as great a shock

just because the culture and the weather and the style are all so different.

I think that was a big, big shock for Jim.

It was always a culture shock every time we moved, you know, for all of us,

all the military or, you know, especially the Navy guys,

because the dads went away every now and then.

So we had a different type of culture shock almost every time we moved.

But we were in classes together, so, I mean, he had somebody he knew.

A lot of the time Dad would be gone. In those days,

some of the tours of duty would be nine months out in the WESTPAC.

But as far as I could see, they got along fine,

and when Dad came home, everything was good.

It was almost like Jim had been taking care of things at home,

and there was, I think, a mutual respect.

I know that he was gone a lot, just that he was deployed on a ship,

and so, like a lot of military families, you know,

the mom probably ends up having to kind of run the show and be the disciplinarian.

I would imagine that that was kind of the way things work there.

I think it certainly doesn't help anybody when you're moving all the time.

And it seems like Jim's family

moved more frequently than average for military families.

And when your father is literally disappearing in space

as well as time, being away,

that can't help but affect somebody, you know?

How did this all...

conspire to produce the effects in Jim?

I can't tell you that, but I'm sure it played a role.

[Jeff] George Stephen Morrison

was an aviator who rose to the rank of rear admiral in the United States Navy.

He served during World War II and the Korean War,

and in August 1964,

he played a major role in the escalation of the Vietnam War

after he commanded the naval carrier division

during the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Known as Steve to family and friends,

he believed Jim, his first born son, would follow in his military footsteps,

but he couldn't have been more wrong.

[Jeff] How would you describe Alameda in general, in brief, at the time you knew Jim,

- 1957 to '58? - [chuckles]

If I had to describe Alameda, it would have been Mayberry and American Graffiti mixed.

I met Jim in... It would have been 1957 at the high school.

And some reason, I remember him when he first got there.

You know, I'm not quite sure why, you know.

I just remember him being a really sweet looking guy, and had a plaid shirt on,

and we all started talking about, "Who's that?" You know, "Who is that guy?"

Became friends with some people right away,

but not outgoing in the traditional sense, you know?

Kind of shy.

The Jim that I knew was pretty serious, and quiet, and sensitive, and very kind.

I kind of put him as kind of a loner

because he was always with Fud, or Gerard Ford, most of the time.

Well, I met him when I was a freshman in high school, at Alameda High School,

through our youth group at Christ Episcopal Church.

We had quite an active youth group.

There were about 20 or 30 members, and Jim was one of them.

And we used to...

We all became very good friends in that particular group,

and so we would go on different retreats and things like this, where we all...

There was a lot of meditation, a lot of religious things going on with that,

and he was very involved in that.

[Jeff] No one seemed to be aware that Jim had musical leanings, even those close to him.

There was never anything that I can recall

that would've led you to believe that he was gonna be a musician.

He had pretty good rhythm, and as I remember,

there's a couple of music pieces that he really loved.

"Topsy I," "Topsy II."

It's a drum-- Drummers. It was all drums. He loved that.

[Jeff] Amazingly, Bonnie relates the earliest firsthand account

of Jim playing music with a group

nearly a decade before his work with The Doors.

[Boller] And I remember going over to Jim Morrison's house,

and they were just playing, you know?

Just seeing how they played together.

- [Jeff] You're kidding me. - They each played different things.

I think Jim Tolman played the bass for as far as I remember.

I don't know what Jim Morrison played.

I know that Fud played a guitar because he later had a guitar shop.

So Fud would've been the guitarist.

And I guess Jim might have been singing, I would think.

Maybe all three of them were singing, as far as I remember.

And I just sat there and watched, you know?

I felt very honored that these guys would include me.

You know, I was just a friend, and I was a girl, you know,

to listen to them while they did this stuff

Because it was all kind of improv. It wasn't planned. It wasn't...

I don't remember sheet music or anything like that.

But I remember that they were...

[Jeff] You're blowing my mind in the best way, and it's incredible,

because we've been trying to pinpoint...

- When he started. - ...when he started or had any musical leanings.

- Because... - Oh, yeah, that was definitely then.

He liked to claim that he hated rock and roll at that time.

Even after he left here and went to Virginia,

he would put down rock and roll except for Elvis.

And we don't really have any record of him actually holding an instrument

or a microphone or anything until UCLA,

which was years and years later, you know.

So we're trying to backtrack in time,

- and you just blew my mind. - Yeah, that's definitely-- They were.

I mean, that's-- My biggest memory of him is that day.

[Jeff] Did Jim play everyone, and know all along that music would be his chosen profession?

Later, I learned more that supports this theory.

Then Jeff showed me a fascinating handwritten letter Jim had sent him.

So this is after Alameda High School, and while Jim was in Alexandria?

That's correct.

I've only shown about three people this in the last 50 years, so...

That's amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Quite frankly, I kept it all pretty private.

I didn't really particularly like the way that others had depicted him afterwards, and...

I'm somewhat very happy that you're doing this

so you can show him maybe a little bit more the way he was.

He was a pretty darn good guy.

Pretty normal, good guy.

Well, not totally normal, but who was?

[both chuckle]

[Jeff] While in Alameda, I met with Joy Allyn

to learn if an infamous passage fromNo One Here Gets Out Alive was true.

The story goes that Jim and high school friend Fud Ford

spied on Joy and her mother as they changed into their swimsuits.

Well, it was really funny because nobody wanted to tell me that I was in this book.

And it was like, "Have you told Joy yet?"

Told me what?

"Have you read Jim's book?" Jim who?

And I had no idea.

And finally, I had to actually pull it out of somebody.

They said, "you're in Jim Morrison's book."

And I didn't know he went to Alameda High School. I didn't know anything about it.

So, of course, I had to go buy the book

because nobody would tell me what it said.

Then my mother was mad. She said, "That's ridiculous.

"He couldn't see that. No way he could do that."

Of course, this story wasn't here. We were downstairs.

and the bedrooms are more towards the front of the house.

So if you stand on the bridge, there really is no way you can see anybody change.

But it was a cool story.

It gave me a little notoriety.

Even though I didn't know Jim, I said, "Wow, I was in his book."

[Jeff] Someone obviously must've-- It must've been Fud...

- It had to have been Fud. - ...told the author the story.

- Who else would've known that? Because Morrison was gone. - Yeah. Yeah.

[woman] He had a prankster side, as you've been told by others.

One of the times we visited them in Alexandria,

he was a little older then, maybe 14 or 15.

He was dressed up in nice clothes.

You know, the family wanted us to do that for pictures and so on.

But in contrast to that demeanor, he had the family cat.

He was pretending to strangle it.

And at one point, he draped it around his neck,

and in the picture that my dad or his dad took of him and his siblings,

there he is with the cat draped around his neck.

Always finding some funny angle.

[Andy] They all got into Mad Magazine,

which was a little bit different than your regular comics

because it had a lot of social comments,

but from a very, I guess, liberal angle.

Anti-establishment, maybe.

They were all into, you know, cartoony-type drawings and stuff like that,

but I think it was more about his personality.

And this was one of two pictures that appeared one morning with Jim, and Jim gave me this.

[Jeff] Thanks to the late Fud Ford, Jim's disturbing Alameda-era drawings survive.

During my first interview with Jim's friend Mirandi Babitz,

I showed her a number of the explicit pencil drawings Jim created circa age 14

in his Alameda bedroom.

Mirandi, a cognitive behavioral therapist,

asked if she could show one particular drawing to her colleague.

The colleague, who had no clue they'd analyzed a late 1950s drawing

by the adolescent Jim Morrison,

recommended Mirandi immediately contact Child Protective Services

regarding a possible case of sexual abuse.

That there is a kind of a tendency to become a hypersexual

is one of the ways people respond to that,

or to become sexually anorexic, like, no sex at all.

Sometimes if it's a family member,

and then the person tries to speak about it, and isn't believed, you know,

then that kind of compounds the issue.

[Jeff] Have these crude drawings revealed onion layers with the passage of time?

I'll soon learn chilling information

which will lead me to believe that's the case.

From kindergarten to first grade to sixth grade, there was no difference.

He was the class president of the sixth grade,

which meant you were the class president of the whole school, you know?

But something happened in seventh, eighth, ninth, or something, for Jim

that he was very different, as far as I could see, when he came in,

in terms of just his attitude.

[Jeff] Are Jim's Alameda drawings a dark window

into his later Alexandria church visit?

At that time, he seemed so disturbed,

Tandy Martin's mother took him to speak with a youth minister.

Jim's lover, Linda Ashcroft,

claimed he told her he'd been sexually abused by his father

starting around age 4

in a bathtub of the Morrison home in Albuquerque.

The family then moved to Los Altos, California.

It's May 29th, 2016.

I'm back in Los Altos, Mountain View.

And there's Jim's home that he lived in for two brief years.

I said to him, well, um,

it must have been horrible for you.

And he said, "Well, no, I was told that that was the way you expressed love

for somebody who loved you.

You could express love for your father that way."

Oh, he hated his father.

He hated his father in a big way.

That's what I always wondered where it came from in Jim

because it seemed more than just rebellion, more than teenage rebellion.

He had it hardwired into him somehow to be just the opposite of that.

[Jeff] Following a half century of speculation

dating back to Jim's attorney Max Fink in 1969,

three sources have publicly corroborated

Jim's alleged claim of childhood sexual abuse.

Linda Ashcroft in 1997, author Stephen Davis in 2004,

and journalist Salli Stevenson in 2015 for this documentary.

Although Ashcroft's literary agent told me she had died,

I tried through a network of private investigators to prove otherwise.

Their stunning photo evidence helped make that a reality, which led to me phoning her.

All right, it is Wednesday, February 15th, 2017.

I'm about to attempt to phone Linda Ashcroft in Liverpool, England.

[line ringing]

[clears throat]

Hi. Ginger?

Hi, is this Linda?

My name is Jeff Finn. Please don't hang up.

I've been trying to find you for years.

I'm a documentary filmmaker in Los Angeles,

and I've been trying to reach you for, well, 20 years now

since your book came out. [laughs]

I hope I'm not calling at an inconvenient time.

I was actually banking on your insomnia that you... [laughs]

Oh, this is not Linda Ashcroft, nicknamed Ginger,

who wrote the book about Jim Morrison?

Okay, if you are-- If there's any chance you are,

could you please call me at your convenience?

I know I'm calling you out of the blue,

- and I don't mean to disturb you or inconvenience you at all-- - No.

[laughs softly]

See how well that went.

I tried the Ginger tactic.

Thought I had her there for a second.

[clears throat] That was her nickname.

Oh, shit.

[announcer] This is the final of this event.

Let's go. Lane 1. Mason Roberts...

He wasn't your standard kind of guy

trying to impress anybody or fit in.

He was who he was.

He enjoyed shocking people.

The one thing that I remembered that I was told--

I never saw it happen because he wouldn't have done it around me,

but I was told that he carried a little thimble in his pocket.

And especially liked to do this around girls,

but he would take the-- They would-- He would show it to them,

and he'd take the thimble, and he would spit into it, and then he would drink it.

And, of course, this is as gross as you can get, I guess,

you know, drinking your own spit,

but that was his kind of MO, was to kind of shock.

And I think that was what he enjoyed doing.

We started drinking honey before the swim meets.

And if I remember right, I think Jim had a--

It looked like a little half pint of bourbon or something.

You know, it had the brown liquid in it,

and we'd sit over in the sidelines on the grassy area

and suck this honey down,

and everybody else would be looking at us like we were crazy. [laughs]

But it was just honey.

I mean, just an energy drink

because we didn't have any 5-Hour Energy drinks back then or anything.

But you know, we just had that before the meet.

We both were doing the same things, believe it or not,

in the seventh and eighth grades, okay?

In other words, we were swimmers. We were always swimmers.

We were good swimmers.

If you can get that film going, you'll see us swimming, and, like, he's splashing me.

[laughs] And I don't like that when I'm 6 years old or anything.

But I wasn't a good swimmer, but neither was he, but we became good swimmers.

And by the sixth grade, yeah, that's when we have the pictures of us swimming in the ocean.

We were really swimming.

I mean, all of us were swimmers, both families. That was a big deal.

No. There was a time when I... Wait.

There was a time when I... Wait.

No, I was never a competitive swimmer. No.

[Jeff] As we continued to small talk,

Frank voluntarily began riffing about the Sunset Strip in the late 1960s.

Where do you wanna go? I don't know. I want Sunset Strip.

Yeah. I don't know if he mentioned that or what.

We'd go to the Sunset Strip, and there was all these people walking around there.

[Jeff] This was the exact time and place

The Doors stepped into the spotlight.

Notice how quickly Frank goes off topic

the moment I ask about the Sunset Strip at the time in question.

That was the motel we stayed in.

[Jeff] Oh, so you were on the Sunset Strip in the '60s?

- Yeah. - That's fantastic. Did you see any bands or anything?

No, we didn't stay there long.

[Jeff] Interesting, but perhaps a mere coincidence?

Then, however, Frank launches into intimate details

about Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones.

Information related as if we were sitting in a room with the Stones themselves.

Not inside info of the type found by a super fan,

but more like the details a peer would know.

One whose heart felt sorrow over the loss of someone great.

Jim apparently felt so aligned with Brian,

he dedicated an epic poem to Jones after his 1969 death at 27,

which, like Jim's alleged death, also fell on July 3rd.

I like Brian Jones.

I think Brian Jones...

Well, of course, he got into alcohol quite heavily,

and he wasn't showing up for practice.

And so they had to drop him.

And-- But I did follow him after that, when he went to Morocco,

listened to the recordings.

I thought they were interesting, the native recordings.

And I don't know, I always liked the guy, you know.

I, of course, have heard negative things about him from the other members.

[Jeff] Did Frank just imply he listened to Rolling Stones demos

directly from Brian Jones?

And that the Stones later shared with him

their specific thoughts on Jones?

How would a supposed maintenance man from somewhere in New York

have access to such insider knowledge?

[Jeff] Now, you and Jim were both in film, is that right?

[man] Yes. Oh, yes.

Yeah, we were both in the film department. Absolutely.

And remember, UCLA is a fairly arty place.

It was not a commercial type of film school.

So you had Hollywood professionals, old pros,

and then you had these sort of more avant-garde or more, you know, um,

bohemian characters that would come in.

So you had both.

Ah, Morrison.

Let's see, I think we met in the 170 workshop, you know

when we worked on our first student film project.

I did get to know him a bit when we were all...

He and I would sit around in the library

and talk about the works of poetry and Rimbaud, of course.

[Jeff] The name Arthur Rimbaud is impossible to avoid

when tracing the trajectory of Jim Morrison.

By age 20, the French author had rejected his career as a poet

and willfully undertook a new life exploring East Africa.

There's a whole period of literature, particularly English literature,

with, like, The Razor's Edge.

You have people going off to China.

Richard Burton, Sir Richard Burton, the traveler,

going off to the Mid-East and what have you.

And people going to another land or another place

to completely forget who they were

so that they could be someone else.

Jim said, "Oh, yeah, Hesse." Get the Journey to the East.

He said, "That's the one."

And in it, the guide,

the one who they hired to take them across the mountains or whatever,

disappears.

Turned out he was the leader all the time,

and he abandoned them at the time that needed to be...

When that time came, he needed to do that.

That doesn't quite explain the book,

but it's interesting that way, that the disappearance of the guide...

Well, I think when I knew him

he and Phil were reading, really, the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud,

books on Jung.

And, of course, some poetry.

You know, I know, you know, that they were very aware of Rimbaud.

In fact, that was why my next movie was gonna be a short take on Rimbaud,

and he was gonna play Rimbaud for me.

[Jeff] Like a sociologist, Jim studied people for curiosity's sake

and as a way to gauge their reactions.

He took his keen interest further,

and crafted a persona out of his observations.

The voyeur, who was, in Jim's words, a dark comedian.

- I think Jim-- - Jim watched.

- He was a watcher. - Yes.

And he was an instant-- I mean, he liked to stir the energy up a little bit too.

Yes, yes.

[Ron] We had started shooting and had done a few scenes.

And Morrison basically came up and was tugging at my elbow,

saying, "Oh, man." He says, "I know what you want. I know what you want.

Let me shoot it."

Because another guy was shooting the film at that point.

"I know what you want. Let me shoot the film. I can get it. I'm right there."

So I thought, well, okay,

because I wasn't really happy with what the other guy was doing,

who didn't seem to understand the nature of it.

And Morrison said, "You want it to be a real voyeur kind of thing, don't you?"

And I said, well, yeah. He says, "Yeah."

He says, "I see that. It's like a real voyeur thing."

So I hand him the camera, and Morrison just dived into it.

He was moving around the room with the camera,

and he really did seem to get it.

And I was quite pleased.

And we shot the rest of the day.

And then at the end of the day, he comes up to me and he says,

"Mm. Hey, man, you know,

I think-- I think maybe I had the wrong kind of wrong viewfinder,

you know, for the lens."

Well, he had shot all afternoon looking, seeing one frame,

and the camera was seeing something quite different.

And...

That's a great story.

- Seriously? - Yeah, seriously.

And so then we showed the rushes to the faculty advisor.

He looked at it and he said, "This is the worst pile of shit I have ever seen.

You're not gonna be able to do anything with this."

I went ahead and cut the film and all that.

And then when we had the screenings,

Morrison was among the first.

He immediately, after about two minutes,

sort of shouted out, "Oh, yeah!" [chuckles]

And then the audience got into it and got into it,

and it turned out to be one of the big hits of that, you know, bunch of films.

I remember that.

When Dave Thompson went to see The Rolling Stones down at Long Beach,

and he came back, and we were all in someone's apartment,

and he was telling us about how the crowd reacted,

and the huge response of hysteria,

and the cops, and stuff around the stage, and pulling girls off the stage.

Anyway, all this stuff.

I remember that Jim Morrison asked,

and in great detail, he wanted to know how Jagger stood,

what he wore, how he presented himself.

And I remember that we were saying, "What do you care?

You're a film-- You're gonna make movies, right? I mean, what is this?

Why do you care about that?" To that extent, to that detail.

So obviously he had something in the back of his mind, or like that.

[Jeff] How would you describe Jim Morrison as a filmmaker?

I think he's a great performer, but I don't think he was a very great filmmaker.

And I don't think he really cared about it.

He was like an actor.

He had the same quality that a good actor has.

Yeah, Jim was clever. Jim was out here in L.A. on his own, basically.

He had to make his way, and, you know, he had plans,

but I remember driving down the hill, driving down Roscomare with Jim.

He didn't have a car. It was in my car.

We got out of the car, we were walking over to school,

and I asked him what he was gonna do when he graduated.

And he said he wanted to be a director.

Said that he's never gonna be able to do it

because there's so much nepotism in that business.

I said, yeah, whatever.

And he goes-- I go, "What do you want to do?"

He goes, "I think I might start a music group with some of the guys from the film school."

And I started laughing.

I said, "What?" I go, "What are you gonna do?"

He goes, "I'm gonna be the singer." And I cracked up.

Because I never heard him sing a note.

I mean, I'm living in the same house with him.

I never heard him sing.

So I didn't know where this was coming from, you know what I mean?

But if you ask me if Jim could plan things out,

yeah, I think he probably schemed out the whole deal, maybe, you know, to do this.

[Jeff] Oh, how fitting, a lizard.

[indistinct chatter]

This is too easy for the Lizard King joke.

Hey, little guy.

[Cohen] Yeah, there goes Morrison up the steps.

[chuckling]

The Lizard King.

[woman] You know, he used to call me Lizard. You remember that?

[Jeff] Can you repeat that for the record? That's incredible.

- He used to call me Lizard. - [Cohen] He did.

- You remember that, Ron? - I do remember that, yeah.

We didn't used to call this Bel Air.

[Jeff] I followed Ron Cohen and Elizabeth Buckner

to the likely site of Jim Morrison's first-ever acid trip.

At the time, circa late 1964, along with Ron and Elizabeth,

Jim's fellow UCLA classmate and roommate Max Schwartz

was a third witness to the event.

He was right about here when Max was...

When he was pontificating in his, you know, LSD trip.

And Max was over there, and Max was sitting with his arms like that.

You know, when I told you what he said to Jim, you know.

[Buckner] What did he say?

"I bet if I punch you in the face, you'll feel it."

And I was sitting over there.

At the time, I was laughing because it was typical Max, you know?

And Jim was all into, you know...

Out there in the universe, you know?

And then you came in over there, and you came in the pool,

and you gave Max a little bit of a bad time

because Max was giving Jim a bad time.

You know, you got on Max's case. You gave Max some attitude.

I just thought the whole thing was kind of funny,

and I never forgot it because Jim was on acid, you know?

And I thought maybe you had taken it too, but I wasn't sure.

- I don't-- - You don't remember, so probably you didn't.

Well, maybe I did because I did it several times with him.

I don't know if you did or not,

but I remember he for sure was because he was talking about it,

that he had taken it, and he was, you know...

And, you know, for Max, it was like-- It was such a dichotomy, you know?

Jim's all out in space, you know, and Max is, like, Hell's Kitchen, New York,

ready to punch him, you know?

You know? Like, "Oh, you think you're so out there, you know?"

Let me show you how out there you are.

- Let me show you what this feels like. - Pow, right in the kisser.

Yeah, we'll see if that brings you back to reality, you know?

And I remember I was laughing and sitting there laughing,

and that's-- So this was it, up here.

And they had the wall here and stuff like that, but...

- Was this here? - Yeah, the wall was there.

These weren't as high, you know, as they are now.

[Buckner] It's beautiful.

- [Cohen] You know, at the time, Mary was Jim's girlfriend. - [Buckner] Right.

[Buckner] The person who became famous was not the person I knew.

We were very good friends.

He was a very special person in my life for about two years.

So Jim was on the streets,

and that's when he got in with Ray and the rest of the guys

and started doing some music,

and wanted my dad to help finance maybe making a demo or whatnot.

Dad wrote back saying he didn't put Jim through four years of college

to take up a music career which he has no background in or history in.

Dad didn't think he had any talent.

And so there was a falling out at that point.

Jim went his way, and there wasn't any more communication.

They got this gig at the Whisky, and it was like they were the Whisky.

They ended up being one of the premier bands at the Whisky.

I remember I was with a bunch of people one night,

and they said, "Let's all go down and hear Jim."

[woman] When we found out that they would be opening, we went down there.

And we got a table, and when the set was over,

uh, Ray Manzarek came up to me and said, "What do you think?"

And I said, "I can't believe the sound I just heard. It was incredible."

A performance that you wouldn't think would come out of somebody

who was so quiet and pensive.

It was just magic. That was magic, and I'll remember it forever.

[woman 2] They had the best luck I've ever heard of.

They didn't have to tour.

You know, Jim would crash at my place.

They'd live around, crash in the girls' houses,

and go around eating my food, and then, you know, go to work,

go play at, you know, had a job as a house band.

And boom, they got a number one record, and they got a million dollars.

I mean, when does that ever happen? When does that happen?

It never happens. They were so lucky.

Not that they didn't deserve it, not that they didn't have all the talent in the world.

I just mean to say that many bands, even great bands,

the Rolling Stones, and bands, you know, have gone

and worked, and worked all these crazy clubs--

The Beatles, everybody, have gone through a lot more than The Doors did.

They got to be big stars just instantly almost.

[Blackburn] I remember I was driving down Sunset,

and I looked up, and I saw the billboard for the first album.

And I saw Jim Morrison's face countless feet high.

And I went-- I almost, like, cracked the car up.

[woman 3] Jim was just astonished at their success.

It was almost like a surreal experience for him.

My mother was horrified, you know.

Because she didn't want people to know that I was related

to this controversial person, you know?

I mean, she grew up in a different world.

And I think later she came to change her view. I think a lot of the family did.

I looked at the old tapes, or the tapes of the early stuff, you know,

and he's got all this power on stage.

He wasn't like any other rock star that I knew because he was so theatrical.

Especially a singer who doesn't even have an instrument as a prop,

who is just standing out there and also performing on the stage

while the band plays these long bridges,

which they invented, thank you very much.

And that's what he was absolutely brilliant at. He knew it.

He knew how to do it.

And another thing that always really impressed me.

When I found out they were The Doors,

I said, oh, that's based on Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception.

He said, "No, Blake."

And I just went, "Wow, he went to the source. He went to the source."

And I was so impressed.

He did take his artistry seriously in the poetry.

I came back to the hotel one afternoon,

and he was so absorbed in working on the poetry

that he wasn't even aware of the fact that I was in the room.

[Schiffman] You know, Jim was a very smart guy,

and he knew that he was putting the world on,

and he got a kick out of it down deep.

[Jeff] So the Lizard King, the Young Lion, Mr. Mojo Risin',

these were all...?

I think most of it was show.

They were playing with incredible intensity,

and there were only three people in the room, plus Pamela. Only three customers.

And she said to him afterwards,

"Why did you play with such intensity

when there were only three people in the room?"

And he said, "Because you never know

when your performance is your last."

[Jeff] If Jim was planning a leap from film to music,

he may have underestimated the impact his landing would have.

Sinister and psychedelic,

The Doors arrived like new creatures from another dimension.

If Elvis Presley was the groin and Bob Dylan was the brain, Jim Morrison was the grain.

But as a sensitive introvert, he couldn't stand the fame,

and consequently began acting out.

[woman] He was a mellow person.

God, he just wanted to write poetry

and drink and have a good time.

But he did do crazy things,

like when we were in the hotel room together

with another couple getting ready to go out for the evening,

and he decides to jump out the window, hang off the sill,

and I'm going, "What the hell are you doing? Get the hell back in this room."

[Norton] He was a little dangerous.

There was a kind of darkness about him,

what he talked about, and what...

The poetry he wrote, and the songs he sang.

One time, when we were sitting at my house in the apartment,

he was sitting on the bed, and he lit a match, and threw it onto the blanket,

and started to burn a hole, which I immediately went over and put it out.

And he did that not really to be mean.

He was just kind of teasing, you know?

He wanted to see what my reaction was.

He did hold a knife to me at one point.

And I think it was because I just had gotten angry at him a little bit,

and I probably said something that hurt his feelings, maybe, or something, or something.

I don't even really remember. It was so long ago.

I just remember the thing that he got this knife.

I had this big, big knife. I could show you a knife like that.

You know, a big butcher knife thing, you know?

And he held it near me.

And he just said, you know, something.

It was just so stupid.

I mean, that really did happen.

And it scared me, and it made me angry.

And actually, right then, we got interrupted,

and I don't know what would have ever happened. I think nothing.

But I ceased associating with him at that time.

I realized, I thought, you know what?

This is getting a little too heavy here.

I don't want to be involved with this guy anymore

because he's getting a little too dark and weird, and I get scared of that.

The part of him that was maybe passive and beautiful

and wanted to be loved,

it's the part of him that he didn't like about being a sex object and a star.

He hated it, but at the same time, I think he felt guilty

because part of him liked it and attracted it, and those parts were warring.

Jim and I were only involved in that sort of a relationship,

I believe it was for one weekend.

And he was, you know, very cuddly and warm,

and he, I think, was so out of it that it wasn't a real focus.

Um... you know, I was totally infatuated with him.

He was sexy, and gorgeous, and incredible.

And I certainly would have wanted more.

But he, after that weekend, we sort of--

And then after I bailed him out of jail, we sort of...

He asked if I would be his friend, and I said, yeah, I would.

So, you know, that was really how we ended.

He was being really romantic and everything was nice.

And then...

Okay, it's in the book. It's harder to say out loud.

He sort of basically raped me--

"Sort of basically." Listen to me make it all nice.

- in the ass, which I didn't wanna do.

And I totally said, "No, I don't want to," and all that stuff,

which is the classic, "Is this rape or not?"

And then he pinned my arms back and down.

And that's why I think, still, he was...

Not excusing him, but I think he just went-- He just went psycho.

It's because it's like his eyes were, like, this sweet blue, and he was sort of tender.

And then they just-- He looked like a possessed monster.

I mean, like, black dilated eyes, just like...

And it was like-- It was beyond anger. It was fury. It was rage.

It seems increasingly likely that something happened

that he felt very ambivalent about, and that he had rage about.

[Jeff] While Jim was sabotaging his personal life, at the same time,

he rebelled against his chosen profession.

On December 9th, 1967, the day after Jim's 24th birthday,

The Doors were scheduled to play the New Haven Arena in Connecticut.

The freight train of Jim's personal unrest had been speeding out of control,

but in New Haven, the wheels fell off.

Jim was maced in the eye by Arthur Baker,

a New Haven cop who hadn't recognized him backstage before the show,

while he and an 18-year-old Southern Connecticut co-ed named Sandy were making out.

New Haven marked Jim not only as the first rock star

arrested on stage mid-performance,

but it also found him a victim of police brutality

at the hands of the New Haven cops,

who arrested him for breach of peace, resisting arrest,

and indecent or immoral exhibition.

In her book Wild Child,

Linda Ashcroft described purple bruising on Jim's body following New Haven.

The cops apparently were careful to avoid hitting Jim's face,

and his mug shot supports that theory.

Eventually, all charges were dropped, but the fuse had been lit.

Jim was well on his way to becoming not just legendary, but infamous,

and like something akin to a serial rock star.

Pissed off and lashing out after recent frustrations

surrounding the Ed Sullivan Show,

the Hilton ballroom concert, and New Haven,

Morrison was ticking like a time bomb, and the fuse grew shorter still.

In Las Vegas on the night of January 28th, 1968,

Jim was attacked and clubbed on the head at the Pussycat A Go-Go

by a security guard named Paul Swoger

who thought Jim was publicly smoking a joint.

Jim and his friend, the author Robert Gover, were arrested by Vegas police.

Like déjà vu from the New Haven bust,

Morrison apparently was a victim of police brutality.

His view of fame had been permanently altered.

I think in the last thing, he threatened if they went through with it that he'd--

Next TV show or something, he'd have a Buick on stage,

and beat it to death with a sledgehammer.

[glass shattering]

[Jeff] The bomb finally went off on March 1st, 1969,

when the doors performed at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami Beach, Florida.

Days after the concert,

Jim was gaslit with charges for his alleged actions that night,

including indecent exposure, even though there was no proof, photographic or otherwise.

[man] We have taken out two warrants for Jim Morrison.

One of them is for indecent exposure.

The other is for the use of obscene languages

during his performance at Dinner Key Saturday night.

[Morrison] Well, in the realm of art and theater,

I do think that there should be complete freedom for the artist and performer.

I'm not personally that convinced...

that nudity is always, you know, a necessary part of a, you know, a play or film,

but the artist should feel free to use it if he feels like it.

They were gonna get him.

There was no question that that was a...

A frame job, as far as I was concerned.

They were out to get him, and they did get him.

[Jeff] On September 20th, 1970,

the Miami jury found Jim guilty of indecent exposure and profanity,

both misdemeanors.

He was released on a $5000 bond, later upped to 50,000.

During trial, Densmore, Krieger, and Manzarek denied that Jim had exposed himself on stage.

You know, and that Miami thing was the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life.

I mean, for heaven's sake, indecent exposure? What the fuck was that?

[Jeff] They've never proven if he whipped it out or not.

I know, and, you know, and I've seen the film on that too.

And you really can't... I mean, it's like, what?

[Andy] When you get back to it, even the Miami thing...

He never really did anything evil.

He was terrified at the prospect of going to prison.

He was terrified at the prospect of being convicted.

He was scared to death of what was gonna happen to him once he was in Raiford.

Max said it would be okay.

But Jim didn't entirely believe Max on that.

He'd been warned several times, actually, that he would be dead once he got to Raiford.

That would be it.

He said the inmates said they could hardly wait for Jim.

That the rednecks were ready to get him.

[Jeff] The Doors' end came in New Orleans on December 11th, 1970,

during Jim's final show with the band.

He no longer could perform, so in his frustration,

Jim smashed the mic stand into the wooden stage until it splintered,

then tossed the jagged, broken stand into the crowd.

He rambled incoherently and finally, exhausted, sat down on the drum riser.

Jim was, in a word, done.

There was a meeting, and it was before that tour started.

And, you know, it had become a business at that point.

There was no longer the art of making music. It was a business.

And Vince came and told me that, as it goes right now,

on this tour, he acts up one time, that's it. He's thrown out of the band.

He's kicked out of the band. That's it.

So everything was going good until...

New Orleans.

[Jeff] You're stating with absolution that Jim Morrison was kicked...

Kicked out of the band.

That was-- Vince and I talked about that.

Vince couldn't believe it.

So he was essentially booted out of his own band.

Yeah.

Jim was never meant to be [laughs]

in the limelight, and all the fame.

That was just not something he ever would've strived toward.

It was very hard on him to have to live that type of life.

[Cohen] It's so sad, you know, that he's this unhappy,

you know, because everybody's looking at him like he's

you know, the great Jim Morrison.

And he's really not happy at all.

You know, he's really sad, and I was sad for him.

[Babitz] Jim wanted to be a poet, and so making this segue

of becoming a singer and fronting a band, I think was uncomfortable for him.

And, you know, he took to it so naturally once he started doing it,

you know, because he was, you know, obviously incredible as a front man.

But I think it was hard.

He was also very shy, and it didn't come easy to him.

[woman] It struck me so hard that between summer of '68 and March of '71...

which is the last time I saw him...

in two years, he just decomposed.

[Cohen] It ended up where he wasn't him.

He was the act.

And I think that's what really destroyed Jim.

Instead of finding himself with The Doors, I think he lost himself.

[Jeff] Jim had gotten to the point of being, in his own words,

a hollow idol.

With his mounting legal pressures,

feeling constricted by fame, and being out of a job,

Jim made the decision to flee with Pam Courson to Paris

with the intention to live there indefinitely.

I didn't think, when I saw Jim leave in 1971 and go to France,

that he'd ever come back to the band again.

Coming in to the Village recorders on his 27th birthday,

overweight, haggard, coming in to just simply record all his poetry.

Coming in there alone, it's always struck me that this was a guy

who knew he had limited time left,

and this was his way of putting down his last will and testament.

This was gonna be his legacy, you know?

He didn't want The Doors, he didn't want anyone else in there,

he just wanted his words and his poetry there, and to be remembered for that.

[Gareth] The song "Hyacinth House"

is one of the last songs he did on L.A. Woman.

And as you know, one of his first songs was "The End."

I mean, and all through the song, it says, "I need a brand new friend, the end."

And it also says in there,

"Why did you throw the jack of hearts away?

It was the only card that I had left to play."

Meaning, why did you throw me out of the band? That's all I had left.

I think Jim was very disappointed.

He knew the problem. He knew the problem was his alcoholism

and having distractions, the type of friends that were hangers-on.

And he wanted to remedy that.

And I think he felt that going to France was the remedy.

He just simply said he was gonna leave this country

and not come back until that damn case was finished, over,

and he was declared free, and was not gonna go to Raiford.

[woman] We're saying goodbye and everything else,

Jim makes me promise that I'll call him in a couple of days to say goodbye

you know, even more formally.

I had been working on a book, and I'd been working on it for quite some time.

And this is about a rock band, and a very, very successful band,

young performer and everything else.

And I had actually started it several years before I'd even met Jim.

And it gets to the point where they're literally pulling themselves apart,

and their management is pulling them apart,

and they're supposed to do a rock opera,

and they're supposed to be doing this and that,

and it's just everything that the lead singer does not wanna do.

It's against everything of his nature.

And so finally, he just can't take it anymore.

He just, you know-- And instead of blowing his brains out

or doing something, whatever,

he, literally onstage, stages an electrocution, where it's going to be,

"Is he dead or did he survive?"

And you don't really know.

You kind of get the hints that, no, he staged it, and he's just gone on,

and he's just had it with the whole band.

So just as I'm leaving, he leans over and whispers in my ear,

"If you don't finish the book, I just might steal your ending."

[Stevenson] He liked to test people. He liked to see their reactions.

He liked to poke around, you know, in your psyche.

And again, that's why, you know, is the abuse real? Is the death real?

Is anything real about Jim Morrison?

Or is Jim Morrison really somebody else that we don't know?

Or do we only know the person we think he is?

[Jeff] The final chapter of No One Here Gets Out Alive

mentions a young woman named Robyn Wurtele,

who was hired by Jim as his personal assistant

during the last few weeks of his life in Paris.

She's described as having been, along with Pam, Siddons, Ronay, and Agnès Varda,

one of the five reported mourners

at Père Lachaise on Wednesday, July 7th, 1971.

Back in 1996, I tried to interview Robyn

for a book I was researching about the real Jim.

But because her full name had been misspelled in all Morrison biographies,

I couldn't locate her in that early Internet age.

At the time, I was under the impression that Robyn Wurtele

was a pseudonym or fictional construct.

Twenty years later, during the summer of 2016, I finally found Robyn.

She's one of the last people to have seen Jim Morrison alive.

And she was one of Jim's trusted inner circle

who likely helped him vanish without a trace.

In any case, I was about to find out.

What Robyn Wurtele told me was mind-blowing, to say the least,

and would reignite my quest for the real truth.

[music]