The Poet in Exile. A Novel. by Ray Manzarek 2001. A review

Open still remaineth the earth for great souls.

Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of tranquil seas.

Open still remaineth a free life for great souls.

Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!

There, where the State ceaseth - there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody.

[Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: from The New Idol] (1)



By 1970 the Doors were just another , clumsier than average, rock group - and, when Morrison died suddenly in Paris 1971, their last vestige of individuality disappeared. Though attempts by Manzarek to continue the group persist, the appeal of the band has badly dated and is unlikely to be convincingly revived.

[The NME Book of Rock, 1973] (2)



It's just going to be poetry and music. Nothing more than it was when we first started playing together.

['The Poet', from The Poet in Exile, A Novel, by Ray Manzarek, 2001. p 184] (3)




The Novel



Essentially, this novel by Ray Manzarek is the story of a spiritual journey, of a life-long hippy trail, from the West to the East, one in search of enlightenment and a final return to paradise. Embedded in this story, though, is the mystery of Jim Morrison, the singer of the Doors, Ray Manzarek's colleague in that band, and his fate after he 'died' in Paris in July 1971.



Did the singer, who was "much obsessed by death", actually defy it?






Using the device of changing all the names, Manzarek seeks to tell the truth of what happened to Jim Morrison through the medium of fiction. For me, those parts of the book which talk about what actually happened to Jim in Paris on the 3rd of July 1971, and immediately after, ring true.

The book's subsequent tales of Jim's life of exile in the 'Seychelles' [because Manzarek often changes the names of places as well as persons, we cannot assume that the 'Seychelles' was the actual destination - and given the connections we are to explore, it is possible that it was rather North Africa], then India, and back to the 'Seychelles' again - facing certain death from cancer in his late 50s - are less convincing.

But I assume that they are the trojan horse used by Ray Manzarek to unburden himself of the truth about the so-called "death" of Jim Morrison, which was no such thing.

And do not the publicly known facts [or lack of them] regarding those last days in Paris suggest very much that Jim faked his own death, changed his identity and went on to live anonymously in another part of the world - to escape the suffocating stardom, his personal entanglements and the six month jail sentence that awaited him in the USA?



Manzarek has Jim tell us how this was done, and the tale fits the facts perfectly, and yes, rings true.




Morrison's death was faked with the help of two others - the brilliant French director Agnes Varda, and her close-friend , the French-American film technician and photographer Alain Claude Ronay. While those others around Jim, such as the Doors [including keyboardist Ray Manzarek and their manager Bill Siddons], and Jim's girlfriend Pamela Courson, suspected that he might attempt to do such a thing one day, because of things he had said, and hints he had dropped, only Varda and Ronay were in on all the details and execution of the specific plan.

As Ray writes in The Poet in Exile: "Only the two French friends knew the truth and they weren't talking. Not to the press, not to me, not to anyone." [p. 2] (page references are to 'The Poet in Exile', unless otherwise stated)



Agnes Varda was a world renowned modernist film maker, and was married to the equally renowned director Jacques Demy. The pair were well connected in Parisian society [even 'official' version of Jim's 'death by natural causes' state that Varda was able to delay the news of the 'death' reaching the press until after the funeral and the Doors own press release]. She was the perfect person then, to organise and orchestrate Jim's escape.

Varda first met Morrison in 1968 when she was working on a film in California. The Doors singer had graduated from UCLA film school only a few years before, forming the Doors with fellow film student Ray Manzarek [they were both at the UCLA at the same time, as was Alain Ronay]. Jim became very friendly with Varda who was pleased and fascinated that Morrison knew all her films. She wanted Morrison to feature in the film she was then making, but he declined, only having a small cameo. The film, called 'Loves Lion', was released in 1969.

Through Alain Ronay, they remained in touch, meeting again in the summer of 1970 in Paris, just a year before Morrison's "death".


Alain Claude Ronay was a dear friend of Morrison's too. Ten years older than Jim, he was a mature student who took photos of the then unknown Morrison in 1963 and 1964 of a distinctly homoerotic nature. While Ronay seems to be around Morrison's activities from the early 60s, all through the Doors, and up to the very last days in Paris of 1971, very little is known about him. It is almost as if Morrison and the Doors publicity machine sought to keep their relationship hidden.

Was there a hint of a gay relationship between them?

In this book Ray has Jim mention his confused sexuality a few times, calling it one of his "biggest fears". Ray quotes Morrison telling him: "'Am I gay? Am I queer? I look so damn pretty. Why do I look so pretty? Am I gay?'"

Here we see a mirroring of Jim's poetic hero, the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Born in 1854, Rimbaud was a poetic prodigy. Aged 16, he wrote to the established poet Paul Verlaine, who was 10 years his senior. Verlaine was so impressed by Rimbaud's talent, they became close companions, and even gay lovers. Despite the revolutionary impact of his writings, Rimbaud gave up poetry at the age of twenty, and spent the rest of his life travelling throughout Europe and Africa. He settled in Africa, dealing in skins, coffee and guns! He only returned to France in 1891, and died that year from cancer - aged 37.




Alain Ronay, French born, was - like Agnes Varda - a perfect co-conspirator in the staging of Jim's last tango in Paris.

All such conspiracies only work if there are as few as possible conspirators involved. They alone know what events are intended to unfold, and others close to the action will often take on the unwitting role of 'fall guy'. This is what happened with Pamela Susan Courson, Jim's long term girlfriend who lived with him in Paris [In early 1969, Morrison had made a Will leaving everything to her].

Playing away with her lover, the drug dealing Count Jean de Breteuil [something Jim didn't try to deter as it aided the staging of his disappearance while she was distracted], Pam Courson returned unexpectedly to the Paris flat on the 3rd of July 1971 to find the sealed coffin [Jim Morrison had left Paris the previous night on a fake passport], when she was told by Ronay and Varda that Jim had died. Fearing that he would be implicated in what must be a drug death, the Count fled, while the stoned-on-heroin Pamela went into hysterics.

Varda and Ronay fed her the alibi she needed: -

'Pam was home with Jim that night, and he fell ill. He took a bath, didn't return to bed, and - Pamela having dropped off to sleep - when she checked after waking on the morning of 3rd July 1971, she found him dying after suffering a massive heart attack still in the bath tub. After trying to [unsuccessfully] help him, she then called Varda and Ronay over'.

If she stuck to that story, the suspicion of a drug related death could be avoided, and she and the drug dealing Count would be in the clear.


The role of the 'Count' needs to be examined more closely. Born in 1949, he was the youngest son of the late Count de Charles Breteuil, by his second wife, whose own family owned a villa in Marrakech. The de Breteuils were from old nobility, and Jean's father was politically powerful in France, and also had a media monopoly in Africa, owning many newspapers there. Jean's elder brother was born to his father's first wife, who also had many aristocratic connections in Africa. When their father died in 1960, the elder brother - Michel de Breteuil - took over the businesses, particularly the African newspapers. Jean inherited the title of Count and became the playboy. Fascinated by the counter culture, he loved to bestow drugs and hospitality on the movers and shakers of the '60s rock scene.

In 1968, so when he was about 19, he enrolled at the UCLA!

No doubt he knew he was following in the footsteps of Jim Morrison of the Doors. And while Jean couldn't be, Jim, he was rich and handsome enough to get Jim's girlfriend, Pamela.

As Jim and Pam had an 'open' relationship, Morrison didn't seem to care too much about the young Count seeing Pamela, and her staying with him for long stretches of time. In the process she became addicted to heroin, although at the same time - from around 1969 onwards, Jim Morrison started to ignore drugs and became an advocate of alcohol - something that went against the grain in the late 60s, but it meant that he didn't mix with the Count so much.

However, the de Breteuil family were powerful, and it was the Count's elder brother - Michel, who was at the business end of the family [Michel lived on to his 90s, while his younger brother Jean, died in 1972 aged 22].

It seems likely that Morrison could have had contact with Michel who was a ceaseless promotor of Black rights in Africa, and especially of Black women. His magazine Amina, aimed at Black women, and started in 1972, is an example of his outlook. Jim shared these views with Michel, and was also drawn to North Africa because his poetic hero - the aforementioned Rimbaud - who had given up his life in France and gone to live there anonymously.

At any rate, Morrison's connections with Varda, Demy and the de Breteuil's would've given him vast scope both in France and Africa to do his own 'Rimbaud', and escape from America, and disappear into Africa.



Soft Asylum



Ray tells us in The Poet in Exile, that he had received some mysterious letters around the late 1990s postmarked from the 'Seychelles'. The letters were cryptic, but they were definitely in Jim Morrison's distinctive handwriting. Ray had always suspected that Morrison had faked his own death, but didn't know how. If Jim was trying to contact him some thirty years later, then he was right. He needed to find out from Jim what had really happened - and he needed to meet his soul-brother Morrison again:

"I wanted to hear the story of his life. And to finally know the truth." [p. 24]



When Manzarek and Morrison do finally meet again at the latter's 'Seychelles' hideaway, where Jim languishes happily under a new identity with a new family, Ray is eager to know:

"How the hell did you pull off the death thing?"

In response, Jim called it his "death-disappearance-resurrection."

It was something he "had to do", he had to "Stage my own death."

Yes: Jim Morrison had staged his own death.



Morrison, Varda and Ronay swore "an oath of secrecy" about the plot. The latter two said nothing for about twenty years, when they both made public statements which were little more than confirmations of the official story that Morrison had died in Paris on 3rd July 1971. Ronay maintained that he didn't see Jim's dead body, because he didn't want to look at it!

Ray says that the well-connected Varda kept Morrison informed of any goings on with the Doors, Morrison and Courson estates during this period between 1971 and 2001.

Of course, there was really no "body" to see - only a sealed coffin full of a "hundred and fifty pounds of bricks and sand"

.

The death certificate was faked by a bought-off Moroccan doctor to the tune of "ten thousand American dollars." [ib.] Morrison needed Pamela Courson to be "out of town" for his 'death', so he encouraged her to go on a drug buying trip to Corsica with the Count to get her out of the way.

The idea to have a sealed coffin was Agnes Varda's - it was very firmly sealed with a combination of "nails and screws." [ib.] She knew that Pamela and Jim's secretary [Robyn] would go into hysterics when presented with the coffin.






[image of Robyn Wertle, (top) with Pam (bottom right corner). They are washing Pam's dog ] 


It is worth mentioning here that in early June 1971, so less than a month before his 'disappearance', Morrison had hired a young French Canadian girl, Robyn Wertle, to be his secretary. That she looked very similar to Pamela was no doubt part of the plot. If need be, she could pass for Pamela, should things go not according to plan. Jim had Robyn cataloguing his poetry, organising his daily life and typing his letters, like that to the Doors accountant Bob Greene the week before his 'death', telling Greene that he and Pam intended to stay in Paris "indefinitely", and had Bob end all of Jim's remaining commitments in LA, and to send money and credit cards on to France. No doubt, Robyn may also have learned to sign documents in Jim and Pam's name, too, but that is just a supposition of mine, although a common task of any secretary. Her employment can only have been to facilitate the plot, although like Pam, Robyn was unaware - another fall girl: expected to react in a certain way, and then have her emotions guided and gaslighted by Alain Ronay and Agnes Varda.



Morrison says that Ronay got the faked death certificate in the seedier part of town in negotiations that lasted about two weeks. This all fits with what we know of the events of that period of Pam and Jim's life in Paris from other sources:





Timeline

Ray recounts that Morrison told him he couldn't have staged his own death without the help of Ronay and Varda. The idea of burying the coffin in Pere Lachaise was arranged by them, and was actually another idea of Varda's. Jim said: "I just wanted them to dump the coffin in some plain cemetery, virtually an unmarked grave. But they both said no ...They knew that there would be pilgrimages ..."

. Fans would find the grave and wonder why he wasn't buried somewhere more grand, and "perhaps demand an exhumation". "So they arranged for the *charming* resting place" in Pere Lachaise.

"But they couldn't do it before Claude [Ronay] had the death certificate. No funeral arrangements could be made until I was legally dead."

Ronay secured the fake death certificate: "then we had to move fast." [ib.]




Agnes had the coffin delivered to the apartment on the 1st of July: "She said it was for an 'art piece'. We weighed it down and sealed it. I had my new passport, my new suitcase, my new clothes, my new name, and my plane ticket."

"I picked up a bag with new clothes at Claude's [Ronay's] - I had to leave all my old clothes at the apartment."

Jim had already wired the Doors accountant to send him $100, 000 - what he called his 'travelling money' [his trip to Paris was ostensibly to be a springboard to further travels around Europe and North Africa, as it indeed was], with which he opened a Swiss bank account.

With that plane ticket, under his new name, he left alone for the 'Seychelles' on the night of the 2nd of July 1971, while Pamela Courson was with her French Count. As for the fake passport: again Ronay and Varda "took care of it. I just took a couple of photos."

This passport cost $5, 000, and had taken about a week to obtain.

Jim Morrison flew out of Paris, "as simple as that".

Aftermath



Things were not so simple in the apartment for Ronay and Varda after Jim left. With a sealed coffin and a death certificate [which was vague enough, saying that Jim's "heart had stopped"], the (bribed) doctor still had to notify the police. He did so and then left before the police arrived, the death certificate being handed to them by Ronay amidst a weeping Varda and Robyn.

Of course, the police demanded to see the body and so have the coffin opened.



Jim tells Ray that Ronay "'wrote me later and told me the whole story. Make hell of a movie too. You know, you could do it, Roy, But you couldn't use real names ... You'd have to fictionalise the characters, of course.' He smiled to himself, liking the idea. 'Or maybe a novel. Yeah ... Why not? You're always looking for a good story to tell, this could be it'. " [ib.]



The French police struggled to open the coffin because it was so well sealed. Ronay and Varda do their best not to help, dreading the moment when the coffin is opened to reveal, not a body, but bricks and sand. Luckily for them, Pamela Courson unexpectedly turned up just as the police were trying to open the casket, with her drug dealer Count in tow. Being told that the coffin contains Jim, she flies into a weeping fit, while the Count, seeing the police and a possible drug bust, flees the scene.

Pandemonium ensues, and the police give up trying to open the coffin as Pamela embraces it, sobbing for her dead lover, while her luggage falls open, female underwear tumbling onto the floor.

"So the cops had had enough. This was just too much hysteria. It wasn't worth the humiliation. Besides, their asses were covered. They had a death certificate. There was no foul play, nothing to investigate."

The police gave their condolences to Pamela after Agnes Varda explained to them that she was "the deceased betrothed", and they left. Pamela Courson continued to weep "hysterically, or she would have had the presence of mind to open the coffin herself. Instead, she went into the bathroom, no doubt shot up some of the good new Corsican smack, came out ten minutes later - according to Claude - dropped down in a chair and just sobbed softly to herself, repeating 'He's gone, he's gone, he's gone!' over and over."

"So that was it. The coffin was buried and I was dead. Phil Simmons [Bill Siddons, Doors manager] took care of the press releases, no doubt called you [Ray] and the other guys [the Doors] ..."

Asked what he did when the money ran out, Morrison tells Ray that Agnes Varda funnelled profits from her 1985 film, Vagabond to him, as he had an [unacknowledged] hand in writing it. Something Manzarek was aware of because that film used a Doors song ['The Changeling'!] in its soundtrack. The same song was used again in her 1988 film 'Jane B'.

Of course, this song could be seen as Morrison's own manifesto for staging his death in order to change into another identity.



Morrison went to live in the 'Seychelles' for five years, before going on to 'India', in order to study yoga. Manzarek goes into some detail about this latter period, where Morrison addressed the demons in his soul and stopped drinking alcohol. He perfected himself, became content with himself, and after a few years [between 2 to 4] returned to the 'Seychelles', determined to settle down.

Morrison scratched a living there by writing articles for a local paper and buying and selling art and artefacts.

Ray says that Jim married a Black woman, and they had two mixed race kids who were teenagers when he visited Jim in the late 1990s. This takes me back to Michel de Breteuil, the Count's elder African press baron brother. Isn't it likely that Jim found somewhere to live in Africa [rather than the 'Seychelles'], and there, marrying a Black woman, he wrote articles for any one of the de Breteuil's many newspapers and magazines? Morrison was fascinated by journalism and his writing often treads a pleasing line between poetry and journalism.

Wouldn't this be a perfect end for the writer of the line: "would you like to pluck this dusky jewel"?





CONCLUSION



In 1971, the rock and pop music business was still seen as something transient and short term. The Doors were largely regarded as passe in the early 1970s, and Jim had been reduced to a figure of fun by some sections of the music press.

The Doors themselves broke up in 1973 after two unsuccessful albums without Jim, the last one released in 1972. As the early photos of Morrison's grave show, few fans were beating a trail to worship him. New gods had come along, like Led Zeppelin: they were playing huge festivals and even stadia. Everything was getting bigger and louder, and one of Jim's old friends - Alice Cooper - was touring a full-on theatrical show, full of macabre elements. On the one hand, things had become more showbiz and more mass appeal - such as Shock Rock, and Glam Rock, while on the other, Progressive Rock bands dazzled large audiences with musical techno-flash: there wasn't much poetry.

The Doors had no place in this brave new world of the early to mid 70s. To top the negativity, on a personal note, Pamela Courson, without her Jim and without her Count [who had died in 1972] died in April 1974, aged 27, after finally winning her share of Jim's estate following a long and protracted legal challenge to Jim's Will from the Doors and the Morrison family. The cause of death was said to be a drugs overdose - though the Courson family believed she was murdered. At least an autopsy was carried out on her - unlike with Jim.




But there were stirrings, and when Ray Manzarek made his second solo album after the Doors of, 1974, the New York poetess Patti Smith, guested on a track where she recited one of Jim Morrison's poems. The album didn't sell well. But Patti, a prime mover of 'new wave' and 'punk', made her own first album with her band in 1975. In it, she paid homage to her favourite poets, among them Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The album was a hit, and the new movement in rock music had begun.

Patti herself visited Morrison's grave in 1975.

Suddenly, Jim and the Doors are seen as relevant again. Many of the mainstays of the New Wave and Punk scenes, in the USA and the UK, acknowledged them as important precursors and influences. Now fans begin to flock to Morrison's grave, and start to buy Doors music once more. And as Punk moved into post-punk and gothic in the late 1970s, new groups and singers were emulating the Doors and Morrison in sound and vision.

Emboldened, the three remaining Doors reformed for a studio project released in 1978. Using the poetry/spoken word tapes that Morrison had recorded in the Elektra studios in 1969, and at the Village recorder studios in 1970, they made the 'poetry album' that Jim had intended. It was a big success, commercially and artistically. Unreleased Doors material was now unearthed and released to a growing fanbase.



As the 1970s ended, in 1980, the first full biography of Morrison was published, written by Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins. It was a big seller: the Morrison myth was well on its way, and Hollywood was looking to make it all into a major film. There were many false starts, and the film - by Oliver Stone, was not released until 1990.



It's unlikely that anyone could have predicted this growth of the Morrison and Doors phenomena back in 1971.I suspect that Jim, Ronay and Varda thought his staged death would be soon forgotten and therefore not subjected to scrutiny. No one would want to write his biography, and there would not be any public interest that would result in something like a major Hollywood movie. And this is where we move into the second phase of the conspiracy. Just as when the police tried to break open the empty coffin back in 1971, so too were Ronay and Varda now having to sweat in 1991. They had both said nothing for twenty years, as per their oath, but now the pressure was mounting. Journalists were probing - the public wanted to know more. And film makers were raking over the minutiae. Not only that, but Albert Goldman - who had done iconoclastic biographies of Presley and Lennon, amongst others, had started to embark on his biography of Jim Morrison.

Ronay and Varda broke cover and gave an interview. They reiterated the 'official' story, but added one red herring: Pamela didn't mention to them that Jim had snorted pure heroin the night of his death. It was this that killed him, not a heart attack. This rumour, and others related to it had been around for some time. But it was the last statement on the issue that they would make. Meanwhile, Goldman kept digging, when - on a trip between Miami and London when researching his book - he died before he could complete it in 1994 - of a heart attack.



The documents relating to Morrison's death were released in various forms to writers and programme makers from 1990 on. Many researchers were surprised how easy it was to get hold of them after such a long embargo. But the documents are flawed, to say the least. For example, Pamela Courson's witness statement to the French police, re. Jim's death, is signed in her name, but in Jim's hand-writing! [see my article on this blog from last month - 28th February, 2023] The funeral arrangement document is again signed in her name but by an unknown hand. The notorised burial certficate describes Pamela as Morrison's 'cousin'.

Given the need of the Courson and Morrison families to maintain that Morrison died on the 3rd of July 1971, and given the need for Varda to maintain the same - as well as the French police wanting to be seen to have done everything properly - is it beyond reason to suggest that these documents, many released into the public domain twenty years after Morrison's "death", are not what they seem?

Doesn't it seem more likely that the account given in Ray Manzarek's book is closer to the truth?








NOTES

(1) The Collected Works of F W Nietzsche, edited by Oscar Levy, Vol 11 p. 57

(2) The New Musical Express Book of Rock, edited by Nick Logan, I.P.C. 1973 p 105

(3) The Poet in Exile, by Ray Manzarek, Thunder's Mouth Press, NY 2001


BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Poet in Exile, A Novel, by Ray Manzarek, published by Thunder Mouth Press, 2001

The Lords. New Creatures. Jim Morrison, 1969, 1970. Omnibus 1985

The Doors Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, John Rocco editor, Schirmer Books, 1997

No One Here Gets Out Alive. Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman. Plexus, 1980

Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The Rebel as Poet. Wallace Fowlie. Souvenir Press 1995,

A Season in Hell The Illuminations. Arthur Rimbaud. Transalted by E Rhodes Peschel, Oxford, 1979

Early Work. 1970-1979. Patti Smith. Norton, 1994