“What a prophecy”: Agnès Varda’s failed attempts to save Jim Morrison
In the final years of his life, it seemed as though the pressure of The Doors got on top of Jim Morrison. As the ultimate archetype of a frontman, the chaos and carnage of fame only fuelled his wildness, but by 1971, something seemed to have cracked.
Perhaps the key to understanding Jim Morrison comes down to the way Eve Babitz wrote about him. To the world, Morrison was the lizard king, he was a kind of shamanic god of rock and of sex. They saw him as untouchable, as he’d whip crowds into riots, wind up getting arrested, but then be back on stage the next week to do it again. To his fans, he was a mirage of seduction, poetry and thrill. But to Babitz, “He never really stopped being a fat kid.”
When Babitz and Morrison met, she cracked him the second she learnt that the singer had grown up chubby, and so the rest of his life was all a mission for approval. “The ultimate dream of everyone who weighs too much and gets thin happened to Jim. He lost the weight and turned into a Prince,” Babitz wrote. Morrison didn’t just stop at Prince, though; he became a god, and the drugs helped both with that mindset and with the actual weight loss.
However, just looking good doesn’t change how a person is inside. Babitz’s entire reading of Morrison was simply ‘once an insecure kid, always an insecure kid’, and by the 1970s, the artist’s long-held self-doubt seemed to have bubbled to the top. Two years after the Miami incident, where Morrison got arrested right at their concert, and a year after the singer had a complete breakdown on stage in New Orleans at what would be the band’s final public appearance, he made the decision to run away for a while.
With it all piling on top of his truthfully soft spirit, Morrison announced to the group that he was moving to Paris. In March 1971, he and his girlfriend Pamela Courson moved into a flat on Rue Beautreillis in the Marais. It could have been a healing period where the singer could have detoxed and recalibrated, but instead, he was spiralling even harder, just in front of a different crowd.
Amongst the new pack of friends, though, was Agnès Varda. Morrison met the iconic French director back in LA in the 1960s, so when he landed in her home of Paris, they became fast yet unexpected friends. However, Morrison had studied film back in California with Varda, telling The Guardian, “Jacques and I met him in the ’60s in Los Angeles, and we saw him become a star. He had been learning cinema, and knew all our films.” But mostly, Varda, like Babitz, seemed to see the truth in Morrison and see the more tender, vulnerable side to him. As she watched his worsening drug use, she actually tried to step in.
Morrison’s close friend Alain Ronay, who went to school with him and visited him out in Paris, recalled the tension that existed between Varda and Courson. With Courson also gripped by heroin addiction, Varda had attempted to stage an intervention for the two, getting nowhere but causing a rift between herself and Morrison’s girlfriend.
After Morrison’s death in July 1971, Varda and her husband Jacques Demy were amongst the tiny crowd at his funeral. “We were four people at his funeral, at Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris,” she recalled, with Courson not being there as she was instead lost in her stupor of drugs and grief.
Afterwards, Varda tried again, wanting to connect with Courson but always being rejected. Ronay recalled, “‘Remember,’ I said to Pam, ‘Agnès hardly knew Jim – They never saw each other alone, and she has always been very correct.’” Picking up on the almost intuitive, wordless connection between Varda and Morrison, Ronay implored Courson to listen to her.
“Do you remember when Jim told you that Agnès would probably be your only friend in Paris if something difficult should come up?”, he told the grieving girlfriend, concluding, “What a prophecy…”
