Jim Morrison’s strange connection to Patricia Kennealy in a “handfasting” ceremony
Despite having died at only 27 years old, Jim Morrison managed to achieve more in his brief spell on earth than most could in much lengthier lifetimes. Not only was his career as the enigmatic frontman of the Doors something to be celebrated but his hedonistic rock and roll existence also meant that there are plenty of fascinating stories to be told about his life.
While he was perhaps best known for having been in an open relationship with Pamela Courson for many years, Morrison was still known for having had a very sexually promiscuous love life, having had many brief flings with groupies, writers, and fellow musicians. However, despite this proclivity for bedding numerous individuals over the course of his storied career, he and Courson were regarded as kindred spirits, with Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek having described her as being the only person “who could so complement his bizarreness.”
Their relationship may have been intense and largely fuelled by their individual drug and alcohol addictions, but following his death in 1971, Courson was named as the sole heir in his will. They may not have been officially wed at any point, but courts declared that due to their cohabitation, they could be declared as being in a common-law marriage, meaning that Courson would have inherited Morrison’s entire estate had she not also died in 1974 just two weeks after court settlements had been agreed upon.
Despite Courson being declared as the sole inheritor, there was one person who disputed the validity of this entitlement. Patricia Kennealy, a rock journalist who met Morrison for the first time in 1970, believed that she ought to have been the one to inherit his fortune, and her reasoning for this claim was that the two were married during what she called a neopagan ‘handfasting ceremony’.
In her salacious 1992 memoir Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison, Kennealy claimed that when she interviewed Morrison for Jazz & Pop magazine, their initial handshake caused “a visible shower of bright blue sparks flying in all directions,” declaring “I know karma when I see it.” While most people wouldn’t consider an introductory handshake to be an official union or declaration of matrimony, Kennealy stretched her unusual perception of their encounter to mean that the two were married.
Her and Morrison later engaged in the ‘handfasting’, which allegedly involved the recital of traditional Celtic oaths and the exchange of droplets of blood, which Kennealy believed he was interested in due to the fact he was “into Native American Indian spirituality, which wasn’t much different than Celtic paganism”.
However, her Wiccan beliefs were not shared by others, and despite going to great lengths to legally add his name to hers (she became Patricia Kennealy-Morrison in 1979, also adding a letter to her own surname), most dismissed her far-fetched understanding of marriage as nothing more than spiritualist claptrap.
Kennealy even went as far as to claim that she had received letters from Morrison prior to his death where he declared he would make their marriage official and break off his relationship with Coulson, although this, like many of her claims, was quickly cast off in a similar fashion due to how absurd and unfounded they were. We might all experience love at first sight at some point in our lives, but no matter how smitten you are by someone, going to lengths this extreme are not the best way to declare a partnership with the love of your life.
