The bizarre theft of Jim Morrison’s headstone
In 1969, Jim Morrison made a film called HWY: An American Pastoral. The opening shot of the movie sees a stretch of asphalt unspool, the credits painted onto the parched road before the camera eventually arcs towards the bruised sky of a moody desert dusk where the desolate moon hangs like a milk bottle top on a washing line awaiting the hissing company of the cicada-filled night. This notion of the long, unfurling roads of America stretching out like lonely ventricles is not just a vignette to open a film but a singular fascination that Morrison seemed to hold throughout his short life.
He was the proverbial free spirit of America’s disenfranchised youth. He’d often escape stilted civility with Nico and take peyote out in the desert. As she recalled: “It is like William Blake; he would see visions like Blake did, angels in trees, he would see these, and so would I. And Jim showed me that this is what a poet does. A poet sees visions and records them. He said that there were more poets in Comanches than there were in bookstores.“
This notion, along with his excesses, made him a unique kind of anti-hero, a spiritual man with a hint of anarchy. He carried this aura over to Europe when he moved to Paris in 1971. He delved into the bygone past of the place in the days when Ernest Hemingway and Édith Piaf would drink to the wee small hours in some decadent yet quaint bar. But sadly, he died within a matter of months of his residency in the French capital.
However, for a multitude of reasons, it still seemed fitting to bury him there. Thus, he resides in the Napoléon-built Père-Lachaise necropolis, not far from the headstones of Piaf herself and Oscar Wilde. Following his burial on July 7th, 1971, many fans have often flocked to his gravesite to not only pay their respects but to honour him in often depraved ways that they strangely see as fitting. Police reports have cited that officers have had to interrupt Black Masses and even an alleged orgy with a harem of sex workers.
However, in 1981, a rather more wholesome act of veneration would take place when a 280lb bust sculpture by the Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin of Morrison was installed at the site. This stood as a proud memorial, attracting visitors from all over the world for seven years. Then, on May 9th, 1988, the bust went missing. Despite it being heavy, robust, and in the sacred grounds of a cemetery, it was somehow taken.
Soon, a stranger occurrence began to unfurl publicly. The masked bandits on a motorbike responsible for the crime gave an anonymous, gloating TV interview. They claimed to be fans but vowed to keep the bust and even posed for pictures with it. True to their word, they didn’t return it, and the police never managed to catch them or recover it. Thus, in the ’90s, Morrison’s family placed their own headstone at the site with a Greek inscription that reads “True to His Own Spirit”.
The location of the original bust remains a mystery to this day; was it sold on the black market, or does it now just haunt a criminal’s bedsit, a cursed motif of the proverbial riders on the storm?
