A timeline of the final 24 hours of Jim Morrison
55 years ago, the Woodstock generation felt another painful blow with the death of Jim Morrison.
In quick succession, the 1960s countercultural heyday began to claim its casualties. Peace and love soon ebbed to a bad mood of political unrest, Vietnam’s napalm nightmare, murder in the Hollywood Hills, and the Altamont disaster, all serving as dark storm clouds over the hippies’ utopian dream. Such turmoil was illustrated in the fallen symbols of the rock and pop revolution, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, all dying within a little over a year of each other and marking the decade’s symbolic close.
Morrison’s passing hammered a final nail. While many would roll their eyes at the ‘Lizard King’ act and harbour misgivings over his later rockist deification, The Doors frontman indeed captured the era’s heady spirit. Leading The Doors’ lysergic brew of foggy keys and ether-ripping guitar attack, Morrison took the James Brown and Mick Jagger performance template but pulled such theatre to an infinitely more violent charge of feverish psychedelia. It was the key to their success, masking a febrile core of danger at odds with the prevailing Flower Power.
Along the way and across six studio albums, rock excess and hedonism soon caught up with The Doors singer. Alcoholism, substance issues, and troubles with the law would heap a strain on the band and trigger health issues for Morrison, who decided to head to Paris after the LA Woman sessions wrapped up in March 1971 and holidayed with his girlfriend and companion Pamela Courson at a rented apartment in Paris’ Le Marais area. Four months later, he would be found dead at 27 years old.
Due to the French authorities’ practice of avoiding an autopsy if no foul play was suspected, coupled with a lack of official investigation or concrete eyewitness statements, the final hours of Morisson’s life are largely based on accounts from Courson and anecdotal information pieced together from friends. With such a lack of verification, the timeline below stands as a broadly agreed outline of how The Doors frontman’s final night played out.
A timeline of the final 24 hours of Jim Morrison:
06:00 – 11:00
Morrison’s last morning
The previous four months had reportedly seen Morisson taking lone strolls through the city, as well as shaving his shaggy beard and attempting to lose the weight he’d gained during the LA Woman sessions.
According to John Densmore, he was the last Doors member to ever talk to him, having had a phone conversation regarding how their final LP was faring in the charts.
On Friday July 2nd, Morisson and Courson are asleep at their rented apartment at 17–19 Rue Beautreillis, waking up around ten in the morning and spending time in the apartment. Allegedly, he looks shaky and unwell, plagued with constant hiccups.
13:00 – 17:30
An afternoon stroll through the city
Morrison meets up with old UCLA friend Alain Ronay, spending the afternoon walking through the Marais area near his residence, and running errands together. Ronay is widely thought to have been the last person to ever take a photo of The Doors frontman only five days earlier during an outing to the Saint-Leu-d’Esserent village in Chantilly.
Morrison picks up a pendant for Courson on Rue des Rosiers and visits the cobblers about the status of his boots. At approximately 15:30, the two stop by the Ma Bourgogne restaurant, where Morrison begins to succumb to hacking coughing fits and serious muscle spasms. After a drinking session at the Café de Phare, Ronay is kept out longer than he wants at Morrison’s insistence, before finally departing to spend dinner with a friend elsewhere.
As best understood, Morrison eats a Chinese meal in Rue Saint-Antoine alone and takes himself to the Action Lafayette cinema in Rue Buffault to watch the 1940s Robert Mitchum picture Pursued.
21:00 – 01:00
A final meal
The official narrative is that Morrison returned to the Rue Beautreillis apartment and ate dinner with Courson, whiling away the evening by a speculated mix of movie watching, music listening and writing poetry before heading to bed. The two likely took heroin together
However, journalist and Rock n’ Roll Circus nightclub owner Sam Bernett has maintained that Morrison visited the venue in Saint-Germain-des-Prés’ Left Bank to try to score some smack. Succeeding, a fatal shoot-up in a toilet cubicle triggered an overdose and the secret carrying of his body back to his apartment to avoid the authorities.
Marianne Faithfull has backed up such claims, claiming her then-boyfriend and dealer, Jean de Breteuil, had supplied the potent dose that killed The Doors frontman.
02:00 – 03:30
Troubled sleep
According to Courson, Morrison woke up sometime in the early hours of Saturday, July 3rd, and after noting that his breathing was loud and heavy while sleeping, Courson urges Morrison to visit a doctor. He declines and decides to run a bath in the hopes that the warm water will soothe his ailments.
Calling out to Courson about his sudden feelings of nausea, she returns with a saucepan ready to gather Morrison’s potential vomit, indeed being sick three times, with the final bout pure blood.
After a final suggestion to call a doctor, Morrison insists he feels fine.
Courson feeling reassured with the colour returning to his face, she returns to bed. “I’m gonna stay in the bath, and I’ll be in with you later,” he reportedly tells her.
06:00 – 09:15
The discovery
Courson wakes up and realises Morrison hasn’t joined her in bed.
Heading to the bathroom, she discovers an either dead or dying Morrisson unresponsive in the tub with an apparent faint smile on his face, with blood around his nose and mouth. Desperately calling the emergency services, medics eventually arrive and officially pronounce Jim Morrison dead due to heart failure.
Subject to death hoaxes before, The Doors team initially met the news with suspicion, and Paris was rife with rumours before the news was clarified to the music world.
Receiving a low-key service and burial at the Père Lachaise Cemetery four days later with as few as five attendees, including Courson (the band members weren’t invited), Morrison’s manager Bill Siddons made an official press statement two days later in Los Angeles, explaining the privacy of Morrison’s send-off to “avoid all the notoriety and circus-like atmosphere”.
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