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Rating: "She did not want to be interviewed and said she did not want to see me again. She died shortly after our meeting. It took several years before Patricia Butler picked up that ball that all other biographers had let slip through their fingers. Patricia called me, and after discussing it, I enthusiastically agreed that Pam deserved an in-depth study. Meanwhile, as the years passed and Pamela's archives began to overflow with photographs and new information, the main subject of the book inevitably changed to become the story of a great love, the story of Jim and Pam, finally returning to Pamela Susan Morrison the importance she deserved, while painting a much more vivid and rich picture of the man she loved" Jerry Hopkins
"The Doors were much more interested in me describing the relationships between them, and they wouldn't have cared if I completely ignored Pamela. They didn't care about Pamela. If I had made the film showing that Jim was primarily a loving, sensitive, and funny person who only sometimes became the sad shadow of himself when he drank too much and had focused too much on their love story and not on the dark, paranoid, and dangerous rockstar, the film would have been deadly boring and I have no intention of making a boring film" Oliver Stone (for the record, I combined his answers to three questions)
Hopkins (together with Danny Sugerman, the young factotum of the Doors) is the author of "No One Here Gets Out Alive", the most famous biography of the band and its leader ("No One Here Gets Out Alive" from 1980).
Oliver Stone is the director of the 1991 film "The Doors"
My opinion on the book, but especially on the film, is absolutely negative. The film is worthless for the reasons expressed by Stone himself and even gets a couple of historical moments wrong inside the "plot". The book should only be read after more realistic ones, and thus "appreciated" as a chronicle that emphasizes certain situations and specific moments while omitting others more intimate and truthful.
All this preamble was necessary to talk to you about this absolutely unique book. In many years, no one had ever written a book about James Douglas Morrison and Pamela Susan Courson and their love story. Probably because it would have sold little (and anyway much less than telling the story of a mad and cursed rockstar) and because it would have involved the "waste" of a lot of time for nothing.
Journalist Patricia Butler spent six years gathering everything she could about the two young people from their childhood to their untimely death. It was especially difficult to gather testimonies from school friends, neighbors, and relatives during their adolescence. People never listened to by anyone. Because no one cared about Courson except as Jim's extravagant partner, the rockstar. Even when it comes to Morrison, no one ever spoke adequately about his adolescence; except for some information on Wikipedia and what he himself had declared in some interviews, Morrison seemed to almost appear out of nowhere as a twenty-year-old at UCLA and then on the terrace of Venice.
It turns out that Jim and Pam were incredibly similar during those school years; two kids different from the others, often uneasy in experiencing school and friendships, two personalities both eccentric but shy, rebellious but gloomy. Two people that no one was able to properly frame. Two tormented souls.
Then, for both, the move to Los Angeles, their meeting, and a love story that would end only with the death of both.
The book tells their relationship through testimonies, inevitably retracing Jim's history with the Doors from 1966 to July 3, 1971, right with Pamela on the day of his disappearance. The only person always present in Morrison's life is Pamela. A tumultuous relationship, made of incredible passions, madness, furious quarrels, goodbyes and reconciliations, relationships with other people, alcohol, and drugs (in this last analysis, situations are highlighted and deepened that I had only read about very superficially before). Two things emerge above all: their mutual trust, in times of real need, only in each other and no one else, and Pamela's character. Pamela is universally described as being of stunning beauty, the kind that "when she entered, everyone turned to look at her" (considering she was very pretty but small, skinny, and pale), but above all, the only one capable of always standing up to Morrison firmly. While the Doors, management, and friends hung on his every word and always did what he wanted, not Pamela; often, instead, she was the one laying down the "sharing" rules. The only one who dared to say no to him, to tell him he was doing something stupid or that he was an idiot. The opposite of that useless ornament that Stone briefly shows in the film, to make it clear. Jim follows her to Paris, realizing that with the Doors it was over and that their Life would begin.
The most heartbreaking "chapter" is Pamela's after Jim's death. Almost three years of agony. A terrible situation, of chronic depression, eating disorders, and everything negative an irreparably broken heart can do to a person's soul and body. Pamela joined Jim deliberately; everything or almost everything suggests this hypothesis (conveniently at age 27). The two deaths are treated with great detail but with respect and, at least this time, without excessively paranoid digressions.
Jim's other women and Pamela's other men, with their testimonies, only certify that their love was as impossible as it was unique and incredible.
For a long time, I have heard and read everything possible and truly shameful about Pamela, probably—indeed certainly—because it was convenient that way.
The expression "cosmic partner (as Jim called her)" does not come from visions during lysergic trips but from the fact that Morrison was immediately struck by the aura Pam emanated, finding a ready "explanation" from her birthplace; the town of Weed was indeed at the foot of Mount Shasta, a sacred place for those Native Americans so dear to James Douglas.
No one will ever know all the truths and have absolute certainty; in the end, only they knew what their love was and how they lived each moment emotionally, but at least Butler does not invent, exalt, or generalize. Perhaps, unconsciously, Pamela is also somewhat "defended and protected" by the author, but after so much meanness and so many gratuitous falsehoods, it's understandable. (The Count Jean de Breteuil, who unfortunately interfered quite a bit in the Pamela/drugs relationship, is never mentioned).
A beautiful love story, so unique it seems unreal.
Happy reading.
The book, in its Italian translated edition, has been out of print for many years. It can be found used on eBay or Amazon at certain times.
The preface is by Jerry Hopkins.
No one will read it anyway, and that's why I allowed myself to tell you something about it.
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