Patricia Kennealy-Morrison: Authorial Madness - FAQ 5 Part 1
What did people think about Pamela when she was alive -- did they even know about her?
As far as I could tell, nobody in Doors circles seemed to particularly like Pam (in fairness to her, I must say that she reciprocated the feeling).
Reportedly this was because she supported his more artistic, poetic leanings and didn't care so much about the rock'n'roll. Ooo, what a bitch!
And the fairness is a little less fair when one considers that Kennealy also detests the Doors. In Blackmantle, she devotes a considerable amount of time to murdering them. Then again, if their autobiographies are to be believed, they didn't seem to dislike Pam. Hell, Ray Manzarek seems downright fond of her, and he implied that another member of the group was enthralled by her.
She was never in Jim's lifetime a "public" rock concubine (in the sense that, say, Jane Asher and Marianne Faithfull were). The general public didn't know about her, and there was literally no media attention paid her while Jim was alive;
... so? There were a lot of rock girlfriends who were like that. Especially if they were dating a sex symbol, in which case the labels usually wanted their girlfriends kept as quiet as possible.
And it's not really fair to compare her to Asher or Faithfull, because both women were in the public eye as entertainers. Asher had been an actress for years and had her own measure of fame (not nearly as much as the Beatles, but enough to catch attention), and Faithfull was a successful pop singer before she became Jagger's lover. Pamela wasn't a singer or actress, so it makes sense that she wouldn't have been as well-known.
only after he was dead did people start to hear about her at all, and even then only sketchily and incorrectly. (My, but that sounds familiar! I wonder who else in Jim's life that could be said about???)
So, she's admitting that people have only heard about HER since Jim's death (thus leaving nobody who can contradict her) and that most of what they've heard has been sketchy and incorrect. Well, that I can agree on... because the majority of what we've heard about PKM... IS FROM HER.
I can personally recall only three articles in which Pamela was specifically mentioned before July 1971.
One of them was about the use of cotton balls in silent blinds runners.
As a rock critic, and editor of a major and well-respected magazine, I read pretty much everything, except for stuff like 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat, which probably wouldn't have mentioned her in any case;
I think she means she read everything RELATED TO ROCK, not that she read all magazines everywhere. That would be a full-time job in itself.
and as someone eager to glean as much strategic information as I could on the opposition, believe me, I was out there looking...
And suddenly her inner bunny-boiler shows up. Seriously, that is creepy. Not just that she refers to Morrison's LONGTIME GIRLFRIEND as "the opposition," but that she was "eager" to get "strategic information" on Courson.
It sounds like she's just a few degrees from stealing Courson's panties and rooting through her trash.
The first, an early-1970 glossy-mag (I think it was Eye) puff-piece on Hollywood boutiques, had a full page with a large Raeanne Rubenstein color photo of a very lovely-looking Pam, red-caftaned and Greek-upsweep-coiffed, in her shop Themis, and one brief accompanying paragraph. Her personal association with Jim was not referred to, not even hinted at; even her correct name wasn't used -- she billed herself for the occasion as 'Pamela Roselily'. Jim did appear in the published photo (as did several other people, one of whom, Tere Tereba, the campy brunette draped over Jim, actually did become a not unsuccessful L.A. clothing designer),
Campy? Did that mean something different in the 60s and 70s?
I think this is the picture they're mentioning.
... campy is not the word that springs to mind.
standing looking up and out of frame with Pam seated on the floor in front of him between two guys, looking into the camera, her head coyly inclined to his dangling hand -- the only intimation that there might be something more than business between them, though Jim's expression seems rather to suggest he is being goosed -- and he was credited in the 'graph as the backer for "his designing friends."
Um, there was more than one picture in that photoshoot. Google "jim morrison themis" and you can basically find ALL of them on the magical Interbutts. I think she mentioned this one because
Wanna see some other pics?
Yeah, I dunno if the whole shoot was in the magazine, but it seems a bit odd that she mentions a single picture... out of a very large photoshoot with several coupley pictures of them printed there. (And no, I'm not including EVERY picture, just the ones where they look coupley. For the whole shoot, google "jim morrison themis").
Another little snippet on the shop, in Rags magazine that same year, had her, correctly, as 'Pamela Courson', with no mention of Jim whatsoever, but some nice words of praise for the handpainted suede clogs I think it was.
... so she was reading magazines that had nothing to do with rock'n'roll... just in the off chance that they might mention Pam's SHOP? And why would a magazine about clothes mention Jim Morrison?
The third was a piece by the late great rockwriter diva Lillian Roxon -- I remember this one particularly, because I was very upset by it at the time. It appeared in print quite soon after the actual event described -- my emotions were still raw from the event itself, and it was the first time I had ever been commented on in public in association with Jim, however erroneously (plus ça change...) or anonymously. I was indirectly mentioned as "a chick who [Jim] promptly balled on the living room floor", and "next morning, as the hostess and her friends were politely stepping over the naked bodies on the floor," "Jim's old lady" (no name given) showed up to complain "Jim, you always ruin my Christmas" -- a clear reference, however inaccurately reported (Roxon had not been present), to the incident at Diane Gardiner's house in December 1970.
So... what, was she mad because Pam was called "Jim's old lady" and the Lizard Queen was merely referred to as a "chick" that Jim had random unpoetic unromantic sex with? Was she upset because it was inaccurately reported? Was she upset because Pam WASN'T upset, just mildly put out?
I'm a little unclear here.
[Despite her initial ignorance, Lillian -- we were not close friends, but we knew and liked one another, and our relations were never anything but cordial and cheerful -- soon learned who in fact the so-called 'chick' had really been, and told a very dear friend of mine how much she admired me for knowing what I wanted and going after it and holding on to it, and how if she'd known it was me she never would have written about it, because she knew all about Jim and me, "and you know Patricia was right by Jim's side in Miami, she was the only woman he wanted there with him, he really cares about her..."]
... funny, it sure didn't seem that way in KENNEALY'S OWN BOOK, when he practically squirmed to get away from her.
Hell, examine one of the two pictures that shows them in the same frame (she's the woman in glasses). You'd think they were strangers from his expression.
They look anything but coupley, and he doesn't exactly look desperate to have her around.
Also, again, she claims that nobody else knows her and Jim, what the dynamics of her relationship and how it worked except her, and don't you dare pass any kind of judgement on it. Except, of course, if you think she was the bestest thing to ever happen to Morrison. Then even if you're a total stranger, she'll insist you SO TOTALLY UNDERSTAND.
As far as nonspecific Pamferences go, there was a story that mentions a young male groupie hanging out before an L.A. concert who "succeeds in exchanging four words with Morrison ('Hi, how are you?'), gets one back ('Fine'), and talks a while with Morrison's girl." Maybe Pam, maybe not.
Well, if it WAS Pam, then clearly that male groupie had sex with her. Because she was an evil abusing heart-stomping tiny-titted junkie, and they do everything that is evil!
Finally, Richard Goldstein wrote a 1968 piece about Jim for New York magazine, in which he remarks at one point that Jim "picks up his girl" and they all head out for the beach, and she tells him his hat makes him look like a Rembrandt; again, this beach-loving art critic may or may not have been Pam, and no description or further mention is made of her.
Well, CLEARLY it wasn't Pam, because she was stupid and PKM is smart and only smart people know anything about art!
Those are all the ones I know of, though I'm sure there are certainly others just as anonymous, and there may even be some references to her by name in little fanzines of the time.
Which PKM wouldn't know about, because she was a for-reelz-legit journalist and stuff! Sniff sniff!
The obituaries and news stories that appeared in real media on Jim's death, if they mentioned Pam at all -- and by no means all of them did -- described her, correctly, as his companion or his girlfriend, not his wife (that lie came later).
She seems a wee bit obsessed with ANYONE calling Pam Jim's wife. The fact is, most sources refer to her as his girlfriend even today.
The point is, however she may have styled herself in private, Pamela was by no means presented to the public in Jim's own lifetime as even his consort of record, much less as 'Mrs. Morrison' -- and she freely admitted to me, of all people, that in truth she was nothing of the sort.
HA! See? Pam totally told me that they weren't married! That PROVES I was the one who was married to him AND his true love! WORSHIP AT MY FEET, PEONS!
Anyway, by 1969 Jim was no longer being touted as a sex symbol for the age, so keeping Pamela in the background, à la Cynthia Lennon, to 'enhance' his desirability quotient amongst the teenyboppers, as some biographers have claimed Elektra Records insisted, was hardly essential in any case -- if indeed it ever had been.
So basically she's now admitting that yes, this was probably the reason that Pam wasn't a "public" rock concubine in the same way that Marianne Faithfull was (which was a totally different situation, since Faithfull was a pop star in her own right). Why, again, should this make us question her legitimacy? Cynthia Lennon wasn't a "public" rock wife either.
And even if that were the case, Jim himself, if he had felt strongly enough about it, could certainly have insisted she be given proper public validation and to hell with the fiction of him as a glamorous unattached bachelor rocker -- which he conspicuously never did.
... but once again, he never did that for PKM either. There was no public validation, no legal marriage, nothing.
Pam's existence or even her actual presence certainly never kept Jim from being with anyone he wanted to be with, so why even bother to keep her a deep dark secret?
Maybe it was... the insane stalker women who bought random magazines to get dirt on her?
Unless, of course, Jim wanted her kept so to protect her, and to protect their privacy -- gee, how strange, just EXACTLY the way he wanted me kept a deep dark secret to protect me, and ours!
So then, I guess, since he didn't talk about Pam,
…. except, you know, when he was telling "plenty of other people" about how awful Pam was and how she was ruining his life and shit. And writing letters comparing her to a puddle of vomit. Yeah, he didn't talk to ANYONE about her! Believe it, for PKM tells you so! She's not contradicting herself!
and the public didn't know about her, she must not have been very important to him. That's the logic the detractors use to dismiss me, so in logic and fairness it must be applied to her too -- or to themselves, since Jim never mentioned them to me...
… which makes no sense either. So because Jim Morrison didn't mention people he DIDN'T KNOW to her, they weren't important to him? Uhhh… of course they weren't. HE DIDN'T KNOW THEM.
The truth is that Jim, being a well-brought-up boy, seldom mentioned anyone in his life to anyone else, male or female; that would be gossip, and he didn't do that. And especially he didn't mention women in his life...
Well, I wouldn't know, since I didn't know him. But see above comments about how sometimes she's claiming that he wouldn't talk to anybody about anybody… and sometimes she insists he was whining to "plenty of other people"about what an evil bitch Pamela was. She wants it both ways!
A photographer who knew Jim, and who phoned me in the summer of 1990 to talk about the movie (and whom I warned, in the course of a very friendly and pleasant conversation, about the late Albert Goldman's then-in-progress "bio") remarked at one point that Jim had never told him about me, and when I reacted with instant hurt and defensiveness, said quickly and reassuringly that Jim never even spoke about Pam to him, and this guy had known Pam for years, so he was not surprised that Jim should never have mentioned me.
… uh, it sounds like the dude was just being polite. I mean, maybe he was telling the truth, but it sounds suspiciously like he was trying to salve her ego when she got upset. That's not something you want to use as "proof."
Also, even if he was telling 100% truth, it's not quite the same. I mean, this guy knew Pam and Jim both, so it merely means that Jim didn't talk to him ABOUT Pam and their relationship. But he didn't even tell this guy of PKM's very EXISTENCE. That's quite different!
According to him, Jim just didn't casually verbalize about what, or whom, mattered most to him; he compartmentalized his life, and most especially his emotional life.
Which seems entirely plausible, yes. Except that not only has she contradicted herself on this matter, but this is STILL a guy who was trying to make her feel better.
On the other hand, a poet friend of Jim's, whom I met just a couple of years ago, told me that Jim had indeed spoken of me, to him
You see what I mean about contradictions?! A minute ago she declared that he just didn't talk about his women, and that he considered that sort of thing to be gossip. And now she's announcing that yeah, he totally told some people about her. WHICH IS IT?
-- which makes perfect sense: Jim talked about me to the people who would appreciate his attraction to somebody as smart and literate as he was, and he protected my name from those who wouldn't. But only people who really knew and understood Jim could be expected to know and understand that...
So, obsessive fans and bandfollowers knew about Pam, and people in rock circles who cared about such things, and that was pretty much it -- and Pam and I certainly knew about one another.
… yes, rock stars' girlfriends usually clue in eventually about the side girlfriends, and no side girlfriend can fail to know about the main girlfriend.
But we see how much so-called Doors insiders cared about her by how swiftly they distanced themselves from her after Jim's death. The surviving Doors don't seem to have exactly rushed over to make condolence calls on her: I don't know about Robby or John, and would hate to reproach them with behavior they are not guilty of; but unless he was misquoted or I have misread the piece (in which case I apologize to him for my error, which is more than any of them have ever done for me), Ray Manzarek, by his own account in a published interview, didn't even see Pamela after Jim's death -- not until some months later, when they encountered one another by chance in an L.A. restaurant, the first time they had seen each other since Pam's return from Paris, and Pam wept in his arms on seeing him, which Ray goes on to say sure convinced him Jim was really dead. And only months later too.
Again… this is not making Pam look bad. It just makes the Doors look like jerks… and honestly, that isn't a surprise either because ROCK STARS OFTEN ARE. And besides, if he needed convincing that Jim was dead, methinks that he might have been a bit messed up by what happened.
Wow. You really have to wonder about these people, don't you... Were his former bandmates not compassionate enough to pay a sympathy visit to the only person who was with Jim when he died? At the very least -- however they may have personally felt about her -- were they not curious in the slightest to learn the details of their singer's demise from the one person who presumably could have supplied them? They never even SAW her, never phoned her up to ask what had happened? Lord, but that is cold...
I'll give Kennealy credit, this is actually a fairly decent thing to say about Pam. She managed to not add on, "Weren't they interested in exacting revenge on the EVIL SLUTWHOREBITCH WHO KILLED JIM ON PURPOSE…?!"
Admittedly, though Ray had some weird and effusive things to say after her death -- perhaps out of guilt, or defensiveness on Jim's behalf, or misplaced if commendable loyalty to his dead bandfellow --
It really doesn't sound like he disliked her or anything. So I'm not quite sure why he needed a different motivation to be speak well of Pam... aside from, you know, PKM's conviction that no person would like Pam EXCEPT through guilt/defensiveness/loyalty, since she was so worthless.
Honestly, I suspect she's just bitter that Manzarak waxed eloquent about Pam and Jim's relationship, and summed Kennealy up as "She was also a well-known writer. She simply fell in love with Jim. Madly." No other mentions, just that.
even the other Doors don't seem to have been big Pam fans.
She had at one point begged them for several thousand dollars so she could get Jim a headstone (the grave was ill-kept and unmarked for many years; I believe his own parents didn't spring for a decent marker until the movie came out, and for a while I was even desperately considering buying him one myself, just to have something there). The Doors duly ponied up, but to quote John Densmore, "It all went into her arm").
Y'see, this is how you credit comments. You mention the person so people can search for the comment… even though google didn't turn up a single result except for MY OWN PAGE. You do not say "lots of people" or "good friend" or "poet," and just leave it at that, as if that's all it takes.
And a former journalist should KNOW THIS. One of the first things they teach journalists is the proper way to cite, and the results if you don't do it right.
Maybe they felt she was just too smacked-out or whacked out to deal with, perhaps they even shared my own unswerving feeling that she had actively contributed to Jim's death;
Why would they? They weren't in romantic competition for him, as far as I know. They had no motivation to see her in a nasty light. They had no motivation to assume she was a murderer... whereas PKM does.
otherwise their studied avoidance of Pamela is hardly the kind of behavior a woman might reasonably expect from her late alleged "husband" 's good friends and co-workers, people she had known and traveled with for years.
Again, whether she was well-liked or not, this still doesn't reflect badly on her. Courtesy alone would have demanded some display of kindness for someone you didn't HATE.
I truly hope I'm wrong; I hope they all did comfort Pam extensively in whatever grief she might have been feeling
Yeah, that hint that she wasn't grieving isn't bitchy at ALL.
(she was allegedly filmed at a party in L.A. a few weeks after Jim's death, wearing not a scrap of black mourning and merrily drinking champagne on the lawn of the French consulate -- well, perhaps she was really consulting with consular authorities about Jim's grave, and who are we to deny a girl a good time anyway...).
Okay, if she was allegedly filmed… where is the film? Who alleged this? Are there no records? Was NOBODY at the consulate willing to even mention her existence? Or were they all in on this conspiracy?
But, though I'd like to think otherwise, from what I've heard it sounds as if once Jim was gone, most Doors connections couldn't wait to get shut of Pam. Maybe they sent a card...
I'd like to mention that Kennealy, elsewhere on her site, praises Yoko Ono. You know, the woman who inspired instant loathing among John Lennon's bandmates, the Beatles circle, and pretty much all their fans. And since Lennon's death, she's been pretty much ignored by them except when she's an asshole to them. By the same logic, shouldn't she believe that Ono is the spawn of Satan?
Even the few people who did keep in touch had little nice to say. Yet the first few books written about Jim, when they came along, were not only weirdly upbeat about Pam's character
I wouldn't know, since they have probably been rightly forgotten. Honestly, I don't know why she even cares - the "biographies" that come out after a star first dies are disposable pap cribbed from a thousand magazine articles, and nobody really cares what they say. And yes, they are usually very chirpy and upbeat to
The meaty stuff comes later.
(one dupe, misled perhaps by flawed chivalry or retro-testosterone, even claimed she was "Jim's intellectual equal"!!! Yeah, maybe in Bizarro World...)
Please tell me yet again how smart, literate and awesome you are! Also, please inform me of how everyone around Jim was stupid except you! Please, Strong Pagan GoddessWoman! I haven't had it drilled through my skull often enough!
And what the hell is "retro-testosterone," O member of Mensa?
but strangely reticent on the true nature of events in Paris, dutifully maintaining the preposterous heart-attack coverup story foisted on the world,
Yes, because it couldn't be that they regarded the "heart attack" theory as being, you know, FACTUAL. No, they were complicit in the vast conspiracy to make Pam look good! The publishing houses were clearly in on the conspiracy!
And you gotta love that despite his well-documented substance abuse problems, she insists that there is NO possibility that he could have had a heart attack due to... I dunno, drugs? Booze? A combo of both?
and silent as the, uh, grave on Pam's involvement in Jim's death and her subsequent brilliant career as junkie hooker, which lasted until her own 1974 smack-out -- possibly because they needed to toe the Courson party line to get permission to use lyrics and poems, possibly because they had no real sources and had done no research and were just big old lazy ignorant stupids, incestuously quoting one another like inbreeding parrots (you find the same exact factual errors in all the books; too bad I in my quest for accuracy ever bothered to point some out to the guilty...it would be fun for them to look as publicly ignorant as they, in fact, are).
Again… LAWSUITS. PKM was allowed to say this stuff because, well, you get to say what you want on the Internet, and Pamela Courson was safely dead once she did so.
And again, she does not have proof of Pam's involvement in his death. It is all SPECULATION. Her "proof" is basically that people were afraid the police MIGHT have suspected her… which is undermined by the fact they DIDN'T. So why exactly should these people just ASSUME that she was involved in his death and write nonfiction based on ONE WOMAN'S SPECULATION?! A woman who wasn't even THERE until several days later?!
But by so doing they set up the Pam&Jim myth that some people take as fact even unto this day...
It's because of the evil meddling idiocy of those stupid stupid writers with their quickie throwaway biographies! It couldn't possibly be that two people who were in a close if not exclusive relationship for most of their adult lives could have been serious about each other!
Then, when Strange Days came out, and all this became blatantly public, because I owed none of them except Jim a fucking thing and could tell the truth to shame them all -- and did --
I'm starting to suspect that there's a simple reason why she despises these first few books, and is lambasting the authors without actually revealing who they are: she was actually interviewed for one of the first books of this type, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which was published more than a decade before Kennealy's book came out.
And like the Rock Wives interview, it paints a very different portrait of Jim Morrison than Strange Days did. Not quite as different, since it doesn't have her being frank about how seriously he took their handfasting or his plans to "return" or not. Not only does it have Kennealy openly admitting that Morrison was a drunken asshole at times, but it has Kennealy stating that when she met Pam alone, there was no ill feeling, no antagonism. Not a quote, but taken from her account. Very different from her own book.
But the most unforgivable thing about it is that SHE WAS ACTUALLY INTERVIEWED for this book. Yes, she actually sat down with Jerry Hopkins and recounted everything, years before Strange Days. For a book that refers to Pamela as his number one girl (page 83), and acknowledges her as the main and most important relationship he had (with Kennealy as second).
And as I've mentioned before, my favorite Morrison book Break On Through came a year before hers. It also credited her with interviewed material. In it, she is referred to as an important figure in his life and says that she fascinated him. But it also refers to Pamela as his longtime girlfriend and their relationship as the predominant relationship of [his] life, says that their romance was a tumultuous blend of tenderness and uncontrolled passion right from the beginning and this fire and ice quality lasted right to the end. It also refers to her as his sexual and intellectual equal, and says she was sweet.
Now history has been rewritten.
Now Kennealy regards herself as the true love of Morrison's life, Pamela as the evil whore who murdered him (again, contradicting her prior claims), and thus all these authors who regard the Pamela/Jim relationship are in on the vast conspiracy. But… she can't slag them off directly, because if she mentioned Riordan or Hopkins directly, people might note that she actually was interviewed for these books.
suddenly they were all Pamela's best friend, her loyal advocate, taking revenge on me for outing them and their perfidy against Jim by painting Pam in bright sunny hues and me as an agent of the dark side.
Um…. no, no they didn't. Hopkins wrote another book that was basically No One Here Gets Out Alive lite, which was equally courteous towards Kennealy. The despised Patricia Butler was also quite courteous. Manzarek mentioned her but rather dismissively. The other Doors didn't really seem to notice her. Linda Ashcroft's book was pure fiction.
Even if their books glorified Pamela (which they didn't usually), they didn't "take revenge" or depict her badly.
The most negative depiction of her was in Stephen Davis' book, which came out long after Kennealy's website was defunct. Now, Davis is a douchebag, but he has some decent points about her story, including that it has yet to be confirmed by reliable, independent sources. Which is, you know, TRUE. Among other things, he points out the disparities between her account of Jim's moods, habits and sexual abilities.
Patricia Kennely later changed the spelling of her name to Kennealy, and retold and elongated her story in her 1993 memoir Strange Days, which described in uncanny detail an alternative Jim Morrison that no one else who knew him was able to recognize. Her tone throughout the book is angry, venomous, secretive, and defensive. But she hedged about some of her bizarre claims by writing that she might have hallucinated the whole thing. She also wrote that she was high on marijuana, cocaine, and tranquilizers during the period in question. After she left music journalism, she wrote mythic romance fantasies for a living.
Not everyone believes Patricia Kennealy's claims. She hasn't yet produced any of the letters she says Jim wrote to her. Former Elektra employees who knew and worked with both Jim and Kennealy can only vouch for her being at certain places at certain times, and for her claiming she was pregnant by him. Over the years, Patricia Kennealy cleverly inserted herself into Jim Morrison's saga via the media, first in No One Here Gets Out Alive, and then in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie The Doors. Kennealy even appeared in the movie as one of the priestesses at her alleged witch wedding to Jim. (She later further changed her name to Patricia Kennealy- Morrison.)
Girlfriend pregnancy and abortions were an everyday thing with Jim, whose lawyer now had multiple paternity suits to deal with. But an occult wedding was something else. Whether this, or indeed any of Kennealy's claims regarding Jim Morrison, can ever be reliably corroborated will determine if her vivid stories will survive as history, or just as a romantic subfable of the legend.
- Stephen Davis, Jim Morrison: Life Death Legend, page 367
Now, I do think it's a little unfair to refer to her "inserting herself" into Morrison's "saga," but otherwise he has good points, including that her claims don't line up with anyone else's, that she comes across as angry and defensive, and that she hasn't yet proved any of her claims such as the endless letters and poems she says he sent her.
And yes, this is the nastiest account I've seen in a Morrison biography. Granted there are a few I haven't yet read, but they are the personal biographies, so they probably won't have any stuff on Kennealy.
As far as I could tell, nobody in Doors circles seemed to particularly like Pam (in fairness to her, I must say that she reciprocated the feeling).
Reportedly this was because she supported his more artistic, poetic leanings and didn't care so much about the rock'n'roll. Ooo, what a bitch!
And the fairness is a little less fair when one considers that Kennealy also detests the Doors. In Blackmantle, she devotes a considerable amount of time to murdering them. Then again, if their autobiographies are to be believed, they didn't seem to dislike Pam. Hell, Ray Manzarek seems downright fond of her, and he implied that another member of the group was enthralled by her.
She was never in Jim's lifetime a "public" rock concubine (in the sense that, say, Jane Asher and Marianne Faithfull were). The general public didn't know about her, and there was literally no media attention paid her while Jim was alive;
... so? There were a lot of rock girlfriends who were like that. Especially if they were dating a sex symbol, in which case the labels usually wanted their girlfriends kept as quiet as possible.
And it's not really fair to compare her to Asher or Faithfull, because both women were in the public eye as entertainers. Asher had been an actress for years and had her own measure of fame (not nearly as much as the Beatles, but enough to catch attention), and Faithfull was a successful pop singer before she became Jagger's lover. Pamela wasn't a singer or actress, so it makes sense that she wouldn't have been as well-known.
only after he was dead did people start to hear about her at all, and even then only sketchily and incorrectly. (My, but that sounds familiar! I wonder who else in Jim's life that could be said about???)
So, she's admitting that people have only heard about HER since Jim's death (thus leaving nobody who can contradict her) and that most of what they've heard has been sketchy and incorrect. Well, that I can agree on... because the majority of what we've heard about PKM... IS FROM HER.
I can personally recall only three articles in which Pamela was specifically mentioned before July 1971.
One of them was about the use of cotton balls in silent blinds runners.
As a rock critic, and editor of a major and well-respected magazine, I read pretty much everything, except for stuff like 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat, which probably wouldn't have mentioned her in any case;
I think she means she read everything RELATED TO ROCK, not that she read all magazines everywhere. That would be a full-time job in itself.
and as someone eager to glean as much strategic information as I could on the opposition, believe me, I was out there looking...
And suddenly her inner bunny-boiler shows up. Seriously, that is creepy. Not just that she refers to Morrison's LONGTIME GIRLFRIEND as "the opposition," but that she was "eager" to get "strategic information" on Courson.
It sounds like she's just a few degrees from stealing Courson's panties and rooting through her trash.
The first, an early-1970 glossy-mag (I think it was Eye) puff-piece on Hollywood boutiques, had a full page with a large Raeanne Rubenstein color photo of a very lovely-looking Pam, red-caftaned and Greek-upsweep-coiffed, in her shop Themis, and one brief accompanying paragraph. Her personal association with Jim was not referred to, not even hinted at; even her correct name wasn't used -- she billed herself for the occasion as 'Pamela Roselily'. Jim did appear in the published photo (as did several other people, one of whom, Tere Tereba, the campy brunette draped over Jim, actually did become a not unsuccessful L.A. clothing designer),
Campy? Did that mean something different in the 60s and 70s?
I think this is the picture they're mentioning.
... campy is not the word that springs to mind.
standing looking up and out of frame with Pam seated on the floor in front of him between two guys, looking into the camera, her head coyly inclined to his dangling hand -- the only intimation that there might be something more than business between them, though Jim's expression seems rather to suggest he is being goosed -- and he was credited in the 'graph as the backer for "his designing friends."
Um, there was more than one picture in that photoshoot. Google "jim morrison themis" and you can basically find ALL of them on the magical Interbutts. I think she mentioned this one because
- Jim looks the least enthusiastic in this, although he doesn't look terribly invested in the whole thing.
- He looks the least "coupley" with Pamela in that one.
Wanna see some other pics?
Yeah, I dunno if the whole shoot was in the magazine, but it seems a bit odd that she mentions a single picture... out of a very large photoshoot with several coupley pictures of them printed there. (And no, I'm not including EVERY picture, just the ones where they look coupley. For the whole shoot, google "jim morrison themis").
Another little snippet on the shop, in Rags magazine that same year, had her, correctly, as 'Pamela Courson', with no mention of Jim whatsoever, but some nice words of praise for the handpainted suede clogs I think it was.
... so she was reading magazines that had nothing to do with rock'n'roll... just in the off chance that they might mention Pam's SHOP? And why would a magazine about clothes mention Jim Morrison?
The third was a piece by the late great rockwriter diva Lillian Roxon -- I remember this one particularly, because I was very upset by it at the time. It appeared in print quite soon after the actual event described -- my emotions were still raw from the event itself, and it was the first time I had ever been commented on in public in association with Jim, however erroneously (plus ça change...) or anonymously. I was indirectly mentioned as "a chick who [Jim] promptly balled on the living room floor", and "next morning, as the hostess and her friends were politely stepping over the naked bodies on the floor," "Jim's old lady" (no name given) showed up to complain "Jim, you always ruin my Christmas" -- a clear reference, however inaccurately reported (Roxon had not been present), to the incident at Diane Gardiner's house in December 1970.
So... what, was she mad because Pam was called "Jim's old lady" and the Lizard Queen was merely referred to as a "chick" that Jim had random unpoetic unromantic sex with? Was she upset because it was inaccurately reported? Was she upset because Pam WASN'T upset, just mildly put out?
I'm a little unclear here.
[Despite her initial ignorance, Lillian -- we were not close friends, but we knew and liked one another, and our relations were never anything but cordial and cheerful -- soon learned who in fact the so-called 'chick' had really been, and told a very dear friend of mine how much she admired me for knowing what I wanted and going after it and holding on to it, and how if she'd known it was me she never would have written about it, because she knew all about Jim and me, "and you know Patricia was right by Jim's side in Miami, she was the only woman he wanted there with him, he really cares about her..."]
... funny, it sure didn't seem that way in KENNEALY'S OWN BOOK, when he practically squirmed to get away from her.
Hell, examine one of the two pictures that shows them in the same frame (she's the woman in glasses). You'd think they were strangers from his expression.
They look anything but coupley, and he doesn't exactly look desperate to have her around.
Also, again, she claims that nobody else knows her and Jim, what the dynamics of her relationship and how it worked except her, and don't you dare pass any kind of judgement on it. Except, of course, if you think she was the bestest thing to ever happen to Morrison. Then even if you're a total stranger, she'll insist you SO TOTALLY UNDERSTAND.
As far as nonspecific Pamferences go, there was a story that mentions a young male groupie hanging out before an L.A. concert who "succeeds in exchanging four words with Morrison ('Hi, how are you?'), gets one back ('Fine'), and talks a while with Morrison's girl." Maybe Pam, maybe not.
Well, if it WAS Pam, then clearly that male groupie had sex with her. Because she was an evil abusing heart-stomping tiny-titted junkie, and they do everything that is evil!
Finally, Richard Goldstein wrote a 1968 piece about Jim for New York magazine, in which he remarks at one point that Jim "picks up his girl" and they all head out for the beach, and she tells him his hat makes him look like a Rembrandt; again, this beach-loving art critic may or may not have been Pam, and no description or further mention is made of her.
Well, CLEARLY it wasn't Pam, because she was stupid and PKM is smart and only smart people know anything about art!
Those are all the ones I know of, though I'm sure there are certainly others just as anonymous, and there may even be some references to her by name in little fanzines of the time.
Which PKM wouldn't know about, because she was a for-reelz-legit journalist and stuff! Sniff sniff!
The obituaries and news stories that appeared in real media on Jim's death, if they mentioned Pam at all -- and by no means all of them did -- described her, correctly, as his companion or his girlfriend, not his wife (that lie came later).
She seems a wee bit obsessed with ANYONE calling Pam Jim's wife. The fact is, most sources refer to her as his girlfriend even today.
The point is, however she may have styled herself in private, Pamela was by no means presented to the public in Jim's own lifetime as even his consort of record, much less as 'Mrs. Morrison' -- and she freely admitted to me, of all people, that in truth she was nothing of the sort.
HA! See? Pam totally told me that they weren't married! That PROVES I was the one who was married to him AND his true love! WORSHIP AT MY FEET, PEONS!
Anyway, by 1969 Jim was no longer being touted as a sex symbol for the age, so keeping Pamela in the background, à la Cynthia Lennon, to 'enhance' his desirability quotient amongst the teenyboppers, as some biographers have claimed Elektra Records insisted, was hardly essential in any case -- if indeed it ever had been.
So basically she's now admitting that yes, this was probably the reason that Pam wasn't a "public" rock concubine in the same way that Marianne Faithfull was (which was a totally different situation, since Faithfull was a pop star in her own right). Why, again, should this make us question her legitimacy? Cynthia Lennon wasn't a "public" rock wife either.
And even if that were the case, Jim himself, if he had felt strongly enough about it, could certainly have insisted she be given proper public validation and to hell with the fiction of him as a glamorous unattached bachelor rocker -- which he conspicuously never did.
... but once again, he never did that for PKM either. There was no public validation, no legal marriage, nothing.
Pam's existence or even her actual presence certainly never kept Jim from being with anyone he wanted to be with, so why even bother to keep her a deep dark secret?
Maybe it was... the insane stalker women who bought random magazines to get dirt on her?
Unless, of course, Jim wanted her kept so to protect her, and to protect their privacy -- gee, how strange, just EXACTLY the way he wanted me kept a deep dark secret to protect me, and ours!
- Or maybe he just didn't publicize his affair with ANY woman, especially since Pam was not famous in her own right.
- He had affairs with lots of other women, but THEY didn't get any more publicity than PKM did. Did he care deeply about protecting ALL of them?!
- And despite PKM's attempts to downplay Pam's significance, the very fact that she had ANY continuous presence in Jim Morrison's life really says a lot. PKM… really didn't have more presence than many of his other less serious girlfriends.
- The only reason it feels like it is because... well, most of them were pretty aware of where they stood in his life compared to Pam.
- PKM doesn't seem to have been.
So then, I guess, since he didn't talk about Pam,
…. except, you know, when he was telling "plenty of other people" about how awful Pam was and how she was ruining his life and shit. And writing letters comparing her to a puddle of vomit. Yeah, he didn't talk to ANYONE about her! Believe it, for PKM tells you so! She's not contradicting herself!
and the public didn't know about her, she must not have been very important to him. That's the logic the detractors use to dismiss me, so in logic and fairness it must be applied to her too -- or to themselves, since Jim never mentioned them to me...
… which makes no sense either. So because Jim Morrison didn't mention people he DIDN'T KNOW to her, they weren't important to him? Uhhh… of course they weren't. HE DIDN'T KNOW THEM.
The truth is that Jim, being a well-brought-up boy, seldom mentioned anyone in his life to anyone else, male or female; that would be gossip, and he didn't do that. And especially he didn't mention women in his life...
Well, I wouldn't know, since I didn't know him. But see above comments about how sometimes she's claiming that he wouldn't talk to anybody about anybody… and sometimes she insists he was whining to "plenty of other people"about what an evil bitch Pamela was. She wants it both ways!
A photographer who knew Jim, and who phoned me in the summer of 1990 to talk about the movie (and whom I warned, in the course of a very friendly and pleasant conversation, about the late Albert Goldman's then-in-progress "bio") remarked at one point that Jim had never told him about me, and when I reacted with instant hurt and defensiveness, said quickly and reassuringly that Jim never even spoke about Pam to him, and this guy had known Pam for years, so he was not surprised that Jim should never have mentioned me.
… uh, it sounds like the dude was just being polite. I mean, maybe he was telling the truth, but it sounds suspiciously like he was trying to salve her ego when she got upset. That's not something you want to use as "proof."
Also, even if he was telling 100% truth, it's not quite the same. I mean, this guy knew Pam and Jim both, so it merely means that Jim didn't talk to him ABOUT Pam and their relationship. But he didn't even tell this guy of PKM's very EXISTENCE. That's quite different!
According to him, Jim just didn't casually verbalize about what, or whom, mattered most to him; he compartmentalized his life, and most especially his emotional life.
Which seems entirely plausible, yes. Except that not only has she contradicted herself on this matter, but this is STILL a guy who was trying to make her feel better.
On the other hand, a poet friend of Jim's, whom I met just a couple of years ago, told me that Jim had indeed spoken of me, to him
You see what I mean about contradictions?! A minute ago she declared that he just didn't talk about his women, and that he considered that sort of thing to be gossip. And now she's announcing that yeah, he totally told some people about her. WHICH IS IT?
-- which makes perfect sense: Jim talked about me to the people who would appreciate his attraction to somebody as smart and literate as he was, and he protected my name from those who wouldn't. But only people who really knew and understood Jim could be expected to know and understand that...
- Yeah, keep preening about how super-smart and literate you are. We haven't heard often enough yet.
- Note the unsubtle implication that a poet is worthy of trust, and a photographer is not.
- And also keep telling us how sniff sniff, only people who REALLY KNEW AND UNDERSTOOD him could possibly know the inner workings of his mind.
- And conveniently, PKM is the only one who does!
So, obsessive fans and bandfollowers knew about Pam, and people in rock circles who cared about such things, and that was pretty much it -- and Pam and I certainly knew about one another.
… yes, rock stars' girlfriends usually clue in eventually about the side girlfriends, and no side girlfriend can fail to know about the main girlfriend.
But we see how much so-called Doors insiders cared about her by how swiftly they distanced themselves from her after Jim's death. The surviving Doors don't seem to have exactly rushed over to make condolence calls on her: I don't know about Robby or John, and would hate to reproach them with behavior they are not guilty of; but unless he was misquoted or I have misread the piece (in which case I apologize to him for my error, which is more than any of them have ever done for me), Ray Manzarek, by his own account in a published interview, didn't even see Pamela after Jim's death -- not until some months later, when they encountered one another by chance in an L.A. restaurant, the first time they had seen each other since Pam's return from Paris, and Pam wept in his arms on seeing him, which Ray goes on to say sure convinced him Jim was really dead. And only months later too.
Again… this is not making Pam look bad. It just makes the Doors look like jerks… and honestly, that isn't a surprise either because ROCK STARS OFTEN ARE. And besides, if he needed convincing that Jim was dead, methinks that he might have been a bit messed up by what happened.
Wow. You really have to wonder about these people, don't you... Were his former bandmates not compassionate enough to pay a sympathy visit to the only person who was with Jim when he died? At the very least -- however they may have personally felt about her -- were they not curious in the slightest to learn the details of their singer's demise from the one person who presumably could have supplied them? They never even SAW her, never phoned her up to ask what had happened? Lord, but that is cold...
I'll give Kennealy credit, this is actually a fairly decent thing to say about Pam. She managed to not add on, "Weren't they interested in exacting revenge on the EVIL SLUTWHOREBITCH WHO KILLED JIM ON PURPOSE…?!"
Admittedly, though Ray had some weird and effusive things to say after her death -- perhaps out of guilt, or defensiveness on Jim's behalf, or misplaced if commendable loyalty to his dead bandfellow --
It really doesn't sound like he disliked her or anything. So I'm not quite sure why he needed a different motivation to be speak well of Pam... aside from, you know, PKM's conviction that no person would like Pam EXCEPT through guilt/defensiveness/loyalty, since she was so worthless.
Honestly, I suspect she's just bitter that Manzarak waxed eloquent about Pam and Jim's relationship, and summed Kennealy up as "She was also a well-known writer. She simply fell in love with Jim. Madly." No other mentions, just that.
even the other Doors don't seem to have been big Pam fans.
She had at one point begged them for several thousand dollars so she could get Jim a headstone (the grave was ill-kept and unmarked for many years; I believe his own parents didn't spring for a decent marker until the movie came out, and for a while I was even desperately considering buying him one myself, just to have something there). The Doors duly ponied up, but to quote John Densmore, "It all went into her arm").
Y'see, this is how you credit comments. You mention the person so people can search for the comment… even though google didn't turn up a single result except for MY OWN PAGE. You do not say "lots of people" or "good friend" or "poet," and just leave it at that, as if that's all it takes.
And a former journalist should KNOW THIS. One of the first things they teach journalists is the proper way to cite, and the results if you don't do it right.
Maybe they felt she was just too smacked-out or whacked out to deal with, perhaps they even shared my own unswerving feeling that she had actively contributed to Jim's death;
Why would they? They weren't in romantic competition for him, as far as I know. They had no motivation to see her in a nasty light. They had no motivation to assume she was a murderer... whereas PKM does.
otherwise their studied avoidance of Pamela is hardly the kind of behavior a woman might reasonably expect from her late alleged "husband" 's good friends and co-workers, people she had known and traveled with for years.
Again, whether she was well-liked or not, this still doesn't reflect badly on her. Courtesy alone would have demanded some display of kindness for someone you didn't HATE.
I truly hope I'm wrong; I hope they all did comfort Pam extensively in whatever grief she might have been feeling
Yeah, that hint that she wasn't grieving isn't bitchy at ALL.
(she was allegedly filmed at a party in L.A. a few weeks after Jim's death, wearing not a scrap of black mourning and merrily drinking champagne on the lawn of the French consulate -- well, perhaps she was really consulting with consular authorities about Jim's grave, and who are we to deny a girl a good time anyway...).
Okay, if she was allegedly filmed… where is the film? Who alleged this? Are there no records? Was NOBODY at the consulate willing to even mention her existence? Or were they all in on this conspiracy?
But, though I'd like to think otherwise, from what I've heard it sounds as if once Jim was gone, most Doors connections couldn't wait to get shut of Pam. Maybe they sent a card...
I'd like to mention that Kennealy, elsewhere on her site, praises Yoko Ono. You know, the woman who inspired instant loathing among John Lennon's bandmates, the Beatles circle, and pretty much all their fans. And since Lennon's death, she's been pretty much ignored by them except when she's an asshole to them. By the same logic, shouldn't she believe that Ono is the spawn of Satan?
Even the few people who did keep in touch had little nice to say. Yet the first few books written about Jim, when they came along, were not only weirdly upbeat about Pam's character
I wouldn't know, since they have probably been rightly forgotten. Honestly, I don't know why she even cares - the "biographies" that come out after a star first dies are disposable pap cribbed from a thousand magazine articles, and nobody really cares what they say. And yes, they are usually very chirpy and upbeat to
- avoid lawsuits.
- avoid angering fans.
The meaty stuff comes later.
(one dupe, misled perhaps by flawed chivalry or retro-testosterone, even claimed she was "Jim's intellectual equal"!!! Yeah, maybe in Bizarro World...)
Please tell me yet again how smart, literate and awesome you are! Also, please inform me of how everyone around Jim was stupid except you! Please, Strong Pagan GoddessWoman! I haven't had it drilled through my skull often enough!
And what the hell is "retro-testosterone," O member of Mensa?
but strangely reticent on the true nature of events in Paris, dutifully maintaining the preposterous heart-attack coverup story foisted on the world,
Yes, because it couldn't be that they regarded the "heart attack" theory as being, you know, FACTUAL. No, they were complicit in the vast conspiracy to make Pam look good! The publishing houses were clearly in on the conspiracy!
And you gotta love that despite his well-documented substance abuse problems, she insists that there is NO possibility that he could have had a heart attack due to... I dunno, drugs? Booze? A combo of both?
and silent as the, uh, grave on Pam's involvement in Jim's death and her subsequent brilliant career as junkie hooker, which lasted until her own 1974 smack-out -- possibly because they needed to toe the Courson party line to get permission to use lyrics and poems, possibly because they had no real sources and had done no research and were just big old lazy ignorant stupids, incestuously quoting one another like inbreeding parrots (you find the same exact factual errors in all the books; too bad I in my quest for accuracy ever bothered to point some out to the guilty...it would be fun for them to look as publicly ignorant as they, in fact, are).
Again… LAWSUITS. PKM was allowed to say this stuff because, well, you get to say what you want on the Internet, and Pamela Courson was safely dead once she did so.
And again, she does not have proof of Pam's involvement in his death. It is all SPECULATION. Her "proof" is basically that people were afraid the police MIGHT have suspected her… which is undermined by the fact they DIDN'T. So why exactly should these people just ASSUME that she was involved in his death and write nonfiction based on ONE WOMAN'S SPECULATION?! A woman who wasn't even THERE until several days later?!
But by so doing they set up the Pam&Jim myth that some people take as fact even unto this day...
It's because of the evil meddling idiocy of those stupid stupid writers with their quickie throwaway biographies! It couldn't possibly be that two people who were in a close if not exclusive relationship for most of their adult lives could have been serious about each other!
Then, when Strange Days came out, and all this became blatantly public, because I owed none of them except Jim a fucking thing and could tell the truth to shame them all -- and did --
I'm starting to suspect that there's a simple reason why she despises these first few books, and is lambasting the authors without actually revealing who they are: she was actually interviewed for one of the first books of this type, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which was published more than a decade before Kennealy's book came out.
And like the Rock Wives interview, it paints a very different portrait of Jim Morrison than Strange Days did. Not quite as different, since it doesn't have her being frank about how seriously he took their handfasting or his plans to "return" or not. Not only does it have Kennealy openly admitting that Morrison was a drunken asshole at times, but it has Kennealy stating that when she met Pam alone, there was no ill feeling, no antagonism. Not a quote, but taken from her account. Very different from her own book.
But the most unforgivable thing about it is that SHE WAS ACTUALLY INTERVIEWED for this book. Yes, she actually sat down with Jerry Hopkins and recounted everything, years before Strange Days. For a book that refers to Pamela as his number one girl (page 83), and acknowledges her as the main and most important relationship he had (with Kennealy as second).
And as I've mentioned before, my favorite Morrison book Break On Through came a year before hers. It also credited her with interviewed material. In it, she is referred to as an important figure in his life and says that she fascinated him. But it also refers to Pamela as his longtime girlfriend and their relationship as the predominant relationship of [his] life, says that their romance was a tumultuous blend of tenderness and uncontrolled passion right from the beginning and this fire and ice quality lasted right to the end. It also refers to her as his sexual and intellectual equal, and says she was sweet.
Now history has been rewritten.
Now Kennealy regards herself as the true love of Morrison's life, Pamela as the evil whore who murdered him (again, contradicting her prior claims), and thus all these authors who regard the Pamela/Jim relationship are in on the vast conspiracy. But… she can't slag them off directly, because if she mentioned Riordan or Hopkins directly, people might note that she actually was interviewed for these books.
suddenly they were all Pamela's best friend, her loyal advocate, taking revenge on me for outing them and their perfidy against Jim by painting Pam in bright sunny hues and me as an agent of the dark side.
Um…. no, no they didn't. Hopkins wrote another book that was basically No One Here Gets Out Alive lite, which was equally courteous towards Kennealy. The despised Patricia Butler was also quite courteous. Manzarek mentioned her but rather dismissively. The other Doors didn't really seem to notice her. Linda Ashcroft's book was pure fiction.
Even if their books glorified Pamela (which they didn't usually), they didn't "take revenge" or depict her badly.
The most negative depiction of her was in Stephen Davis' book, which came out long after Kennealy's website was defunct. Now, Davis is a douchebag, but he has some decent points about her story, including that it has yet to be confirmed by reliable, independent sources. Which is, you know, TRUE. Among other things, he points out the disparities between her account of Jim's moods, habits and sexual abilities.
Patricia Kennely later changed the spelling of her name to Kennealy, and retold and elongated her story in her 1993 memoir Strange Days, which described in uncanny detail an alternative Jim Morrison that no one else who knew him was able to recognize. Her tone throughout the book is angry, venomous, secretive, and defensive. But she hedged about some of her bizarre claims by writing that she might have hallucinated the whole thing. She also wrote that she was high on marijuana, cocaine, and tranquilizers during the period in question. After she left music journalism, she wrote mythic romance fantasies for a living.
Not everyone believes Patricia Kennealy's claims. She hasn't yet produced any of the letters she says Jim wrote to her. Former Elektra employees who knew and worked with both Jim and Kennealy can only vouch for her being at certain places at certain times, and for her claiming she was pregnant by him. Over the years, Patricia Kennealy cleverly inserted herself into Jim Morrison's saga via the media, first in No One Here Gets Out Alive, and then in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie The Doors. Kennealy even appeared in the movie as one of the priestesses at her alleged witch wedding to Jim. (She later further changed her name to Patricia Kennealy- Morrison.)
Girlfriend pregnancy and abortions were an everyday thing with Jim, whose lawyer now had multiple paternity suits to deal with. But an occult wedding was something else. Whether this, or indeed any of Kennealy's claims regarding Jim Morrison, can ever be reliably corroborated will determine if her vivid stories will survive as history, or just as a romantic subfable of the legend.
- Stephen Davis, Jim Morrison: Life Death Legend, page 367
Now, I do think it's a little unfair to refer to her "inserting herself" into Morrison's "saga," but otherwise he has good points, including that her claims don't line up with anyone else's, that she comes across as angry and defensive, and that she hasn't yet proved any of her claims such as the endless letters and poems she says he sent her.
And yes, this is the nastiest account I've seen in a Morrison biography. Granted there are a few I haven't yet read, but they are the personal biographies, so they probably won't have any stuff on Kennealy.