Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend

Jim didn’t take [his girlfriend] Pamela to screenwriter Gavin Lambert’s big party for Andy Warhol in Santa Monica Canyon. It was a Young Hollywood crowd, with oddball musician Tiny Tim performing for movie stars Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and Tuesday Weld.…Jim met director Roman Polanski and his stoned starlet wife, Sharon Tate. Janis Joplin — the hot, gravel-voiced singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company — was there too, dressed in handmade crushed velvet clothes and peacock feathers, holding her trademark bottle of Southern Comfort.

Jim sat down next to Janis and threw his arm around her. He was drinking Scotch. Jim asked Janis about herself, and she blurted a few phrases about her troubled high school years in Texas, where she had been mocked and shunned because her family wasn’t well off. After an hour, and after many more drinks and some pills, just as Janis was laughing a little too raucously at something Jim had said, he grabbed her by her hair and suddenly forced her face down into his crotch.

It was an awful moment. People near them backed off. Furious at this humiliation, Janis hit Jim in the face and walked away, calling him an asshole over her shoulder.

“I know I’m an asshole,” he said to her back.

Later, as she was leaving, an even drunker Jim stopped her car in the driveway and tried to speak to her. Witnesses said she rolled down her window and, when Jim bent down to apologize, she smashed her Southern Comfort bottle over his head before driving off, cursing him.

Excerpted from Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend, by Stephen Davis, © 2004. Reprinted with permission from Gotham Books.