The New Yorker:

The singer died in 1971. A new documentary series posits that he faked his death to escape the burden of fame, and is living in hiding.

By Naomi Fry

There’s something that has always struck me as undeniably teen-age about loving the Doors, and particularly its lead singer, Jim Morrison. The rock group, which was active for only eight years, from 1965 until two years after Morrison’s death, at twenty-seven, in 1971, offers an irresistible proposition to the excitable pubescent mind: flagrantly poetic lyrics chock-full of copulation and death and madness, scored by the haunting sounds of an organ, and sung by a black-leather-clad bad-boy crooner who was “so cute that no woman was safe,” as the essayist Eve Babitz once wrote. When I began listening to the Doors as a fourteen-year-old, it felt both important and erotic, as if I were taking my first steps into a new and dangerous adult world. This was music meant to arouse wonder and yearning. Put another way—and I swear I don’t mean this negatively—this was music for virgins who had just found out about sex.

In “Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison,” a new three-part documentary now streaming on Apple TV+, the director Jeff Finn recalls hearing the Doors as a young child and thinking that the eerie sounds were “Halloween music.” But he pegs the beginning of his real obsession with the band and its lead singer to his teen years. “I was hooked,” he says. The group’s music and imagery spoke to him, but so did the tale of Morrison’s short, tumultuous life and, especially, his death, which has always been shrouded in some mystery. In the spring of 1971, the singer decided to take a break from the Doors to pursue his poetry—which he published under his full name, the more self-consciously grownup “James Douglas Morrison”—and decamped to Paris with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson. Only four months later, in the early-morning hours of July 3rd, Courson discovered his body in the bathtub of their Marais apartment, and the singer was buried a couple of days later at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Morrison’s death certificate stated that he had experienced heart failure, but Finn had questions. Why was no autopsy performed? Who was “Dr. Max Vassille,” the man who allegedly signed the certificate, and why couldn’t he be found after the fact? Why was Morrison’s coffin sealed? Why was his American passport never recovered? And what about the singer’s purported desire, commented on by more than one friend, to fake his own death and shed his burdensome rock-star persona? The story of Morrison’s end, Finn tells us sonorously, is “a cold-case mystery” that “raises the question of collusion.”

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