A new three-part documentary about late The Doors star Jim Morrison delves into an eyebrow-raising fan theory that the singer faked his own death.
Before The End, put together by Doors superfan Jeff Finn, was released this week on Apple TV+ and other streaming platforms.
Morrison died suddenly in Paris in 1971, aged 27, from heart failure. The mysterious circumstances surrounding his death served to fuel his legend and, more than 50 years later, his grave at Père-Lachaise cemetery remains one of the city’s most popular tourist sites.
One of the key points of self-proclaimed “evidence” in Finn’s documentary is a maintenance man, Frank, apparently pictured with The Doors drummer John Densmore back in 2013, whom Finn believes could be Morrison in disguise.
Frank is interviewed by Finn and, according to the Daily Mail, professes a love of the poet Baudelaire, whom Morrison also loved.
Asked directly: “Are you Jim Morrison,” he responded: “I’m not Jim… except I love the song [‘We All Are One’] by Jimmy Cliff.” Quoting the lyrics, “We all are one, we are the same person,” Frank added: “That’s one way to look at it.”
Finn acknowledges at the beginning of the documentary that the man he suspects to be Morrison is, in all likelihood, another Morrison superfan who shares a resemblance with his idol.
Morrison’s body was discovered in a bathtub at his Paris apartment by his long-term girlfriend, Pamela Courson, with whom he lived.
Courson was addicted to heroin, something Morrison initially despised, with his friend Alan Ronay recalling how she would often take the drug with friends at their apartment, while he and Morrison would retreat into a corner.
In a piece for The Independent, Sean Smith wrote how Morrison seemed in poor health on his final day, and at one point became “incapacitated” by a fit of hiccups that would not abate. He refused Ronay’s offer to take him to the hospital.
The following morning, on 3 July 1971, Ronay received a phone call from Courson, in hysterics, telling him that Morrison wasn’t breathing.
Answering a call from Ronay for urgent medical medical assistance, a fireman named Alain Raisson arrived at the fourth-floor apartment in the Marais quarter to find Courson weeping over Morrison’s body in the bathtub.
Confusion surrounding the exact details of Morrison’s death has been attributed to Courson’s inconsistent accounts to friends, family members and the police, which writer Sean Smith said was “understandable” due to her status as a “penniless foreign national and drug addict stranded in Paris… her involvement in a drug-related death would have had disastrous criminal implications”.
“In those days we didn’t have rehabs or any of that stuff,” guitarist Robby Krieger told The Independent in 2021. “We tried to make Jim stop drinking and stuff a couple of times but it never worked and we were hoping that when he went to Paris that would be a whole different vibe and maybe he would clean himself up – that’s what he said – but that’s pretty tough to do on your own [and] unfortunately the opposite happened.
“Had Jim come back from Paris then I’m sure we would’ve been playing again but we’ll never know.”
In 2014, late singer Marianne Faithfull said that her then-boyfriend, heroin dealer Jean de Breteuil, was responsible for Morrison’s death, claiming that he had given the singer the drugs that killed him.
“He went to see Jim Morrison and killed him,” she told Mojo. “I mean, I’m sure it was an accident. Poor bastard. The smack was too strong? Yeah. And he died. And I didn’t know anything about this.”
She claimed that she could have accompanied De Breteuil on his visit to Morrison but chose not to because she could “intuitively feel trouble”.
Faithfull died on 30 January, aged 78.
