When people are in dysfunctional relationships fueled by addiction to alcohol and drugs, they do things like that all the time. I think that ultimately, to Jim, Pamela was familiar and "safe".
... or, if you go by Occam's razor, maybe he actually loved her.
That seems to be the one idea that Kennealy can never entertain: the idea that Morrison may have actually had real, genuine love for Pamela Courson. She'll suggest just about any other reason for Morrison to have stayed with Courson EXCEPT that.
This is despite pretty much everybody in Jim's life acknowledging, "Yeah, he loved her, and she loved him," including Ray Manzarek waxing poetic about her involvement with Jim in his autobiography. And there's the added bonus that Pamela got together with Jim long before he became famous, unlike almost every other woman he got involved with - INCLUDING KENNEALY. There's a special quality to relationships like that, because no matter what, the famous person knows that there is something there that existed BEFORE fame, glamour and money.
She was bad for him, she was nuts, she was abusive and addicted,
Again, none of these things show up in her autobiography except for "addicted." In that book, Pam comes across as a rather sweet if not-too-bright person, which seems to grind Kennealy's gears even more.
Also, I have shocking news for Kennealy, but Jim had addictions as well. Why were Pamela's worse?
There's a bizarre kind of attraction to that sort of "safety". It's sick and dangerous, but even the best of us can be seduced by badness, by someone you know perfectly well is bad for you, and familiarity is a very powerful point of persuasion.
Again... this is the ONLY reason she can come up with for why Jim Morrison would stay with Pamela Courson: battered wife syndrome. There's just 0% chance that he actually loved the woman in a real, deep way.
Also, she was even more fucked up than he was, and that made him feel better --
Again, I see no evidence of that in her actual book. And since she mines pretty much every encounter for material, that is saying something.
Yes, Pamela Courson was addicted to heroin. No denying that. But Jim Morrison was addicted to alcohol and he took some other drugs. And just to be nitpicky, I think you're more fucked up when you keep misbehaving onstage in addition to all that.
He saw me, I think, as somebody smarter and better for him, and he knew that if he failed with me it would be his fault, he would not be able to escape blame.
Yes, the reason he stayed with Pamela was just because PKM was just TOO WONDERFUL AND GLORIOUS for him, while Pamela was gutter slime scraped off the carcass of mediocrity and he automatically looked awesome next to her. It's the ONLY possible answer!
That things wound up so ruinous with Pam was something that he could partly put off on her
Wound up so ruinous? Um, how? They undoubtedly seemed ruinous from PKM's perspective, but she hasn't actually mentioned anything disastrous that happened in their relationship.
Don't EVER dismiss or underestimate the incredible power of this kind of thing.
If you do, This Kind Of Thing will break into your house and beat you up!
it's still staggeringly difficult for people to break away from addictions, and from the relationships founded on enabling and codependency: 25 years ago it was just about impossible.
Again, HOW THE HELL WOULD SHE KNOW what their relationship is based on? I'm sorry, but this woman has lectured us on not presuming to know anything about HER relationship with Jim Morrison, but she claims to know every last aspect of his and Pamela's relationship.
According to her, the people who were actually WATCHING as Morrison fell in love with Pamela were totally wrong, and spent months with them as they fell in love. No, the woman who didn't even know either of them back then knows EXACTLY why they got and stayed together.
People make so much of the fact that Jim always went back to Pamela, which of course to some extent he always did
Like, they make SUCH a big deal of the fact that he always went back to her and left his other lovers behind. Why do people keep HARPING on that?!
(though, as Jim himself writes in his last letter to me from Paris, "I went back to Pam like a dog going back to its own vomit"; you'll see the whole letter in Fireheart).
No we won't, because it's been several years, and PKM has not published jackshit. So I'm going to assume that that letter is nonexistent.
Poor man looks SO miserable.
But do they ever ask themselves WHY he always went back to her -- she who was strung out more often than not, who had never held a job or functioned to support herself in the real world, who screamed at him and slept around and all the rest of it?
- Well, unlike PKM, I do not presume to know about the daily life of a woman I have never really known.
- Seriously, how often did she even meet Pamela?!
- Here's another fun thing: Jim Morrison got drunk a lot, used drugs, and he never held a job or functioned to support himself in the real world (since he was sleeping on a rooftop when the Doors started). He also slept around. A lot.
- So why is Pamela depicted as a mass of negatives when he wasn't that different?
He certainly loved her and cared about her, and I've never denied or dismissed that:
... only every single time the topic comes up.
He had a history with her, and that's impossible to escape -- none of us ever escape the history we have with people in our lives.
True, but we rarely date those people for the remainder of our lives. We tend to only do that with people we love.
Certainly he felt guilty about leaving her, about outgrowing her (as she herself admitted to me on more than one occasion), and felt somehow responsible for her, to take care of her.
I'm starting to feel like a looped audio clip, constantly repeating that HELLO, we have only her word that he planned to leave Pamela Courson.
This isn't like the slow decline of Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull's romance as she fell into heroin addiction, or the splintering of Bebe Buell's relationship with Todd Rundgren after she got pregnant with Steven Tyler's baby, or the rapid explosion of Brian Jones' relationship with Anita Pallenberg after he beat her to a pulp for refusing to have a drug-fueled foursome with two Middle-Eastern whores and she fled Morocco with Keith Richards.
...
... you know, I just realized that the rock world in general is kind of like a soap opera. A big, awesome, violent, drug-addled soap with better clothes and music.
His less evolved side, perhaps in a pattern begun in childhood, enjoyed big dramatic scenes, and she could always be counted on to supply one. (In those days, I cheerfully admit, I was not averse to a scene or two myself -- I was young, it was the 60's, I could get into a scene with the best of them -- but I did not go out of my way to provoke such disagreeable and painful events, and I certainly did not regard them as a favorite indoor sport, the way Pamela seemed to...)
So in other words, the two of them enjoyed drama and big over-the-top scenes... and for some reason, Kennealy has a problem with this. And yet, for some reason, their shared interest is supposed to be a sign of how INcompatible Jim and Pamela were. I'm confused.
But, in a sense, with Pam Jim was like a battered wife;
Except for the abuse part, and the woman part, and the wife part.
we hear all these stories about how battered women go back constantly and consistently to the very men who so terribly abuse them, and we never understand why they do it. Well, they do it because, in a weird sick kind of way, they actually feel safer doing that than braving the unknown. The unknown is very, very scary, and in the face of fear even abuse can feel like a friend...
That is a TERRIBLE comparison, because it leaves two of the major reasons battered women go back out of the equation: money and power. Battered women often are brainwashed into thinking that they can't survive on their own, and develop a feeling of dependence on the abuser. Also, they are often afraid of the abuser.
Jim Morrison had none of those. He had the money. He had the power. It has NOTHING to do with battered wives.
And you notice how that naturally pans out? Poor Jim kept going back to Pamela because she was an evil vile puppy-kicking flower-crushing soul-tainting abusive bitchybutt, so of course his relationship with Patricia would have been perfection!
And they go back too because they can thereby displace the blame for their own failure onto the batterer.
That is a disgusting thing to say. And the worst part is, I don't think she was TRYING to be,
They know it's horrible, they don't like it for a minute, but at least it's familiar: They know how to deal with it, even if they deal with it in a totally doormat, abasing, unselfesteeming way. It's familiar, they've done it before, they can do it again; it gives them a sense of control, even though in reality they know they have no control whatsoever, either over the other person or over the relationship or indeed over themselves.
Again, PKM spent maybe two weeks with Jim Morrison, an unknown amount of time corresponding with him, and almost no time with Pamela. She has no experience as a therapist or psychologist. And yet she thinks she actually is in a position to judge not only their relationship, but Jim Morrison's psychological profile, mental state, and social skills.
Well, since apparently she can accurately pin down someone's entire relationship and mental state from minimal contact, I'll just do it too.
Judging from her book and her website ramblings, I think that when she was young, PKM didn't feel very pretty compared to the hippie chicks like Pamela. But she was intelligent, and I think she pinned a lot of her self-confidence on being attractive through her brain as well as her body. So when she met Jim Morrison and developed a crush on him, she thought that a man as smart, literate and gorgeous as he was was her soulmate. She thought it was destiny, especially when he developed an interest in her.
And at first, it probably seemed like a dream come true - he probably said he was sick of Pamela or something, and he went through a handfasting ritual with her. But then her dream started falling apart. Not only did he show total disinterest in having any kind of binding tie to her (a baby, a legal marriage), but he stayed on the West Coast with Pam, doing the same ol' same ol' stuff. Then he left for Paris with Pam, lived there for awhile, and died unexpectedly. Now she could never have the "fate" that she believed was hers, a happily-ever-after with Morrison. As far as Kennealy was concerned, Pam had ruined her destiny to be with him (since obviously her soulmate could never have done that himself).
So ever since then, she's devoted herself to MAKING her destiny come true in retrospect. Her entire life revolves around making people believe in her version of reality, which reaffirms everything about her self-worth. It's very sad.
This is such a typical story; people in recovery say they hear it all the time.
Right after the story of the Poky Little Puppy.
I don't mean to suggest for a minute, because I don't know, that Pamela abused Jim physically, though I have heard and read that she did (I myself once slapped his face, one slap, for very good cause); but as an emotional batterer she was right up there with the gold medalists...
Again, HOW DOES SHE KNOW THIS? She met Pamela for maybe an hour in her autobiography, and the worst thing Pamela did was be mildly insensitive (due to being on drugs, not intentionally) about Kennealy's abortion. I can't believe that if she had seen any evidence of Pamela being a "gold medalist" emotional batterer, she wouldn't have laid it out in loving detail to justify her own story.
This is another running thing in Kennealy's diatribes: she attributes every nasty, vile, cruel attribute to Pamela Courson without backing it up with any kind of anecdotal evidence. I think she expects us to just automatically BELIEVE her because she met Courson a few times, had sex with Jim Morrison and sorta kinda ran in intersecting circles with them.
But again: Pamela is generally a sweet, pleasant person in her book.
And this is what their relationship was down to, at least by the time I met him. I think when Jim met me he knew very well what I was and what I did for him, and what he needed me to do for him;
Just a tip: Kennealy claims, in her book, to have been the only person in Jim Morrison's entire family and vast circle of friends, plus Pamela, who never betrayed him in life and that he was so traumatized that he was surprised when she said "I love you."
I am serious. She actually claims this.
You see what I mean about her Morrison being more of a rock'n'roll Gary Stu?
and, because he was mostly smart, he knew that this was something, and someone, he really, really wanted. But because of that very wanting and knowing, he was also very afraid; he knew that if he blew it with me there would be only himself to blame, he would have no convenient excuses with me as he did with Pamela.
Again, he was afraid of a relationship with Kennealy because she was so utterly perfect, brilliant, awesome and ball-bustingly tough in a perfectly perfect way of perfection. She was just TOO GOOD for him, not like Pamela.
I could not make up egotism like this, people.
And it's bullshit too. For instance:
"... he was just one of those people who changed his mind a lot." muses Patricia. "You never knew where you were. There was no consistency, but inconsistency."
"He could be the unadulterated creep, the pig man of L.A. He could be incredibly cruel. I don't know how he made me happy."
"As soon as a relationship got trying, he would get crazy and run away from it. I used to think, when things got really hairy, `Well, doesn't he want to keep me?' Apparently not, if it means work."
"I think he was losing all sense of judgment at this point [SK: when he left for Paris]. Our relationship had gotten so weird with all this other stuff."
If Jim were alive today, would Patricia put up with all the stuff that Jim used to pull on her? "Never in a million years!" she answers vehemently. "No way. This wasn't any kind of liberating relationship! He called all the shots. And the worst part of being with him was that I never knew whether I was going to see him again. I never asked him, `When am I going to see you again?' I was afraid to hear what he might say."
- Victoria Balfour, Rock Wives: The Hard Lives and Good Times of the Wives, Girlfriends, and Groupies of Rock and Roll
The fact nonetheless remains that Jim was unquestionably moving toward this when he died.
LEARN WHAT A FACT IS. It MIGHT be considered a fact if he bought a house in New York, told fifty people he was dumping Courson for Kennealy and bought tickets for the following week. Even then, it's only EVIDENCE.
But what PKM is talking about is her PERSONAL OPINION. It's not a fact, and it's definitely not "unquestionable." There are lots of questions, especially if you read her own words (see above) or alternate takes on the same time period.
People forget that he was only twenty-seven; nothing in his life was cast in stone, yet they persist in thinking that the way he was then was the way he would still be if he had lived.
Are you kidding? For a rock star, that is pretty damn far along - or at least, it is for the bad boy, tormented artists of the world. I ain't talking about the Keefs of the world (who, despite his longtime drug addiction, is a relatively sedate person in private life), but the Brian Joneses - wild, crazy, unpredictable and artistically out-there.
Here's the thing about people like Morrison: they burn out. It's sad, but true. There are just some people in our world who don't have the mindset to live a long, happy domesticated life, especially if they're boundary-smashing artists given lots of money, fame and a vast devoted audience. They flame out. They burn up. Call it a sacrifice of kings for the sake of the people or a guy who simply was too volatile and brilliant to survive, but one way or another, THEY AIN'T DESTINED FOR A LONG LIFE.
Often by the age of 27, such people have blasted their body and soul to the point where they just have nowhere left to go and no strength left. Even if the soul or body is still strong, the other often gives out.
For a person like that, 27 years old is a pretty old age, which is why so many of them die at that age. They burn through a whole lifetime in a decade or so, and then they just slip away. These are not people who are going to make it to age 50 and be baking muffins for the grandkiddies while they write poetry in their country house. It's just wishful thinking to believe that.
TL:DR version: Awe-inspiring genius + vast resources to live a wild life = wearing out body and soul until something kills you.
He had by no means made any final life choices in either the career or the mate departments, and when he died he was very much in the process of changing them both bigtime. He had already effectively left the Doors; now he was leaving Pamela too.
Yes, he might have been leaving the Doors, or at least putting them aside for awhile (I doubt that after the success of their final album, the record label would just have let him go without a fight). Certainly the other members of the band didn't think so, and honestly I'm more inclined to believe them than the woman who wasn't even part of their circle, and spent only a few days with Morrison before his departure for Paris.
But fer cryin' out loud, what does ANYTHING he did in this period indicate about leaving Pamela?! That whole "moving to Paris with her" was a sign that he was leaving her? Uh, Kennealy needs to find out how breakups work.
Everybody says oh yeah, Jim went to Paris to change his life; well, duh! By still being with Pam he wasn't really changing it, was he; it was just more of the same old addiction and abuse, only in France instead of L.A. He still had not succeeded in freeing himself from the death-spiral of destructiveness and self-destructiveness to which Pam contributed so finally and fatally.
- ... wait, just a line ago PKM claimed that he was leaving Pamela, and earlier claimed he was "unquestionably" moving towards a relationship with PKM. And now she's saying that he was sticking with Pam and the same ol' same ol'.
- So... WHICH IS IT? Can't this woman keep her story straight for more than a few minutes?!
- "Changing one's life" involves more than dating a new person. Morrison was (by various accounts) losing weight, trying to wean himself off his drugs, and trying out new artistic avenues that were less masses-friendly than rock'n'roll.
- He was allegedly seeking a "artist expatriate" lifestyle comparable to many of the greats who found sanctuary in a distant ancient city like Paris. You know, like Sargent, Durrell, Wharton, etc (yes, PKM, you're not the only one who reads).
- Also, remember that line about self-destructiveness. It will be relevant later.
You don't have to take my word for this; plenty of other people, in the spring of 1971, were hearing the same thing from him, independently.
Yes, I do have to take your word for it, because your "plenty of other people" are not cited, named or even hinted at. So how am I supposed to take THEIR word for it? I don't know who they are!
Also, recall that in a previous rant, PKM insisted that Jim rarely, if ever, spoke about his women. Now she's asserting that he was nattering about Pam to anyone who would listen.
The fact that once he got to Paris he found it much harder to extricate himself than he had thought is completely typical of codependency; and I was not surprised that it was taking longer than he and I had both expected for him to end it with Pamela and join me in New York.
I'm sorry, but does ANYONE seriously think that Jim Morrison - who lived most of his life in California and was inextricably bound with it - was magically going to become a New Yawker just because one of his semi-serious girlfriends lived there?!
Don't forget, Jim was trying to kick that whole lifestyle all at once, and all alone -- we know now how utterly doomed and hopeless such attempts are -- and at the same time desperately trying to maintain something with me that he knew would be there for him once he had won his freedom. I think his realization of his own inability to break away was what was making him so despondent, as others report and as his letters to me show, and his despondency, in a vicious circle, made him all the more unable to break away.
- Again, believing in Kennealy's accounts depends ENTIRELY on taking her word for stuff that is not particularly believable.
- We're supposed to believe that Pam was a horrible, wretched, abusive spider-woman who was entrapping poor wittle sensitive Jim in her web of Evil...
- ... despite nothing in Kennealy's own experience OR ANYONE ELSE'S supporting this claim (see Ray Manzarek's autobiography).
- And we're also supposed to believe in the letters Kennealy claims to have from Morrison, despite NO ONE ELSE having seen these letters.
But I am absolutely convinced that he would have done so in the end, and come to me. What would have transpired after that is something we shall never now know.
We'll never know ANYTHING he would have done. So how come she is "absolutely convinced" that Jim would have come scuttling back to her and lived happily ever after in New Yawk?
Yeah, sure, Jim died with Pam; but only because she killed him -- and not just by providing the heroin that took him out. In some ways, I think she killed him long before that July morning in Paris...
Of course you do. I mean, your whole identity is wrapped up in being the bride, soulmate and only REAL love of Jim Morrison. Therefore the woman who got together with him BEFORE his fame, stayed with him for the rest of his life and by all accounts passionately loved and was loved by him must be vilified.
And I'm not just saying this because of Kennealy's rants about Pamela, but by the fact that she completely dismisses ANY and ALL biographical information that merely acknowledges Courson as his main girlfriend, and doesn't call HER (PKM) his wife. Her blog is called Mrs. Morrison's Hotel. Her identity is basically all about validating herself via Jim Morrison.
And this is not something she's ALWAYS done - she was willing to offer her viewpoints and experiences to Jerry Hopkins in the 80s, in a book that acknowledges that Pamela was his number one girl. For some reason, after the Doors movie, she suddenly went off the deep end and became fanatical about being seen as Morrison's ONLY true love, and in trashing Pamela. She won't tolerate any differing viewpoints, and slathers crap all over the people who disagree.
People tax me with wanting them to count only the bad in Jim and Pam's relationship, and only the good in Jim and mine -- that simply is not so.
Actually, it is. The fact that it visibly pains her to say ANYTHING even remotely good about Pam, and that she won't say anything genuinely positive about their relationship, just shows this.
At the same time, she claims that she and Jim are astrally bound in the perfect marriage, and that he was panting to return to her because she was so perfectly good for him.
In fact, it's SO not so -- In fact, it's exactly the opposite: IT'S EXACTLY WHAT PEOPLE ARE DOING WITH ME AND JIM, AND HAVE BEEN DOING FOR 25 YEARS.
No, mostly people have been ignoring her for most of that time. Yes, there has been some acknowledgement of her admittedly interesting role in Morrison's life. But no author/expert except her believes that she was more significant - or even AS significant - as Pamela.
I think that the lack of acknowledgement is what really pisses her off. I mean, look at Ray Manzarek - he practically writes poetry about Pamela and her relationship with Jim, but he sums up PKM in two lines. He seems more perplexed by her than hostile.
For whatever reasons, they see only the sunny side of Jim and Pam, and only (what they perceive as) the dark side of Jim and me. Pamela and Jim: good; Patricia and Jim: bad.
No, actually there has been plenty of acknowledgement of the downsides of Jim and Pam's relationship, and most biographical sources are actually quite nice about Kennealy.
THIS is the balance I am trying to redress, and I do not believe I am at fault for wanting to do so, and I will never cease trying to do so, and I will use as my weapons all the anger and all the pain it causes me.
Yeah, except anger and pain make TERRIBLE ways of getting people to agree with you.
Because -- and again I feel, rightly or wrongly, that people are still willfully misunderstanding, whether it is out of agendas of their own, or else because I am failing abysmally at choosing the right words to give them --
Yes, people have those secret evil agendas against PKM because... uh.... because... give her a minute, and she'll come up with some reason.
I want BOTH relationships to be seen in their entirety.
"I just want everyone to see that Pamela was an evil murdering leeching whorebag whom Jim didn't really love because she was evil and stupid, and that I was his one true shining brilliant saint of a lover who farts doves and sparkles! Is that SO much to ask?!"
Indeed, that is all I have ever wanted: for me to get the credit for the good stuff that I absolutely do deserve and that I have so conspicuously never gotten,
For WHAT?
Seriously, what has she done? Did she inspire songs? Poems? Did she bolster Morrison up during a bad time in his life? Did she secretly cowrite all his songs? Did she donate a kidney to him? WHAT?
and for Pamela to be acknowledged for the bad stuff she absolutely espoused and did, and has so conspicuously gotten away with.
She hasn't "gotten away" with anything, lady. She simply didn't come across that bad once everything was weighed.
What Kennealy means is that she wants people to acknowledge her as Morrison's only wedded wife, and Pamela as an addictive leech who murdered him. And since nobody else is going to acknowledge that, she's pissed.
Right now, still, it continues to remain almost entirely the other way round.
Or, even worse, you're being ignored.
I'm sorry that some people for some reason seem to view my anger as inappropriate; but it is how I feel. And I am allowed to feel it.
And no, I'm not sorry at all, actually...
Well, you're allowed to feel it. Just don't expect other people to sympathize or agree merely because you do feel it.
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