The Sexuality of the Lizard King: Jim Morrison

The Lizard King.

The King of Orgasmic Rock.

Jim Morrison.

The Doors.

When it comes to rock ‘n’ roll and sexuality, no one projected it like doomed rock ‘n’ roller Jim Morrison. Today, more than 40 years after his untimely death in Paris, France, the legacy of Jim Morrison—the image—is still as powerful and revered as it was during his brief heyday in the spotlight.

Jim Morrison lived life on the edge, challenging conformity. He was the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll wild man, who was also able to back it up with talent. At a time when the feel-good songs of the Sixties were ruling the airwaves—possibly with the exception of some of The Rolling Stones darker themes—Jim Morrison and the Doors gave the world a darker, more thoughtful rock song, Jim combining his love of poetry and vast intellect in all he did. Some have dismissed him as a hack, yet millions choose to believe differently, and more than 40 years after his death, he is still relevant.

What other rock star has ever been threatened with eviction from his very own grave? Yes, in 2001, with the lease up on his grave in Paris’s Pere Lachaise cemetery, officials at the facility wanted the rock star gone. Morrison’s grave, found amongst the resting places of such noted icons as Balzac, Moliere and Proust, is a daily destination place for fans, who decorate it with graffiti, a happening that hasn’t ceased, even to this day.

Why?

The mystique of Morrison.

The artistry of Morrison.

Or, the simple fact that Jim Morrison is sex itself.

 

Mr. Mojo Risin’

“Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies,” said Jim Morrison, who himself, lived a life trying not to be crippled by lies.

Morrison didn’t want to live with boundaries. As he stated, “I am the lizard king. I can do anything.”

In 1965, while attending UCLA’s film school—sharing a classroom with Francis Ford Coppola—a slightly chubby Jim Morrison, high on acid, confessed to fellow classmate, Ray Manzarek that he could hear an entire concert playing in his head. This concert comprised most of what would become The Door’s first two albums.

With this meeting between Jim and Ray, The Doors were formed, and Morrison was given a platform to be Jim—a rebel, looking to challenge authority, a celebrity who didn’t want to lead, but encouraged others to set themselves free from the mental prisons they locked themelves in.

 

The beginning of ‘The End’

The Doors first album in 1967 should have been a clue to this. From Break On Through, Light My Fire and Backdoor Man, Jim sang sex, but nowhere did he challenge his audience more than in the album’s epic closer The End.

 

“He went into the room where his sister lived,

And then he paid a visit to his brother

And then he, walked on down the hall

He came to a door

And he looked inside

“Father?”

“Yes, son?”

“I want to kill you.

Mother, I want to…

 

A primal scream blocked out the words “fuck you,” but everyone knew they belonged there. “Oedipus is a Greek myth. Sophocles wrote about it. I don’t know who before that. It’s about a man who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother,” recalled Morrison in a Rolling Stone magazine article. “Yeah, I’d say there was a similarity, definitely. But to tell you the truth, every time I hear that song, it means something else to me. I really don’t know what I was trying to say. Probably just to a girl, but I could see how it could be good-bye to a kind of childhood. I really don’t know. I think it’s significantly complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.”

In another interview, Morrison classified the song as being about three things: sex, death and travel.

 

The stage life of a lizard

Jim Morrison is a fantasy figure. An eternal sex symbol. Glorified in memory and by the passing of time. For those who knew and worked with him, he was a challenge. A tragic rock god who was arrested no fewer than ten times in his brief 27-years and the first rock artist arrested onstage during a concert performance.

At the end of his life, fleeing to Paris, Morrison was looking for rejuvenation, a new start, and to distance himself from a trial in Miami concerning his arrest for exposing himself on stage. An alcoholic, Morrison like to challenge his audience, see how far he could push them in the moment, and that night in Miami (1969) he berated the audience, accusing them of not being there to hear the music but to see his “cock.” He promised to show them, and was arrested for indecent exposure. Out of 150 photos taken that night, and shown at his trial, not one of them proves he actually did expose himself, but even if he did, Morrison didn’t see the problem.

“Six guys and girls are naked every night in Hair and nobody calls the cops,” Morrison commented about the stage play. “My audience expects me to do something freaky. If I’d been in L.A. or New York, nothing would have happened.”

Morrison died before the trial was concluded.

 

The sex life of a lizard

For all young men who worship at the memory of Jim Morrison, the thought that he could have homosexual tendencies is sacrilegious. After all, he had a long time girlfriend, Pamela Courson, and an infamous affair with Patricia Kennealy, a 22-year-old editor for Jazz & Pop magazine, who was also a self-proclaimed witch.

Nevertheless, rumours of homosexuality abound. In one infamous episode, suspecting that Jim had cheated on her, Pamela took one of Jim’s favourite on-stage vests and wrote ‘FAGGOT’ across the back of it.

“Pam would never tell me exactly what she meant by that, but I’m pretty sure Jim never had anything like a gay affair, because she would’ve found out and that would’ve really upset her,” stated Mirandi Babitz, a friend of the couple. “If that had been going on, I’m sure she would’ve told me. I think he probably had a gay experience at one time because of his experimental nature, but nothing like regular experiences. I know their sex life was weird. He tied her up all the time and sometimes he was really brutal with her. It was okay with her to a point, but then he would always go over the line. I think part of the fag stuff came from the fact that he really preferred women from the backside (anal). Pam was always very pissed off about that, but that was apparently what he was into so she stuck with it. That was part of the reason she was always snarling at him.”

While Mirandi wasn’t sure Morrison was bi-sexual, his booking agent and friend, Todd Schifman was. “I think Jim was gay.” When asked about his relationships with Pamela and Patricia, he stated, “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t gay. Those were not successful storybook relationships. And Pam always seemed like a little boy to me. I know for a fact that Jim was into being gay.”

In one instance where Jim annoyed an audience, he crawled on stage at a Jim Hendrix performance at New York’s Scene Club and wrapped himself around the guitarist, shouting, “I want to suck your cock!” While doing this, he actually attempted to remove Jimi’s velvet trousers, until Jim’s friend Paul Ferrara pulled him off the performer.

 

The legend of the lizard

There is no question that Jim loved women. His relationship with Pamela and Patricia, which resulted in the latter having to have an abortion, and no doubt numerous groupies, attests to that. There is also no doubt that based on the way he lived his life, Jim engaged in same-sex love. Jim tried to live without borders and challenge the norm. He was a free spirit, but also a philosopher of the dangerous.

Jim Morrison lived life.

As stated, Jim Morrison was sex.

Sexual Awakening in 1992’s The Lover

In 1992, director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who in 1988 had captured film-going audience’s attention with The Bear, a film that follows the travels of an orphaned bear cub, brought to the screen author Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Lover. A work of erotic cinema, The Lover, set in 1929 French colonial Vietnam, tells the tale of a young French girl (Jane March), from a bankrupt family, who engages in a forbidden sexual relationship with a wealthy Chinese man (Tony Leung Ka Fai), who is more than double her age. It is not a relationship based on money, but one based on attraction and a love they dare not speak. While their affair transcended race, culture, class and age, for those around them, all these elements were matters of importance. Theirs was a love that could not survive; yet one they could not resist.

The Young Girl and the Chinaman

To bring Duras’s novel to life, Annaud made one important decision, to cast unknowns.

“I did not want a face with a ‘history,’” explained the director in 1992. “This is a story of ‘the first time’—had I cast a ‘name,’ audiences probably would find her innocence difficult to believe.”

Annaud searched the world over for the young woman to play his lead. “I was in despair, when my wife showed me an English magazine with a young girl in it who was different. She wasn’t any more beautiful than the others, but she had something rare in the eyes. Five photos, five expressions—unheard of! This Jane March was spectacular.”

“Jane was different than all the others,” explained Annaud. “She was a unique mixture of fear and ambition, strength and fragility, insecurities and certainties. She was, with all her contradictions, a young Marguerite Duras.”

For the role of her Chinese lover, Annaud was determined to find an actor who could portray a character caught “between traditional Chinese culture and the sophisticated European culture of the day.”

Once again he searched the world over, until on his last day of auditions in Hong Kong, and with him set to cancel the project, Leung walked into his hotel suite. “He has the generosity, the culture and the intelligence that I had always imagined the Chinese lover possessed.”

Annaud was ready to progress.

The love scenes

Principal photography on The Lover began in Vietnam on January 14, 1991 and finished 96 days later on May 4, 1991. Despite the challenges the crew faced in shooting a film in some of the most remote parts of the Mekong Delta, the director’s greatest concern was directing the love scenes, which comprise a third of the movie.

“How would I show this act—so simple, so beautiful, so banal, so extraordinary—without becoming a ‘Peeping Tom’ or becoming a cliché of artistic haze?” he considered at the time.

“We are so afraid of this act, so ashamed of it, that we do all we can to hide it,” he continued. “We turn out the lights, we close our eyes, and we pan towards the window. We don’t see the love we’re doing. I wanted to show this carnal passion as part of common life.”

To make his actors comfortable with the scenes, Annaud waited to film them on a Paris soundstage at the end of the shoot, hoping by then March and Leung would have gotten to know one another and become comfortable together. The director was determined to get close to the actors during this time, to capture “the honesty of their flesh.”

Nevertheless, Annaud and the actors were still “petrified” before shooting the sex scenes. “We were shaking,” he recalled. “Our hope was that people would buy it. Now, when I am asked the question, ‘did they or didn’t they?’ I think it is a great compliment to my actors.”

“This extraordinary intimacy between the girl and her Chinese lover enabled me to talk about the legitimacy of desire, the marvel of pleasure, the abandoning of oneself to the flesh and, ultimately, the consequences of that pleasure and the pain of love.”

Twenty-two years later

Annaud, March and Leung achieved their goals. The Lover stands the test of time. It is a look at one young girl’s sexual awakening, presented beautifully, and relying on intelligence in its depiction, not exploitation. Whether during the 1920, ’30 or today, each and every individual goes through their own sexual awakening in their own way. It’s a simple fact of the human condition. The Lover addresses this in a profound way, while also touching upon such important topics as class and prejudice.

Throughout the course of world cinema, sex and nudity has been used for many reasons—although most prominently for exploitation purposes. Then there are films like The Lover, where it is the story and characters that are important, with the erotica integral to both. The Lover is a forgotten film definitely worth finding or rediscovering.

Defying the Odds—The African Queen

As far as Hollywood was concerned, it just couldn’t be done. The book was basically un-filmable—a belief echoed by numerous studio readers given the task of evaluating its cinematic potential. The book in question was C.S. Forester’s The African Queen, a novel about a rum-soaked reprobate, Charlie Allnut and a proper, middle-aged missionary, Rose Sayer who take it upon themselves to sink a German gunboat in East Africa at the onset of World War One.

First published in 1935, The African Queen kicked around Hollywood for quite some time with no one sure how to adapt it. The lead male character, Charlie wasn’t exactly the heroic type, having been described by the author C.S. Forester as a “Liverpool or London slum rat.” The lead female character, Rose was simply described as a spinster; neither character embodied the tenets of youth and beauty that Hollywood enjoyed portraying.

Originally bought by RKO Studios in 1946, Warner Bros. bought the rights hoping to turn it into a vehicle for Bette Davis. By 1947 they were desperately trying to unload the rights—no one, NO ONE, thought the book could translate into a successful film.

It was then that director John Huston decided he wanted to go hunting and kill himself an elephant. While that may not be the exact reason he and his partner Sam Siegel bought the book’s rights in 1950 for their independent company, Horizon Pictures, but it did give the director a reason to head for Africa. As one assistant director commented, “John wanted to shoot an elephant. That was what the whole picture was about.”

After Siegel sent the book to Katherine Hepburn and received her commitment to the role, Huston took Humphrey Bogart to lunch at Romanoff’s and supposedly told him, “The hero is a lowlife, and you are the biggest lowlife in town and therefore most suitable for the part.”

Huston and Bogart had all ready teamed up for a number of successful projects such as The Maltese Falcon, Across the Pacific, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Key Largo, so based on that, and Bogart’s desire to share the screen with Hepburn, he signed on board.

“The local hazards included poisonous snakes, crocodiles, scorpions, invading soldier ants, leprosy, dysentery, and a particularly nasty malady called bilharzias that comes from contact with tainted river water and involves worms working their way under one’s skin,” recalled the late Katherine Hepburn in her memoir.

To accommodate Huston’s desire to hunt, the film was shot on location in the Congo, rather than Kenya which was the original setting in the novel. Despite putting in a great performance, Bogart wasn’t interested in hunting, nor did he like Africa. “The food was so awful we had to drink Scotch most of the time,” he had stated, adding that Hepburn “kept saying wouldn’t it be mahvelous if we could all stay there forever.” Apparently, based on the amount of drinking Bogart and Huston engaged in, Hepburn also noted that anything that bit the two, mosquitoes or otherwise, died right away.

The African Queen, under the influence of Huston, Hepburn and Bogart prove everybody wrong and was a box-office success. The film garnered four Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay, with Bogart winning in his category.

To celebrate this classic film, that Hollywood had a hard time believing in, Paramount Home Entertainment has meticulously restored The African Queen to its original glory and released it in an impressive Commemorative Box Set.

A perfect double feature with The African Queen is Clint Eastwood’s brilliant but often overlooked White Hunter, Black Heart. In the film Eastwood channels the spirit of John Huston playing a director making an African Queen-like film, but also obsessed with killing an elephant.