LYRIC KING
In recent days, social-media feeds saw a burst of images of people lounging around Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris’ Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Someone had attached a handmade sign to his grave: THANKS FOR YOUR WORDS.
The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the death of Morrison, lead singer of The Doors and the original leather-pantswearing, hell-raising Lizard King, but it could have been any day. It’s a pilgrimage done by thousands every year, including me, decades ago during one baking Parisian summer. The cemetery is also home to Oscar Wilde, Édith Piaf, Molière, Chopin, Proust and Bizet, although most head for Morrison’s littered, graffitied last resting place.
“My daughter sent me the same pictures,” says Morrison’s sister, Anne Morrison Chewning, on the phone from her home in California. “It’s really wonderful that people do remember. It’s one of the most popular walking tours in Paris, from what I understand, Père Lachaise.”
We’re speaking because Chewning, a sharp and thoughtful 74-year-old who was a schoolteacher “for years and years”, was deeply involved in putting together a book of her brother’s collected writings in accordance with a plan he included in his notebooks. In the book’s nearly 600 pages are all his published and unpublished writings, including probably his last poetry reading on his 27th, about a murderous hitchhiker.
