The Doors' John Densmore remembers Joan Didion, Eve Babitz and Jim Morrison
LOS ANGELES — "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously wrote to open "The White Album," her kaleidoscopic essay on Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early '70s that effortlessly flows through topics including Jim Morrison, Sharon Tate, Huey Newton, Didion's stint in a psych ward, the Manson murders, living in a Franklin Avenue home in "a senseless-murder district" and that time "Roman Polanski accidentally spilled a glass of red wine" on her in Bel-Air.
Named for the Beatles' self-titled album, Didion's essay, which she worked on for a decade and published in her 1979 book of the
