Cosmic Mates

From across the shady Sunset Strip nightclub, The London Fog, Jim Morrison, lead singer of up and coming rock n' roll band The Doors, noticed a breathtakingly beautiful redheaded woman decorated in freckles, light skin, and delicate features. She looked like something out of a painting. She turned the head of the man who would become the dominate sex icon of the 1960s. Her name was Pamela Susan Courson.

Now, there are plenty of iconic celebrity couples that have gotten the spotlight throughout the years: Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman, George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, most recently Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, etc., but one of the most tragic and intriguing is probably the completely fucked up yet touching relationship shared by Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson.

Pam and Jim met around 1965 when the Doors were just starting and instantly fell in love. They had a lot in common. Neither was very athletic, but both were highly intelligent, self-driven, and creative people. They enjoyed drugs and music. With the guidance of Jim, Pam began to appreciate poetry and Western philosophy. Pamela's dad, like Jim's, had been a Navy flyer. Pamela also was from Weed, California, an area a few miles away from Mount Shasta which was sacred to the Indians that Jim was so interested in. This alongside the fact that Pamela completely devoted herself to the slightly arrogant Jim, going so far as to call herself "Jim's creation," made their love instant and lasting.

Now, "instant and lasting," despite what it may sound like, doesn't necessarily mean hopeless love birds who got along. Their case was far from it. They were both very independent, hard-headed people who liked to call the shots, test each other (they'd often play "chicken"), and this led to many fights during which Jim would leave her temporarily for other women and Pam the same with other me. In one case, Pamela scolded Jim for not washing his famed leather pants, and he took it personally and went on their vacation to Jamaica on his own. Some songs, though sweet for the most part, portrays the senses of doubt in stress in their relationship.

 I see you live on Love Street 

There's this store where the creatures meet 

I wonder what they do in there 

Summer Sunday and a year 

I guess I like it fine, so far  

 It was a turbulent relationship, to put it lightly, but its pros showed to outweigh its cons. For instance, Jim has dedicated his books of poetry to one Pamela Susan. If you read his will, pictured later below, he first left everything in his possession to his one love. You can take this a step further and consider that Jim Morrison, the reckless, outwardly sexy and promiscuous man who could get any girl he wanted and her sister put up with such extreme fights and refused to leave his as he preferred to call it, "cosmic mate," it shows that there was most definitely a spark that lit their fire. 

Many Morrison-written Doors lyrics prove this.

Well I used to know someone fair

She had orange ribbons in her hair

She was such a trip

She was hardly there

But I loved her

Just the same

It was an awful love, but it was a true love, and many good tunes and stories came out of it all. After Jim died of heart failure in Paris on July 8, 171, Pam fell into a spiraling depression causing her to do audacious and life-threatening things such as crashing a truck into the front of Themis, the boutique he'd bought her, and speaking to Sage, their golden retriever, as if he were Jim, before joining him on the other side on April 25, 1974. Courson's parents later announced that the two had a "common law marriage" while alive. Many people close to the two said that the only proof that Jim had actually died was the woman he left behind. Their relationship is remembered as another spectacle in the life of one Jim Morrison and is immortalized in the timeless music of The Doors.