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About Me
TIFFANY TALKS: YOUR BALLROOM DAYS ARE OVER, BABY
by Janet M. Erwin
PROLOGUE
In September of 1970 I was living in New York City, working as a publicity writer in the Press and Public Information Department of Columbia/Epic Records, and mulling over the offer of a promotion to Assistant Director of East Coast Publicity for Epic. I thought about it for awhile, then thanked them kindly and resigned.
The West was calling me, Los Angeles was calling me—had been calling me, actually, for most of my 27 years—and I was finally ready to listen. I'd been in New York 13 months and as far as I was concerned that was 12 ˝ months too long. I'd had it with the crowds, the noise, the smells, and most of all the lack of privacy. In New York you could afford to live alone only if you were wealthy or if you'd lived in the same rent-controlled apartment for years. I fitted in neither category and I was ready for the wide open spaces.
But I took time from my fantasies of coyotes and bougainvillea to write a letter to Jazz & Pop magazine. It was in response to an article in the September 1970 issue written by one "Chris Reabur"—an anagram, as it turned out, for the name of Elektra Records' East Coast publicity chief, Bruce Harris.
The article was a review of The Doors' LP Morrison Hotel, and I thought it was a bit over the top so I said so. I pointed out that Morrison Hotel was a rock 'n' roll record, not the Great American Novel. Said moreover there were four good songs, four that were fair to middlin', and four that were real dogs (in my humble opinion, anyway). Also pointed out there were four men in the band, a fact Mr. Reabur had apparently overlooked.
It was all in good fun, and I mailed it and forgot about it. I had no clue it was about to change my life.
Within a couple of days I'd had phone calls from Bruce Harris and from Patricia Kennely (as she spelled it then), the editor of Jazz & Pop. They both wanted to know about me, and Patricia said she was about to go down to Miami where Jim Morrison was on trial on a number of charges. She thought he'd get a kick out of my letter and asked my permission to show it to him. Of course I said she could. I suspected he could use a good laugh about then.
She called me when she got back to tell me Jim had enjoyed the letter. We also talked about my upcoming move to Los Angeles—I'd spent a week on the West Coast job hunting while she was in Miami.
She called me a third time to ask my permission to print the letter in Jazz & Pop. In the meantime I'd had another call from Bruce Harris, so I decided it was time to reciprocate what seemed to be overtures of friendship. I suggested to Patricia that the three of us should have lunch sometime. She agreed, although as I recall she said Mr. Harris would be unavailable, or she preferred it just be the two of us. I can't remember which, though I suspect it was the latter.
[I'd known her former boyfriend David Walley for nearly a year by that time so I knew about her affair with Jim Morrison. He'd told me initially that Jim and Patricia were friends. Then, around the time of the Kent State shootings in early May of 1970, when The Doors were doing shows on the East Coast, soon-to-be ex-boyfriend DW told me Jim and Patricia were about to be more than friends. Perhaps three weeks later he marched into my office and announced, "Well, I'm free...."]
I hadn't expected to like Patricia as much as I did. I was also unprepared for her eagerness to talk immediately about the most intimate aspects of her life--I'd barely sat down when she told me she was pregnant. Because of my acquaintance with the newly-ex-boyfriend my first question, while perhaps not the most diplomatic, was a natural one: "Is it Jim's?" She assured me it was. Not surprisingly, the diaphragm-as-Frisbee story came next. I think I was still looking over the menu.
******************
Update 12/1/11: Kerry and I never did get around to doing the final copyediting of BD, and in the meantime I've tinkered with it so much (even adding a story or two) without keeping track of the changes that I'm going to have to send it to him all over again, and he's going to have to convert it to HTML all over again as well. THEN we can do the final editing, and THEN it will finally make its appearance on the DCM website.
In the meantime the earlier version can still be found in the thread of the same name here on the message board.
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Okay, just tuned into Tavis Smiley
09 May 2013 - 07:28 PM
in time to see him plug tomorrow's program in on which his guest is John Densmore.
Just a reminder...
Just a reminder...
Densmore on Jimmy Fallon's show
04 May 2013 - 07:15 AM
.... they're doing Roadhouse Blues with Fallon singing--and barely got started before they cut to a commercial. Un-fucking-believable.
Now they're back, no sign of Densmore, just some chick rapper. Such stupifying crap these days...
Now they're back, no sign of Densmore, just some chick rapper. Such stupifying crap these days...
Roger Ebert
05 April 2013 - 02:03 PM
Thought I should weigh in on Roger's death, since he was an Urbana native who lived next door to my ex-husband growing up.
In the mid/late sixties the premier hang-out for us Champaign-Urbana/UIUC Theatre/English/Journalism types was the Capitol bar and restaurant on Green Street inUrbana Champaign, just a block west of the UIUC campus.
Roger was a Capitol regular as well--except more often than not he sat at a table by himself, sullen and alone and always rejecting any offers to join us Kewl Kids. From time to time he'd be joined by another fellow, but I don't remember ever seeing him sitting with more than one or two others--always men (and I'm not suggesting he was gay because he wasn't; he just wasn't--(cough)--a particularly attractive person, physically or otherwise).
I can remember one incident--can't remember the details but it prompted me to ask Terry (my ex) what TF was eating Roger--and Terry just shrugged and said he'd always been like that.
Anyway, I remember very well when Roger abruptly disappeared from the Capitol, and the word was that he'd dropped out of school and gone up to Chicago to work for the Sun-Times.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Except for this: when Oliver Stone's The Doors was released in 1991 I remember coming in on the tail end of a television interview with Roger, and hearing him diss the movie as a bit of a downer, and hearing him say (I still crack up when I remember this) something to the effect that Jim just wasn't a very fun person to be around (!!!)
Something like that, anyway...
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, since--as I've said and so have Tex and Anne Morrison and Frank Lisciandro and just about everyone who actually knew the man--Jim was absolutely, positively the funniest person any one of us has ever known.
But I always respected Roger's film reviews, since his tastes mirrored my own (what a coincidence!) and I was very sorry to hear of his health problems. He looked so grotesque and awful after the removal of most of his jawbone that I couldn't bear to look at those photographs.
Anyway, bon voyage Roger Ebert, and (when I get there) I hereby offer to stand you a beer or two in that cosmic Capitol in the sky.
Edited 4/9 to change intellectual to Journalism.
In the mid/late sixties the premier hang-out for us Champaign-Urbana/UIUC Theatre/English/Journalism types was the Capitol bar and restaurant on Green Street in
Roger was a Capitol regular as well--except more often than not he sat at a table by himself, sullen and alone and always rejecting any offers to join us Kewl Kids. From time to time he'd be joined by another fellow, but I don't remember ever seeing him sitting with more than one or two others--always men (and I'm not suggesting he was gay because he wasn't; he just wasn't--(cough)--a particularly attractive person, physically or otherwise).
I can remember one incident--can't remember the details but it prompted me to ask Terry (my ex) what TF was eating Roger--and Terry just shrugged and said he'd always been like that.
Anyway, I remember very well when Roger abruptly disappeared from the Capitol, and the word was that he'd dropped out of school and gone up to Chicago to work for the Sun-Times.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Except for this: when Oliver Stone's The Doors was released in 1991 I remember coming in on the tail end of a television interview with Roger, and hearing him diss the movie as a bit of a downer, and hearing him say (I still crack up when I remember this) something to the effect that Jim just wasn't a very fun person to be around (!!!)
Something like that, anyway...
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, since--as I've said and so have Tex and Anne Morrison and Frank Lisciandro and just about everyone who actually knew the man--Jim was absolutely, positively the funniest person any one of us has ever known.
But I always respected Roger's film reviews, since his tastes mirrored my own (what a coincidence!) and I was very sorry to hear of his health problems. He looked so grotesque and awful after the removal of most of his jawbone that I couldn't bear to look at those photographs.
Anyway, bon voyage Roger Ebert, and (when I get there) I hereby offer to stand you a beer or two in that cosmic Capitol in the sky.
Edited 4/9 to change intellectual to Journalism.
Jim, Dennis Jakob & Flannery O'Connor
05 March 2013 - 10:19 PM
I finally got around to ordering Jakob's Summer With Morrison and stayed up part of last night reading it.
One paragraph from p. 114 especially leapt off the page at me:
Now I was a huuuge Flannery O'Connor freak back in the day, but to the best of my recollection Jim and I had never discussed her or her work.
Then I remembered this paragraph from Ballroom Days:
So thanks for the shout out, DJ, if indeed that's what it was, and maybe you'll join me in mourning what could have been. (IIRC the only work of O'Connor's ever to hit the big screen was 1979's Wise Blood, starring Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, and Jim's friend Harry Dean Stanton*--and directed by none other than the great John Huston.)
Of course Wise Blood is a novel while AGMIHTF is a short story--but still, what a movie that would have been! Jim as The Misfit, HDS in a major role, and Huston directing. Damn!...just...Damn!!
*I don't remember where I heard that Jim and Harry Dean were friends, except that IIRC they both lived in L.A.'s gorgeous Beachwood Canyon at one time.
One paragraph from p. 114 especially leapt off the page at me:
Incidentally Jim was very fond of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find. ​He identified with "the misfit" in that story.
Now I was a huuuge Flannery O'Connor freak back in the day, but to the best of my recollection Jim and I had never discussed her or her work.
Then I remembered this paragraph from Ballroom Days:
I give them my last two beers and set off for the laundromat to get my clothes, wondering if I should try to head off Mr. AFI. It's obvious I'm going to have to introduce him to Jim at some point, though, the way he keeps turning up. I assume he has a project he wants to pitch, and since the film that got him into AFI in the first place was a version of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard To Find I wonder if he has it in mind that Jim should play The Misfit in a new version of same. Now that would be a movie!
So thanks for the shout out, DJ, if indeed that's what it was, and maybe you'll join me in mourning what could have been. (IIRC the only work of O'Connor's ever to hit the big screen was 1979's Wise Blood, starring Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, and Jim's friend Harry Dean Stanton*--and directed by none other than the great John Huston.)
Of course Wise Blood is a novel while AGMIHTF is a short story--but still, what a movie that would have been! Jim as The Misfit, HDS in a major role, and Huston directing. Damn!...just...Damn!!
*I don't remember where I heard that Jim and Harry Dean were friends, except that IIRC they both lived in L.A.'s gorgeous Beachwood Canyon at one time.
Johnny Depp Breaks On Through...
11 December 2012 - 01:29 AM
This is pretty funny but kind of sad too, at least for those of us who think Depp would have given a much more nuanced, sympathetic (and accurate) portrayal of Jim than Kilmer apparently did...
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