The Fire Still Burns -- Kennealy's `Strange Days' Reads Like A Love Poem To Jim Morrison

Patricia Kennealy is a witch.

She says so proudly, openly and with a nonchalance that suggests witches are as common as toast.

"I know lots of people who are just like me," she says. "Witches who are stockbrokers and policemen and accountants. I mean, regular people.

"It's just a choice like anything else. This is the way that works for them. This is the way they can touch the divine."

Her witchery is one of the things that drew Jim Morrison to her, Kennealy says in her new book, "Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison" (Dutton; $23).

The book was inspired by Oliver Stone's movie "The Doors" in which Kennealy, one of the great loves of Morrison's life, was portrayed by Kathleen Quinlan. Kennealy (pronounced Ken-NEEL-ee) herself had a bit part in the movie - playing a witch.

Although she cooperated with Stone while the film was being made, she was horrified at the result, feeling the movie showed only one side of Morrison: the drunken lout, the Lizard King who was interested only in sex, booze and rock 'n' roll.

A professional writer known for her Gothic sci-fi series "The Keltiad," Kennealy had always resisted writing about Morrison, although she was interviewed for some of the many books about the Doors, including the bestseller "No One Here Gets Out Alive" by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman, one of the sources for the film script.

She was so appalled by the movie that she felt compelled to set

the record straight. And her book does present a very different picture of Morrison, the Doors' fiery lead singer.

"He was mannerly, charming, joyful, generous, hopeful, loving," she writes. She also portrays him as romantic, thoughtful, intelligent and articulate. And she says she saw him intoxicated only a few times.

"Oliver went for the really cheap, sleazy, sensational stuff," she said in a phone interview from her Manhattan apartment. "He didn't go for the serious subtext. I mean, we were very serious in the '60s. We had a serious subtext underlying everything, and this is what I think Oliver missed."

In her book, Kennealy recounts seeing the Doors at some of their earliest New York performances. She writes that she knew she and Morrison would have a relationship the first time she saw him on stage.

"Coming events really do cast a shadow before them," she said over the phone. "You just know, somehow."

But it wasn't until several years later, when she interviewed Morrison for a rock magazine in 1969, that their relationship began. Shortly after the interview they became lovers and saw each other regularly before his death in 1971.

Kennealy recounts their meetings with amazing detail. She quotes verbatim long conversations from more than 20 years ago. She said she kept journals in those days and also has a good memory.

"Some things you never forget," she explained. "There's lots of stuff I don't remember. This is basically all the stuff I remember. If I couldn't remember it, or if it wasn't written down, it didn't get in the book."

Her remembered conversations seem to often include pledges of love and admiration from Morrison. And she seems to never forget what she, and others, were wearing, right down to their shoes.

The book comes close to being a hagiography, except for the fact that she has to deal with Morrison's death in Paris on July 3, 1971. She blames his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, for his death, calling it "negligent homicide."

In addition to being a love poem to Morrison, the book is a hatchet job on Courson (who was played in the movie by Meg Ryan).

"She was a slut, a junkie, a whore and possibly a murderess," Kennealy writes. "She didn't have a brain in her head or a moral in her body."

But Courson was the woman closest to Morrison. She lived with him, and was his heir, along with his estranged parents. Her inheritance - including millions from continuing sales of Doors music and other products - passed to her parents when she died of a heroin overdose, several years after Morrison.

Is Kennealy's view of Courson colored by jealousy?

"Perhaps a smidgen," she admits. "I don't think really a whole lot. The thing with Jim and me was never really intended to be an exclusive sort of thing. It was a strange arrangement. It was kind of unusual, even for the time."

The centerpiece of the book is a marriage ceremony Kennealy says she and Morrison had in 1970. The ceremony, called "handfasting," was performed by a witch - the part Kennealy played in the movie.

Another scene in the movie, in which Morrison (played by Val Kilmer) jokes about the "handfasting," drove Kennealy to write the book.

"That's what hurt me most in the movie, where Jim puts down the wedding," she said. "That one single thing put me over the edge."

She is still livid about it, insisting Morrison took the ceremony seriously and considered himself married to Kennealy.

Besides the book, she got back at Stone in one other way, she said.

"I asked Jim to take care of it," she said. "I told him, `Make sure Oliver Stone doesn't get the Oscar' (for directing `JFK'). And he didn't!"