Elisha Gerald Hopkins (November 9, 1935 – June 3, 2018) was an American journalist and author best known for writing the first biographies of Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison of the Doors, as well as serving for 20 years as a correspondent and contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine.

From an interview of Jerry Hopkins:

"Morrison was the most interesting of all the rock stars I met because he was the best conversationalist," Hopkins says, reaching into his refrigerator, the door of which sports Doors and Presley fridge magnets.

"Something I always had trouble with at Rolling Stone was that I was interviewing people whose avenue of communication was singing or playing an instrument. Why should anyone expect them to have a political opinion worth listening to? Most of them didn’t, but Morrison was interesting on a totally different level.”

"I wasn’t a close friend of Jim, but more than an acquaintance. I really liked the Doors. I thought they were …" Hopkins sighs, polishing his glasses. "They were worthy of attention as musicians, and I thought Jim’s drunken-asshole antics got in the way of them getting the respect they deserved.

"That first article [about the Doors] was a little critical. I called Jim pretentious. He deliberately threw himself into the audience and I thought that was a little precious, but I really liked their lyrics and I really liked Morrison. We drank in the same bars and he would invite me to poetry readings and screenings and stuff. I went to Mexico for a week with them, and toured with them on the West Coast."

Hopkins gleaned many personal insights into Morrison while covering the Los Angeles music scene, and film director Oliver Stone used Hopkins' interview notes, as well as No One Here, as backbone to his 1991 biopic The Doors. The movie's release resulted in the biography bounding back to the top of The New York Times bestseller list, this time to the number-two spot, but the writer is conflicted about Stone's cinematic portrayal.

"The look of the movie was bang on," Hopkins says. "It was like being whiplashed into my past. Oliver had everything very accurate visually, which is interesting [considering that] 40 per cent of the screenplay turned out to be total fiction."

"It’s true that Jim was a drunken asshole, but that wasn’t all he was. He read more books and was more articulate than anyone else I’ve ever met in the entertainment world. He had a sense of humour about himself. He didn’t take his stardom seriously. He was a poet. He was a lot of things that Oliver ignored." Hopkins has only praise, however, for the movie's star. "Val Kilmer was brilliant. He had Morrison down."

In the official French police report concerning Morrison’s death, Courson found the singer dead in their Paris apartment’s bathtub on July 3, 1971, apparently of a heart attack. He was quickly buried in the French capital’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. Conspiracy theories regarding the exact circumstances have multiplied ever since.

"I get blamed for this," says Hopkins. "The Morrison book was written in 1972, 1973, and it wasn’t published for seven years or so. My original plan had been for two different final chapters. One ending would have Jim overdosing on a combination of heroin and alcohol. [In the second version] he faked his death and, like his idol, the French poet Rimbaud, he wandered off to North Africa to gain the freedom that anonymity would give him. He was fed up with being a star."

"I suggested that if the publisher were to print 10,000 copies of the book, 5,000 should have one ending, and 5,000 the other. Distribute them and don’t say anything, which I still think is an interesting concept. [The publisher] said that was too much trouble, and to put the two chapters together, end the book ambiguously, which I did. So now, many people say that book created the controversy over whether Morrison is dead or alive, and of how he died, and blah, blah, blah."

Hopkins insists that the true cause of Morrison’s death had been "very well established long before my book came out", and the writer is not culpable for crackpot theories.

"America lets go of its heroes very reluctantly," Hopkins says. "It's quick to build them up and slap them down, but it doesn't want them to die, and Morrison did die under mysterious circumstances. He was in the ground before anyone had announced his death, and there was no autopsy. Well, no autopsy was required."

"The risks he took, in terms of the drugs and alcohol, and the quantity … In a way it's almost a miracle that he made it to 27."

In his auto-biography, Set the Night On Fire, Robbie Krieger wrote of the book No One Here gets Out Alive, "I don't remember seeing a manuscript until I had an actual copy of the published books in my hands, at which point it was too late for me to fix any inaccuracies or effectively complain. But even with all the massaged stories, I have to admit it's still one of the better books out there about our history."

No One Here Gets Out Alive