Light My FireRay Manzarek "Light My Fire"
Jim lived by himself, although he had a girlfriend, Mary Werbelow. She was his junior college sweetheart. She had followed him out from Florida. And was now going to school at L.A. City College - LACC - on the other end of town, but she was around with regularity. And, man, what a fox. ...she went on to become “Gazzari’s Go-Go Girl of 1965,” a nightclub on the Sunset Strip; the Doors played there in 1966.
Jim wanted her to stop the go-go-girl, shimmy-shake dancing and go back to school. Continue on with her education; she was taking painting courses and seemed to really enjoy them. But she was seduced by fame and thought being Miss Gazzari’s 1965 was the beginning of her show-business career. Unfortunately, it was her career. That was all the fates had written on her slate: “Queen of the Sunset Strip--Summer 1965.” Nothing more ever happened.
In her hubris at the time, however, she had constructed grandiose fantasies. And when Jim told her to go back to school and continue with her painting, she told him to go back to school and get a master’s degree. She told him his career was hopeless - she didn’t like the Doors - and his band was going nowhere and he would never amount to anything. I don’t think he ever saw her again after that exchange. She had fallen into the tar pit of Hollywood - "show business," don’t you know - and it destroyed their relationship.
She was just too naive, too beautiful, too foolish to make the right choice. Ten years later I heard she was a belly dancer at a Greek restaurant in Honolulu, "the Mad Greek," or the "Passionate Greek," or "the Flaming Greek," or something equally Dionysian. However, she had taken up painting again, as Jim told her, except the moment had passed. Jim was dead. It was all too late.
Summer With MorrisonSummer With Morrison The Early Life and Times of James Douglas Morrison A Memoir By Dennis C. Jakob:
"At this point I did something I do not ordinarily do. I directly interfered with other people's lives. I knew Mary, Jim's ex-girlfriend. She, too, lived in Venice.
All she ever talked about was Jim. In her mind, it was clear that she would always think of herself as Jim's girl. Only she wasn't.
So I arranged a meeting in my Venice West atelier between her and Jim and Pam and myself. I didn't think that Mary would ever get back with him, at least in this lifetime. But I hoped, for her sake, and maybe for his, too, that they could at least have some sort of a relationship as friends, at least speak to one another.
Pam and I left the two of them alone for awhile and she said something I will never forget: “I feel sorry for Mary.” I knew at once what that meant. It meant she was not threatened by the emergence of Mary. That something had long been settled between her and Jim. A relationship deeper than either one of them had ever had before. I’d begun to suspect that something had been settled between the two of them – unbreakable except by death itself."
There's a book called "Love Her Madly: Jim Morrison, Mary and Me", but it adds nothing.
Set the Night on FireRobbie Krieger Set the Night on Fire:
We all assumed Jim wrote the song about his first serious girlfriend, Mary, a stunning brunette who followed him when he moved from Florida to L.A. to attend UCLA film school. She worked as a go-go dancer at Gazzarri's but wasn't the wild and crazy type. Jim's wildness and craziness was apparently too much for her after a while, so she broke up with him, but they stayed in touch. We could tell she had broken his heart, but he never admitted it out loud. When he first showed me the lyrics to "The End," he said only that it was about the end of a romance.
Angels Dance And Angels DiePatricia Butler Angels Dance and Angels Die:
Recalls Manzarek, Jim said, 'Look, I'll take care of us, this band is going all the way,' and she said, 'No I don't like your band, I don't think this band is going all the way.' Jim said, 'Yes it is, we're going to be big.' And she said, `No, I don't think so, Jim. I'm going to be big, I don't think you are.' And that was the end of their relationship."
Years later, running into Bryan Gates in Miami, Jim would tell a slightly different story of the demise of his relationship with Mary Werbelow. Recalls Gates: "Jim said Mary simply was not able to handle the swirl of California life around UCLA. When they met the exotic and bizarre people, she didn't have the capacity to just observe it for what it was and let it go, she had to be involved in it." Jim went on to tell Bryan that eventually Mary got involved with what Bryan recalls Jim describing as "a small sect that had their own holy man, and before he knew it she was off to India on a pilgrimage."
Jim said that after that he only heard from Mary twice, each time to ask for money to get out of her current situation and get back to the United States. The first time, Jim told Bryan, he sent the money to her immediately. Then, says Gates, "he said several months later he heard from her again with another desperate plea for money, and realized in his own mind that she was so far gone that he was nothing to her anymore than a source of possible economic relief for the travail that she might be in, and he let her go."
Gates noted the Morrison seemed genuinely remorseful over the end of the relationship. "He did say that he felt that he'd lost her to that oblivion and, try as he would, he couldn't recover her."
