Patricia Kennealy-morrison
White witch, rock writer, fantasy author and sometime consort of Jim Morrison of the Doors
PATRICIA KENNEALY-MORRISON, who has died aged 75, was a Brooklyn girl who grew up to become a Celtic white witch, rock journalist and author of fantasy novels; she also claimed to be the widow of Jim Morrison, the Doors’ frontman, having “married” him in a “handfasting” ceremony in 1970.
She later published Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison (1992), a Mills & Boon-style account of their relationship which began in 1969 when Patricia Kennely, as she then was (she added the “a” later), interviewed the star for Jazz & Pop magazine. When they shook hands, she claimed, there was “a visible shower of bright blue sparks flying in all directions”. But it was more than mere love at first sight: “I know karma when I see it.”
Which was hardly surprising, as she claimed to be a witch, “born the heir of intergalactic royalty abandoned by gipsies and raised by wolves”. Morrison, she recalled, was “into Native American Indian spirituality, which wasn’t much different than Celtic paganism. And when he realized that Celtic paganism was part of his own Scot heritage, he delved in.”
In 1970 she and Morrison exchanged vows in a ceremony (“strictly private, between the two people and the Goddess and the God”), that involved speaking traditional Celtic oaths and exchanging drops of their own blood.
The real Jim Morrison was an alcoholic and heavy drug user, heroically sexually promiscuous and prone to reckless and violent behaviour. A few weeks after the “handfasting” he was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity following a raucous 1969 concert in Miami, an event that effectively neutered the Doors’ career.
To Patricia, however, he was “brilliant, beautiful, creative, intelligent, sexy and romantic”, a man whom she described lounging “on fur throws and big squashy pillows in front of the fireplace” singing medieval love lyrics.
When Morrison was found dead aged 27 in a Paris bathtub in 1971, wrecked by whiskey and heroin, their sexual relationship, she claimed, was still at “honeymoon intensity”.
In fact Morrison had been spending most of his time with Pamela Courson, a long-time girlfriend and fellow junkie, who was with him when he died and to whom he left his estate. She died three years later, also aged 27.
Critics suggested that Patricia Kennealy-morrison (she added Morrison by deed poll in 1979) had written her account as an attempt to usurp Pamela’s place in Morrison mythology.
Patricia claimed to have letters from Morrison from a few months before his death in which he told her that he intended to break off his relationship with Pamela and marry her in a “legal” ceremony.
In her book, Patricia Kennealy-morrison blamed her rival for Morrison’s death: “She fed heroin to the man she claimed to love, leaving him dying while she nodded out.”
The book was also a response to Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic The Doors, starring Val Kilmer as Morrison, in which Patricia had a small role as the Wicca priestess who presides over the handfasting ceremony (Kathleen Quinlan played her character). But she was outraged by the finished film, claiming to have put a curse on it, partly on the grounds that it had not given due prominence to her relationship with Morrison.
Patricia Kennely was born on March 4 1946 to Irish Catholic parents in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. She discovered paganism while a journalism student at St Bonaventure University, New York state: “They had an amazing library on the subject … I guess operating on the principle of ‘Know thy enemy’,” she recalled in an interview. “And that’s where I began my formal instruction in the only religion I ever wanted to be instructed in – Celtic paganism.” It was, she said, the faith “my ancestors believed in before St Patrick ruined Ireland with Christianity”.
Initiated in 1966 by a high priest and high priestess, she transferred to Harpur College in Binghamton, New York state, where she earned extra money as a go-go dancer at nightclubs and graduated in English in 1967.
Hired as an editorial assistant by Jazz & Pop in early 1968, by the end of the year she had been appointed editor. The following year, before her interview with Morrison, she became a Celtic pagan high priestess, head of a coven of 12 to 15 people.
She disbanded the group after Morrison’s death, though she remained committed to paganism and to Morrison, continuing to wear the pagan wedding ring he had given her and to live in the low-rent tenement in New York’s East Village where they slept together. “I do not want,” she explained, “ever to wake up in a room that Jim was never in.”
Patricia Kennealy-morrison, who described herself as a “sovereign Eastern empress having certain treaty understandings with the Lizard Throne” – a reference to a line from a Jim Morrison poem, in which he wrote: “I am the Lizard King” – went on to publish several fantasy novels based on Celtic mythology.
In 1996 she announced that she had compiled Fireheart: The True ‘Lost Writings’ of James Douglas Morrison, an annotated volume of letters, poems and songs-in-progress that he had given her during their two-year relationship. Under US copyright law, however, while letters are the property of the recipient, the content belongs to the writer, and Morrison’s writings belonged to his estate (controlled by his relatives and those of Pamela Courson) for 50 years after his death. Patricia Kennealy-morrison declared that she would “sooner be dead in a ditch than ask these people for permission to publish love letters written to me”, and accepted that she would have to wait until at least July 2021 to publish: “I’ll be 75, and if I’m still around, it will either be very embarrassing or kind of cool.”
The book remained unpublished at the time of her death.