PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, Joan Didion sitting on the floor of a Los Angeles recording studio in 1968, gazing up at Jim Morrison of the Doors, a band she went on to describe as “apocalyptic missionaries of sex.” If our patron saint of Californian disenchantment ever appeared starstruck, even girlish, it was surely here, in the presence of the Lizard King. (“An attempt to cast a spell,” she once called her use of repetition as a literary device. That the phrase “black vinyl pants” occurs three times in her vignette about the Doors tells us all we need to know.) Also in the studio that day were, Didion writes, “a couple of girls,” and of those “couple of girls,” one was the writer and adventuress Eve Babitz, an ex-lover of Morrison’s who was not quite as enamored of his cod-shamanic shtick. The Doors “had lyrics you could understand about stuff [kids] learned in Psychology 101,” Babitz wrote in 1991 in Esquire, an eye roll detectable in print. Didion claimed to like the Doors because “their music insists that love is sex and sex is death and therein lies salvation.” Babitz did not think that love was sex or sex was death, only that sex was sex, and having peeled off those black vinyl pants for herself, she’d seen too much of the man to buy the myth. Imagine calling your most self-serious ex an “apocalyptic missionary of sex” with a straight face. As Didion herself would say: does not apply. {read}
