My summer with the future Lizard King: new memoir offers a look at the pre-fame Jim Morrison

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Imagine meeting The Beatles in Hamburg or Elvis before he became the King of Rock n’ Roll. A new memoir from a Kelowna man provides an intimate look at Jim Morrison before the fame.

In Love Her Madly, Jim Morrison, Mary, and Me, author Bill Cosgrave talks about the summer he spent hanging out with the future Lizard King a couple of years before The Doors achieved stardom. “He was so shy you would not believe it was the same guy who would romp and scream around the stage,” Cosgrave remembers. “He was a gentle, lovely human being.”

The “Mary” the title of the book refers to is Mary Werbelow. “I left home when I was 15 [and] ended up in Clearwater, Florida. I was staying with some friends. Mary was three years older than me. Long story short, I couldn’t get my eyes off her,” explains Cosgrave.

Fast forward a few years and Mary lures him away from college in Montreal and out to Los Angeles where she’s living with her then-fiancé. “An hour later, Jim walked in. And we became fast friends.”

LISTEN: My Summer with the Lizard King 

Soon Mary would throw Jim out of their shared Venice apartment and he ended up sleeping under the Santa Monica Pier. When he wasn’t doing that, he was hanging out with Cosgrave.
“Well, Jim and I were, essentially, long-haired, homeless hippies. We just smoked dope and talked to people and he had a notebook and he would be writing [down] all of these things,” he recalls. “And it didn’t strike me that they would be world-famous songs one day.”

“Without Mary, let’s face it, you wouldn’t have The Doors,” he says. “He wrote The End, one of his most famous songs, about his break-up with Mary.”

Today on @NEWS1130: I speak with Kelowna’s Bill Cosgrave, author of “Love Her Madly: Jim Morrison, Mary, and Me,” new from @dundurnpress. “Jim and I were, essentially, long-haired, homeless hippies,” says Cosgrave of his time with the pre-fame Lizard King. #1130bookshelf pic.twitter.com/ETapgxxjEE

— John Ackermann ???? (@jackermann) November 22, 2020

The last time Bill saw Morrison in-person, he had just moved in with future Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. “We vowed to keep in touch and whoever made any money first was going to contact the other one.”

A couple of years go by, Bill is in Canada in the travel business, and Jim is world-famous. “I was walking down the street and I saw Jim 20 feet away looking at me from, I believe it was, the cover of Rolling Stone.”

While the book provides an intimate look at the future Doors frontman, the heart of Love Her Madly is Bill’s decades-long quest to reconnect with Mary. While they do end up meeting again, it’s not under the happiest of circumstances.

“I was particularly in love with Mary. She was my dream girl,” he admits. “I spent many, many, many years trying to find her and I did. But I don’t really want to give away the rest of the story because it’s such an essential part of the book. But I did find her 43 years later.”

Look for Love Her Madly, Jim Morrison, Mary, and Me from Dundurn Press.