This 300-Pound Bust Was Stolen From Jim Morrison’s Grave in 1988. French Police Just Recovered It
Created for the tenth anniversary of the Doors frontman’s death in 1971, the bust stood on his grave in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris for only seven years
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/eli2.png)
Only five people came to Jim Morrison’s funeral in Paris. His girlfriend, Pamela Courson, recited one of the 27-year-old rockstar’s poems from memory. Then the small crowd (which included filmmaker Agnès Varda) dispersed. It lasted only eight minutes.
Since that day in the summer of 1971, there have been few moments of such calmness and solitude at the grave in Père Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetery where the Doors’ lead singer and songwriter is buried alongside the likes of Honoré de Balzac, Édith Piaf, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde.
Even among other celebrity graves, Morrison’s commands another level of attention in Père Lachaise, a cemetery of 70,000 plots spread over more than 100 acres in Paris’ 20th arrondissement. Mourners scrawl notes to “Jim” throughout the graveyard. They bring bottles of whiskey, cigarettes and marijuana to toast Morrison. They leave keepsakes and mementos around the grave and stick pieces of gum on a nearby tree.
To mark the tenth anniversary of Morrison’s death, Mladen Mikulin, a Croatian artist, added his own monumental gift: a 300-pound bust of the musician. For seven years, as it sat atop the grave, the bust garnered layers of graffiti. Fans chipped off bits of the stone Morrison to take home as souvenirs.
Then, one night in 1988, the whole bust disappeared without a trace. Theories proliferated. Some claimed they saw two men peeling away on a moped; others suggested the cemetery hid it away for safekeeping. But the bust never resurfaced—until earlier this month, when French police announced they had recovered it during an unrelated investigation, nearly four decades after its disappearance.
“This was a chance discovery made during a search ordered by an examining magistrate at the Paris court,” a spokesperson from the Paris public prosecutor’s office tells CNN’s Amarachi Orie.
Details about the investigation are scant. Investigators have not shared the identity of the suspects, only fueling rumors about how the bust disappeared and where it’s been all these years, per the French broadcaster RTL.
The long absence of the bust generated unease among Morrison’s devotees. When Todd Mitchell of Utah visited Père Lachaise in 1993 and saw that the bust was missing from Morrison’s grave, he “went off the deep end,” said his wife, Lori, soon after the theft, per Pollstar. Upon his return to the United States, he could think of little else except for the bust. He decided to pay a sculptor $1,700 from his retirement fund to remake the piece in bronze.
He and his nephew flew to Paris “with the sculpture, three bags of tools and a bottle of whiskey to toast the late rock star,” per Pollstar. They snuck into the cemetery after dark, waited until the coast was clear and began drilling bolts into the tombstone to secure the artwork. Security guards and police soon appeared and arrested the pair, despite their insistence that they were adding to the grave, not destroying it.
Many of the millions of tourists who visit Père Lachaise each year believe they’re adding to the graves of their idols. Until a glass barrier was added around Wilde’s grave in 2011, lipstick stains left by admirers of the Irish author, playwright and poet caused damage to his tomb’s massive sculpture. The crotch on the bronze sculpture of 19th-century French journalist Victor Noir has been rubbed to a shine by visitors who consider it a boon for fertility.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/5b/11/5b11dd62-4e7f-4657-bb8d-daf3bcf21f20/gumorrison.jpg)
Morrison’s grave has commanded its fair share of excessive attention, with some mourners of those buried in nearby plots demanding the singer’s remains return to America, according to the London Times’ Adam Sage.
Morrison’s grave is now fenced off, but its infamy is inextricable from the legend of Père Lachaise. It is “to Père Lachaise as the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre,” Benoît Gallot, the curator of the cemetery, writes in his book The Secret Life of a Cemetery: The Wild Nature and Enchanting Lore of Père Lachaise, per Le Figaro’s Emma Ferrand.
Whether the bust is coming back to Morrison’s grave is still unclear. “The police haven’t contacted us,” Gallot tells Le Figaro. “I don’t know if the bust will be returned to us.”
Based on photos posted by the Parisian police on social media, the bust appears to be in just as poor shape as it was in the 1980s. The nose is missing, and every inch is covered in grime and graffiti.
Jeff Jampol, manager of Morrison’s estate, tells CNN that he was “happy to hear” the bust was located after nearly four decades. “Obviously it’s a piece of history, and one Jim’s family wanted there on his grave, so it’s gratifying to see that it’s been recovered.”
