The retired Hollywood lawyer who played golf with Max Fink — the attorney who defended Jim Morrison on the 1969 Miami obscenity and indecent-exposure charges — said in 2002 that he believed Fink might have received a warning concerning Morrison about a month before Jim left for Paris, which would have been in early February 1971. According to this attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Fink was given a tip by an associate of Mickey Rudin, the prominent Beverly Hills attorney whose clients included Frank Sinatra and who had ties to the Nixon administration. This retired lawyer was given to understand that Fink was quietly told that his famous client would be neutralized in prison — murdered or incapacitated — and should get out of the country before his legal appeals were exhausted and his passport confiscated. France, which has no extradition treaty with the United States for so-called sex crimes, was suggested as a logical place for Jim to take refuge. No direct or documentary evidence for this warning exists, only the unverifiable word of a respected former associate of both Rudin and Fink. Whatever the accuracy of this account, within one month Jim Morrison was in Paris, living incognito as a lodger in an apartment house, under the assumed names of James Douglas and/or Douglas James.

Pamela left for Paris first, on February 14th. The next day she checked into the Hotel George V and hooked up with her sometime boyfriend, Count Jean de Breteuil, a playboy and classy dope dealer — his hashish and opium supposedly came from a Moroccan chauffeur attached to the French consulate in L.A. The de Breteuil family owned all the French-language newspapers in North Africa. When his father had died a few years earlier, Jean inherited his title of Comte de Breteuil, so he was an actual French count whose lineage went back 700 years.

Jim himself left four weeks later. He didn't pack much. He took prints of his two films, Feast of Friends and HWY; as many notebooks as he could find; the typed manuscripts of his unpublished poetry; the two quarter-inch-tape reels of his solo poetry readings; his Super-8 movie camera; a few copies of his poetry books; his personal photo file (including color transparencies of himself, a recent publicity photo of Joan Baez, pictures from the Miami trial and selected Elektra eight-by-ten-inch promotional glossies of himself); and a few precious books and clothes. He left his library and some files in Pamela's apartment and told the Doors' accountant to pay the rent while they were gone.

Pamela was by now a familiar figure in upscale Saint Germain hangouts like Cafe de Flore, Les Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp as a companion of Count Jean de Breteuil. Her acquaintances included young models and actors, a few diplomats and cafe habitues such as les minets (gay fashion kids) and les michetons (handsome young men, impeccably dressed and groomed, who hung around le Drugstore and were employed as gigolos by fashionable but lonely women of the quarter). Through de Breteuil, Pamela had become friends with the gamine model and starlet Elizabeth Lariviere, known professionally as Zozo. Zozo lived in a large apartment on the Right Bank, and when Pamela learned Zozo had a job coming up in the south, she arranged for Jim to rent the flat while Zozo was away that spring.

Sometime in the middle of March 1971, Jim moved into the second-largest bedroom of a fourth-floor apartment in a handsome nineteenth-century Beaux Arts building at 17 rue Beautrellis, in the Fourth Arrondissement. The slightly shabby flat was furnished with the typically overstuffed antiques of the bourgeoisie. There were elegant marble fireplaces, parquet floors and plaster reliefs on the walls, and the ceiling of the salon was painted with a blue sky and puffy clouds. The leaky bathroom, smelling of old-fashioned French plumbing, had a bidet, a toilet and a narrow tiled wall tub that was equipped with a hand-held shower. (Zozo had padlocked her bedroom while she was away.) Jim's room faced the morning sun, and he moved a leather-covered writing table to the big window. As the day progressed, he would move the table to the other side of the flat, so he could sit in the sun as it warmed the courtyard in the rear of the building. A concert pianist lived across the courtyard, and the sound of her daily exercises seemed to please Jim. On the apartment's lobby mailbox, he taped a handwritten label for the postman: "James Douglas."