On 1962 Jim and Mary met when Jim was living in N Osceloa Avenue, Clearwater. Since their first meeting they became were inseparable, and Jim Morrison was her first love, before he got famous with the Doors. He mourns their break-up in the Doors' ballad The End.
On summer 1962, Mary and best friend Mary Wilkin spread their beach blanket near Pier 60. Mary was 17, and she saw a young guy. He was Jim Morrison.
Jim had been sent here by his father, then a Navy captain, after he blew off his high school graduation ceremony in Virginia. He had just finished the year at St. Petersburg Junior College and lived with his grandparents, who ran a coin laundry on Clearwater-Largo Road.
Jim tagged along when his friend came over to flirt with Mary Wilkin. He told Mary he was a regular pro at the game of matchsticks, a mental puzzle in which the matches are laid out in rows, like a pyramid. Loser picks up the last one.
Jim challenged Mary and suggested they spice things up with a wager. If she won she would be Jim’s slave for the day. If he won Mary had to watch beach basketball with him.
Later on, Mary’s father came with a picnic basket and suggested the couple adjourn to the Clearwater Causeway. Then they went to see the movie West Side Story.
Jim read his poetry at the avant-garde Beaux Arts coffeehouse in Pinellas Park and visited St. Pete's only live burlesque show, at the Sun Art Theatre on Ninth Street.
Friends who thought they knew Mary couldn't understand why she would want to hang out with the likes of Jim Morrison. What they didn't know was how out of place Mary felt in her social circle.
Mary felt this was not puppy love, like the earlier boyfriend who played guitar, wrote songs and serenaded her by phone. This was different. This was intense. "We connected on a level where speaking was almost unnecessary. We'd look at each other and know what we were thinking."
When Jim drove, Mary kept a notebook at the ready and always wrote what Jim said, anything he saw on the street, later on he'd pull over and scribble himself. "He was a genius," Mary says. "He was incredible."
Mary says Jim rarely drank in her presence. "It was out of respect for me. We were in love, and he didn't want to do things that I didn't like." Mary was the love of his life in those days, they were virtually soul mates for three or four years.
In the fall, Jim transferred to Florida State. Most weekends, rain or shine, he hitchhiked back to Clearwater, 230 miles down U.S. 19. Most days in between, letters postmarked Tallahassee arrived at the Werbelow mailbox on Nursery Road.
Mary's father intercepted one, read the page about sex and never got to the part that made clear Jim was writing about a class. Furious at her father's snooping; she burned all Jim's letters, a move she came to regret, deeply.
She wasn't much of a letter writer herself. At Jim's direction, she wrote once a week and included the number of a public telephone in Clearwater and a time he should call. They would talk for hours. She always assumed he had her wait at different phones for her protection; now she's thinking it was his way of making sure she wrote him at least once a week.
On March 30, 1963 the Jaycees called to recruit her for the Miss Clearwater competition, Mary's mother answered the phone. The third and final night of competition, more than 1,000 people packed Clearwater Municipal Auditorium. Five finalists matched "beauty, personality and poise." Mary was looking good, not that Jim was thrilled. If she won, it was on to Miss Florida. Less time for him.She got first runner-up.
Around 1964 Mary's father banned Jim from the Werbelow house. When she followed Jim to Tallahassee for a semester, her parents objected. When he started film school at UCLA and Mary announced she was following him to Los Angeles, they were devastated.
To bribe Mary to stay, her mother bought her an antique bedroom set, no competition for a 19-year-old following her heart.
Mary says Jim asked her to wear "something floaty" when she arrived in Los Angeles. "He wanted me to look like an angel coming off the plane." Instead, she drove out a week early and surprised him.
Together again, in an exciting, intimidating city, they kept separate apartments. Mary got her first real job, in the office of a hospital X-ray department. Later, she donned a fringe skirt and boots as a go-go dancer at Gazzari's on the Sunset Strip.
Mary says he started doubting her commitment. "You're going to leave me," he would tell her. "No, I'm not. How can you say that? I'm in love with you."
After one fight, Jim went out with another woman. He wasn't home the next morning. Mary went to the woman's house, but she said Jim wasn't there. Mary called: "Come out wherever you are!" Jim slinked forward, a hand towel around him. Mary bolted and, in a blur, hit the woman's fence as she sped off.
"That was the beginning of the end."
He was drinking hard and taking psychedelic drugs. The darkness she says she had seen from the start was overtaking him, and she didn't want to watch him explore his self-destructive bent. She felt he had swallowed her identity. Whatever he liked, she liked.
She enrolled in art school. The day Jim helped her move to a new apartment; she told him she needed a break.
They split up in the summer of 1965.
A few months later, Jim got together with a film school buddy, Ray Manzarek, who says he wanted to combine his keyboards with Jim's poetry. They started the band that became the Doors.
Manzarek says all the guys in film school were in love with Mary. She was gorgeous and sweet on top of that. "She was Jim's first love. She held a deep place in his soul."
The Doors' 11-minute ballad The End, Manzarek says, originally was "a short goodbye love song to Mary."
This is the end, Beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes . . . again
. . .
This is the end, Beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you'll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
Before a photo shoot for the Doors' fourth album, she says Jim told her: "The first three albums are about you. Didn't you know that?" She didn't have the heart to tell him she had never really listened to them. She had heard Doors songs on the radio, but she didn't go to his concerts, she didn't keep up with his career.
In late 1968, Mary moved to India to study meditation. She never saw Jim again.
September 2005 - Mary is 61, unemployed and rarely leaves her mobile home in California. She married and divorced twice, and she has no children. "I can't find anybody to replace Jim. We definitely have a soul connection so deep. I've never had anything like that again, and I don't expect I ever will."
Mary would not meet with a reporter for this story or allow her photo to be taken. She says she weighs exactly what she did in high school - 107 pounds - but now her hair is long and grey. "People sometimes tell me I look like an artist."
She wants to forget, and still she feels his ghost checking on her.
"I promised it wouldn't be forever, that I'd get back together with him sometime. I never did. It's very painful to think of that. For a long time, any time I would think about him, or anyone would talk about him, I'd cry. It used to make me so sad. I never gave him that second chance. That destroyed me for so long. I let him go and never gave him that second chance. I felt so guilty about that."
Mary says she is tired. She has trouble sleeping. She says she's not sure if she has done right by talking so much. She's worried that others will seek interviews that she does not want to give. She wants that made clear: She does not want to talk about Jim anymore.