Death made Jimi into something he had never been before: a celebrity. In life he had been a charismatic man; in death he acquired the far feebler and insubstantial luster of glamour.
Celebrities are figures of fantasy, and dead people are easier to fantasize about because they will not change or disappoint us by becoming fundamentalist Christians or selling real estate. (Kathy Etchingham became a very successful realtor.) And they will not age, which makes the process of apotheosis—becoming a god—all the more convincing.
Jimi’s memory deserves better than this. Because of the association of death with celebrity, the death of someone on the brink of celebrity is referred to with a cynical irony as a career move. But death did Jimi’s reputation as a musician no favors. Apart, of course, from denying him the chance to mature musically, death robbed him of any chance to take control of and edit his back catalogue and to prevent the release of a torrent of material, official and unofficial, that poured out to fill the void. Even as his life closed he was unhappy with the way pirated tapes and contractual obligations were bringing substandard work into circulation. In 1970 the mass media took far less interest in rock stars than it does now. Jimi had topped polls in the music press for three years, and would continue to do so well into the 1970s. When he died, however, he was still unknown to the vast majority of people, who took no interest in progressive rock. None of the people who became officially involved with his death—the emergency services, the doctors, and the coroner—had ever heard of him. It was his death that brought the mass media to his door, and when it arrived, because he was relatively unknown, he was easy to caricature as a self-destructive hedonist.
Central to the events of Jimi’s death was Monika Dannemann, a twenty-six-year-old from Dussledorf in West Germany. In her youth she had enjoyed modest success as a competitive ice skater until an injury ended her career. The death of Jimi became the central event of Monika Dannemann’s life, until she committed suicide in 1996, when she gassed herself with a hosepipe attached to the exhaust pipe of her car in the garage of her home in rural Sussex in the south of England.
As the woman there at the time, the title of Jimi’s widow was thrust upon Monika and she hung on to it tenaciously. Various parties at various times supported her claim for their own ends.
Monika was capable of being calculating. As early as September 19, 1970—the day after he died—she began to use conversations about Jimi’s death and Jimi in general to fish for information that she would later recycle as her own testimony. Yet she often regurgitated information regardless of whether it was in her interest to do so or not. Possibly over the years she came to believe that the figment of her imagination she named Jimi Hendrix had asked her to marry him. Wherever one draws the line between the fantasist and the liar, nothing she ever said can be taken as reliable.
Monika’s involvement with Jimi’s life, as opposed to his death, added up to less than a week. In the third week of September1970 Monika approached Alvinia Hedges, Eric Burdon’s girlfriend, in the Speakeasy. Monika claimed that she and Alvinia had worked together two summers previously. Alvinia’s own memory required some prompting before she recalled that they had. Then Monika told Alvinia of her passion for Jimi. She had met him a couple of years ago; he had taken her virginity, and she was deeply in love with him. Touched by this forlorn woman, Alvinia phoned Jimi and asked him to come to the Speakeasy.
Monika was Jimi’s companion for the last few days of his life—the woman Sharon Lawrence saw with Jimi at Ronnie Scott’s and the woman who collected Jimi from a party in the early hours of Friday, September 18. On this occasion she appears to have been accompanied by Devon Wilson, who Jimi had known first in his Harlem days and had become part of his New York entourage. Party guests heard raised voices in the street. Where and when Devon left Jimi and Monika that night remains a mystery. Jimi and Monika went back to the Samarkand Hotel.
At some time between 6 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. Monika phoned Alvinia in Eric Burdon’s hotel room. She told Alvinia that Jimi was ill, and asked her if she knew the telephone number of Jimi’s doctor. In 1970 Britain was in the second year of an experiment with double summer time (known to Americans as daylight savings time), and so, although it was 6 a.m., the streets were still dark. It felt as if it was the middle of the night. If Monika felt she had had time to search through Jimi’s papers for a doctor’s number, as she said she had, this could hardly be a pressing emergency. Alvinia, with Eric at her elbow, suggested that Monika call an ambulance.
Around 11 a.m. Monika phoned Alvinia and Eric again. Already worried that he should have done more, Eric became insistent that an ambulance be called and set off to the Samarkand with Alvinia. The emergency call for an ambulance was logged at 11:18 a.m.
The two-man ambulance crew found the door of the hotel room open and Jimi lying on the bed, covered in vomit, “vomit of all colours, black and brown, all over him and all over the pillow,” one of the ambulance crew told Kathy Etchingham more than twenty years later. Jimi appeared lifeless; an aspirator was fetched from the ambulance, but he could not be revived. The ambulance crew called for the police over the radio, and two beat officers arrived.
It is here that corners were cut. The beat officers should have called in a detective. Rather than face a day of filling in forms and tracing next of kin, however, the police constables persuaded the ambulance crew to take Jimi’s body to the hospital and have him admitted as an emergency. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, Jimi was pronounced dead by the doctor on duty and sent straight to the mortuary.
Strong emotion can color memory, and for many years afterward Eric Burdon believed that he had seen Jimi dead on the bed. He arrived at the Samarkand with Alvinia at around 11:45 a.m., when the ambulance had already left. Monika emerged from somewhere, and the young women embraced each other and wailed. Eric wandered around and found a long poem in Jimi’s handwriting beside the bed. Gerry Stickells, the Experience’s first roadie, was sent for, to take Jimi’s guitars into safekeeping and to remove any drugs in case there was to be a police search. When asked what she had done between her first call to Alvinia and Eric and her second, all Monika found to say is that she had gone out to buy cigarettes. It was the only clear statement she was ever to make about the events of September 18, 1970.
The day after Jimi died, Sharron Lawrence was introduced to Monika by Eric Burdon at his hotel. She asked Monika what drugs Jimi had taken and was told Vesperax.
Vesperax is a secobarbitol. Secobarbitols are efficient painkillers but in the 1960s they were frequently prescribed for insomnia, and even for anxiety. They are potentially lethal; before they were withdrawn in the late 1980s, they had become the drug of choice in medically assisted suicides.
Monika was prescribed Vesperax for the pain she still suffered from the accident that had ended her skating career. She had four packs of ten pills with her in the Smarakand. It is not clear whether Monika recommended the pills as something that would help Jimi sleep, or whether he had found them himself in the bathroom. Monika found a sachet from one pack on the bathroom floor, with only one of the pills left in it. This implied that Jimi had taken nine Vesperax.
The number made an impression on Lawrence. Jimi had strong faith in numerolgy, or number divination, and believed that the number nine held personal significance for him. September is the ninth month of the year, and the eighteenth is a nine day.
On the same occasion, Eric Burdon showed Sharon Lawrence the writing he had found beside Jimi’s bed, a poem that closed with the ominous lines, “In the wink of an eye/life is hello and goodbye.” Lawrence thought it significant that the writing had been found at all. She knew Jimi well enough to know that he made a point of tidying his writing away in a burgundy folder when he was finished with it. He had told her he did this to stop his work from being pilfered by souvenir hunters. From the symbolism of the number of pills, and the fact that his last poem had been left where it would be found, Lawrence concluded that Jimi had meant to end his life.
The inquest into Jimi’s death opened at (34) Westminster Coroner’s Court, 65 Horseferry Road, a squat little building a few hundred yards from Westminster Abbey, on Tuesday, September 24, the day after an autopsy had been performed. The inquest was immediately adjourned to the following Monday, September 28, to allow the pathologist time to complete tests.
When the inquest reopened, the coroner, Dr. Gavin Thurston, was evidently determined to protect Jimi’s reputation. Monika Dannemann was the main witness. She described herself as a friend (not, as yet, the fiancée she would later claim to have been), and said she had known Jimi since January 1969 (she may have met him them). She told the court that she had collected Jimi from a party at 3 a.m., and had taken a sleeping pill before going to bed. She said that she had woken up at around 10:30 a.m. and found Jimi sleeping peacefully. She said that she then went out to buy a packet of cigarettes and that when she came back she found Jimi was ill and called an ambulance. The coroner asked Monika if Jimi had used hard drugs. Monika said that she thought he might have tried them in the past but was not involved with them. The coroner was satisfied with this answer.
The pathologist, Professor Donald Teare, gave the cause of Jimi’s death as inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate poisoning. This meant that Jimi did not die because he vomited in his sleep, but vomited because he was already dying. It is a subtlety that is easy to miss.
As to Jimi’s state of mind, the coroner made much of Gerry Stickell’s testimony that Jimi was “a happy chap.” Roadies are not renowned for their penetrating psychological skills, but it was a view many other people would have expressed.
English coroner’s juries usually deliver the verdict as the coroner directs them to. This case was no exception, and the result was an “open verdict.” The significance is that although Jimi’s death could not be declared “accidental,” it was not “misadventure” either, that is, careless or reckless behavior. He died of a drug overdose, but he did not die from substance abuse.
Sharron Lawrence, who was present, was appalled then, and is appalled now, that suicide was not considered. Until 1960 suicide and attempted suicide were criminal offenses in England. Attempted suicides were placed under arrest as soon as they regained consciousness. To spare the feelings of the family and friends of the deceased, English coroners will avoid delivering a verdict of “suicide” whenever they can, even if the deceased died of something patently suicidal such as jumping under a moving train. An open verdict is delivered in such cases, too, but in this instance Dr. Thurston appears to have been concerned to exonerate Jimi from being declared a drug addict.
Jimi’s state of mind in the last days of his life was mysterious even to those who knew him well. Nobody can be sure how he came to take nine Vesperax (if it was in fact nine—four would have been enough to be fatal). Perhaps he was putting his life into the hands of cosmic forces as a test of whether he should live or die. Or perhaps he felt he needed some rest.
A distressed Monika Dannemann, escorted by Gerry Stickells, is driven away from Jimi’s inquest.