Window onto the Doors?

Just for the record, Cheri Woods is no fan of the Doors. Jim Morrison’s band was too dark, too druggy. “No, I’m an Elvis nut. I did like that one song ... what was it? ‘Light My Fire’?” Still, Woods has been on a crash course in all things Doors that has included hours of research, memorabilia shopping and a seance. These are the things you do if you run a two-bedroom Morrison Hotel. “It’s $200 a night,” Woods says in a chirpy voice, “or $1,000 for a week.”

Woods is a real estate agent, but she learned more about magical property values during her pilgrimages to Graceland. “If you really idolize somebody, there’s nothing you won’t do to be part of their lives,” she said last week with supreme confidence.

She was standing in the living room of an upstairs unit of a handsomely weathered apartment building that sits with a sag on West Norton Avenue in West Hollywood. She bought the six-unit complex in late 2003 for $700,000 and only after the transaction was underway did she find out that it also had an address in rock history.

“This is internationally recognized as the last known U.S. residence of Jim Morrison,” Woods said of the upstairs rear unit. It’s a claim that you can read on her website, in her brochures or even hear on your car radio if you drive by the lot and turn your dial to 1610 AM. All of this is to lure Morrison disciples into the $9.95 tour (ask about the discount for seniors and children) or, better yet, investing in the nightly rate to crash in Jim’s old pad.

Technically, it wasn’t Morrison’s apartment. The unit in question in the 1932 Spanish style building belonged to his girlfriend, Pamela Courson.

“He was staying at the Alta Cienega Motel, room No. 32, but he spent a lot of time at Pam’s place,” said Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist. “It was his home away from home.”

Was it his home enough to charge fans $200 a night?

Manzarek laughed. “God bless them if they can get it. It’s like the guy who will take you on the famous Hollywood death spots in a hearse, right? Stardom and death go hand in hand.”

True enough, as evidenced by the periodic phone calls to the front desks of the Joshua Tree Inn or the Chateau Marmont about getting that room, you know, the one where you know who overdosed.

Morrison, with his dark charisma and Lizard King mythology, is especially bewitching to his loyalists. That made the apartment at 8216 1/2 Norton a destination point for fans long before Woods made it official by putting a plaque and ceramic iguana up on the wall.

Fans have hopped the fence for years. The police were summoned once to extricate a woman who had locked herself in a basement and shrieked that she knew Morrison’s death had been faked. A pizza delivery, parcel or letter arrives at the doorstep once a month or so with the singer’s name on it. One particular rotund fan has spooked the tenants repeatedly with his nighttime bellowing about the “beauty of the Doors!” Woods’ daughter, Tiana, lives in a downstairs unit and says he usually shows up about the time the local bars make final call.

In November, a new paint job and some other perks were enough to coax the tenants in the Courson apartment to move to the unit downstairs. Woods set about making the place a proper landmark. She hung posters of Morrison and beaded curtains. One of the rooms got a paint job that makes the wall look like the scales of a reptile. She replaced the window screens and light switches -- and then she sold the old ones on EBay, complete with certificates of authenticity.

That was just the beginning. Morrison’s band took its name from the writings of Aldous Huxley, but Woods seems to be more beholden to the teachings of P.T. Barnum, especially that one line -- wasn’t it something about consumer birthrates?

“This is Doors dirt,” she said pointing to a mound of sod overgrown with weeds in the recent storms. “I sell Ziploc bags of it on EBay. This is dirt that Jim walked on or walked past, dirt he might have looked at. Maybe he even peed on it, but I don’t say that on EBay.”

On her own website, the baggies of dirt are described in existential terms: “We have a limited supply, so when it’s gone it’s gone forever! No two bags are alike.” The bags usually bring in a buck or two (not including $7.95 for shipping and handling), but one scored $20.

If it sounds like Woods is pimping Morrison, it should be noted that real estate is a second career. Once she was an executive in the world’s oldest profession, a checkered past that led to two predictable gulags: the Los Angeles County Jail and the daytime talk-show circuit.

She claims in her book “Death Row Madam” that, at her height of commerce, she was bigger than Heidi Fleiss. Other entries on her resume include actress, model and “former cousin-in-law” to Philip Michael Thomas of “Miami Vice” fame. The Doors project, though, is her main focus of the moment.

The place opened up for lodgers a month ago. The first visitor was a two-night guest, a businessman in from Fort Myers, Fla. He hit the local boutiques for armloads of Doors memorabilia and also asked Tiana Woods to drive him to a package store so he could buy a case of Miller Lite.

“He told me the door opened in the middle of the night and he thought it was Jim’s ghost,” the elder Woods said. “But I went in after he left and found all these bottles. He sat in there by himself and drank 24 beers, by himself. So he could have seen anything. When he left he told me it was the best $400 he ever spent.”

The second visitors were an Orange County man and his girlfriend visiting from Italy. A local couple have an upcoming reservation to spend their anniversary night in the place, and Woods is expecting an uptick in interest when Morrison’s birthday (Dec. 8, 1943) and death date (July 3, 1971) come up. “It’s going great,” Woods said, pushing back her streaked tresses. Well, there is one problem.

It’s a nagging semantics issue that crops up every time she describes the residence as “Morrison’s last American address.” It’s not that he didn’t live there -- it’s that he hasn’t actually died. She got the awkward news about a week after she put a memorial fountain in the courtyard.

The “official” story -- that Morrison left Los Angeles for Paris in March 1971 and four months later died in a hotel room after an apparent heart attack -- is bunk, Woods said.

She knows because Morrison’s new manager contacted her and shared not only the story of Morrison’s secret retirement but also a videotape of the reclusive Lizard King. Woods was skeptical, of course, but after twice talking to Morrison on the phone, she was sold and promptly signed up as West Coast distributor for the shocking video.

There’s an advertisement for the video in her Morrison Hotel because, hey, when you have a captive audience, you might as well maximize your sales message. The ad shows a guy in frontier mode -- black cowboy hat, a pistol and rifle clutched menacingly -- but his face is cut out.

“I did that because the first thing a fan will want to know is what he looks like now,” said the L.A. woman. “You have to buy the video to see what he looks like.”