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Even on a gray day in Paris, you can always find a crowd of tourists gathered around the grave of Jim Morrison at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Forget Frédéric Chopin, Oscar Wilde and the hundreds of other luminaries interred among its chestnut trees; the lead singer of the Doors has long been the cemetery's headline draw. Part of the attraction is the almost mystical magnetism he exuded in life. Part is the macabre mystery of his demise. How did this rock legend die in a bathtub at age 27, of what the Paris police report called "natural causes"?

He did not, according to Sam Bernett, whose book The End: Jim Morrison has just been published in France. In 1971, Bernett, then 21, ran the hippest club in Paris, the Rock 'n' Roll Circus. Bernett claims that in the early hours of July 3, he discovered Morrison's lifeless body in the club's toilet. In an interview with TIME, Bernett recalls: "There was foam coming out of his lips." As Bernett tells it, a doctor who was in the club that night examined Morrison in the toilet and declared him dead, apparently of a heart attack caused by a heroin overdose. Bernett says he "wanted to call the police or rescue people to help," but Morrison's drug dealers "said no." Instead, he claims, they had the body driven back to the apartment the singer had rented with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, where he was deposited in the bathtub.

This might sound like a juicy tale concocted to sell books. But Bernett isn't the only person who remembers that night 36 years ago. Patrick Chauvel, now a renowned war photographer, told TIME he was 21 and drunk that night when he was dragooned into helping load Morrison's body into a car; having just returned from photographing the Vietnam War, Chauvel was deemed especially suited to dealing with corpses. "We carried him in a blanket and got him the hell out of there," says Chauvel, who was a friend of Morrison and did not cooperate with Bernett's book. He adds: "I guess if you have a nightclub and Jim Morrison dies in your toilet, it isn't good p.r. The five or six people who knew, who were there that night, agreed to just forget about it."

Courson told police that Morrison fell ill at home after they had listened to records. She died soon after, taking her secrets with her, and the tale of his watery death has held ever since. The official death reports, reproduced by Bernett, seem to suggest that Paris authorities were less than eager to find out what really happened: there was no autopsy, yet they confidently reported that Morrison had "classic signs" of a heart attack. Oliver Stone's 1991 movie The Doors also concluded that he died in the tub, with a stoned Courson nearby. Bernett says he once met Stone's mother, and said to her: "Tell your son to call me and I'll tell him how his movie should end." Stone never called.

To the disciples who still flock to the singer's graveside, the tragic tawdriness of his demise is unlikely to dent his mythical status. "Morrison's death was the end of an era; that's why people are so infatuated with him," muses Céline Sauls, a 31-year-old Parisian who emigrated to Florida a decade ago and who has returned to Père Lachaise to pay her respects. For her, Morrison will forever be the frenetic singer who belted out classics like L.A. Woman until he and his audience wept. "He was 27, wild and crazy," Sauls says. "He will always be that."

• VIVIENNE WALT/PARIS
• A new book claims compellingly that Jim Morrison did not die in his bathtub of natural causes