Mary Werbelow was born in July 1944 and she came from a very strict Catholic family. In Summer 1962 she was just finishing her junior year at Clearwater High, when Mary and best friend Mary Wilkin spread their beach blanket near Pier 60. She was 17, and met Jim Morrison, who 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. Mary was on the high school homecoming court. Her friends did cotillion dances at the Jack Tar Harrison Hotel, hit Brown Brothers dairy store for burgers and malts, and shopped Mertz’s records for Ben E. King, Del Shannon and Elvis Presley. 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 Theater on Ninth Street. Friends who thought they knew Mary couldn’t fathom why she would want to hang out with Jim Morrison. What they didn’t know was how out of place Mary felt in her social circle. Jim talked like no one she had met. “We connected on a level where speaking was almost unnecessary. We’d look at each other and know what we were thinking.” He recited long poems from memory. She liked her alone time, in her bedroom, dancing and drawing. Jim liked his alone time, in his bedroom, reading. They skipped dances and football games and hung out, at her house or at his grandparents’ house. When Jim drove, Mary kept a notebook at the ready. “Write this!” he’d say, dictating an observation. Or he’d pull over and scribble himself. “He was a genius,” Mary says. “He was incredible.” Mary says he 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.” At 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. 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. On his end, Jim would put in a dime for the first two minutes. They would talk for hours. On her end, Mary would loiter by the phone at the appointed hour. On March 30, 1963 the Jaycees called to recruit Mary for the Miss Clearwater competition, Mary’s mother answered the phone.“Oh, yeah,” she said, as Mary recalled “she’ll be happy to do it.” although Mary herself would have declined. 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. Mary performed body twirls. She did the bossa nova. Time for her big question: “If your husband grew a beard, what would you do?” she answered: “I’d let him grow it. Whether he would kiss me or not would be another matter.” She got first runner-up. As Mary’s father banned Jim from the Werbelow house, she followed him to Tallahassee for a semester, although her parents objected. in 1964, When he started film school at UCLA and Mary announced she was following him to Los Angeles, her parents were devastated. 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. By November 1964 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 although Jim didn’t like the idea. Later that month, she went to Celebrate Thanksgiving with Jim and his parents. Jim studied film. At the end of the year, a handful from among hundreds of student films were selected for public showing. Jim’s was not among them. Shortly after, Mary says, he told her he was humiliated, considered his formal education over and needed to forget everything. He built a fire in his back yard and incinerated many of his precious Florida notebooks. 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 had always seen seemed to be overtaking him, and she didn’t want to watch him explore his self-destructive bent. And she felt he had swallowed her identity. Whatever he liked, she liked. “I had to go out and see what parts of that were me. I just knew I had to be away from him. I needed to be by myself, to find my own identity.” She enrolled in art school. The day Jim helped her move to a new apartment, she told him she needed a break. “He clammed up after that. I really hurt him. It hurts me to say that. I really hurt him.” 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. “He didn’t sit around and sing,” Mary says, laughing. “Jim, no, he was a poet. He wrote poetry.” By phone from his home in Northern California, 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.” Doors drummer John Densmore stated: “Jim wrote The Crystal Ship for Mary Werbelow, a girlfriend with whom he was breaking up… . The song was a goodbye love song.” Jim Morrison took up with other women, notably with longtime companion Pam, but Mary says she and Jim kept up with each other. She says she was his anchor to the times before things got crazy. “I’d see him when he really needed to talk to someone.” She thought they were too young. She worried they might grow apart. She needed more time to explore her own identity, so by late 1968 to early-mid 1969, Mary moved to India to study meditation, while there, she wrote several letters to her parents. She never saw Jim again.