Jim Morrison

Paris, May 3 (Reuters): The man in charge of preserving France’s most famous cemetery wishes that Jim Morrison would just go away.

The former Doors frontman, who died aged 27 in 1971, is the main draw at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, eclipsing other famous denizens like Irish writer Oscar Wilde, Polish-born composer Frederic Chopin and French singer Edith Piaf.

For historian Christian Charlet, who is responsible for the upkeep of the graveyard’s 70,000 tombs, the crowds who come to commune with their deceased idol are nothing but an expensive headache.

“We would like to kick out Morrison because we don’t want him, he causes too many problems,” he said. “If we could get rid of him, we would do it straight away, but unfortunately the Americans don’t want him back.”

On a sunny April afternoon, visitors of all ages milled around Morrison’s simple marker, watched by a security guard. It seems that even in death, the rocker has been a magnet for trouble. Before the guard was appointed, fans would converge at the gravestone to drink beer and smoke pot, or worse even, have sex among the tombstones in a macabre communion.

“People come here not to worship the dead, but think they can do what they want as if it was a rave party,” fumed Charlet. “Tourists have no respect for anything.”

As it prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary this month, the Pere Lachaise is more popular than ever. The necropolis draws two million visitors per year, a third of the six million who throng to the city’s emblematic Eiffel Tower. A vast park filled with spectacular sculptures, it is an oasis of tranquillity on the edge of town.

It is also a fully functioning graveyard, with 100 staff in charge of burying the dead, restoring graves and pruning 6,000 trees spread over a 110-acre hillside in northeast Paris.

That fact is sometimes lost on the crowds of tourists, who treat the place like an open-air shrine and litter tombstones with mementoes, when they are not trying to break off stone fingers and other souvenirs to take home.

Public fascination has been fuelled by the legends surrounding the final resting place of writers Moliere, Marcel Proust and Honore de Balzac, opera diva Maria Callas and actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, to name but a few.

“I can’t get close to these people when they’re alive,” said Marie-Christine Nanniot, a day tripper from Reims, explaining the lure of the famous.

Wilde’s towering memorial, featuring a winged male deity by sculptor Jacob Epstein, is covered in purple lipstick marks. The figure’s penis has been snapped off, presumably by a collector. Even non-celebrities can attain cult status. The statue of Victor Noir, a dashing young journalist killed in 1870, has become a fertility symbol, its crotch rubbed to a brassy shine by women seeking to increase their chances of conceiving.

When it opened in 1804, the cemetery was shunned by Paris residents accustomed to being tossed into common graves.

The government of Louis XVIII tried to drum up interest by transferring to the site in 1817 the mortal remains of doomed lovers Abelard and Heloise, alongside those of Moliere and poet Jean de La Fontaine. But it was only after Balzac featured Pere Lachaise in a key scene of his 1835 novel Le Pere Goriot that it became fashionable to buy a plot.

Memorials of every shape and size bear witness to the cultural diversity of the cemetery, which from the beginning took in Catholics, Protestants and Jews alike, breaking the Catholic Church’s previous monopoly on mass burial sites.

For some relatives of the dead, the presence of tourists is a comfort rather than an inconvenience. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” said Manuela Eckes, 66, who visits her husband’s grave once a week. “On the contrary, people should join in. It’s nicer. Maybe for the dead too, it’s nicer to have people around.”