Chelsea Wildness - This Ain't no Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995 - page 38

feel all lovey-dovey. Otherwise, Jimi was always being absconded from her.
Guys would get him to jam with them, or the chicks would be all over him.
Devon used this ploy: “I'm going to get him stoned on heroin and be intimate
with him.” But what she didn't know was that Hendrix had been partying on
heroin all day. The tablespoon of heroin she put in his coffee was the straw that
broke the camel's back. And he overdosed and died!
And now Devon had a terrible guilt complex about giving Jimi Hendrix his
final dose of heroin, and she would tell people about it, maybe as a sort of con-
fession to relieve her feelings of guilt.
The questions surrounding Jimi Hendrix's mysterious death in London—and Devon
Wilson's plunge out a Chelsea Hotel window—may never be resolved.
Devon Wilson, about whom Hendrix wrote the unflattering song “Dolly Dagger,” was
hardly a bedrock of emotional stability. According to John McDermott and Eddie Kramer,
Wilson was extremely insecure but hid her fears under a tough, streetwise persona. Al-
though she was a be-witchingly charismatic, talented model and actress, her taste for sedu-
cing superstars like Mick Jagger and Brian Jones distracted her from her own career. Not
to mention her heroin addiction. She was also knownforcarrying around massive amounts
of drugs. 29
Her relationship with Hendrix was a continual power struggle, a brutal dynamic they
both seemed to enjoy, or at least felt compelled to act out. On the one hand, she assumed
the role of his guardian and protector, but then she would sleep with other men to make
him jealous. Once, at party where Mick Jagger cut his finger, Wilson elbowed her way in
to suck the blood off as Hendrix watched.
The night before his death, Jimi was at a party hosted by Kit Lambert, manager of The
Who. Afterward, he went back to London's Samarkand Hotel, where he'd been staying
with a German artist and skating instructor named Monika Danneman. She spent the night
with Hendrix and later testified that, the next morning, after waking up next to him, she
had gone out on a quick errand to buy cigarettes. When she came back to their room, Jimi
Hendrix was dead in bed, suggesting that Hendrix had been fine when she left, but died
before she returned.
However, according to Carmen Geddes, 30 Monika Danneman's story is full of holes
and contradictions. Danneman said she found Hendrix dead around 8:00 a.m., but records
show she didn't dial 999 (Britain's 911) until around 11:00. She did, however, phone the
bad news to rocker Eric Burdon and to Gerrie Stickells, one of Hendrix's roadies, between
8:00 and 9:00. So why did she wait three hours to call the authorities?