Source: Entertainment Weekly

Before her breakout role on the beloved 1970s family drama Little House on the Prairie, Charlotte Stewart had a whirlwind adventure with a rock star.

The actress behind Eva Beadle Simms, a.k.a. the wholesome teacher Miss Beadle, recently recalled hitting the road with Jim Morrison in 1969, after the Dade County Sheriff’s Office issued a warrant for his arrest following his controversial show at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami.

Stewart said that Morrison, who was charged with indecent exposure and public profanity, came to her for help when he got back to California. “You have to remember, this was a very serious offense in Florida,” the actress told Fox News in a new interview. “He was facing trial. So he came up to me and said, ‘I gotta get out of town. You want to go?’ I said, ‘Sure.'”

The actress, who would later star in David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Twin Peaks, said she set the itinerary for the drinking buddies’ four-day trip. “We jumped in the car, and he didn’t know where he wanted to go, so I directed him up Highway 1, which follows the Pacific Ocean all the way to Washington and Oregon,” she recalled. “We just drove — stopping at bars along the way and staying overnight at motels.”

Stewart documented the road trip on her Super 8 camera. “Most of it was just him driving, which wasn’t very interesting,” she said. “I was in the passenger seat. Outside the car was the Pacific Ocean, practically the whole time.”

She continued, “I took him to Hearst Castle. There are pictures of me eating a hot dog there. We stayed with a lot of friends I had up there. They didn’t even know who he was because, at the time, he had a full beard and really didn’t take care of it. He looked like a bum. But I introduced him to my friends, and they didn’t have a clue it was Jim Morrison.”

Morrison and Stewart eventually turned around and returned to California. “We had to go back to Los Angeles,” she said. “He dropped me off at my store, and we said goodbye. I never saw him again.”

The “Light My Fire” singer was ultimately sentenced to six months of hard labor for two misdemeanor charges, but he died in Paris in 1971 at the age of 27 before he could serve any time. Morrison was later pardoned by Florida’s clemency board in 2010.

“The fact that he trusted me at the worst time in his life when he was facing jail time — I will always cherish that,” Stewart reflected. “He knew he was going to have to fly back to Florida and face trial. And then he was gone.”

The actress said she was shocked to hear of Morrison’s death. “I was heartbroken,” she said. “A bunch of us were at a recording studio with Johnny Rivers. He was doing an album, and he wanted all of us to be singing in the background. We didn’t have cellphones in those days, so we didn’t know what was going on in the outside world. And suddenly, word got passed around the room. ‘Did you hear? He’s dead.'”

She continued, “I wasn’t going to share my personal relationship with these people. I left the room, sat on the staircase, and just cried.”

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