Love & Death (14 page)

“My record’s coming out in eight weeks and all publicity’s good publicity…. What should I tell the Associated Press?…If it goes in and I deny it—and I can deny it all the way to the bank—and people will believe me if I deny it and say it never happened…. What I can say is that [Kurt] left rehab, and I had come down to L.A. with the baby and our nanny to support him, and when he left, I got very depressed and had to be hospitalized for some sort of nervous breakdown…that way, there’s no drugs involved and Kurt doesn’t get in any trouble because it looks like he wasn’t meant to be in rehab in the first place and he felt pressured and jumped over the wall. I mean, how’s that for spin? It’s gonna appear that I attempted suicide. Even if it says I ODed on Xanax and booze, that would be fine, but if it says heroin, I’m in deep shit. I don’t use heroin anymore. I haven’t since my daughter’s been born, certainly. I haven’t used it in almost two years except intermittently when Kurt’s brought it home…. You know, I’ve been dealing with the media for a long time. Hopefully tomorrow this AP thing
will
hit that I’m in a coma.”

When Grant asks her if she thinks Kurt might resent the fact that she tricked him, she shrugs off the possibility, insisting Kurt would never find out because “the people I had do this [plant the false story], I paid.” In her world, Courtney says, people are “scared of me” so “they don’t fuck with me.” The fact that the press always perceives her as “completely tragic and fucked up” anyway, she continues, might work to her benefit because she has a record coming out, so “selfishly, it might even help sell records.”

Although he says he didn’t realize it at the time, Grant believes this conversation is highly significant.

“In retrospect,” he says, “I realized that Courtney was trying to plant a trail of clues that the couple had some sort of suicide pact. You’ll see later that many writers reported this pact, based on things that Courtney told the public after Kurt’s death. In this discussion the first day I met her, she actually admits to me that her planted story was designed to falsely convince people that she had attempted suicide while Kurt was missing. I think it was a calculated effort to gain sympathy with Kurt’s followers to help them make the seamless transition from Nirvana fan to Hole fan.”

Grant’s Easter Sunday conversations with Courtney are extraordinarily revealing and include the first concrete evidence of the couple’s long-rumored marital breakup. But as remarkable as these April 3 disclosures appear, they may not be nearly as significant as what she failed to tell Grant that day.

Although the Seattle Police Department never seriously considered Cobain’s death as anything but a suicide, they nevertheless conducted a routine investigation into the events surrounding his demise. During this probe, they attempted to locate anybody who had come in contact with Kurt during the period he was reported missing. Though his whereabouts are sketchy during the days leading up to the discovery of his body on April 8, police were able to track some of his movements in the hours following his departure from the L.A. rehab center on the evening of April 1.

Approximately an hour after Kurt jumped over the Exodus recovery center’s patio wall, he called Delta Air Lines and booked Flight 788 to Seattle, leaving from Los Angeles International Airport at 10:20
P.M.
When he arrived at the airport around 9:30
P.M.,
he was recognized by a number of fans while checking in at the Delta ticket counter. He graciously chatted and signed autographs for almost fifteen minutes. Before boarding, he called ahead to his car service, Seattle Limousines, to inform them he’d be arriving at Seattle/Tacoma International Airport at 12:47
A.M.

During the two-hour flight, Kurt sat next to Duff McKagan, bassist for Guns n’ Roses (a band, incidentally, Cobain despised). Kurt told McKagan, also a recovering heroin addict, that he had left rehab and was “going home.”

When the plane landed in Seattle, Kurt’s driver, Linda Walker, was waiting at the airport. She drove him directly to his Lake Washington estate and dropped him off in the driveway at approximately 1:30
A.M.

The house’s only occupant while Kurt and Courtney were in L.A. was Michael “Cali” Dewitt, Courtney’s old boyfriend from California who had been hired as a nanny for Frances Bean, despite his longtime cocaine and heroin habits. Cali had apparently invited a girlfriend, Jessica Hopper, to visit while she was on spring break from her Minneapolis boarding school. As a result, Jessica was present just after 6:00
A.M.
the next morning when Kurt walked into Cali’s room and sat on the end of their bed. On waking up and seeing Kurt, the two immediately urged him to call Courtney because “she was freaking out.”

Cali later insisted that Kurt picked up the phone and called Courtney at the Peninsula but could not get through to her room. A year later, Courtney told a slightly different story in an interview with
Spin
magazine, claiming that Kurt unsuccessfully tried to call her at 8:54
A.M.
:

It is a poignant story. But when the reporter from
Spin,
and later we, contacted the Peninsula Hotel, the management denied the incident had ever taken place. No attempted calls were placed to Love’s room that morning, the hotel insisted, nor did Courtney leave instructions that Kurt’s calls were to be put through. The hotel, in fact, logs each call received, as well as every call made from the rooms. These phone records provide a clear picture of what happened next.

Just after 7:00
A.M.,
Kurt called for a Graytop cab, which picked him up fifteen minutes later. Jessica and Cali claim they never saw him again. Later that day, according to Peninsula Hotel records, Courtney made eight separate long-distance calls to Cali’s private number at the Lake Washington house, some of them lasting for several minutes. Yet when she hired Tom Grant the next day to find her missing husband, she inexplicably failed to tell him that Kurt had been seen at the house the day before.

“It made no sense whatsoever,” recalls Grant. “When she hired me, she made it seem as if she had no idea where he had gone: she didn’t even know if he was in Seattle. When I found out that Cali had actually seen Kurt at the house on April 2, I wondered what possible reason could she have had for withholding that information from me, the guy she supposedly hired to find him. What’s even stranger is that she wanted us to stake out Caitlin’s apartment, but she never asked us to keep a watch on the Lake Washington house, even after she finally told me a couple of days later that Kurt had been there. That’s probably the first time I sensed that something wasn’t right about this case.”

Monday, April 4, starts with a telephone discussion between Courtney and Grant about his retainer. Money’s not a problem, she tells him: “I mean, money is a problem if we get a divorce and I don’t have my publishing deal, but that’s not going to happen for quite some time.”

She tells Grant about her recent fights with Kurt, resulting from his decision to pull out of that summer’s Lollapalooza tour. Nirvana, she explains, had been offered a percentage of the gate receipts that would have netted the band an estimated $9 million. She gripes furiously about the financial repercussions of his decision, revealing that Kurt had recently told her that he didn’t even want to be in Nirvana. If Kurt wants to turn up his nose at $9.5 million for Lollapalooza, she says, “We [Hole] could have fucking played Lollapalooza and gotten the cash; that’s the part that pisses me off!” Now, because Kurt had pulled out, Hole won’t be invited to play Lollapallooza even if they sell two million records, she fumes: “I mean, he would have got $9.5 million, and I would have only got about $100,000, but at least I would have sold some records, and now he’s fucking that up.”

When she is finished criticizing her husband, Courtney takes aim at the other members of Nirvana, who she feels are getting too much money for their contributions. She describes Dave and Krist as “total losers” who made more than $3 million for songs that they didn’t write a note on. “Even his band has turned against him,” she says, revealing that neither of his bandmates had attended the recent drug intervention. She has particularly harsh words for Krist, who she calls “the stupid one,” telling Grant that, after the intervention, she asked Krist to keep an eye on Kurt. Instead, she claims, he hotwired Kurt’s car and attempted to drag him to rehab against his will. “You just don’t do that,” she says.

Courtney is still obsessed with the notion that Kurt is with Caitlin Moore. Grant has refused her request to place a bug in the drug dealer’s apartment, so she asks a friend to do it, a longtime customer of Caitlin’s. Courtney calls her friend and lets Grant listen in on the conversation. The friend tells her that he had already been to Caitlin’s apartment and there was no sign of Kurt, but that Caitlin had been frequently leaving her place for hours at a time. He says Caitlin claimed that Kurt hadn’t been around lately.

Courtney asks whether Caitlin knew Kurt had left rehab. Her friend says she did, leaving Courtney to wonder how she had heard the news. “Caitlin hates Dylan, so I wonder how she’d find that out. It wasn’t on the news.” Courtney offers her friend $500 to put a bug in Caitlin’s apartment, explaining, “Frances needs her dad.” She tells him she just wants to find out if Kurt is safe, insisting that she has no intention to narc out Caitlin.

Courtney suspects that Caitlin is supplying Kurt with money to stay at a motel because she doesn’t believe that any of Kurt’s other friends are supporting him. “You know how dumb Kurt can be,” she says. “I mean, he’s brilliant but he can’t even get himself a cab.”

She tells her friend that she doesn’t want to bust either Kurt or Caitlin. “If he wants to be alone and he’s leaving me, I’m not going to bother him,” she says. She just wants “to find out where the fuck he is.” If he wants a divorce, Courtney continues, she will accept that: “I just want to make him happy, and drugs are not going to make him happy.”

Courtney insists that Kurt has never cheated on her, but she clearly believes that Kurt is involved with Caitlin. “If he’s fucking her, look out,” she tells her friend, “but you know he can be so fucked up, it’s possible, right?” She reveals that Kurt cheated on two of his former girlfriends, and that he slept with another woman who used to get him drugs, although he swore he never would. Kurt’s “pretty asexual,” she says, and he’s still wearing his wedding ring, so “I’m not really worried, but…”

By this point in the tapes, as she ranted repeatedly about the drug dealer, it seemed to us that Courtney’s obsession with Caitlin Moore was based on little more than paranoia. Not a single friend of Kurt or Courtney that we spoke to believed that Kurt was having an affair with Caitlin. Yet it becomes clearer with each conversation we listen to that Courtney’s jealousy, justified or not, played a considerable role in her actions during the week that Kurt was missing. However, it is possible that she is on firmer ground in her suspicion that Caitlin was helping Kurt hide during some of this period.

Of all the drug dealers that ever hit Seattle, Courtney tells her friend, Caitlin Moore is “the most Satanic because you know she likes the rock clientele.” She believes Caitlin was the most logical person for Kurt to turn to after he left rehab because he knows she would never “narc him off to anybody.”