Love & Death (16 page)

The crowd roared, “Asshole!” Then she started to read from the note:

As before, the Freddie Mercury comparison seems to elicit Courtney’s particular irritation: “Well, Kurt, so fucking what—then don’t be a rock star, you asshole.” She continues:

Courtney: “Well, Kurt, the worst crime I can think of is for you to just continue being a rock star when you fucking hate it, just fucking stop.”

Courtney: “So why didn’t you just fucking stay?”

Courtney: “Oh shut up, you bastard.”

Courtney: “Then he goes on to say personal things to me that are none of your damn business; personal things to Frances that are none of your damn business.”

This line suggests that Kurt decided that he no longer does. But when a copy of the note was made public months later, it turned out that Kurt had in fact written, “I
have
it good.” Some people wondered whether there was any significance to the fact that Courtney misread this passage in particular.

Courtney: “Empathy?”

Courtney: “There is some more personal things that is none of your damn business. And just remember this is all bullshit and I’m laying in our bed, and I’m really sorry. And I feel the same way you do. I’m really sorry, you guys. I don’t know what I could have done. I wish I’d been here. I wish I hadn’t listened to other people, but I did. Every night I’ve been sleeping with his mother, and I wake up in the morning and think it’s him because his body’s sort of the same. I have to go now.”

An hour later, a twenty-eight-year-old Seattle man named Daniel Kaspar returned home from the vigil and shot himself in the head. His roommate, who had also attended, told police Kaspar had been very distraught over Kurt’s death. Ever since the body was discovered two days earlier, suicide hotlines across the country had been flooded with calls from depressed teenagers. The Seattle Crisis Clinic was fielding three hundred calls a day, 50 percent more than usual. Mental health professionals feared a rash of copycat suicides. Already, reports from around the world indicated Kurt’s death was having a global impact. In Australia, a teenage boy reportedly shot himself in homage to Kurt. The following day, a sixteen-year-old Turkish girl, who friends said had been severely depressed since hearing of Kurt’s death, locked herself in her room, put on a Nirvana CD at full volume and shot herself in the head.

What was it about Kurt Cobain and his music that inspired this kind of emotional reaction from his fans? Seattle’s local music paper
The Rocket
compared Kurt’s life and death to those of two other great artists who also died at their peak, Janis Joplin, who OD’d at twenty-seven—the same age as Kurt—and Sylvia Plath, who put her head in an oven at thirty: “All three lived lives of stunning, constant pain—which arose out of both the circumstances of their tortured lives, but even more from the sensitivity that allowed them to create their beautiful, chilling reports from the bowels of hell in the first place.”

Yet neither their deaths nor any of the other countless rock-and-roll tragedies over the years had touched off the tidal wave of grief and despair that now appeared to be engulfing young people around the globe.

Is it because, behind Kurt’s angst-ridden lyrics, there was a message of hope in a world dominated by baby boomers? Was Kurt really “an awakening voice for a new generation,” as the
Los Angeles Times
described him? Soon after the death, one fourteen-year-old boy posted his thoughts on the Internet about what Kurt had meant to him: “He was like my guru. I felt like he was leading me to something better.”

Now, for millions of his followers, it was as if Kurt had abandoned them, as if he were telling them, “Why bother?” or, more appropriately, “Nevermind.” Andy Rooney summed it up best during his weekly commentary on 60
Minutes:
“When the spokesman for his generation blows his head off, what is that generation supposed to think?”

Tom Grant was uneasy, but he was not quite sure why. When he got back to L.A. on Saturday, he knew his assignment was officially over. He had been hired by Courtney to find her husband, and now Kurt had been found. Still, he couldn’t help thinking something was wrong. On Tuesday morning, he arranged a meeting for the next day with Courtney’s attorney, Rosemary Carroll, whom he had talked to on a number of occasions during the previous week. He thought she might be able to clear up some of the confusion about the events surrounding Kurt’s disappearance.

At the time of Kurt’s death, Rosemary Carroll was more than just Courtney Love’s lawyer. For more than two years, she had simultaneously served as the attorney for both Kurt and Courtney, as well as for Nirvana. She also happened to be married to Danny Goldberg, president of Kurt’s management company, Gold Mountain, and the man often credited with “discovering” Nirvana. But the couple were much more than clients to Carroll. She and her husband had become extremely close to both Kurt and Courtney, and they had even been designated as godparents for Frances Bean. Both Kurt and Courtney said they trusted Carroll and Goldberg more than their own parents. Kurt even told friends he regarded Carroll as a surrogate mother. Rosemary knew more than a little about troubled artists. Before she met Goldberg, she had been married for many years to Jim Carroll, the notorious former junkie poet who penned the 1978 cult classic
The Basketball Diaries.
Now she was one of L.A.’s most powerful entertainment attorneys and senior partner of her own firm.

When Grant arrives at Carroll’s Sunset Boulevard law offices on Wednesday morning, he immediately tells her he is “very confused” about a number of things surrounding Kurt’s death.

“I was sounding her out at first. I needed to find out where she stood,” he recalls. “Then, after a few minutes of talking, she lets out a sigh, puts her head in her hands and just let it all out.”

Carroll tells Grant that Kurt’s death just didn’t make any sense, insisting that Kurt wasn’t suicidal. “I knew him too well,” she says.

When Grant tells her that the papers are saying Kurt had been suicidal for a long time, she responds, “No, no,” and proceeds to tell him the story as she knows it.

Both Kurt and Courtney wanted a divorce, Carroll reveals. They were “hateful” toward each other, she says. Recently, Courtney had called her and asked her to find her the “meanest, most vicious divorce lawyer” she knew. Courtney said Kurt was leaving her. She also wanted to know if Carroll knew of any way the couple’s 1992 prenuptial agreement could be voided.

Soon afterward, Carroll continues, Kurt called her and asked her to take Courtney out of his recently drafted will, which was still unsigned at the time of his death. It was very emotionally draining for her to be in the middle of the couple’s breakup, Carroll laments to Grant. “I loved both of them.”

This conversation sheds considerable light on an interview granted to BBC filmmaker Nick Broomfield in 1997 by a woman named “Jennifer,” who was hired by Kurt and Courtney in March 1994 as one of Frances Bean’s nannies just after they returned from Rome following Kurt’s overdose. She quit at the end of March. In the interview, the former nanny tells Broomfield that Courtney was obsessed with Kurt’s will during this period. Before we heard the tapes, this revelation was always puzzling because Kurt didn’t leave a will when he died: