Love & Death (26 page)

A few months before Kurt died,
Rolling Stone
reporter David Fricke asked him how literally he meant the title
I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
:

Does this explain why so many of Kurt’s close friends and associates insisted
after
his death that Kurt wasn’t suicidal, even though he had frequently made statements that could reasonably be interpreted otherwise?

“The thing you have to remember about all the talk of Kurt being suicidal,” explains his Seattle drug buddy Peter Cleary, “is that all the talk only started when Courtney came out after the death and said Rome was a suicide attempt and the media picked up on all her examples of Kurt being suicidal. That’s when all these people started saying, ‘Of course he was suicidal, just listen to his music.’ But that’s a bunch of crap. Sure he was a moody guy and got depressed quite often. That applies to a hell of a lot of people, including me. But nobody ever talked about Kurt being suicidal before he died. Nobody. Why do you think everybody who knew him was so surprised when Courtney said that Rome was a suicide attempt? I’ve read all this ignorant bullshit in the media pointing to the fact that Kurt wanted to call
In Utero ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.’
It was a joke, for chrissake. That was his warped sense of humor. He was the most sarcastic guy you’ll ever meet. He was not suicidal, at least not when I knew him, and I knew him for the last year of his life.”

Yet who is to say? Perhaps it is naive to dismiss Kurt’s frequent references to suicide as gallows humor or the kind of banter rockers, and youth in general, have always indulged in to shake things up. Whether his death resulted from murder or suicide, it’s hard to deny that Kurt was a troubled soul, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that, like many young Americans, he may have contemplated suicide at various times in his life.

One of Kurt’s longtime friends, Seattle photographer Alice Wheeler, says she never knew Kurt to be suicidal. Unlike Peter Cleary, however, Wheeler firmly believes that Kurt killed himself. In fact, she says most of Kurt’s circle concluded he was suicidal “in retrospect.”

“I went to the wake at Krist’s house after Kurt’s memorial service,” she recalls, “and there were all these people there trying to make sense of the whole suicide thing. Krist came up to me and asked, ‘How could we have missed the signs, Alice?’ And then he started analyzing Kurt’s lyrics and replaying everything that he had ever said, and saying that it should have been obvious. He really felt guilty, I think.”

Yet did the “signs” really point to suicide, or did they signify another momentous life decision? We know that Kurt had already told his lawyer on March 1 that he had decided to divorce his wife. Janet Billig, spokesperson for his management company, confirmed that he wrote a note to Courtney the same week announcing his intention to “run away and disappear.” Krist later described this period to Kurt’s biographer Charles Cross, explaining, “There was something going on with him in his personal life that was really troubling him. There was some kind of situation.” Thus even his oldest friend was unable to pinpoint Kurt’s emotional state as suicidal during his final weeks, sensing instead that something else was wrong.

After the Rome overdose, Dylan Carlson was the first of Kurt’s friends to see him when he returned to Seattle. He later described Kurt’s mood to the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“Kurt was facing lots of pretty heavy things, but he was actually pretty upbeat. He was prepared to deal with things facing him.”

After Kurt’s death, his friend Mark Lanegan, leader of the Screaming Trees, told
Rolling Stone,
“I never knew [Kurt] to be suicidal, I just knew that he was going through a really tough time.”

Another of Kurt’s friends, Seattle music photographer Charles Peterson, ran into him on the street “a week or a week and a half” before he died. Kurt’s mood, Peterson recalls, was decidedly cheerful: “He seemed really happy to me, happier than I had seen him in a long time: not that he was usually unhappy, but he was often pretty sickly, and he looked like he was doing a lot better. My first book had just come out and he was really nice about it: I think he was sincerely pleased for me. He was wearing this heavy overcoat and sunglasses to appear incognito, but ironically, they just made him stand out even more. We went to the Linda Tavern and had a few beers, and he gave me his new phone number. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong as far as I could tell.”

Kurt’s late grandmother, Iris Cobain, talked to him shortly before he entered rehab at the end of March and told the
Seattle Times
that “everything seemed fine” and that “he seemed to be happy.” The only thing Kurt told her about the Rome incident, she said, was that it was an accident. In this call, he made plans to go on a fishing trip with his grandfather in April.

A number of suicide studies have found that some people seem very happy and upbeat just before they commit suicide because they have made a decision and feel relief about it. Yet studies also show that these people rarely make long-term plans. Moreover, Kurt’s mood does not appear to have suddenly shifted from depressed to upbeat only in the final days and weeks of his life. Rather, his friends insist the change in his personality happened months before his death, when his unbearable stomach ailment was finally diagnosed and treated. It was in fall 1993 that he told
Rolling Stone,
“I’ve never been happier in my life.”

Did something happen between this interview and his departure from the Exodus rehab facility on April 1 to change his mood? Did his stomach ailment suddenly return? Could the intervention on March 25 have triggered something dark in Kurt’s personality? Was he especially depressed when he entered Exodus on March 30? In the two days Kurt spent at Exodus, he talked to several staff psychologists at the facility, none of whom considered him suicidal. Moreover, the last person to visit Kurt at Exodus on April 1, an old artist friend named Joe “Mama” Nitzburg, told
Rolling Stone:
“I was ready to see him looking like shit and depressed. He looked so fucking great.”

In the weeks leading up to his death, then, it is clear that most of his friends, associates and even the mental health professionals who treated him did not believe Kurt was suicidal.

Now Tom Grant produces an astonishing taped conversation he recorded with Courtney in late April 1994, proving that she, too, believed Kurt wasn’t suicidal after he returned from Rome.

This remarkable admission stands in stark contrast to what Courtney publicly told the media for months after Kurt’s death about her husband’s suicidal tendencies as well as what she told Seattle police on April 4 when she filed the missing person’s report. It also directly contradicts what she told Tom Grant on April 3, when she first hired him to find her husband: “He’s suicidal…. Everybody expects him to die.”

By the time Courtney approached Charles Cross in 1999, it was clear that Tom Grant’s murder theory wasn’t going to go away. Although he was once mocked as a conspiracy theorist, Grant’s website was now receiving more than a million hits a year. Nick Broomfield’s BBC film about the case, moreover, had become one of the highest grossing documentaries of all time. Grant was beginning to attract the attention of mainstream media, and many credible journalists appeared to believe for the first time that there might be something to his charges. Gene Siskel himself gave Broomfield’s film a “thumbs down” because, he complained, the film hadn’t explored the possibility of murder as deeply as it should have and had left many leads unpursued. Worse still, the murder theory was beginning to take a toll on Courtney’s bottom line. Hole’s 1998 album,
Celebrity Skin,
had been widely expected to be one of the year’s top sellers. Instead, it was a massive sales disappointment. Many attributed its relative failure to the thousands of Cobain fans who vowed in Internet chat rooms to boycott the album. Something had to be done.

Charles Cross was the longtime editor of the respected Seattle music weekly
The Rocket,
one of the first publications to cover Nirvana in its pages. Cross was not necessarily a friend of Courtney’s, but they had known each other for years and got along well. By the time Courtney approached him, he had already decided to write a Cobain biography, but he wasn’t having much luck finding a publisher. That changed when Courtney made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Kurt had kept a journal for years, and she was now offering Cross the exclusive right to read the journal and quote from it in his book. The terms of their agreement, if any, have never been disclosed, and the book is not officially described as an “authorized biography.” But when it was released in the fall of 2001, many readers were immediately struck by how carefully the book conformed to Courtney’s version of events. One reviewer at Amazon.com even wrote that the publisher “should have put Courtney as the author.”

Indeed, the book contains scores of facts about Kurt’s death that Cross could have obtained only from Courtney herself. Although he doesn’t once mention Grant’s murder theory, it is almost as if the book is addressing and refuting each of Grant’s allegations in turn. This would be a welcome contribution to the debate if Cross acknowledged this as his intention, but he doesn’t. Instead, his book is a neat compendium of unsourced anecdotes that just happen to contradict Grant’s version of events. Unfortunately, many of these anecdotes are demonstrably false. The most glaring example concerns the events of April 7, when Cali is said to be searching the house for Kurt at dusk, even though police reports prove he took a taxi to the airport at 4:00
P.M.
that day to join Courtney in Los Angeles. Similarly, Courtney is exonerated for her failure to tell Grant that Kurt had been seen at the house on April 2 because the man who saw him there first thought it was a “dream.”

Although Courtney’s version of events is tirelessly replayed throughout the book, the most egregious example of slavishness has to be in the final chapter, when Cross describes Kurt’s death. Here Cross takes Courtney’s suicide-obsessed portrayal of her husband and runs with it, creating for Kurt a near–Norma Desmond moment:

More than one reviewer has asked how Cross could have possibly known what Kurt was thinking and doing in his final moments. Cross defended his narrative leap, insisting, “It’s clear to anyone who’s read the book to that point that I’ve done an incredible amount of research and that I’m not making things up out of thin air. I’m not creating evidence; I’m just taking evidence that I have discovered…and piecing it together to try to tell the story of those last few minutes.”

Since Cross cites no evidence backing this account, it is a dubious explanation at best, and there is in fact evidence to contradict his description of Kurt’s last moments. Cross, for example, describes Kurt picking up a “legal-sized notepad” on which to write his suicide note. In reality, however, the so-called suicide note was written on the back of an IHOP place mat, as Courtney confides to Tom Grant in one taped conversation. Police later photocopied the note on legal-sized paper, which probably accounts for Cross’s error.

Still, Cross is a respected music journalist known for his integrity, and his book—a warts-and-all account filled with valuable insights into Kurt’s childhood, life and career—is in many respects the best and most thorough biography ever written about the rock icon. Cross even discovered some important new evidence about Kurt’s final weeks, revealing for the first time that Kurt announced his intention to divorce Courtney two days before the Rome overdose. According to Alice Wheeler, who was one of Cross’s research assistants, it was Cross who first suggested to Courtney that she publish Kurt’s journals as a book. Wheeler described Cross’s relationship with Courtney as “tight.” But there is no evidence that Cross simply did Courtney’s bidding or wrote what she told him to. Instead, he appears to have accepted much of what she told him at face value, and allowed himself to be manipulated into writing an account that served Courtney’s interests very well.