Love & Death (4 page)

“We got more attention [than other alternative bands] because our songs have hooks and they kind of stick in people’s minds,” said Kurt, attempting to explain the album’s success. Indeed, each member of Nirvana claimed the Beatles as his favorite group, and it showed. But it was the lyrics—on topics as daring and diverse as rape and religious zealotry—that tapped into the angst of an American youth alienated by a decade of Republicans in the White House and the recently fought Gulf War, which some theorize readied a generation for the rebellion of alternative music. The angry, culture-shifting single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” played ad nauseam on rock radio and MTV, was instantly hailed as the anthem of Generation X, and Cobain its voice. “This was music by, for, and about a whole new group of young people who had been overlooked, ignored or condescended to,” wrote Michael Azerrad.

Still, this kind of success wasn’t supposed to happen. Had Nirvana sold out? It was a question being asked by many of Kurt’s old punk rock friends, and he was acutely sensitive to it. He had a simple explanation: “We didn’t go to the mainstream, the mainstream came to us.” Later he would tell interviewers that he hated the album, that it was the kind of album he himself would never listen to and that it was “too slick-sounding.” But the poppy hooks were no accident. Nirvana had unstinting creative control over
Nevermind.
Kurt’s entourage—who knew he listened to his favorite album,
Abba Gold: Greatest Hits,
almost constantly while touring—were well aware just how absurd his protestations were.

The most ironic by-product of the album’s success was the acquisition of a brand-new fan base largely consisting of what Kurt would describe as the “stump dumb rednecks that I thought we had left behind in Aberdeen.” Indeed, the crowds at the band’s sold-out concerts were almost indistinguishable from the fans at a Guns n’ Roses concert. So embarrassing was this turn of events that Kurt would use the liner notes of his next album to warn the homo-phobes, the racists and the misogynists in Nirvana’s audience “to leave us the fuck alone.”

As if to underscore Leland’s claim that his mother didn’t have any use for Kurt until he became famous, Wendy wrote a letter to the local Aberdeen newspaper shortly after
Nevermind
hit the charts, sounding like a doting mother whose son had just left the nest for the first time. “Kurt, if you happen to read this, we are so proud of you and you are truly one of the nicest sons a mother could have. Please don’t forget to eat your vegetables or brush your teeth and now [that] you have your maid, make your bed.” The irony wasn’t lost on Kurt, who was struck by the hypocrisy of the sudden attention from Wendy and his other relatives, most of whom had wanted nothing to do with him only a few months earlier. He had left Aberdeen and his family behind for good, and no amount of sucking up would make him forget two decades of rejection.

At the height of his band’s success, Kurt clearly identified with his favorite Beatle, John Lennon, who knew as well as anybody the price of fame. In an interview with
Rolling Stone,
Kurt talked about this bond with Lennon: “I don’t know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed…. I just felt really sorry for him…his life was a prison. He was imprisoned. It’s not fair. That’s the crux of the problem that I’ve had with becoming a celebrity—the way people deal with celebrities.”

The next chapter in Cobain’s short life was to invite new comparisons between himself and his musical idol. When George Harrison was asked how he first met Yoko Ono, he replied, “I’m not sure. All of a sudden she was just there.” Kurt’s bandmates, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, would tell similar stories in later years about the bleached blonde who started to appear at Kurt’s side shortly after
Nevermind
was released. Perhaps that’s why Grohl and Novoselic both called her Yoko—at least behind her back.

W
hen we set out to interview those who might offer us the best insight into the real Courtney Love, we encountered an unusual obstacle. The first two people we contacted said they were in hiding. Each gave us the same explanation: they were “afraid of her.” What made this even more unusual was the fact that these two people were her father and her first husband.

Now, in the summer of 2003, we are sitting on the outdoor terrace of the Seattle Art Museum with an old friend of Kurt’s who witnessed his relationship with Courtney unfold from its beginnings. After about half an hour of candid memories about her old friend Kurt, captured by our video camera for a potential documentary, the subject turns to Courtney Love. “Tell us about her,” we say. She immediately turns pale. “You expect me to talk about Courtney with the camera running? Do you think I have a death wish?”

The first time Kurt Cobain spotted Courtney Love, he thought she looked like Nancy Spungen. Courtney liked that. For several years, she had been obsessed with the infamous bleached blonde whose life so closely paralleled her own. Nancy was an upper-middle-class girl turned groupie, stripper and heroin addict, whose tempestuous relationship with the notorious Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious—a tortured working-class youth turned punk legend—culminated in both their deaths, one mysteriously murdered, the other from an overdose. To friends, Courtney liked to claim that she had modeled her life after the so-called punk rock Juliet. A few years before she met Kurt, she had even auditioned to play the lead in Alex Cox’s film biopic
Sid and Nancy
and, although failing to land the role, ended up playing the smaller part of Nancy’s best friend, Gretchen.

For her part, Courtney thought Kurt looked like Dave Pirner, the front man for Soul Asylum. At their initial encounter in the Portland club where Nirvana had just opened for the Dharma Bums, she flirted with the boyish blond musician for a while and later kept tabs on the progress of Kurt and his band—even sending him a little heart-shaped box as a gift after the Nirvana buzz started to grow louder. But, like Nancy, Courtney was a self-proclaimed groupie, and Kurt was still a relatively unknown musician. By the time they met again a year later, shortly before the release of
Nevermind,
that had changed. The band had signed a major record deal and was obviously on the verge of something big. The two were attending a concert in L.A. when Courtney spotted Kurt downing a bottle of cough medicine. She chided, “You’re a pussy; you shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach,” and offered him one of her prescription painkillers. “We bonded over pharmaceuticals,” she later recalled. They went home that night and had sex for the first time. “She had a completely planned way of seducing me and it worked,” said Kurt, telling friends it was the best sex he had ever had.

But Courtney’s boyfriend at the time was Billy Corgan, whose band Smashing Pumpkins had opened for Guns n’ Roses the same week she slept with Kurt for the first time. For now, Corgan was still more famous than Kurt Cobain. Nirvana and the Pumpkins both had albums scheduled for imminent release;
Nevermind
and
Gish
shared the same producer. When the albums were released, they both exceeded expectations, making Cobain and Corgan instant rock stars. On the
Billboard
charts, however, there was no contest. By the time
Nevermind
hit number one in late December 1991, Kurt and Courtney were inseparable.

She came from a broken home and had a mother who rejected her, but that’s where the similarities ended between Kurt Cobain and the woman who would soon turn his world upside down. If we were going to obtain the clues to make sense of Courtney Love’s early years and discover whether she was really capable of committing the heinous act of which she had been accused, we would have to head as far afield as California, Oregon, Australia, Japan, England, and New Zealand. For economy’s sake, we decided to confine our quest to the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Courtney Love Michelle Harrison was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1965—O. J. Simpson’s eighteenth birthday. A little while after she made her appearance, Courtney’s father, Hank Harrison, headed over to share the good news with the members of the small San Francisco band he managed. They were still known as the Warlocks, but within a few months they would take on their more familiar name—the Grateful Dead. Harrison couldn’t decide which of his friends he would ask to be the godfather. Jerry Garcia was good with kids, but Hank’s roommate, bassist Phil Lesh, was the only one home, so Lesh received the honor. Instead of passing out cigars, Harrison broke out a couple of tabs of acid, and they celebrated the birth of the little rock-and-roll princess. Meanwhile, her mother’s adoptive family—heirs to the Bausch & Lomb eye care fortune—marked the occasion by setting up a trust fund for the new baby. “Courtney is not the rags-to-riches rock-and-roll story,” says her father when we finally persuade him to meet with us at his horse ranch in northern California. He had insisted we meet in the center of town so he could size us up and ensure we weren’t working for Courtney before he would escort us to his home.

This is a man who for years has been publicly vilified by his own daughter as a grotesque, anti-Semitic, drug-crazed pathological liar. But Courtney’s accusations pale beside his own oft-repeated and publicly leveled charge—that Courtney was somehow involved in the murder of her husband Kurt. What kind of father would say these things about his own child? we wanted to know the first time we met him, convinced that—no matter what the truth of his charges—we must be in the presence of an unpleasant opportunist. However, that was apparently the least of his sins.

In 1995, before a TV audience of 25 million Americans, Courtney told Barbara Walters that this man had given her LSD when she was three as part of a bizarre eugenics experiment. “He was anti-Semitic, his father was anti-Semitic,” she claimed. “Three people testified that he gave me acid. He wanted to make a superior race, and by giving children acid you could do that.”

So when we arrive for our first encounter with Hank Harrison, we are a little spooked, expecting to meet some kind of bizarre rock-and-roll Hitler. He hardly disabuses us of this notion as he begins burrowing into his boxes of old papers, photos and Grateful Dead memorabilia. “Check this out,” he says, handing over a yellowing envelope with a letter inside. At the bottom of the letter, just under the signature, is a large hand-drawn swastika. The sender’s name is unmistakable: “Charles Manson.” Case closed, we think. Reading the letter itself, however, soon causes us to reevaluate. It’s just a letter from Manson bad-mouthing the Dead’s music. “He sort of stalked us for a while,” explains Harrison. “But that was long before the murders and stuff, so nobody paid much attention.”

As he continues to forage, we take in our surroundings. On the living room wall is a framed letter on White House stationery bearing the seal of the president of the United States. Sent a few months after Kurt’s death, it is a personal note from Bill Clinton commending Harrison for his work promoting suicide awareness and offering his best wishes to “you, Courtney and Frances Bean during this difficult time.” On another wall hangs a Chagall oil painting that Harrison bought with the proceeds from his 1971 biography,
The Dead
—the first book ever written about the band. Although it is still considered by many as the definitive account, the book caused a permanent estrangement between Harrison and the group after he revealed that they had dealt heroin to finance their early tours. Today, thanks to Courtney’s public statements, Harrison is more likely to be falsely described as a Dead “hanger-on” or “roadie” than as the band’s first manager.

Eventually, Harrison apparently finds what he’s looking for: hundreds of pages of transcripts from the divorce proceedings initiated by his wife, Linda Carroll, when Courtney was five years old. Nowhere in the transcripts is there a single suggestion that Harrison ever gave his baby daughter LSD, as Courtney later charged. What is revealed, however, is that Linda feared he would abduct Courtney and take her to live with him in another country after she threatened divorce. The LSD story appears to be based on the suggestion that Courtney may have been given acid while she was left with a babysitter at a hippie commune, perhaps supplying a chemical explanation for her erratic behavior later on. (In 1995, when asked about the allegation that her father had given her acid, Courtney admitted to the
San Francisco Chronicle,
“I don’t know if it actually happened.”) However, private detectives hired by Carroll’s family had dredged up a number of other skeletons in Harrison’s closet, including arrests for pot possession and petty theft while he was still in college. “They tried to portray me as a bad influence, and I just didn’t have enough money to fight it, so Linda got full custody,” he recalls, admitting that his father was indeed somewhat anti-Semitic but saying “that’s the only true thing about her Barbara Walters story.” Courtney has frequently claimed she has seen her father only a “few times” since her parents divorced. But he pulls out a trove of letters and photos of them together during various phases of her life to prove that father and daughter have at times been very close.

Clearly we can’t trust anything Courtney said about her father, and we have already resolved to take most of what Harrison says with a grain of salt. But as he continues to pull scrapbooks and folders out of the boxes, including hundreds of letters and poems written by Courtney, as well as photos and documentation pinpointing the facts about various chapters of her life, we realize that we have discovered a valuable insight into her turbulent early years and a clue to the supposedly imminent train wreck that millions would later watch with voyeuristic fascination.

Courtney Love may have been too young when her parents split to blame her troubled childhood on the trauma of her parents’ divorce, as Kurt’s family did to explain his own downward spiral, but by the time she was seven, Courtney’s mother had already divorced her second husband, Frank Rodriguez, and married husband number three, David Menely. They moved to a mansion in Oregon, where Linda and her new husband ran a free-spirited commune. Linda followed a strange assortment of gurus during those years, and, depending on the spiritual flavor of the moment, she and Menely might be chanting, meditating or screaming at the tops of their lungs while little Courtney was left to her own devices. She would later recall an assortment of “hairy, wangly ass hippies” running around doing Gestalt therapy. On the back of her album
Live Through This
is a photo of a waiflike little Courtney from this period. “We were living in a tepee and I always smelt like piss,” she recalled.

When Courtney was seven, Linda and her new husband suddenly decided they were going to move to New Zealand and raise sheep. Linda told friends it was easier than raising her daughter; consequently, Courtney was left behind. In therapy for a pattern of misbehavior since she was three, Courtney was sent to live with one of her therapists, an old friend of Linda’s in Eugene. “It was all done behind my back,” recalls Harrison. “I would have been very glad to have her come live with me, but I was never consulted and there was nothing I could do. Courtney would always say in later years that she had never felt so abandoned.”