Love & Death (6 page)

He takes out a letter Courtney wrote him during this period:

Heroin is an expensive habit. Although she was still receiving about $800 a month from her trust fund, it wasn’t enough, so Courtney headed north to Alaska, where she had been offered a job stripping for the pipeline workers. Soon she was offered a more lucrative stripping gig, at L.A.’s notorious Star Strip Club. The lure of Hollywood was appealing, and for a while Courtney thought movies might offer a quicker route to stardom than rock and roll. After failing to win the coveted part of Nancy, she finally landed a major role in another Alex Cox film,
Straight to Hell,
featuring the Pogues. The movie bombed, going straight to video and landing on many critics’ lists as one of the worst films of all time. However, she put part of her $20,000 acting fee to good use, getting a nose job to repair her most glaring physical flaw and transforming herself in preparation for the next chapter of her life. It was time to return to her original plan.

Starting from scratch again, Courtney placed an ad in the popular L.A. music guide
The Recycler:
“I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac.” Her earlier failures, she said later, had only taught her the formula for success. Within three months, her new band, Hole, was attracting a favorable buzz in indie circles. She had abandoned her old softer-edged musical style in favor of hard-core screaming and screeching beats, but underneath the noise, you could still hear the melodic influences of the catchy pop music she loved. She got rid of the David Bowie hairdo, bleached it blond and pioneered a new look that she would soon refer to as “kinderwhore”—ripped little-girl dresses and pink ribbons in her hair. With the contrived new image, fans and critics were starting to pay attention. Courtney was convinced stardom was just around the corner. But old habits are hard to break. She had forged a new sound, a new look and a new personality on her own terms, but she couldn’t quite shed her groupie ways, the old notion that it might just be a little easier to ride on the coattails of a man’s success. In Portland, she had tried and failed to mold Rozz Rezabek into her version of a rock star. In L.A., she was after something different—a shortcut to the top.

Courtney knew virtually nothing about punk rock. She had never liked the music nor cared about its political message. She hadn’t a clue about who was in or out and, more important, who knew the directions to the musical holy grail—a record deal. By the time Courtney set eyes on James Moreland for the first time, he was already known as an L.A. punk rock survivor. Since the late ’70s, he had paid his dues and then some, gaining a larger following with every year he stuck it out, grinding out his high-octane, obscenity-laced lyrics night after night. His music was not much different from the countless hard-core punk bands Courtney had scouted while doing her homework in one dingy club after another, often leaving with the front man or a backup musician. However, there was something different about Moreland the first time she saw his band perform, something that set him apart from the typical clichéd punk rocker, each sporting the same look—torn jeans, black T-shirt and a sneer. As he jumped all over the stage, screaming out the typically indecipherable lyrics, Moreland happened to be wearing a cocktail dress, fishnet stockings and ruby red lipstick with black mascara. His onstage antics, a mixture of slapstick and acrobatics, had the crowd in a frenzy. Courtney was just beginning to pioneer her soon-to-be infamous brand of showman-ship with her own band, Hole. She was definitely intrigued. When she was informed by a barmaid that Moreland, known to his fans as “Falling James,” was every inch a heterosexual, she knew she would have to get to know him better.

A few days later, they were married.

The way Courtney tells it, the marriage lasted only two days, but, according to her father, it was closer to two years. When we first contacted Moreland for an interview, he refused to talk about his marriage, claiming he was still “petrified” of Courtney. But Harrison, who hadn’t spoken to Moreland for years, offered to arrange an interview for us after we supplied him with the phone number.

“Hi, James. This is your former father-in-law, Hank. Long time no speak.” They proceeded to reminisce, trading memories of Courtney the way old soldiers swap war stories. He asked if Moreland would mind “talking to some Canadian writer friends of mine.” Apparently, Falling James had recently been spooked by Courtney’s reaction to the only other detailed interview he had ever given about her. In that article, he had called her “Conan the Barbarian when it comes to her career” and described her as a homophobic conservative who believed that people got into punk rock and homosexuality only to piss off their parents. “She would also say that me and other knee-jerk liberals don’t know what we’re talking about, because she had slept with generals at this army base in Alaska and they had a lot of secret information which proved that the wars they got us into were really for our own good,” Moreland recalled. “I thought I was marrying the female Johnny Rotten. Instead I got this right-wing Phyllis Diller.”

Moreland did indeed agree to talk to us, but only after Harrison assured him we could be trusted.

They were married in Las Vegas, “pretty well on the spur of the moment,” he recalls, after he jokingly asked her if she wanted to tie the knot and she said yes. At first, their relationship was very intense. He had never met anybody like her, and he was enthralled by her in-your-face personality, but they always seemed to clash, mostly about politics. “We would have these huge fights and split up for weeks at a time and then get back together. She was really fucked up on drugs most of the time, and she could get uncontrollably violent.”

Violent enough to have her next husband killed? “I can’t really answer that because I wasn’t there, but when we were married, she certainly seemed to know a lot about hit men. If somebody pissed her off a lot, she would pay this guy she knew fifty or a hundred dollars to beat them up. It was pretty scary. From my own experience, she’s dangerous. She definitely has an evil side. She once tried to burn my bed when I was sleeping. A fire started and I woke up in shock. It’s impossible to figure out Courtney’s motives. Her disdain was powerful, and she came off as a spoiled little snot.”

Moreland offered a slightly different version to
New York Press
when the conspiracy theories started to surface: “I can see [Kurt] getting into some ridiculous argument with her and getting so fed up that he ran into the house and blew his head off rather spontaneously. Most people would want to kill themselves just waking up to her. The other scenario, which is scarier and more cold-blooded, is that there was a profit motive for knocking him off. I can also see that happening, because Courtney is a violent person who, even in the midst of our anonymous, crummy, poverty-stricken little marriage, threatened to have me beaten up for two hundred dollars when I didn’t do what she wanted. I was so scared of her I caved in immediately. In those days, she was just this junkie stripper and prostitute, but give somebody like that a couple million and you can’t overestimate how dangerous they might be.”

Moreland recalled what for him was the last straw—why their relationship finally ended. Choking down tears, he said Courtney had become pregnant with their child but refused to stop using heavy drugs, which eventually forced her to get an abortion. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “I’ll never forgive her for that.”

Although their turbulent marriage temporarily put the brakes on Moreland’s own music career, it appeared to have the opposite effect on Courtney, whose band released its first single soon after they were married. It created enough buzz to attract the attention of the respected Caroline label, which released Hole’s first album,
Pretty on the Inside,
in 1991, to instant critical acclaim in alternative music circles, and earned her a reputation as the new queen of the riot grrrl movement. Madonna and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon were among a growing legion of new fans. For those who would later claim that Kurt Cobain wrote most of her music,
Pretty on the Inside
—recorded a year before she began to date him—proved that, no matter what anybody said about her, Courtney was about more than just hype. Reviewing the album,
The New Yorker
wrote,
“Pretty on the Inside
is a cacophony—full of such grating, abrasive, and unpleasant sludges of noise that very few people are likely to get through it once, let alone give it the repeated listenings it needs for you to discover that it’s probably the most compelling album to have been released in 1991.”

Somewhere in the midst of the ruthless ambition, the carefully crafted image and the trail of bitter ex-lovers prepared to believe the worst of her was an undeniable talent. But like Yoko Ono, who was already among the most important figures of the ’60s avant-garde arts scene before she ever met John Lennon, that talent was about to be overshadowed by a man who would be labeled the musical genius of his generation.

“Only about a quarter of what Courtney says is true,” declares her on-again, off-again friend Kat Bjelland, the leader of Babes in Toyland. “But nobody usually bothers to decipher which are the lies. She’s all about image. And that’s interesting. Irritating, but interesting.”

The way Courtney tells the story, she had only dabbled in heroin a couple of times before she met Kurt, who was already a full-fledged junkie. But Kurt’s friends scoff at the suggestion—prominently repeated in a number of dubious biographies—that he turned her on to the habit. The truth appears to be somewhat more elusive.

By 1992, the stomach pain that had once caused Kurt only occasional irritation was a near constant source of agony. Most agree that his periodic heroin use became a full-fledged habit around the time
Nevermind
was released in the fall of 1991. The fact that it also coincided with the period when he and Courtney started dating may have been why there was a perception that she was responsible for his stepped-up drug use. The way Kurt publicly described it, he had “decided” to become a junkie in September 1991, to relieve the “excruciating, burning, nauseous pain” in his stomach he experienced every time he swallowed food. “The only thing I found that worked were heavy opiates,” he later explained. “There were many times that I found myself literally incapacitated, in bed for weeks, vomiting and starving. So I decided, if I feel like a junkie as it is, I may as well be one.” For months, however, a prescription of morphine had seemed to do the trick. Why he eventually substituted heroin, despite his needle phobia, is still a mystery.

“He had already tried heroin a few times before he met Courtney,” says Kurt’s old friend Alice Wheeler, the unofficial photographer of Seattle’s grunge scene, who had known him since his days in Olympia. “But she definitely used it as a lure to control him. She’s very sophisticated that way. It was in her best interests for Kurt to form a habit.” Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, tells a similar story: “She knew that the more drugs he did, the less chance that he’d be in a state to get up and leave her.” However, Kurt always denied that Courtney was responsible and would later claim that he formed his habit while she was in Europe touring with Hole.

The magnitude of his drug problem was brought home to his bandmates in early January 1992, when he arrived in a virtual stupor at the NBC studios in New York for Nirvana’s appearance on
Saturday Night Live.
He and Courtney had shot heroin in the hotel room earlier in the day, and, by the time Kurt arrived for the afternoon rehearsal, Dave and Krist had never seen him looking so out of it. Though Krist had a severe drinking problem and Dave had grown up a self-described “suburban stoner,” neither had a lot of experience with hard drugs. Now they were decidedly worried about Kurt’s near catatonic state, but neither of them had any idea as to how to approach the problem. Ever since Kurt had started spending time with Courtney a few months earlier, he had become increasingly distant from his old friends. They no longer hung out together the way they used to, lamenting and laughing at their unexpected success. After the rehearsal, Kurt returned to the dressing room, where he vomited for almost an hour. He managed to get through the show but afterward, backstage, he nearly collapsed. Dave was heard calling him a “junkie asshole.”