Love & Death (7 page)

Whether or not Courtney exercised a Rasputin-like control over Kurt, as many speculated, or whether he had simply found somebody who understood him, as he told his friends, one thing is certain: the two were very much in love, at least in the beginning. “My attitude has changed dramatically,” he told
Sassy
magazine in January 1992, “and I can’t believe how much happier I am and how even less career-oriented I am. At times, I even forget I’m in a band, I’m so blinded by love. I know that sounds embarrassing, but it’s true.” In the same interview, he revealed for the first time that he and Courtney had recently become engaged; he may or may not have known at the time that Courtney was carrying his baby, conceived two months earlier. Some of his friends, Dylan Carlson among them, say it was the pregnancy that prompted Kurt to propose and that the couple delayed the news only to avoid the stigma of a shotgun wedding. By the end of January, however, it was no longer a secret, and Kurt was ecstatic about impending fatherhood, telling everybody who would listen that he was going to be a “punk rock daddy.”

By the time their baby was born on August 18, 1992, Kurt and Courtney had become the darlings of the music media, the rock-and-roll couple that everybody loved to watch. They had flown to Hawaii in February for a small wedding, attended by only a few Nirvana crew members, Dave Grohl, and Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, who served as best man. Conspicuously missing from the ceremony was Krist Novoselic, possibly because he had been getting on Kurt’s case about his increasing use of heroin, more probably because neither he nor his wife, Shelli, appeared to approve of his choice of mate. Nor was a single member of either Kurt’s or Courtney’s family invited to attend. Before the wedding, Courtney insisted that Kurt sign a prenuptial agreement, in the apparent conviction that she would soon be more successful than her superstar husband. “I didn’t want Kurt running away with all my money,” she told a reporter, only half-jokingly.

Within months, their faces adorned the covers of countless magazines. In an interview with
Rolling Stone
in April 1993, Kurt finally admitted that his success wasn’t the drag that he had been complaining about for months in the media and to his punk rock friends. When
Nevermind
hit number one, he revealed, he was “kind of excited, [but] I wouldn’t admit that at the time.” He also dismissed the media reports suggesting that he was uncomfortable with his newfound fame. “It really isn’t affecting me as much as it seems like it is in interviews and the way that a lot of journalists have portrayed my attitude. I’m pretty relaxed with it.” It was a heady time for Courtney as well. Her band was attracting a lot of attention after a recent UK tour, and a number of major labels had recently come calling, especially after news leaked out that Madonna’s new label, Maverick, was interested in signing Hole. Years later, Madonna revealed what happened when she arrived for her first meeting with Courtney, whom she described as “miserable and self-obsessed.”

“When I met her, when I was trying to sign her, she spent the whole time slagging off her husband,” Madonna recalled. “She was saying, ‘Hole are so much better than Nirvana.’ ”

After a fierce bidding war, it was Nirvana’s label, Geffen, offering a million-dollar advance and unprecedented royalties, which finally signed Hole to its first major record contract, while denying the lucrative deal had anything to do with keeping in Kurt’s good graces. For years Courtney would brag that she had landed a better record deal than her husband.

Both Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were living the dream that neither would admit to publicly for the sake of their punk rock cred. Success, money, glamour and a new baby on the way. They seemed to have it all. And then the bottom fell out.

On August 20, 1992, only two days after Frances Bean Cobain was born at L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the September issue of
Vanity Fair
hit the newsstands. Three months earlier, Courtney had allowed the respected celebrity scribe Lynn Hirschberg to follow her around for a feature. One of Courtney’s favorite publications,
Vanity Fair
was nothing less than the arbiter of who was hot in the entertainment business. Moreover, Hirschberg was not interested in writing the kind of rock-and-roll-couple story that had become a staple of the music press in recent months. She had said she wanted to focus on Courtney, who was now anxious to get out of her husband’s shadow and jump-start her own career.

But by the time Courtney had finished reading an advance copy of Hirschberg’s story faxed to her in the hospital before it hit the stands, she knew that she had gotten more than she’d bargained for. The article paints a devastating portrait of an opportunist—albeit a charismatic, talented one—married to a rock-and-roll “holy man.” Weighing in about Courtney are friends and rivals who had crossed her path and come away the worse for the experience. “Courtney’s delusional,” her longtime friend Kat Bjelland told Hirschberg. “Last night I had a dream that I killed her. I was really happy.”

Courtney, however, gives as good as she gets, slagging both Madonna and Krist Novoselic’s wife, Shelli, and suggesting to Kurt that he start a new band without Dave Grohl, whom she had always despised. All in all, however, she presents herself as content with her new life. “Things are really good. It’s all coming true,” she says, before acknowledging prophetically that it could “all fuck up any time. You never know.”

All this would be perfect, Hirschberg concludes, “except for the drugs.” She proceeds to cite no fewer than twenty different music-industry sources who maintain that the Cobains have been “heavily into heroin.” Though it wasn’t the first time a journalist had confronted Kurt or Courtney about their rumored drug use, Kurt had usually been content just to lie. Only a few months earlier, he had told
Rolling Stone
that “all drugs are a waste of time” and that his body wouldn’t allow him to take drugs even if he wanted to “because I’m so weak.” Courtney’s usual strategy was to admit that she had dabbled in hard drugs in the past but had now straightened herself out and might just pop the occasional valium. In the interview she granted Hirschberg, however, she apparently failed to do some basic arithmetic.

The fateful words come in a quote describing the couple’s January 1992 stay in New York when Nirvana appeared on
Saturday Night Live.
“We did a lot of drugs,” says Courtney. “We got pills, and then we went down to Alphabet City and Kurt wore a hat, I wore a hat, and we copped some dope. Then we got high and went to
S.N.L.
After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.”

If this was true, it meant that Courtney had still been doing heroin
after
she knew she was pregnant. Hirschberg interviewed a “business associate” of the couple’s who proceeded to confirm that exact scenario. “It was horrible,” the source revealed. “Courtney was pregnant and she was shooting up. Kurt was throwing up on people in the cab. They were both out of it.”

The wave of revulsion set off by Courtney’s shocking revelation in the
Vanity Fair
piece was a devastating blow to the new parents. The
Globe
tabloid published a story headlined “Rock Star’s Baby Is Born a Junkie” over a photo of a deformed newborn baby falsely purported to be Frances Bean. “I knew that my world was over. I was dead,” Courtney later said. “That was it. The rest of my life…any happiness that I had known, I was going to have to fight for, for the rest of my life.”

The day before the issue hit the stands, the couple’s handlers were already in full damage-control mode, issuing a press release in the name of Kurt and Courtney saying the forthcoming article contained “many inaccuracies and distortions.” At first, Courtney claimed that she had been misquoted, that she had never done heroin while she was pregnant. “I didn’t do heroin during my pregnancy,” she told
Melody Maker.
“And even if I shot coke every night and took coke every day, it’s my own motherfucking business.” But Hirschberg had fairly incontrovertible evidence that Courtney did indeed admit to taking heroin for two months after the
SNL
appearance. “I taped the interview and I wrote what I saw,” the journalist insisted.
Vanity Fair
stood firmly behind the story. Then Courtney’s story changed. She had indeed done heroin in the first trimester, Courtney admitted, but only before she learned she was pregnant. This story stands in glaring contradiction to both the story she told Hirschberg and the account of Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, who told us he had shot up with both Kurt and Courtney before their February wedding, where he was best man.

To make matters worse, only five days after Frances Bean was born, somebody from the hospital anonymously faxed a copy of Courtney’s medical records to the
Los Angeles Times
revealing that she had been receiving “daily doses of methadone, a heroin substitute used to treat narcotics addiction.” Because hospital records are sealed, it is unknown whether her baby was born drug-addicted, but, as the
Times
article disclosed, such a condition would be a given if the mother was regularly using methadone at the end of her pregnancy. The article quotes the director of a nearby drug rehab center saying that babies born chemically dependent must go through methadone detox, but that “babies go through that well.”

The fallout was devastating. On August 20, two days after the birth, an L.A. County child services social worker, brandishing a copy of Hirschberg’s article, arrived at the hospital to interview Courtney. The new mother was scheduled to leave with the baby the next day, but, after interviewing Courtney, the social worker recommended that Frances stay in the hospital for observation. Four days later, at a state-ordered custody hearing, a judge ruled that neither Kurt nor Courtney would be allowed to see their new baby without the supervision of a court-appointed guardian.

The couple’s lawyers persuaded the court to allow Courtney’s half sister to act as Frances Bean’s guardian. “[The half sister] barely knew Courtney,” admitted Danny Goldberg, the president of Kurt’s management company, “and she couldn’t stand her. So we had to kind of bribe her to pretend she gave a shit.”

The ordeal was taking an especially hard toll on Kurt, who had so been looking forward to fatherhood. “I felt as if I had been raped,” he later revealed. For her part, Courtney was out for revenge, and all her wrath focused on Lynn Hirschberg. In 1995, Courtney admitted to
Select
magazine that she had indeed taken heroin while she was pregnant, “or else I would have sued [Hirschberg’s] ass off.” However, that didn’t stop her from firing off repeated threats to Hirschberg,
Vanity Fair
and the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast. Hirschberg later revealed that she had received repeated death threats from Courtney, as well as a promise to cut up her dog. Hirschberg still refuses to talk to journalists about the article, claiming she is “terrified for my life.”

She wasn’t the only one. A few months before the article ran, Kurt had given the go-ahead to two Seattle-based British music journalists, Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins, to write a book about Nirvana and had even sat for a number of interviews with the two writers. As the longtime girlfriend of the legendary Pogues front man, Shane MacGowan—with whom she had briefly split—Clarke was well connected in the music industry and was herself no stranger to tempestuous rock relationships. MacGowan, who is considered by many as a musical genius in the same category as John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, had recently been thrown out of the band he founded because of his own self-destructive drug and alcohol use. Clarke believed she could offer a unique insight into Kurt’s world.

Courtney had always revered MacGowan, with whom she had starred in the ill-fated movie
Straight to Hell.
So for months she had been all too happy to cooperate with his girlfriend. However, several weeks after the publication of the
Vanity Fair
article, she apparently heard that Clarke had attempted to meet with Hirschberg to get her side of the story and possibly obtain the tape of the original interview. That set off a chain of events that has left both Collins and Clarke terrified ever since. One day in late fall 1992, Victoria Clarke returned to her Seattle apartment to find an hysterical message on her answering machine from Courtney. The tone of the tape is chilling:

The next day, with Courtney’s voice egging him on in the background, Kurt himself left a series of messages that sounded even more threatening: