Love & Death (8 page)

Quick with the damage control, Danny Goldberg denied that it was Kurt’s voice on the answering-machine tape, but Kurt himself later confirmed to his biographer Michael Azerrad that he had made the threatening calls. “Obviously I have a lot to lose right now so I won’t be able to do it,” Kurt said. “But I have all the rest of my life…. I’ve tried killing people before in a fit of rage…. When people unnecessarily fuck with me, I just can’t help but want to beat them to death.”

Kurt’s longtime friend Alice Wheeler says she isn’t surprised by this aspect of his personality. “Everybody always tries to portray Kurt as some kind of saint and Courtney as this bitch,” she says, “but Kurt definitely had a dark side. He could be very twisted, real mean at times. Most of the time, though, he was real sweet, a quiet gentle guy. It just didn’t compute.” Wheeler says that, after the incident, she and about seventy other friends of Kurt’s were visited by a private detective working for Kurt and Courtney who was attempting to find out whether they had talked to the two British writers. “It was very intimidating,” she recalls. “I think they were trying to send us a message that we better shut up. It seemed like a veiled threat.”

Meanwhile, Clarke—who had relocated to Los Angeles within hours after she heard the messages on her answering machine—had the misfortune to run into Courtney some months later at an L.A. bar, where she claims she was attacked. “She hit me with a glass and then tried to drag me outside by my hair,” recalls Clarke, who has subsequently returned to the UK, still fearful of Courtney’s wrath.

Soon after, in a further attempt at damage control, Nirvana’s management company Gold Mountain approached veteran
Rolling Stone
writer Michael Azerrad to write the authorized biography of the band. Mindful of his journalistic credibility, Azerrad was uncomfortable with the idea that the biography would be called “authorized” but agreed to the project as long as he retained full editorial control. Officially, the book would be written with the band’s “cooperation.”

“Kurt and Courtney were using Azerrad for one purpose,” reveals Alice Wheeler. “They needed to convince people that their drug use had been exaggerated and that they had put all that behind them. Kurt especially was terrified of losing the baby, so he did what he had to do, even if he had to lie. We all knew what was going on. Kurt even admitted what was happening. At one point, I received a letter from their people instructing me to speak only to Michael Azerrad and not to those British writers. That’s why you can’t really trust a lot of the information in that book.”

Indeed,
Come as You Are,
released in October 1993, is filled with passages that downplay the couple’s drug use. The book takes special pains to sanitize Courtney’s drug habit, implying that she had once used heroin casually but had put all that behind her. The book also appears to settle a number of the couple’s personal scores, excoriating Hirschberg and other writers who had portrayed Courtney in a negative light. Azerrad details a number of relatively minor factual errors in the
Vanity Fair
piece and suggests that Hirschberg had failed to understand Courtney’s sardonic sense of humor. He goes on to blame Courtney’s treatment by the media on “a considerable sexist force.” In 2001, long after it became obvious that his book had painted a less-than-accurate portrait, Azerrad appeared to acknowledge the fact in a statement to the Nirvana Fan Club: “It’s true, I didn’t realize the full extent of Kurt’s drug addiction while I was writing the book. But even Krist and Dave didn’t know how much Kurt was using.” Despite its flaws,
Come as You Are
remains a valuable behind-the-scenes portrait of Nirvana at the peak of their career.

Because of Kurt and Courtney’s almost obsessive attempts to control the information disseminated about them after the controversy involving the birth of Frances Bean, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out which of their public statements over the following two years can be trusted and which should be dismissed as spin. Both checked themselves into rehab and made genuine attempts to kick their habits, and both apparently more or less failed. “I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed and it’s true,” Kurt told the
Los Angeles Times
after the couple had finally won back full custody of their baby in 1993. “I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.”

“He adored that little girl,” says Alice Wheeler. “You’d see him with the baby carrier and the diapers, the whole setup. His mood wasn’t quite so morose anymore. I think he really got off on being a daddy.” All of his friends echo this description, calling Kurt a changed man. “I was invited to Frances’s first birthday party, and I noticed how different he was. When he was with his daughter, he just lit up,” recalls Kurt’s friend, Seattle rock photographer Charles Peterson. Kurt’s grandfather remembers visiting the couple’s Seattle house when Frances was almost a year and a half. “Courtney was going out to a club or bar or something and she wanted Kurt to come with her,” recalls Leland. “But he just wanted to stay home and play with the baby. He just thought the world of Frances.”

Around the fall of 1993, something else happened to lift Kurt’s mood. Over the years, a succession of stomach specialists had failed to determine what was causing the unbearable agony in his lower abdomen. So mysterious was its source that some doctors even believed it was psychosomatic. Finally, one specialist decided to look a little further into Kurt’s early medical history and discovered that, when he was a child, he had been diagnosed with a mild case of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. He consulted the medical literature. Scoliosis can sometimes cause pinched abdominal nerves, and this is what had been causing Kurt’s pain all these years. Once the problem was diagnosed, it took a simple prescription to erase the pain.

In more than one interview over the years, Kurt had described his stomach pain as so agonizing that it made him want to “blow his brains out,” a phrase that would soon prove uncomfortably prescient. So those who knew him couldn’t help but take notice when they read the first interview where he announced that the pain was gone, in the January 27, 1994, issue of
Rolling Stone,
two months before his death. “It’s just that my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore,” he exults. “I’m eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice to be able to do that. And it just raises my spirits.”

To the average fan, these words are innocuous and would hardly register in the months to come. More than one reader, however, remembered another of Kurt’s quotes near the beginning of the same interview.

The writer, David Fricke, revealed that, when he caught up with his subject in the middle of Nirvana’s U.S. tour, he had expected to find what he describes as the Cobain press myth—a “pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic.” Instead, he writes, he was surprised to find Kurt in a thoughtful mood, taking great pains to explain that success doesn’t really suck—not as much as it used to anyway—and that his life was pretty good and getting better.

In the years since his death, the public has been fed a steady stream of assertions about the supposed despair that led to Kurt’s suicide. Even many of those who have never heard a Nirvana song can practically recite the factors by rote: the pop success-induced desolation, the alienation and misery that came with his fame. All the more surprising, then, to read what he told Fricke in this interview just a few months before he allegedly killed himself: “I’ve never been happier in my life.”

A
s the rumor spread through the ranks of the Seattle Police Department, its impact was the same on every officer, from the lowliest beat cop to the thirty-year veteran. On March 23, 1999, to the stunned disbelief of his colleagues, Sergeant Donald Cameron was suspended by the chief of police in connection with a two-year-old theft case. The stench of corruption had long hung over the SPD, which had been rocked time and again through the years by revelations of malfeasance, kickbacks, police brutality and close ties to organized crime. But Cameron, one of the department’s longest-serving homicide detectives, had always appeared above reproach. Now his conduct threatened to put the department under the microscope of public scrutiny yet again.

He was affectionately known among his colleagues as “Mr. Homicide.” During his thirty-eight-year career with the force, Cameron had investigated hundreds of murders and earned the respect of many, if not all, of his fellow officers for his no-nonsense approach to criminal investigation. When he pronounced a suicide verdict in the highest-profile case of his career, the investigation into the death of Kurt Cobain, Cameron’s sterling reputation was repeatedly cited to back up his claim.

Now he was being accused of helping one of his detectives cover up the theft of $10,000 from a crime scene two years earlier. At first, the story went that Cameron had merely gently suggested to a subordinate officer, thirty-year veteran Sonny Davis, that he avoid a career-ending mistake and return the money he had stolen from the crime scene before it was discovered missing. But at Davis’s subsequent trial, his partner, Cloyd Steiger, told the jury that he believed Cameron himself had “conspired to steal money.” The accusation further rocked a department already reeling from the scandal.

After an investigation, the prosecutor publicly stated that Cameron could have been charged with a number of offenses, including rendering criminal assistance, but by then the two-year statute of limitations had expired. Cameron quietly retired from the force before he could face an SPD internal affairs investigation and disciplinary action. In the end, after two hung juries—the latter of which voted eleven to one to convict—prosecutors decided not to retry the case, and Davis was released. But the affair left a dark cloud over the department and, more important, over the reputation and career of Sergeant Donald Cameron.

The news that Cameron’s integrity was being openly questioned may have come as a shock to his many friends and supporters, but it came as no real surprise to us. A few years earlier, we had a revealing encounter with Detective Cameron, and it left us with our own lingering doubts. When Cameron closed the Cobain case in 1994, he publicly declared that he would be very willing to reopen the dossier if he were presented with new evidence pointing to homicide. Three years later, we decided to take him up on his offer. We arrived at the offices of the SPD Homicide Division in 1997, followed by a BBC camera crew. Our compendium of new evidence compiled over the three years since Kurt’s death included the polygraph of a man who said he was offered $50,000 to kill Cobain. After we told a receptionist we had important new information about the Cobain case for Sergeant Cameron, she went to deliver our message. We could see Cameron at a desk, seemingly unoccupied. Soon another detective came out to tell us Cameron was busy. We told him that we had come three thousand miles, from Montreal to Seattle, and that we would be willing to wait. The detective was implacable. “That case is closed,” he said. “Now leave.” We informed him that Cameron had promised to consider reopening the case if he was presented with credible new evidence. We said we just wanted to give him what we had. We’d even be willing to leave our file for him at the front desk. He threatened to arrest us if we didn’t leave immediately. We beat a hasty retreat.

On the BBC’s film footage, Cameron can be clearly seen peeking out from behind his cubicle. In the years since, he has consistently refused to comment on the case.

On August 6, 2002, three years after Cameron retired from the SPD, his old friend, Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne, climbed to the top of a steep cliff in the Lauterbrunnen Valley of central Switzerland and prepared to plummet to the ground thirteen hundred feet below. A few years before, Hartshorne had taken up BASE jumping, an extreme sport version of skydiving in which participants parachute off buildings, bridges and cliffs. Oddly enough, his interest in this dangerous sport had been sparked a few years earlier when, as deputy medical examiner for Seattle’s King County, he was called to the scene of a BASE-jumping death. Fascinated, he soon tried it out himself and was immediately hooked by its walking-off-a-ledge thrill. Since then, he had recorded more than five hundred jumps and won the U.S. BASE-jumping national championship. However, Hartshorne was probably better known as the doctor who conducted the 1994 autopsy on the body of Kurt Cobain and ruled that the rock icon had committed suicide.

His fellow BASE-jumping participants referred to Hartshorne as “Dr. Death,” partly because of his job, partly because of his penchant for investigating the deaths of his fellow jumpers. His motive was to learn exactly what went wrong so as to reduce the risks that had cost some forty lives in twenty years. But, as he hurtled off the menacing Swiss cliff, known locally as “The Nose,” his scientific prowess proved futile. His body turned 180 degrees, facing the cliff as he fell. He struck three ledges on his descent as his chute, which had opened normally, collapsed around him. He died instantly.

We didn’t yet know if the abrupt retirement of Cameron and the sudden death of Hartshorne—the two men most responsible for convincing the world that Kurt Cobain committed suicide—represented an obstacle to getting at the truth or an opportunity to find it.

The series of events that would inextricably link Detective Cameron and Dr. Hartshorne took place a few years earlier, when both men were still at the peaks of their professional careers. On Friday, April 8, 1994, each received a call at their desks shortly before 10:00
A.M.
Earlier that morning, Gary Smith, an electrician, had arrived at the Lake Washington estate of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love to install an alarm system. He and his crew had been working at the estate for several days; Smith had arrived early Friday morning to finish wiring the garage, located in a separate structure close to the main house. As he climbed to the balcony that jutted from a room above the garage, he spotted what he first thought was a mannequin through the glass of the French doors. Then he noticed there was blood in the right ear; when he saw a gun, he immediately called his supervisor at Veca Electric to report the gruesome discovery. Instead of calling the police, the company dispatcher placed a call to local radio station KXRX-FM and told DJ Marty Reimer, “You’re going to owe me some pretty good Pink Floyd tickets for this one.” At first, Reimer thought the call was a hoax, but, twenty minutes later, the news was flashed around the world: a body had been found at the residence of Kurt Cobain.

A week earlier, on Friday, April 1, Kurt had climbed over the wall of an L.A. drug rehab center and disappeared. Although the stomach ailment that he claimed had prompted his heroin habit no longer bothered him, he was already a severe addict. By the end of 1993, Kurt no longer needed heroin to relieve the pain—he just needed it.

During the final months of his life, one thing had become very clear to most of Kurt’s family, friends and colleagues: his relationship with Courtney was in trouble. Whereas a year earlier, they were clearly very much in love, now it was obvious to just about everybody who came into contact with the couple that a vicious and largely one-sided pattern had set in. “She was always hurling abuse at him, even in public,” recalls Peter Cleary, one of Kurt’s Seattle drug buddies. “She would call him a dumb fuck all the time. He would just stand there and take her abuse…. He was like a baby.”

When Nirvana headed into the studio in 1993 to record the widely anticipated follow-up to
Nevermind,
reports began to circulate that Courtney was constantly meddling in the session. She demanded that Kurt follow her advice, screamed at him constantly and nearly came to blows with both Dave Grohl and Steve Albini, the producer. Twice Albini threatened to quit, citing Courtney’s continual interference. Later he went public with his complaints, telling reporters, “I don’t feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hosebeast his wife is, especially because he knows it already.”

In January 1994, Tad Doyle, another old friend of Kurt’s, also went public with complaints about Courtney, telling
Melody Maker
magazine, “She’s outta control. Wherever trouble is, she’ll find it or make it…. She’s disgusting. And you can quote me on that.” Soon after, Doyle’s band, Tad, was abruptly dropped as the opening act for Nirvana’s January 8 Seattle Center gig.

Even during their relationship’s finest hour, in 1992, it would be a stretch to describe Kurt and Courtney’s home life as domestic bliss. By the middle of 1993, however, the relationship had become what one observer called a “pitched battle.” Cobain biographer Christopher Sandford quotes a friend of Kurt’s who arrived at their home during this period to find “Courtney throwing everything that was loose against the wall and screaming at Kurt for being useless. His fault, as she saw it, was not being able to come up with a song.”

Their marital troubles hit the public’s radar screen for the first time in June 1993, when Seattle police responded to a 911 domestic disturbance call from the couple’s Lakeside Avenue home. When police arrived, Courtney told them that Kurt had shoved her after she threw a glass of juice in his face during an argument. Kurt was arrested for assault and spent three hours in the King County Jail before being released on $950 bail. One witness to the incident told police that Kurt had been “provoked.” Courtney declined to press charges, and the case was dropped.

Courtney would later claim that Kurt’s drug use was the chief source of their domestic troubles, but those close to him say that Courtney was regularly shooting up herself. She had even hired a known junkie—an ex-boyfriend from California named Michael “Cali” Dewitt—as the full-time nanny for Frances Bean. Kurt’s grandfather visited the house in January 1994 and was shocked by the scene. “Courtney and the male nanny were obviously high as a kite, and Frances was right there in the room,” Leland recalls. “I didn’t know who the fellow was at first, but when I found out he was in charge of taking care of the baby, I was very upset. There was another nanny there, too, and she was also on drugs. Later I told Wendy [Kurt’s mother] that they better get rid of those nannies, or they’re going to get Frances taken away again. She said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Because they’re both full of dope.’ She said, ‘They ain’t on dope,’ and I said, ‘The hell they ain’t. You just have to take one look at them and you can see they’re stoned to the eyeballs.’ Then a couple of months later, I read a magazine article where Wendy was saying how nice Courtney was because she was paying for her nannies to go into drug rehab.”

Dylan Carlson, one of the couple’s prime drug sources, recalls the tragicomic interplay of Kurt and Courtney putting in their orders: “One of them would be on the phone asking me to bring them something,” he recalls. “Then I’d get a call-waiting beep, and it would be the other one asking for drugs. Each of them would tell me not to tell the other one.”

However, friends of the couple claim that money, not drugs, appeared to be the chief source of conflict. The tension between Kurt and his bandmates had reached a boiling point in mid-1993, when he insisted on renegotiating the terms of their royalty agreement. When the band signed their first major contract with Geffen Records, they had agreed all royalties should be divided equally among them. But, after
Nevermind
hit number one, Courtney was said to have been furious that Krist and Dave would be receiving an equal share of the millions of dollars in royalties, despite the fact that Kurt had written most of the songs. She demanded that he do something to alter the arrangement. “Anybody can do what they do,” his friends say she nagged him repeatedly. “You’re the one with all the talent.” Reluctantly, he gave in and confronted his bandmates. From now on, he argued, 100 percent of the lyrics and 75 percent of the music royalties should go to him. Moreover, he demanded the changes be made retroactive to the first sales of
Nevermind.
Stunned at what they believed was a betrayal of their friendship, not to mention Kurt’s punk rock ideals, Dave and Krist initially balked at the changes, arguing that the arrangement should take effect only with the next album. But Kurt stood his ground and threatened to quit the band unless they accepted his terms. Dave and Krist blamed Courtney for their old friend’s decision to sell them out, and things were never the same again. They barely spoke, except about Nirvana-related issues.