Love & Death (9 page)

With the increased income, Courtney insisted that they live in a house that befitted Kurt’s superstar status. She had set her sights on the exclusive neighborhood of Denny-Blaine, where Seattle’s old-money elite resided, socioeconomic light-years from the seedy university district the couple had inhabited for almost two years. Kurt was more comfortable in the kind of dives he had grown up in, and he had no real desire to see how the other half lived. But at Courtney’s insistence, he shelled out more than $1 million for a 7,800-square-foot mansion up the hill from Lake Washington, next door to Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz and directly across the lake from where another Seattle icon, Bill Gates, was constructing his own palatial estate. His new neighbors were more likely to call the police when they heard loud music than to welcome the infamous grunge couple to their domain. Kurt regularly complained to friends that he was embarrassed by the opulent surroundings.

To go with the new upscale digs, Courtney wanted a nice car to replace Kurt’s beat-up old Valiant. Though she didn’t have a license and had never learned to drive, she convinced Kurt to buy a black luxury Lexus. Mortified by the ostentatiousness of it all, however, he kept it for only eighteen hours before returning it to the dealer.

Shortly after they moved into the new house, Kurt gave the go-ahead to his management company to proceed with a 38-date European tour scheduled to begin in early February 1994. He was exhausted from the band’s recently completed American tour and considered canceling the European dates, but he was still exhilarated by the absence of his stomach problems. He told friends he enjoyed playing music again without having to endure the constant pain he had experienced since he was a teenager. As his friend Peter Cleary described it, Kurt loved to tour because it provided him with a long-craved-for independence. “The thing about touring,” he explains, “is that Kurt said it’s the only time he gets to call the shots. At home, he was like an emotional cripple around his wife, but on tour it was different. He was the center of attention and he was the boss.” As an added bonus, Courtney would not be accompanying him on the European dates because she was in the studio mixing Hole’s upcoming album.

Nirvana kicked off their tour on February 4 in Paris with an appearance on a lunchtime TV show. Afterward, Kurt—jet-lagged but cheerful—posed for publicity shots with a French photographer named Youri Lenquette, who had become a close friend during Nirvana’s 1992 Australian tour. At one point, Lenquette asked Kurt to pose with a toy gun in his mouth, as he had once seen him do at Dave Grohl’s house in Seattle. No one could have known how prophetic the pose would be.

On March 1, two weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday, Kurt complained he was feeling ill shortly after the band arrived in Munich to play the first of two concerts at an abandoned air terminal. He had looked exhausted for weeks and had been uncharacteristically listless onstage during recent concerts in Milan and Lisbon. At one point, he even asked a member of his entourage what would happen if he canceled the tour. The band, he was told, would be held liable for any missed shows, resulting in a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Shortly before the first scheduled Munich concert, Kurt phoned Courtney, who was in London doing advance promotion for her upcoming album. True to form, the conversation ended in a screaming match. After the show, Kurt asked his agent to cancel the upcoming gig, and the following morning, he saw an Italian physician, who diagnosed a severe case of bronchitis. The doctor signed a medical slip required for insurance purposes and then recommended that Kurt take two months off to recover.

The next day, March 3, Kurt flew to Rome to meet up with Courtney and Frances. He checked in to the city’s most luxurious hotel, the Excelsior, and waited for his wife and daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in twenty-six days.

Details of what transpired over the next twenty-four hours are still murky. Between 6:00 and 6:30
A.M.
March 4, the front desk received a frantic call from Courtney asking them to summon an ambulance. She had just found her husband unconscious on the floor of their hotel room. Kurt was rushed to the Umberto I Polyclinic hospital. Back in the United States, CNN interrupted its programming to announce that Kurt Cobain had died of a drug overdose in Rome. The report turned out to be premature: twenty hours after he arrived at the hospital, Kurt opened his eyes and asked for a strawberry milk shake.

The next day, his doctor, Osvaldo Galletta, held a press conference to announce that Kurt was recovering from a “pharmacological coma, due not to narcotics, but the combined effect of alcohol and tranquilizers which had been medically prescribed by a doctor.”

Nirvana’s management company, Gold Mountain, issued a statement that Kurt had suffered an accidental overdose. Not a word about suicide was ever mentioned—publicly or privately. Gold Mountain was well aware that this was not the first time Kurt had overdosed on drugs. A year earlier, on May 2, 1993, a Seattle Fire Department unit had been dispatched to Kurt and Courtney’s Lakeside Avenue home, where they found Kurt “shaking, flushed, delirious and talking incoherently.” He had apparently suffered an overdose after injecting $30 to $40 worth of heroin. He was taken to the hospital, where he was treated and released.

Courtney claims that, when the couple returned to Seattle a few days after the Rome overdose, the European tour abandoned, she banished drug dealers from the house and went to extreme lengths to ensure Kurt kept away from drugs. This, she said, sparked renewed tension between them. But, according to Dylan Carlson, it was again money, not drugs, that led to the conflict.

Nirvana had been offered the headlining spot at the giant alternative music festival Lollapalooza, including a generous percentage of the gate receipts, which would have brought the band millions of dollars. But when he returned from Rome, Kurt flatly declared that he wasn’t going to participate in the summer tour. According to Carlson, who saw Kurt the day he returned from Rome, Courtney was furious that he was willing to turn down that kind of money.

“She went ballistic,” he recalls. “She kept on screaming at him about how much money he was giving up and said if he didn’t want to do it, she’d be glad to take his place.”

Courtney later took great pains to paint herself as a tender but firmly antidrug maternal figure to Kurt at this time. “When he came home from Rome high, I flipped out,” she told
Rolling Stone
in December 1994. She has claimed that, as a result, Kurt only did drugs behind her back because he knew she would not have tolerated any drug use. Carlson, who was still supplying them both, finds this laughable. “That’s interesting,” he says.

Indeed, the recollections of two Seattle car salesmen paint a very different picture. On March 22, only two weeks after they returned from Rome, Kurt and Courtney took a taxi to the American Dream used-car lot, which specialized in vintage cars. When he had returned the Lexus in January, Kurt decided he wanted a vehicle more in keeping with his image. He had spotted a classic ’65 sky blue Dodge Dart at the lot, and he wanted to acquire it.

The cabdriver, Leon Hassan, remembers that the couple had “quarreled viciously” in the backseat on the way to American Dream. When they arrived, they were served by a salesman named Joe Kenney, who says they were talking about the Lexus, with Kurt trying to convince her that the Dart could do everything the luxury car could do. After a few minutes, Courtney said she had to use the bathroom. On the way, Kenney says, she dropped a handful of drugs and had to pick them up. Kenney claims he remarked to his colleague that he should get Kurt to autograph his CD soon because it didn’t look like they would be around much longer, they were so strung out. “She was really tossing down the drugs,” the other salesman recalled.

Meanwhile, Geffen Records was terrified about the close call in Rome. Nirvana was the company’s greatest asset, worth tens of millions of dollars in profits—they could not afford to lose Kurt. Equally concerned was the president of Nirvana’s management company, Danny Goldberg, who also stood to lose millions in commissions. But Goldberg, who was Frances Bean’s godfather, had also become very personally close to Kurt and was genuinely concerned about his deteriorating state.

Goldberg contacted Steven Chatoff, head of a prominent drug rehab center, who recommended an “intervention,” a controversial course of action that had been used with limited success on severe drug addicts. The idea was to gather friends and family members together to confront the addict about his drug use. On the morning of March 25, Kurt walked downstairs with Dylan after the two friends had shot up together, shortly after waking up. Gathered in the living room were Courtney; Michael “Cali” Dewitt, Frances Bean’s nanny; Nirvana’s new guitarist, Pat Smear; and several executives from Kurt’s management company and record label. Led by David Burr, a drug counselor, the participants took turns confronting Kurt about his drug use and demanding he seek treatment. Unless he did, the executives threatened, they would no longer work with him and his career would be ruined. When it was Courtney’s turn, she said, “This has got to end…. You have to be a good daddy.”

Counting Dylan, who watched the intervention but did not participate, three of the people in the room, including Courtney, were junkies themselves. “Who the fuck are all of you to tell me this?” Kurt responded indignantly, calling them “hypocrites.” As biographer Charles Cross recorded, Kurt then proceeded to describe in explicit detail what he had witnessed of the heavy drug use by most of those present in the room. From the coke-filled music industry schmooze fests he had attended to the daily heroin habit of his wife, the irony was not lost on Kurt. According to Danny Goldberg, “His big thing was that Courtney was more fucked-up than he was.” Kurt stormed out, declaring that nobody in the room had any right to judge him.

Courtney was terrified that Geffen and Gold Mountain would follow through on their threats to drop him; this would severely jeopardize the extravagant lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. She saved her ultimate pressure tactic for the next day. If Kurt refused to seek treatment, she would limit his access to Frances Bean. Knowing he could not risk losing his baby, he finally agreed to check into the Daniel X. Freeman Clinic—also known as the Exodus recovery center—a rehab facility in Marina Del Rey, California, long favored by rock stars and other celebrities.

In September 1992, at the height of the
Vanity Fair
controversy, Kurt had detoxed at Exodus once before, an experience he found “disgusting.” He described it to his biographer Michael Azerrad: “Right away, these forty-year-old hippie long-term junkie type counselors would come in and try to talk to me on a rock and roll level, like, ‘I know where you’re at, man. Drugs are real prevalent in rock ’n roll and I’ve seen it all in the seventies. Would you mind if David Crosby came in and said hello? Or Steven Tyler?’ Rattling off these rock stars’ names. I was like, ‘Fuck that. I don’t have any respect for these people at all.’ ” That time, he had left a few days before the treatment ended, exasperated by unremitting group therapy sessions and twelve-step meetings. Seeking treatment back then had been all about convincing child welfare authorities that he was cleaning up his act.

On March 30, Kurt flew to Los Angeles to begin his 28-day treatment at Exodus. He was assigned Room 206 and went through an intake session with a nurse, who attempted to determine the extent of his addiction. The next morning, he attended an individual therapy session with a counselor, Nial Stimson, who later recalled that Kurt “was totally in denial that he had a heroin problem.” Stimson tried to make him understand the seriousness of the Rome incident, but Kurt told him, “I understand. I just want to get cleaned up and out of here.” Meanwhile, Courtney was attempting her own withdrawal a few miles away at the five-star Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where a doctor was supervising a treatment plan called “hotel detox”—supposedly meant to shield celebrities from the media spotlight of a public rehab center.

That afternoon, Jackie Farry, one of Frances’s nannies, brought the baby to the clinic to visit Kurt, who played with his daughter for about twenty minutes. Kurt complained to Farry about his battles with Courtney over Lollapalooza. The next day, Jackie brought Frances to visit again, and this time Kurt played with the nineteen-month-old baby for almost an hour, tossing her in the air and making her giggle—Frances Bean’s favorite game.

After they left, Kurt went outside and smoked a cigarette with another rock star resident, his friend Gibby Haynes of the Butt-hole Surfers. Haynes told him about a friend who had recently escaped Exodus by jumping over the wall in the backyard. They both laughed at the story because Exodus wasn’t a lockdown facility and there was therefore no reason to escape. Anybody could just walk right out the front door anytime they wanted.

Later that evening, at 7:25
P.M.,
Kurt told a nurse he was going outside to smoke a cigarette, this time alone. It wasn’t until an hour later that the Exodus staff noticed him missing. He had scaled the same wall that he and Gibby Haynes had joked about earlier in the day.

Seven days later, his body was found in the room above his garage. Much of what happened in the interval has remained a mystery for nearly a decade, but over time, several missing pieces of the puzzle have materialized, offering the opportunity to paint a clearer picture of what happened that week.