Love & Death (25 page)

Could somebody have dropped an incapacitating dose of Rohypnol into Kurt’s drink without his knowledge? That’s exactly what Tom Grant speculates: “I think that Courtney mixed Rohypnol into Kurt’s drink to induce an overdose. I firmly believe this was her first attempt to kill him.”

Boosting Grant’s theory, it was later reported that the Rohypnol was in fact Courtney’s prescription, not Kurt’s. After his death, the British music magazine
Select
reported that one of its journalists interviewed Courtney in her London hotel room on March 3, hours before she flew to Rome to join Kurt. One passage in the article seems eerily significant:

After Kurt’s death, when Courtney claimed for the first time that Rome had been a failed suicide attempt, the tranquilizers figured prominently in stories she told about the incident. According to her version, she had “retrieved two empty blister packs of Rohypnol next to Kurt—he had taken sixty of the aspirin-size pills, individually removing each from a plastic-and-foil container.” She later told
Rolling Stone,
“I can see how it happened. He took fifty fucking pills.”

Of course, if Kurt had really taken fifty or sixty Rohypnol pills, it would prove that Rome was indeed a suicide attempt. However, there is not a single witness who actually saw the empty Rohypnol packets—not the paramedics, nor any hotel official. The media and biographers have simply accepted Courtney’s version of the incident as the truth.

When we interviewed Dr. Osvaldo Galletta, the doctor who treated Kurt after his overdose, he vehemently denied that Kurt had taken the massive quantity of Rohypnol described by Courtney. Neither did he believe that Kurt’s overdose was deliberate. “We can usually tell a suicide attempt,” he told us. “This didn’t look like one to me. He mixed tranquilizers and alcohol and when you do that, you’re playing with fire.” After Kurt’s death, Dr. Galletta told reporters, “The last image I have of him, which in the light of the tragedy now seems pathetic, is of a young man playing with the little girl [Frances]. He did not seem like a young man who wanted to end it all.”

Galletta’s doubts and the absence of witnesses would all be irrelevant if Kurt really left a suicide note in Rome. And it appears to have been Courtney’s revelation about the note that convinced the press and public that Rome had been a suicide attempt. But, as we heard Courtney tell Grant, the letter Kurt left her doesn’t appear to have been a suicide note at all, but a husband’s declaration of independence from a wife he detests. In it, as Courtney confessed to Grant, Kurt wrote that he was leaving her: “It’s not very nice. It’s mean to me…. It wasn’t really nice. It talked about getting a divorce.” The one part of the note that might be reasonably construed as referring to suicide—where Kurt declares he is “choosing death”—is lifted entirely out of context.

Even members of the Seattle Police Department who saw the Rome letter didn’t believe it was a suicide note. According to one SPD source who is critical of his department’s investigation, “Love gave us another note which she said Kurt had written in Rome. She said it was a suicide note, but it wasn’t. It was a rambling letter which was very unflattering to her. There are some veiled references which you’d have to stretch to conclude referred to suicide.”

At the time of Kurt’s Rome overdose, Geffen Records itself issued a statement declaring that Kurt’s mixing of alcohol and tranquilizers “was definitely not a suicide attempt—it was strictly accidental.” But perhaps the most significant public statement about the Rome incident may be that of Janet Billig, the spokesperson for Nirvana’s management company, Gold Mountain. Billig told
Rolling Stone—after
Kurt’s death—that she had talked to Kurt about the note in Rome and “Kurt insisted it was not a suicide note. He just took all of his and Courtney’s money and was going to run away and disappear.” This would appear to confirm what Courtney told Tom Grant on April 3, that in the note, Kurt “says he’s leaving me.” In light of this revelation, it is especially interesting to read what Courtney told
Select
magazine while Kurt was still in the Rome hospital recovering from his coma: “If he thinks he can get away from me that easily, he can forget it. I’ll follow him through hell.”

In Charles Cross’s
Heavier Than Heaven,
Rosemary Carroll reveals a crucial piece of the chronological puzzle for the first time. She had already made it clear to Tom Grant that Kurt wanted a divorce from Courtney but had never told him precisely when Kurt first made his intentions known. Cross supplies the missing data: on March 1 in Munich shortly before going on stage for his last concert, and two days before he met up with Courtney in Rome.

Within sixty hours of this telephone call, we know that Kurt flew to Rome, wrote a three-page letter to Courtney declaring he was leaving her and fell into a coma after ingesting the date rape drug, Rohypnol. Yet when Courtney described their encounter to
Rolling Stone,
she painted a romantic scenario:

The story teems with contradictions, yet one thing in particular has always troubled us. If, as Grant claims, Courtney intended to kill Kurt in Rome, why did she call an ambulance after she found him unconscious, thereby saving his life? Why didn’t she simply leave him to die? In fact, we have always cited her actions in Rome as one of the primary flaws in Grant’s murder theory. And, while it doesn’t disprove the fact that Kurt was murdered, it appeared to exonerate Courtney herself in the crime.

We are certain that Grant has no hard evidence to back up his serious allegation that Rome was an attempt by Courtney to murder her husband, and we criticized him in our first book for making this unsubstantiated allegation. In response, he offered a number of questionable theories. Maybe she realized too late that Kurt hadn’t ingested enough Rohypnol to kill him, Grant speculated, and she wanted to make herself look good by appearing to save his life. But in the years since we first aired our doubts, some additional information has surfaced, causing us to rethink our initial skepticism.

The first and most serious disclosure comes from Courtney herself. Umberto I Polyclinic hospital has confirmed that Kurt arrived by ambulance at approximately 7:00
A.M.
, at which point doctors immediately pumped out his stomach. This timeline would seem to correspond with the Excelsior Hotel’s statement that the front desk received a call from Courtney’s room shortly before 6:30
A.M.
requesting an ambulance. Yet eight months later, Courtney told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
how she had found Kurt unconscious some
two to three hours
before she called for an ambulance:

Why did she wait for more than two hours before calling for an ambulance at 6:30
A.M.
? Was she waiting to first make sure he was dead? Or was she simply misquoted by
Rolling Stone?
Here is the version she told
Spin
magazine:

Here she confirms that she not only discovered him at 4:00 in the morning, but also thought he was “dead.”

When the ambulance transported Kurt to the hospital some two to three hours later, Courtney rode in the back with her husband. When they arrived at the hospital just before 7:00
A.M.
, the famed Italian paparazzo Massimo Sestini, tipped off about their arrival, was waiting to snap photos when the ambulance doors swung open. His widely published photo shows Courtney in full makeup. Many who have seen this photo are struck by the fact that, although her husband was dying, she had the presence of mind to apply her makeup before the ambulance arrived.

Various media accounts have described Kurt’s first request upon awaking from his coma: a strawberry milk shake. Only Charles Cross records Kurt’s first actions. His mouth still full of tubes, he took a pencil and a notepad and scribbled a note to Courtney, who was waiting by his bedside. The first words he wrote were “Fuck You.” Then he demanded the tubes be removed from his mouth and asked for the milk shake. Presumably, only Courtney knows the significance of Kurt’s angry gesture.

Cross’s
Heavier Than Heaven
provides another intriguing detail about the incident in Rome. Sometime that morning, “a female identifying herself as Courtney had left a message with the [head of Geffen Records] saying Kurt was dead.” This call was apparently why some American media outlets, including CNN, wrongly reported that Kurt had died. After an hour of panic and grief at Geffen, Cross reports, “it was discovered the caller was an impersonator.” Who discovered this? And more disturbingly, how did they know it wasn’t really Courtney who called? Did she simply deny it later on? Or by that time, had they learned Kurt was still alive and, thus, assumed the call was a hoax? Geffen won’t say, and Cross provides no source for this revelation.

If the caller was Courtney, it shows she initially believed Kurt was dead, and therefore may have called the ambulance under the false impression that she had already succeeded in killing her husband. After all, Courtney herself later told a reporter that she thought Kurt was dead. However, this is pure conjecture and is far from convincing evidence that she attempted to murder Kurt in Rome.

Unless a more convincing explanation surfaces, her call for the ambulance may be the most compelling indication that Courtney is innocent of the terrible accusation that has been publicly leveled against her for nearly a decade.

For years, the murder theorists have argued that Kurt was never suicidal but was only pinned with the label by Courtney after his death. However, Kurt’s own statements suggest he had at least toyed with the idea at certain times in his life. Indeed, it was Kurt, not Courtney, who in 1993 gave
Rolling Stone
reporter Michael Azerrad the following explanation as to why he started using heroin:

In another interview with
Rolling Stone
a year later, he provides an equally prescient quote:

However, it was in this very interview, published less than three months before his death, that Kurt declares, “I have never been happier in my life” because “my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore.”

The oft-cited fact that Kurt had originally titled Nirvana’s last album
I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
would also seem to suggest that suicide wasn’t far from Kurt’s mind during this period. Only after pressure from his label did Kurt consent to change the title to
In Utero.
When we asked Dylan Carlson how he could say Kurt wasn’t suicidal, given the sheer volume of such references over the years, he shrugged. “That was all just a joke,” he said. “Kurt said so himself. And when he talked about blowing his brains out, anybody who knew him knew that was just how he talked when he described the pain. I don’t think he meant it literally. It was an expression he used.”