Love & Death (33 page)

The tone of his response was by now familiar, as was his demonic laugh: “I can make fifty grand go a long way,” he declares.

I
t is February 2002, and Courtney has consented to appear on her friend Carrie Fisher’s TV talk show,
Conversations from the Edge,
to talk about her life and career. Midway through the taping, they have already touched on a wide range of subjects—Courtney’s childhood, her parents, her daughter, her films. But one topic has been conspicuously avoided, and now Fisher is determined to raise it: “So, how did you meet Kurt? We have never talked about that.”

Courtney’s answer is revealing. “Let’s not. I wish I’d never married him,” she replies.

Indeed, in the years since her husband’s death, Courtney had skillfully emerged from Kurt’s shadow and established a distinct persona of her own, carving out a successful music and film career while shedding—at least temporarily—much of the bad-girl image that Americans had come to love and loathe. The transformation from thrift-shop rags to Versace and from junkie grunge musician to movie star was accomplished so seamlessly that it’s easy to see why she once described herself as a “chameleon press whore.” In late 1994, while still receiving favorable national attention as the tragic widow of a rock icon, she can be heard gloating to Tom Grant on tape about how the national media are “falling at my footsteps wanting to interview me. I have the power,” Courtney exults.

By 1995, she had become, as Barbara Walters called her, “one of the ten most fascinating people” in America. Her mainstream acceptance had involved lying about her drug use on Walters’s show, but no one could deny that she had pulled off the heady transformation into a celebrity that all America could hail.

The transformation didn’t happen overnight. In November 1994, Courtney was spotted wearing a floor-length slip, running barefoot after a woman on L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard and yelling, “I’m gonna kill you!” The woman was indie singer Mary Lou Lord, one of Kurt’s ex-girlfriends, who had shown up at an after-hours party Courtney was attending. Courtney had shoved her, told her to “get your ass out of here” and then taken up the chase. When asked about the incident later, Courtney told
Spin
magazine, “There are five people in this world that, if I ever run into, I will fucking kill and she is definitely one of them.” Two years earlier, while Kurt was alive, Courtney had phoned Lord and threatened, “I’m gonna cut your head off and shove it up your ass—and Kurt’s gonna throw you in the oven.” Reportedly, Courtney’s wrath had been prompted by a profile of Lord in the
Boston Phoenix,
which mentioned in passing that she had once dated Kurt. After it appeared, the newspaper received two faxed letters from Kurt calling Lord a “creepy girl” and claiming that he couldn’t even remember her name or her face. According to the paper’s former editor, Brett Milano, the letters were signed by Kurt but written in Courtney’s handwriting.

“I wouldn’t say that Courtney’s insanely jealous,” recalls Lord of the incident. “She’s just insane. I have no idea if she killed Kurt, but I think she’s capable of something like that. There was a time that I was truly afraid that she was going to kill me.”

In January 1995, Courtney was arrested after an air rage incident on a Qantas airplane during Hole’s tour of Australia and New Zealand. After a flight attendant asked her to calm down, an apparently drunk Courtney was heard yelling, “I’m allowed to do whatever the fuck I want! Do you know who I am?”

A few months later, on the first date of the 1995 Lollapalooza tour, Hole had just finished their set when Courtney spotted Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna heading backstage with the members of Sonic Youth. Hanna had been a good friend of Kurt’s in Olympia, and it had long been rumored that they had had an affair. As Sonic Youth took the stage, Courtney marched up to Hanna and punched her in the face. When assault charges were filed, Courtney claimed that Hanna had asked her, “Where’s the baby? In a closet with an IV?” but witnesses denied that Hanna had provoked her in any way. Courtney then claimed that Hanna was “Kurt’s worst enemy in the world” and that she had done only what he would have wanted. Like Lord, Hanna’s only sin seems to have been her indulgence in a long-gone romantic episode with Kurt. Courtney later pleaded guilty in a Washington State courtroom to assault and was handed a one-year suspended sentence, ordered to refrain from violent acts and forced to take anger management classes. Outside the courtroom, she told reporters, “The judge said I can’t punch her in Grant County, but I can clock her again in Seattle.”

Yet incidents like these barely found their way into the mainstream media, thanks to a carefully orchestrated campaign by Courtney’s PR agency, PMK, headed by the queen of celebrity publicists, Pat Kingsley, who boasted a roster of clients including Tom Cruise, Al Pacino, Jodie Foster and Tom Hanks. Before long, any reporter who wished to interview Courtney or her band was first required to sign a twelve-page agreement not to ask about the murder theories, Courtney’s drug use and a number of other contentious issues from her past. Courtney once briefly stormed off the set of the
Today
show, on which she was appearing to promote her movie
The People vs. Larry Flynt,
when the interviewer asked about her past drug use. “Where are you going with this?” snapped Courtney. “I’m not going to talk about this on the
Today
show, I’m just not. It’s not a demographic that I feel like talking about this.”

But to attribute Courtney’s success solely to her genius for media manipulation would be a mistake. Many consider Hole’s
Live Through This
—named album of the year in
Rolling Stone
’s 1994 readers’ poll—a masterpiece. Her tour de force performance in
The People vs. Larry Flynt
earned her a Golden Globe nomination. To her vehement denials, Courtney bashers insisted that it was Kurt who had written the distinctive musical bridges on
Live Through This,
and recently surfaced evidence from unreleased studio recordings would seem to prove he did play a significant role in the recording. The charges became more pointed when Billy Corgan claimed to have written a good portion of the songs on her next album,
Celebrity Skin,
and publicly complained when Courtney attempted to take credit. As for her brilliant performance as Althea Flynt, skeptics pointed out that she was simply portraying an out-of-control junkie—hardly an acting stretch for Courtney. Nevertheless, the lyrics on both albums—which were indisputably written by Courtney—demonstrate genuine talent, and she more than holds her own in the films she has starred in post–
Larry Flynt.

But, while mainstream America appeared to be enjoying a love affair with the new Courtney, her old peers had a decidedly different opinion. Seattle’s original grunge band, Mudhoney, recorded a song, “Into Yer Schtik,” clearly directed at her. It contained the lyrics “Why don’t you blow your brains out too?” In his 1995 song “I’ll Stick Around,” off the first album Dave Grohl recorded with his new band, Foo Fighters, he sings, “How could it be / I’m the only one who sees your rehearsed insanity / I’ve been around all the pawns you’ve gagged and bound.”

Her profile has been lower of late, thanks to a string of forgettable movies and the relative commercial failure of
Celebrity Skin.
But in 2001, Courtney resurfaced as the target of a very bitter, and very public, legal feud with the surviving members of Nirvana over Kurt’s musical legacy. In June, Courtney sued Grohl and Novoselic to block the release of a proposed box set of unreleased Nirvana music, which was to come out on the tenth anniversary of the release of
Nevermind.
The lawsuit was designed to release her from the partnership she entered into with Krist and Dave following Kurt’s death. Six months later, they countersued, claiming in Washington Superior Court that Courtney’s legal action was “really about securing more money to support Love’s prima donna lifestyle. In her professional dealings, Love is irrational, mercurial, self-centered, unmanageable, inconsistent and unpredictable…. In truth, her actions are only about the revitalization of her career motivated solely by her blind self-interest…. She is using Nirvana’s music as a bargaining chip to increase leverage for her personal gain, without any regard for the Nirvana legacy. Our music is just a pawn in her endless legal battles and her obsessive need for publicity and attention.” Four months later, Dave and Krist—claiming Courtney was “incapacitated”—filed a court motion asking that she be forced to undergo a mental examination.

The soap opera intensified when Kurt’s mother issued a statement supporting Courtney and characterizing Grohl and Novoselic as “liars and crooks.” “I am shocked and disgusted at the behavior of Krist Novoselic, David Grohl and their ‘managers’ and lawyers,” Wendy wrote. “I know that Nirvana was never a partnership of any sort. I know that in the last year of his life, my son despised his bandmates and told me many times he no longer wanted to play with them or have anything to do with them…. Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl never wrote a Nirvana song in their lives. For them to have formed an equal partnership is ridiculous beyond comprehension.”

Few believed Wendy had written the words in the statement. According to Leland Cobain, Courtney bought Wendy a very expensive house a few years ago and provided her with a generous allowance. “I don’t know what she has on Courtney, but it must be something for her to give Wendy all that money,” says Leland. “I know that Kurt wouldn’t have wanted that. His mother didn’t want anything to do with him until he became famous.”

Whatever goodwill once existed between Courtney and Wendy, however, appears to have finally dissipated after a widely publicized incident in Los Angeles in fall 2003 in which Courtney, apparently under the influence of drugs, was arrested by Beverly Hills police after she tried to kick in the door of her manager and ex-boyfriend James Barber while he was inside his house in bed with Courtney’s former assistant. After her release on bail, she was arrested again hours later, this time on felony drug charges, when paramedics were summoned to her home, where Courtney had reportedly overdosed on the drug Oxycontin, a synthetic form of morphine commonly referred to as “hillbilly heroin.” When it was reported that the overdose had taken place in the presence of Frances Bean, the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services marched into Frances’s school and took the eleven-year-old girl into protective custody, charging Courtney with “abandonment” of her child. The move set off a bitter custody battle between Courtney and Wendy, during which the two came to blows outside an L.A. courthouse. “Wendy went nuts,” Courtney told the New York
Daily News,
“so I slapped her like a four-year-old.”

Dave and Krist eventually settled their lawsuit with Courtney out of court, but the legal battles and her own dwindling commercial fortunes have stretched her financial resources thin. Since half of Kurt’s royalties are held for Frances Bean in escrow, Courtney was obliged to look a little farther afield for a source of funds. In early 2002, she sold Kurt’s unpublished diaries to Riverhead books for a reported advance of $4.5 million. A few months later, his more than twenty notebooks, full of private writings, doodles, drawings and song lyrics, were released in the form of a coffee-table book called
Journals
and became an immediate worldwide bestseller.

The publication of
Journals,
however, was not universally celebrated. One reviewer called it an act of “obscene grave robbery,” while another urged a boycott because “every unsold copy gives publishers yet another reason why something as necrophilic as this should not be done again.”

Ironically,
Journals
itself contains a hint at how Kurt might have felt about its publication. In one 1992 entry, he wrote:

As the tenth anniversary of Kurt’s death approaches, the doubts over how he died show no signs of receding. If anything, they are stronger than ever. Kurt died just as the Internet was starting to take hold, and there are now countless websites and online forums devoted exclusively to the murder theory. Neither has Hollywood ignored it. In October 2002, NBC’s
Law & Order,
known for presenting cases “ripped from the headlines,” broadcast an episode clearly based on the Cobain murder theory. It portrays an ambitious but widely hated female rocker whose rock star husband had apparently committed suicide sometime before. When her own father accuses her of killing her husband and a diligent P.I. works to have the case reopened, her husband’s death is found to be a murder.

Tom Grant is encouraged by such mainstream acceptance of the murder theory. Although he no longer works full-time as a private investigator, this “grunge world Inspector Javert,” as one newspaper called him, continues to devote considerable time and energy to the Cobain case. He has vowed to pursue his investigation for another ten years if necessary, until “justice is done.”