Every age, or so it has been said, gets the icons it deserves. It’s an observation as cynical as it is astute, and this seems as good a time as any to ask whether we deserve the bundle of raw ambition and astonishing resilience known as Courtney Love. Less than ten years ago, she was still gyrating in a G-string and pasties at Jumbo’s Clown Room, a mini-mall strip joint on Hollywood Boulevard. Much like Madonna, whom she rivals in her attention-seeking, and whom she credits with paving the way for her dissy, fuck-all style, Love says she has always wanted to be famous, and, now that she’s made it out of the shadows, she shows every sign of hanging on to the spotlight for longer than fifteen minutes.
But before we can even pose the question of whether she’s the right incarnation for our cultural moment, we have to define our terms—as in which Courtney Love, exactly, are we talking about? Is it the cleaned-up, surgically enhanced Hollywood celebrity, surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers, publicists, and assistants, who in the last two years has posed for Vogue, the cover of Harper’s Bazaar (as one of “America’s Most Stylish Women”), and a ten-page Versace spread shot by Richard Avedon which appeared in this magazine? Or are we referring to the bad, pre-1995 Courtney, whose degraded antics we thrilled to: the “riot grrrl” who specialized in rage, strutting around when she performed with her band, Hole, in decrepit party-girl schmattes that she referred to as “kinderwhore” clothing, and fearlessly diving into the mosh pit, there to be pawed by the crowd? This Courtney openly took drugs, punched out people, harassed journalists she didn’t like with menacing phone calls, and stalked the Internet with graphic depictions of her inner state. Love, who has been demonized as passionately as she has been embraced—and is in for a fresh round of name-calling with the release, this week, of Nick Broomfield’s chilling documentary “Kurt & Courtney”—has described herself as “a cockroach.” She survived a harrowing, unconventional background: a childhood spent in hippie communes while her heiress mother tried to find herself; brief periods in foster homes and boarding schools; an adolescence spent first in reform school and then as a stripper in Alaska, Taiwan, and parts in between. Love has said that her mother, who became a therapist, was “detached”; she had an even more sporadic relationship with her father, who calls himself “the Jane Goodall of rock and roll” (he has self-published a three-volume history of the Grateful Dead), and whom she calls “insane,” claiming that he beat her and that he gave her LSD when she was a toddler. At thirty-two, Love has been an erotic dancer, a druggie, a groupie, a bit actress (“Sid and Nancy”), a punk rocker, a wife, a mother, a widow, and a movie star (“The People vs. Larry Flynt”), all in the amount of time it takes other young people to decide what they want to be—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief—let alone get there. She seems to be precisely the sort of person for whom the quintessentially nineties term “morphing” was coined.
There are some who might argue that Love’s most infamous transformation occurred on the day in early April, 1994, when Kurt Cobain, her husband of two years, committed suicide, at the age of twenty-seven, by injecting himself with enough heroin to kill three people and then shooting himself in the mouth. Cobain, of course, was the lead singer of Nirvana, the enormously successful grunge group out of Seattle; he also wrote the group’s songs, with their oblique lyrics, gigantic beat, and unexpectedly melodic hooks. The spectacular sales (eventually totalling ten million copies) of Nirvana’s second album, “Nevermind,” turned the group into superstars overnight and their songs—especially “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—into slacker anthems. But, for the perennially disconsolate Cobain, success brought more anguish than happiness; he disdained the “yuppies in their BMWs” among his fans and escaped further into his heroin habit. Marriage to Love—Cobain once described their relationship as a mixture of “Evian water and battery acid,” while she quipped that “we bonded over pharmaceuticals”—and fatherhood seemed for a while to calm his demons. (Their daughter, Frances Bean, was born less than six months after the couple got hitched in Hawaii, with Kurt wearing green pajamas and Courtney wearing a dress that had once belonged to Frances Farmer, the Seattle-born actress with whom Cobain was obsessed.) But at the time of his suicide Kurt was rumored to be deeply unhappy in the marriage and talking of divorce.
If Cobain’s image—the unkempt choirboy good looks and moody, anti-materialist style—had lent itself to idealization during his lifetime, it was ripe for sanctification once he was gone. The fact that Cobain, as several of his biographers have pointed out, had a youthful reputation as a bully—and, his disclaimers notwithstanding, was as driven to succeed as any other young rock hopeful—had been conveniently ignored while he was alive; in death, he was canonized as the noble prince of the streets. Courtney, brash and outspoken, became the vilified widow, the one who had dragged him out of his purist daydreams into the sewer of money and stardom: she was seen as the craven Yoko to his artistic John.
Love, whose acclaimed second album (entitled, with retroactive irony, “Live Through This”) came out within days of Cobain’s death, raucously mourned her husband and, some said, brilliantly exploited the tragedy. She didn’t help matters by granting an interview to MTV the day after the suicide, and she continued to talk about him every chance she got—when she wasn’t going on shopping sprees (Love and her daughter were the sole heirs to Cobain’s estate), checking into health spas with ex-flames (Billy Corgan, of Smashing Pumpkins), attending the MTV Movie Awards with Michael Stipe, of R.E.M., or having her image reupholstered by the publicity firm PMK, which she had hired at fifteen thousand dollars a month, and through cosmetic surgery. Love’s original feelings about her physical appearance were summed up in the half-forlorn, half-sardonic title of Hole’s first album, “Pretty on the Inside.” But over the years she has had her nose bobbed and rebobbed, her teeth done, and her breasts enlarged and lifted; she has dropped forty pounds and redesigned her once chunky body with the help of trainers and liposuction. The one thing that hasn’t changed is her striking green eyes, which remain her best feature.
Along with this protracted physical makeover has come—or so we’ve been led to believe—a kinder, gentler Courtney Love. The woman who just nano-seconds ago cultivated a snarling, bad-girl persona both in her lyrics (“I don’t do the dishes / I throw them in the crib”) and in her life gradually began to reshape the public’s perception of her. A writer for the London Independent noted last year that Love, in the presence of a publicist who was there to see that she didn’t run off at the mouth as in days of yore, “looked fantastically attractive” and wasn’t at all bothered by the prospect of becoming “mainstream.” “How long do you have to be cool?” she asked. “How long do you want not to be married and not have kids and not have a family and not be grounded?” Four months before that, she had told a Los Angeles Times reporter that she thought of herself as “very conservative, a real traditionalist.”
It’s hard to reconcile these Tipper Gore-like sentiments with Love’s thuggish endorsement of acting as a profession just a year and a half earlier—she described it as “a whole new way to kick ass,” according to Melissa Rossi in her unauthorized biography, “Courtney Love: Queen of Noise”—or with her general reputation as a bully. “I punched some bitch in the mouth and her teeth got in the way,” was how she explained a bandaged hand to a crowd in the summer of 1995, when she was playing Lollapalooza, the roving musical tour. Even if you grant that people can change, there’s something unconvincing about the way Love has gone from pugilism to politesse—from the kind of person who gets booked on the Jerry Springer show to the kind you see on Charlie Rose. Although Love, who once described her persona as “ugly and gross and psychotic,” has been able to shed baggage from her past the way other people discard worn-out running shoes, she may have trouble outdistancing some rumors of seriously disturbed behavior. A 1992 Vanity Fair profile of her suggested that Love had continued to take heroin while she was pregnant; this not only enraged Kurt and Courtney but attracted the attention of the Los Angeles child services, who put the two-week-old Frances Bean in the custody of Courtney’s half sister for two months. Love responded by railing against the writer, who, she said, had taken remarks of hers out of context. She also issued threats to any other reporters who might follow suit (“Remember, if you write anything nasty about me, I’ll come round and blow up your toilet”), and she tightened her control over journalistic access. “With Pat [Kingsley] as her publicist, she was more than media-savvy,” Rossi writes. “She was the press princess, able to place, kill, or at least tone down stories more effectively than the government or the mob.”
There is one story, however, that persists in dogging Love—and has now surfaced again, just when she’s arrived at the glistening, neon-lit place she dreamed about as an unhappy, angry child. It sprang up a month after Cobain’s death, as the result of an article in the Seattle Times, and it has been floating around the Internet and various outlets of the alternative media ever since. According to this account, the circumstances of Cobain’s death were murky enough to suggest that it may have been a murder rather than a suicide. In case you haven’t already guessed, it features Courtney Love as a diabolical Black Widow—a tackily dishabille version of Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity” or Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice”—scheming to dispose of the hubby and grab the dough.
It sounds like the stuff of diehard conspiracy theorists—the kind of exotic, vaguely plausible scenario that the schizoid types who haunt the Internet entertain themselves with. And these speculations would probably have remained out there on the fringes, if it weren’t for Broomfield’s documentary, which follows the recent publication of “Who Killed Kurt Cobain?: The Mysterious Death of an Icon,” by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace. The book is a mostly judicious presentation of explosive material, and, as its title implies, the authors’ four years of research has led to more questions than answers. They point to a number of unresolved issues concerning Cobain’s death: the lack of fingerprints on the gun and the high level of heroin in his blood, which some say would have incapacitated him from using a gun; the fact that the singer’s credit card (which Love had cancelled) was used after his death; the alleged existence of an unfinished will excluding Love; and the evidence that there were two sets of handwriting on Cobain’s so-called suicide note, indicating that it may have been a statement of his wish to resign from the music industry rather than a declaration of his intent to kill himself.
The most vocal proponents of the Courtney-as-murderer-by-proxy theory are Hank Harrison, her estranged father, and Tom Grant, a private investigator whom Courtney hired to help find Cobain after he escaped from a detox facility in Los Angeles, four days before he died. Grant, a former undercover agent for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, has stubbornly pursued his suspicions ever since Love first found his name in the Yellow Pages. Although Halperin and Wallace are convinced that Grant “is sincere in his crusade,” they also note that he has failed to produce tangible proof of her guilt. They draw a wider margin around Harrison, observing that many of his arguments are not only flaky but “subjective.” They nonetheless use him as a source, citing his incendiary remarks about his daughter in a way that could only lead a jury. (“Face it,” he gleefully tells them, “she’s a psychopath. It runs in the family. She’s entirely capable of doing something like this.”) The writers insist that their agenda is to have the police case reopened, rather than to point a finger at Love, and they concede that Cobain’s intensely symbiotic relationship with his wife, which he characterized in a lyric as “an umbilical noose,” is hard to disentangle: she not only gave him the mothering he needed but arguably expressed, in her grabbing for power, his own masked wish to control those around him. It’s clear that Halperin and Wallace have pursued this project (in spite of Love’s alternating attempts, through her lawyers, to intimidate them and bribe them out of it) because of their affection for Cobain, whom they describe, as many have done before them and no doubt many will do after them, as “the voice of a generation.”
If there are people out there who feel affection for Courtney Love—and there must be some—Nick Broomfield hasn’t found them. The British director gravitates toward unsavory subjects—earlier films have examined the serial killer Aileen Wuornos and the Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss—and “Kurt & Courtney” gives off such a stench that Love’s lawyers succeeded in having it banned from the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. (They claimed that Broomfield didn’t have the legal clearance to use two songs.) Although the film covers basically the same terrain as Halperin and Wallace’s book, its final effect is more unnerving: we begin in a sleepy Washington town, with a blond little boy who likes to sing Beatles songs, and we end up lost in the woods with no way out. Broomfield is a skilled, if somewhat stagy, interviewer, wearing goofily large earphones and carrying his own sound equipment. The movie has its sweet moments: Cobain’s Aunt Mary, who gave him his first guitar, plays tapes of him singing at the age of two. “He was a pretty loud little guy,” she says. Broomfield talks to former friends and girlfriends of Kurt’s, who portray him as unremittingly sensitive and modest (one young woman remembers his arguing with Courtney over the purchase of a Lexus, which he made her return). But with the entrance of Courtney’s father the mood of the film shifts. Harrison, a beefy man with thick features, who resembles the old, untouched-up Courtney, seems harmless at first, albeit aggressively self-promoting. He stands on a sunny street next to Broomfield’s car, trying to cut in on a piece of his daughter’s action, angling a copy of his book (which is also called “Who Killed Kurt Cobain?”) so that it will best catch the light and show up clearly on film. He chats about Love’s “almost deranged thinking process,” her “compulsion to succeed no matter what,” her “well-documented violent-outburst pattern.” Harrison at first seems paternal in an eerie kind of way, comprehending of his daughter’s less attractive sides as only a father could be, although you wonder why he’s so ready to indict her.
After that, however, the negative pattern of the film is set, especially since Love refused to talk to the director, and tried to block the film at every pass. (In the course of the documentary, it’s revealed that Showtime, which is owned by Viacom, cancelled its sponsorship, possibly because of pressure from Love through MTV, another subsidiary of Viacom.) The film cuts between anti-Courtney revelations and a taped interview with Cobain himself, in which he looks and sounds unusually self-possessed. “I really was a lot more negative and angry,” he says of his stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off attitude. “But that had a lot to do with not having a mate.” Meanwhile, we encounter a former punk rocker and boyfriend of Courtney’s, Rozz Rezabek, who reveals an amusingly acidic side of Courtney when he describes how she offered a “scathing review” of his performance upon meeting him, yelling at him in an English accent to “lose the green checkered pants and cut out the Rod Stewart poses.” Broomfield follows Rezabek down into his basement, where he keeps boxes of Courtney memorabilia—journals and letters and papers, including some crumpled lists she wrote detailing “how Courtney will make it,” from which he quotes: “Stop working at jobs; be financed; get a deal using the new connections and old ones; become friends with Michael Stipe.” Rezabek, who seems more perceptive in his bitterness than many of the people who drifted around Love, says that she “would find out what your kink was or your peccadilloes and expound on it.” Then, in a damning finale, he directly addresses the camera: “I would’ve ended up like Kurt . . . fucking shoving a gun down my throat!”
At that point, the roof starts caving in, as Broomfield tracks down one drug-addled misfit after another. It’s a freakish netherworld out of “Midnight Cowboy,” only there’s no sign that anyone ever got off the bus in a state of innocence. A young woman who speaks in a slurred fashion claims that she used to do drugs with Cobain and Love: she calls Courtney a “name-dropper . . . sucking the spotlight from everyone else,” while Kurt was “totally a listener.” When Broomfield talks to Dylan Carlson, Cobain’s best friend, the disorienting darkness only spreads. Carlson, Broomfield was told, lives with an Uzi-toting drug dealer; he seems strung out beyond human connection. His forehead is dotted with ugly red scabs, and he mumbles evasively—in confusion or fear, it’s hard to tell which—that he didn’t think Kurt was “necessarily, like, planning to kill himself . . . I mean, I don’t know.”
In an effort to get to Courtney herself, Broomfield hooks up with a pair of “stalkerazzis” who work for the tabloids, one of whom speaks from behind a purple mask (he looks like a holdup guy in an early Woody Allen movie). The two promise to find Courtney, but first they introduce him to El Duce, the leader of an S & M rock group known as the Mentors. A fat, bald, intoxicated-looking man with pink slits for eyes, El Duce stands behind a chain-link fence in a tank top and tells Broomfield that Love offered him “fifty grand” to “whack” her husband. He’s willing to talk more in exchange for some beer, but we never see him again—not least because he’s killed shortly afterward in a mysterious train accident.
At the end of the documentary, the director finally meets Love—the new, shimmering, silk-sheathed Love—when she arrives at an A.C.L.U. reception to present an award on behalf of freedom of the press. Broomfield is so galled by the irony of it, having just devoted a film to recording Love’s manipulation of her image and suppression of anyone who tries to counter it, that he takes the microphone after Love and attempts to expose her, only to be hustled off the stage by Danny Goldberg, of Mercury Records, who is the president of the A.C.L.U. Foundation. Perhaps the most touching testimony comes from Frances Bean’s nanny, a gentle, frightened girl with lank hair, who quit a week before Cobain’s suicide. She says that she “couldn’t stand it up there,” because there was “just way too much . . . talk” about Kurt’s will; that Courtney “totally controlled” him and that she thinks he wanted “to get away” from her. “If he wasn’t murdered,” she almost whispers, “he was driven to murdering himself.”
Nick Broomfield says he doesn’t believe in the murder theory. “There’s plenty in Courtney’s behavior to suggest she’s capable of doing it—she hasn’t shrunk from physical violence—but it’s still a step to blowing someone’s head off,” he tells me. When I ask him whom he believes, if anyone, he says he believes the nanny. Broomfield has been accused of skewed tactics, interviewing all these losers and loonies and not getting anyone to speak up for Love. He insists that he set out not to trash her but, rather, to honor Cobain, whose music he has admired ever since his ten-year-old son gave him a copy of “Nevermind,” and that “if she had wanted to use it positively, it could’ve been a different film. I was quite open to her persuading me that all that stuff was incorrect.” So how is it that everyone he talked to either hates or fears Love? “I didn’t find anyone who had anything wonderful to say about her,” he replies.
Love continued to exercise her clout after the film was done. According to Broomfield, the BBC postponed showing the film at the end of last year, because of a blizzard of legal paper from Love’s side (she even offered to buy the film from the company), and after Fine Line and Miramax expressed interest in distributing the film here they were both contacted by I.C.M., where Ed Limato is her agent. (I.C.M. denies that any pressure was applied.) Broomfield, whose iron determination is a match for Love’s, went round the back door and approached the Roxie, an independently owned theatre in San Francisco, just to prove that the film could be opened without a lawsuit. At its première, in March, Hank Harrison was in the audience.
Harrison—or Biodad, as he calls himself on-line—is the scariest character in the bizarre lineup of figures in “Kurt & Courtney.” If the pure products of America go crazy, as William Carlos Williams wrote, then the impure products end up worse than crazy. They inhabit a shadow world with a logic all its own (Carlson, for example, couldn’t understand why Kurt should get off drugs, since he had the money to buy them); it’s a world that is ultimately impenetrable to those who live in well-lit rooms. The true circumstances of Cobain’s death seem unknowable, buried in a haze of heroin and weirdness. But none of the testaments to the sick ballad of Kurt and Courtney, not even the conflicting insinuations of foul play, make as lasting an impression as Courtney Love’s parasitic capo of a father. Broomfield interviews Harrison three times, and by the end he is out in full malignant bloom, explaining that he got pit bulls in order to discipline his adolescent daughter. Describing their relationship as “a great war,” he elaborates, “I got her number . . . I got her nailed.” Then, growing louder with each breath, he declares, “It’s still tough love and I’m still the father. . . . Keep on bad-rapping me, I’ll keep kicking your ass.” By now, he’s really into the terrorism of it, and he points a finger at his head. “I know how she works inside,” he chants. “I know what her next thought’s going to be.”
For all the garbage that is pelted at her in Broomfield’s movie, one comes away feeling sympathy for the girl who grew up in the black orbit of this man and inherited his genes—sympathy for the hurt she must have endured, and sadness about the carapace of toughness she seems to have made for herself. But one feels a keen sense of dread as well. For if this is where Courtney Love began, and this is what she’s running from, it’s also what she seems destined to become.
Iconhood is a strange business. Who could have predicted that Elvis, fat and long past crooning when he died sitting on the toilet, would take up permanent residence in the imaginations of fans not yet born? (Cobain, according to a girlfriend, was fascinated by “the whole idea of Elvis and Graceland.”) Until recently, however, most of the women who were considered worthy of our sustained interest were imbued with beauty, character, or some sort of tragic dignity. You know the list: Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Mother Teresa. It’s true that there have always been screen vamps, tough-talking gals like Theda Bara and Jean Harlow, but no one mistook them as prototypes for emulation. Sometime in the past decade or two, though, beginning with the rise of the ballsy Catholic girl from Michigan, our taste in female icons has changed: we want them less exalted and more sullied—more tossed around by life. We have moved from a hierarchical form of voyeurism, based on idealization and the envy that goes with it, to a more democratic form of voyeurism, in which everyone is pulled down to the same level by the dirty secrets—the appalling history of addictions, tantrums, weight problems, and messy relationships—that it’s assumed we share.
One of Courtney Love’s claims on our attention is the way she turned an atmosphere of real-life squalor into bad-girl atmospherics, which other women—more cautious or conventional, or simply less desperate—could inhale when they were tired of being good girls. She never even pretended to mind her manners, to defer to others, to contain her huge appetites. “I want to be the girl with the most cake,” she sang, in that husky, compelling voice of hers. But it’s also the pain, discernible under all the defiant stuff, that draws women to Love—just as it was the pain, discernible under all the glamorous stuff, that drew them to Princess Di. “Someday,” Love wails, “you will ache like I ache.” It is fair to say, I suppose, that from such hopelessness and sorrow the avenging self rises, imposing its sense of injury on others. But it is also fair to say that the transformation of a personal hell into an artistic stance requires talent as well as force of personality: Love has clearly charmed some people with her swaggering charisma, just as she has antagonized others. Indeed, in her constant morphing she may be a genuine millennial type: forever self-inventing, carelessly straddling image and reality. Still, whatever harm she has done, it seems a pity that Love has gone the way of gloss, that she has tamed the wild child who beat her fists against the straight world and given us what we surely don’t need—another movie star who’s pretty on the outside. ♦
