Everything happens on Courtney Love’s bed. It’s a 1920s cherry-wood sleigh with art-nouveau inlay, decadent, plush. It’s covered in blue-grey silk velvet and a mountain of pillows. Her silver laptop has swirls of turquoise and silver crystals. She likes to take care of detail. It’s dark, even though it’s morning in Los Angeles outside. The Office plays on the DVD in silence.
We do the interview stretched out on her bed. She is wearing crepey flares and a black crepe Chloé top, girlie but imposing. Milky breasts threaten to pop out. Between us is a full ashtray; she chain-smokes. She sets aside her knitting – a scarf – and pats for me to join her. Everything happens on this bed. My hairdresser did her hair once, while she was lying there. He said: “Footballers’ Wives was playing. It’s a good thing I do yoga: I had to bend all the way round the bed. I’ve seen all kinds of demanding people in Hollywood, but she was vulnerable with it.” That’s how I felt too.
She has a book out, Dirty Blonde. Not a memoir in the conventional sense, but remnants, scraps, mementos. You read it and you feel you are inside the thick scars of her past. It reveals everything and keeps you wondering and wanting more. There’s her drawings of Biba-ish girls and kitty cats, her deranged handwriting, poems written on hotel notepaper so you can picture the place of the drama. Parole reports from her institutionalised childhood. Her rejection from the Mickey Mouse Club (the kids’ TV show that spawned Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake) on a postcard that says the Mickey Mouse Club is only for those with exceptional talent, not her. A page from a notebook with something spilt over it that says: “The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.” And she should know; she’s written one and received one.
She wrote to Kurt and their daughter, Frances Bean: “You are too beautiful for me.” She writes about feeling fat. She writes: “Even the ugliest among us have made our lovers beg.” She writes about her own self-destruction. She is forensic in the detail. “I was raped by the crowd but I asked for it.” As a teenager she wrote a poem, Angel Dust, about “someone who can fulfil my deepest needs but does not choose to”. That’s still her theme. Was this her mother? Her father? They both abandoned her as a child. Is Courtney Love unlovable? Part of her feels that and part of her feels that she’s loved by the world. Her friend Carrie Fisher, who wrote the foreword to her book, suggests she thought fame was her new mother. “Worldwide acclaim, audiences up on their feet and screaming your name, and you up there, above reproach, past caring… The pain and losses of your childhood are not even a memory.”
Courtney has a double-edged relationship with fame. It helped her to be known, but also misunderstood. She makes lists of things she hates and things she likes. She loved Nirvana mania. She hated it. She loves attention. She hates being judged. She longs to be known for who she is. Everyone has a Courtney story in this town. She has thrived and drowned on the spiral of slanders and sleaze. Her own father made the outrageous claim that she’d had a hand in Kurt’s death. “I felt sorry for Kurt because he was up against the devil, my daughter,” said Hank Harrison, a former roadie for the Grateful Dead, who she says gave her pot and peyote as a young teenager. How stoned is Courtney? Is she a fit mother? Why did she take her top off on David Letterman? Where does she come from? Trash or pedigree? Let’s deal with that first. I’d say it was trashy pedigree.
Her grandmother, she recently discovered, is the renowned novelist Paula Fox, who disowned her after only one meeting. Her grandfather might have been Marlon Brando. Love’s heritage, though, is one of abandonment and despair. Her grandmother was given up for adoption. Paula’s parents, the screenwriter Elsie Fox and the novelist Paul Hervey Fox, gave her away when she was born. Paula herself had a teenage marriage that unhappily produced a daughter, Linda, and she gave Linda up for adoption. Linda Carroll conceived Courtney, she says, from a rape. Got on a bus to Mexico for an abortion but changed her mind. As Courtney sings on Nobody’s Daughter, “Hell hath no fury as the day that I was born.”
Courtney is staring out, her pale-blue eyes gazing like a cat fixing on an imaginary bug. She is nervous and talks in torrents, littering her speech with famous names as if a connection to them somehow gives her worth. Her lips are full and sticky with lipstick, dark pink. I’m not sure if she looks her 42 years or not. There are no lines in Hollywood but there’s a look in the eye. She is unnurtured. “I don’t really have parents. I have never had parents. I haven’t spoken to my father in 25 years. My mother claims I have spoken to her, but I haven’t. Maybe I spoke to her to say, ‘Stay away from me.’ I haven’t lived with my mother since I was seven. I was either at boarding school or institutionalised. She first tried to send me to a school for emotionally disturbed children in New Zealand. Because I was conceived by a rape, she had all this crazy stuff in her head.” She wrote a book, Her Mother’s Daughter, claiming Courtney was bipolar. “She was cashing in because she always wanted to be a star. Even as a child she would not let me do plays. I did commercials, and most of the time I would forge signatures of parents’ consent.”
She pauses for a low, hollow laugh and she’s off on tangential dramas, spiralling between playing the outraged victim and avenging predator. She claims: “I’m at least five- eighths Jewish, depending on whether my grandfather was that famous actor or Sam Brand, a publicist for that actor. So you see, I’m a nice Jewish girl… and I’ve lots of Irish in me. Norman Mailer said it was the coolest thing to be half-Irish, half-Jewish. And look, I have the coolest thing I want to show you.” She brings me a photo from her dresser. There she is drinking tea with Prince Andrew. “He just came round at one in the morning and I made him a cup of tea.” You can’t believe it, but it must be true, here’s the picture. Courtney draws you in. She can draw anyone in, or almost anyone. She always knew how to manipulate.
She managed to avoid the school for the emotionally disturbed. “I talked one of my mother’s gurus, of which she had many, into letting me live with him. He got $3,000 a month from my trust fund, which he’d spend on boys, and I went to the junior high, where my friends were teenage prostitutes. They were so glamorous, I just wanted to hang out with them. Melissa, Melinda and Melody. I ended up going through the juvenile system with them because I got arrested shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt.” She was 13.
“I didn’t mind being in institutions. I liked being around criminals – they were nice people and there was a sense of structure.” When she was 15 she met a man in a gay disco who offered her a job as an exotic dancer in Japan. “They were paying me $600-800 a week for pretty much doing nothing. I did not have to have sex or take all my clothes off. The only way I could get out of Japan was to get myself deported because I had to give my passport up to do the dancing. They took all my money but they left me my guitar,” she says, relishing the romance of it all. She was sent back into the juvenile system, eventually escaping to LA “to be a rock star and a movie star”. During this time she was on her own, a self-destructive life force.
In her book are copies of reports from the children’s services division. “Placements have been problematic. Courtney pushes for the freedom of independent living while displaying many dependency needs and repeatedly asking for authorities to find her a ‘home’. It has been apparent that Courtney has been in search of a family life that she has been deprived of for so many years and she has rejected substitutes as unworthy.”
The quest for love has always torn her apart. If she found it, she managed to ruin it or somehow she was again abandoned. Kurt Cobain shot himself, thus abandoning her. For the rest of the time, Love has chased impossible people who would abandon her, because abandonment is what she knows. Her father lost custody when she was three. In the 1998 documentary film by Nick Broomfield, Kurt & Courtney, Hank Harrison called his daughter a devil. Love made sure that film lost its slot at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, claiming they did not have the rights to use the music. That’s a thing about Courtney, never a victim for long. You hurt her, you’re dead. “My mother says my father is psychotic. But my mother is a sociopath,” she shrugs. “He has alleged I was in his house turning tricks; that’s one level I have never gone through thankfully, and I have never lived with him, although I went with my friend Cat one night and we stayed over at his house and he tried to steal our guitars.” She alleges that he was a pot dealer, not a professor at Trinity College, Dublin, as he claimed. She saw him again in Dublin. By this time she was living in Liverpool with Julian Cope and two members of Echo and the Bunnymen. “Will Sergeant from the Bunnymen taught me how to play guitar. Not that I am anywhere as good as him.” She likes to make it clear that she didn’t lose her virginity until she was 18, and that was to Mike Mooney, who also played with the Bunnymen.
Her housekeeper brings in tea and she tells me: “I always knew I would be famous. I just always did.” At 34 she found out that her grandmother was a respected novelist. “I met her once and she disowned me. She is 6ft 1in and wears important jewellery. She is the only good-looking person I have seen in my family.
