“Kurt’s side of the family are all blond, perfect teeth. That is the side of the family that functions. Frances’s grandmother and aunties are good people. We did have a problem at one point. They decided they did not want me to be a trustee of the trust fund. But it’s over now and everything’s fine.” By fine she means she is now back in control of Kurt Cobain’s trust fund. There were some terrible moments, though. In 2003 the social services were called in. She had to fight for custody of Frances, which she lost and regained after a few months. She had to get her stepfather to come and look after Frances while she was forced into rehab to get over drug addictions.
Love also had to fight for the trust fund and fight for the missing millions that had been skimmed from her bank account. Love was out of control. She was arrested when police found her breaking windows in the middle of the night at the house of her ex-boyfriend, the music executive James Barber. She was arrested for being intoxicated and for disorderly conduct. Her home was searched and she was found to be in illegal possession of prescription painkillers oxycodone and hydrocodone, the drugs she tried to overdose on around that time. The terms of her probation were that she needed to be drug-free and attend counselling.
Miraculously, the one person she has not alienated is her daughter, Frances Bean. She is now 14. Long dark hair and her eyes look wise. She wanders in and asks her mother if she has seen her cellphone. Normal teenager. Except that her godparents are Edward Norton and Bono. Norton met Love on the set of The People vs Larry Flynt, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1997 for her portrayal of a drug addict on self-destruct. Ed Norton was a good guy in her life. She loved him but let him go for a bad guy. She is desperately remorseful about this now.
Frances Bean has never known a father; hers committed suicide in 1994 when she was just a baby. Courtney, a few weeks after Kurt’s death, went on the road with her band Hole. Her guitar stopped her from grieving, but the grief came out in destructive relationships with men and a spiralling relationship with drugs, all kinds of drugs, which precipitated financial disaster. Only her daughter provided her with the spirit to survive.
Her cat pads in. It is shaved with a pompom at the end of its formerly fluffy tail, a cat channelling poodle. “My cat doesn’t know what it is. We have two beagles and a setter-retriever mix and a pomeranian. When I was in rehab they were kennelled for six months. They need a lot of love to make up for that.” She feels its pain, of course she does.
Although out of rehab, she is still fragile and has embraced Buddhism for the third time. “I did it first to get myself off the streets, to get my band really famous, to get a Nirvana tour, and I ended up with a Nirvana husband. Then when I got everything I could possibly want, I quit and fell into a pit with a drug called heroin. A drug which I have never touched again in over 10 years. I began again after Kurt died. I tripled my wealth and tripled my ability to do philanthropic things, met Edward [Norton], then stopped. Now I want to chant for what my mission is. I need to find out what I am here for. These tragedies I’ve gone through, things I’ve done to myself, the wreckages I’ve created – I feel I need to make amends for all those things. I was really vilified because I married Kurt. But I have people here I can trust and who believe in me. I won’t be in actor jail for ever.”
She has done her book, she has written her album How Dirty Girls Get Clean, there’s a meaty acting role she says she’s ready for. “I believe in myself more and more, I believe in myself as a parent, and the proof in the pudding is my daughter. She does not curse, she never smoked, she has never kissed a boy, she is a total square. She gets straight A’s and is the most popular girl in school. How did that happen? It did not happen from the nannies.”
What was it like for her when you had to go into custody and she was looked after by your stepfather? “It was stressful for her. She quit riding, and her equestrian level was one of the best in California. Schwarzenegger’s daughter Katherine was her biggest competition. She’s got piles of first prizes. When that happened and then the money stuff happened she did not know how to deal with it.” The money stuff she refers to is a lost $20m which had been embezzled, but more of that later.
“I remember her crying, saying she wished she’d never taken money for granted. But now we have this wonderful house.” And it is a wonderful house. Exquisitely decorated, beautiful art, a boudoir of silk, velvet and flowers nestling in the Hollywood Hills. “People reached out to me, Billy Corgan, Drew [Barrymore], Michael Stipe, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone.” Frances is called Bean because she looked like a bean on the sonogram. “She hates it.” Frances has been offered three films in the past three months. She went to acting camp and did photo shoots for Teen Vogue and i-D magazines. “Then everybody wanted her. And she’s just too young. And she decided she did not want to do any modelling or acting until she is 18. Until Herb Ritts took a picture of her and published it in Vanity Fair without my permission, nobody knew what she looked like.”
As keen as she is not to have Frances exploited, she seems unable to stop herself from going the same way. Recently the photographer David LaChapelle dressed her up as the Virgin Mary and had her holding a man who looks like Kurt. Wasn’t that kind of exploitation? “Kind of isn’t the word. There are things we can’t help ourselves doing… I did not want to lose a friend.”
She draws sharply on her cigarette as if she’s sucking it for lifeblood. She says she didn’t want Dirty Blonde to be a kiss-and-tell. Of course not, she only wants to reveal herself. She never wants to hurt other people or live off other people’s stories. Her own pain is enough. Somehow her pleading ramblings on hotel notepaper make her pain more tangible. On notepaper from the Sunset Marquis hotel she wrote the track How Dirty Girls Get Clean. Do they ever? Can they? “Absolutely. I think that love is the answer. Love for oneself. You can take all the love you should be giving to yourself and project it into another person and it doesn’t work that way. In some ways I’m more co-dependent than I am a drug addict.” Were you co-dependent with Kurt? “Absolutely. I spent a lot of time nursing him. He had a terrible stomach ailment and was in a lot of pain a lot of the time. But people didn’t believe him. We went to the best doctors in Japan. All kinds of doctors. He had endoscopy after endoscopy. I would find him on the floor vomiting bile. I had the adrenaline kit that you would put into the heart. I was on my own with it.” She doesn’t look at me when she’s saying this. She looks like she’s watching something painful. Her eyes wince. But in fact she is staring at The Office with the sound off. Nobody’s ever thought of her as Nurse Love. It’s rock tradition to vilify the wife of the rock God – think Yoko, think Linda, think Nancy. The image of Kurt with his soft melting eyes, his sad mouth, his head bowed, and in his shadow Courtney – loud, trashy lingerie and bleeding lipstick. He was the first person to love her, and he died.
Years afterwards her dead husband would be the first person she’d call out to in a crisis. Yet he himself was in constant pain, a manic-depressive and a drug addict. His music touched a generation. Defined it. But they did not seem to define each other. They seemed such an odd pairing. Were you happy together? “I really loved him. He was my best friend. Other than Edward I don’t think I’ll ever have such a good friend again. I really miss him a lot. If he’d just gotten diagnosed he’d be having a blast right now.” Hot, big tears roll down her face. Another cigarette.
