by Max Wallace
All this would be perfect, Hirschberg concludes, “except for the drugs.” She proceeds to cite no fewer than twenty different music-industry sources who maintain that the Cobains have been “heavily into heroin.” Though it wasn’t the first time a journalist had confronted Kurt or Courtney about their rumored drug use, Kurt had usually been content just to lie. Only a few months earlier, he had toldRolling Stone that “all drugs are a waste of time” and that his body wouldn’t allow him to take drugs even if he wanted to “because I’m so weak.” Courtney’s usual strategy was to admit that she had dabbled in hard drugs in the past but had now straightened herself out and might just pop the occasional valium. In the interview she granted Hirschberg, however, she apparently failed to do some basic arithmetic.
The fateful words come in a quote describing the couple’s January 1992 stay in New York when Nirvana appeared onSaturday Night Live. “We did a lot of drugs,” says Courtney. “We got pills, and then we went down to Alphabet City and Kurt wore a hat, I wore a hat, and we copped some dope. Then we got high and went toS.N.L. After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.”
If this was true, it meant that Courtney had still been doing heroinafter she knew she was pregnant. Hirschberg interviewed a “business associate” of the couple’s who proceeded to confirm that exact scenario. “It was horrible,” the source revealed. “Courtney was pregnant and she was shooting up. Kurt was throwing up on people in the cab. They were both out of it.”
The wave of revulsion set off by Courtney’s shocking revelation in theVanity Fair piece was a devastating blow to the new parents. TheGlobe tabloid published a story headlined “Rock Star’s Baby Is Born a Junkie” over a photo of a deformed newborn baby falsely purported to be Frances Bean. “I knew that my world was over. I was dead,” Courtney later said. “That was it. The rest of my life…any happiness that I had known, I was going to have to fight for, for the rest of my life.”
The day before the issue hit the stands, the couple’s handlers were already in full damage-control mode, issuing a press release in the name of Kurt and Courtney saying the forthcoming article contained “many inaccuracies and distortions.” At first, Courtney claimed that she had been misquoted, that she had never done heroin while she was pregnant. “I didn’t do heroin during my pregnancy,” she toldMelody Maker. “And even if I shot coke every night and took coke every day, it’s my own motherfucking business.” But Hirschberg had fairly incontrovertible evidence that Courtney did indeed admit to taking heroin for two months after theSNL appearance. “I taped the interview and I wrote what I saw,” the journalist insisted.Vanity Fair stood firmly behind the story. Then Courtney’s story changed. She had indeed done heroin in the first trimester, Courtney admitted, but only before she learned she was pregnant. This story stands in glaring contradiction to both the story she told Hirschberg and the account of Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, who told us he had shot up with both Kurt and Courtney before their February wedding, where he was best man.
To make matters worse, only five days after Frances Bean was born, somebody from the hospital anonymously faxed a copy of Courtney’s medical records to theLos Angeles Times revealing that she had been receiving “daily doses of methadone, a heroin substitute used to treat narcotics addiction.” Because hospital records are sealed, it is unknown whether her baby was born drug-addicted, but, as theTimes article disclosed, such a condition would be a given if the mother was regularly using methadone at the end of her pregnancy. The article quotes the director of a nearby drug rehab center saying that babies born chemically dependent must go through methadone detox, but that “babies go through that well.”
The fallout was devastating. On August 20, two days after the birth, an L.A. County child services social worker, brandishing a copy of Hirschberg’s article, arrived at the hospital to interview Courtney. The new mother was scheduled to leave with the baby the next day, but, after interviewing Courtney, the social worker recommended that Frances stay in the hospital for observation. Four days later, at a state-ordered custody hearing, a judge ruled that neither Kurt nor Courtney would be allowed to see their new baby without the supervision of a court-appointed guardian.
The couple’s lawyers persuaded the court to allow Courtney’s half sister to act as Frances Bean’s guardian. “[The half sister] barely knew Courtney,” admitted Danny Goldberg, the president of Kurt’s management company, “and she couldn’t stand her. So we had to kind of bribe her to pretend she gave a shit.”
The ordeal was taking an especially hard toll on Kurt, who had so been looking forward to fatherhood. “I felt as if I had been raped,” he later revealed. For her part, Courtney was out for revenge, and all her wrath focused on Lynn Hirschberg. In 1995, Courtney admitted toSelect magazine that she had indeed taken heroin while she was pregnant, “or else I would have sued [Hirschberg’s] ass off.” However, that didn’t stop her from firing off repeated threats to Hirschberg,Vanity Fair and the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast. Hirschberg later revealed that she had received repeated death threats from Courtney, as well as a promise to cut up her dog. Hirschberg still refuses to talk to journalists about the article, claiming she is “terrified for my life.”
She wasn’t the only one. A few months before the article ran, Kurt had given the go-ahead to two Seattle-based British music journalists, Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins, to write a book about Nirvana and had even sat for a number of interviews with the two writers. As the longtime girlfriend of the legendary Pogues front man, Shane MacGowan—with whom she had briefly split—Clarke was well connected in the music industry and was herself no stranger to tempestuous rock relationships. MacGowan, who is considered by many as a musical genius in the same category as John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, had recently been thrown out of the band he founded because of his own self-destructive drug and alcohol use. Clarke believed she could offer a unique insight into Kurt’s world.
Courtney had always revered MacGowan, with whom she had starred in the ill-fated movieStraight to Hell. So for months she had been all too happy to cooperate with his girlfriend. However, several weeks after the publication of theVanity Fair article, she apparently heard that Clarke had attempted to meet with Hirschberg to get her side of the story and possibly obtain the tape of the original interview. That set off a chain of events that has left both Collins and Clarke terrified ever since. One day in late fall 1992, Victoria Clarke returned to her Seattle apartment to find an hysterical message on her answering machine from Courtney. The tone of the tape is chilling:
I will never fucking forgive you…. I will haunt you two fucking cunts for the rest of your life…. Going and interviewing Lynn Hirschberg is called rape…. Fucking bitch…. You’re going to pay and pay and pay up your ass and that’s a fact…. You’re going to wish you’ve never been born!
The next day, with Courtney’s voice egging him on in the background, Kurt himself left a series of messages that sounded even more threatening:
If anything comes out in this book that hurts my wife, I’ll fucking hurt you…. I’ll cut out your fucking eyes, you sluts…whores…parasitic little cunts!…I don’t give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I’m threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few hundred thousand dollars to have you snuffed out, but maybe I’ll try it the legal way first.
Quick with the damage control, Danny Goldberg denied that it was Kurt’s voice on the answering-machine tape, but Kurt himself later confirmed to his biographer Michael Azerrad that he had made the threatening calls. “Obviously I have a lot to lose right now so I won’t be able to do it,” Kurt said. “But I have all the rest of my life…. I’ve tried killing people before in a fit of rage…. When people unnecessarily fuck with me, I just can’t help but want to beat them to death.”
Kurt’s longtime friend Alice Wheeler says she isn’t surprised by this aspect of his personality. “Everybody always tries to portray Kurt as some kind of saint and Courtney as this bitch,” she says, “but Kurt de
finitely had a dark side. He could be very twisted, real mean at times. Most of the time, though, he was real sweet, a quiet gentle guy. It just didn’t compute.” Wheeler says that, after the incident, she and about seventy other friends of Kurt’s were visited by a private detective working for Kurt and Courtney who was attempting to find out whether they had talked to the two British writers. “It was very intimidating,” she recalls. “I think they were trying to send us a message that we better shut up. It seemed like a veiled threat.”
Meanwhile, Clarke—who had relocated to Los Angeles within hours after she heard the messages on her answering machine—had the misfortune to run into Courtney some months later at an L.A. bar, where she claims she was attacked. “She hit me with a glass and then tried to drag me outside by my hair,” recalls Clarke, who has subsequently returned to the UK, still fearful of Courtney’s wrath.
Soon after, in a further attempt at damage control, Nirvana’s management company Gold Mountain approached veteranRolling Stone writer Michael Azerrad to write the authorized biography of the band. Mindful of his journalistic credibility, Azerrad was uncomfortable with the idea that the biography would be called “authorized” but agreed to the project as long as he retained full editorial control. Officially, the book would be written with the band’s “cooperation.”
“Kurt and Courtney were using Azerrad for one purpose,” reveals Alice Wheeler. “They needed to convince people that their drug use had been exaggerated and that they had put all that behind them. Kurt especially was terrified of losing the baby, so he did what he had to do, even if he had to lie. We all knew what was going on. Kurt even admitted what was happening. At one point, I received a letter from their people instructing me to speak only to Michael Azerrad and not to those British writers. That’s why you can’t really trust a lot of the information in that book.”
Indeed,Come as You Are, released in October 1993, is filled with passages that downplay the couple’s drug use. The book takes special pains to sanitize Courtney’s drug habit, implying that she had once used heroin casually but had put all that behind her. The book also appears to settle a number of the couple’s personal scores, excoriating Hirschberg and other writers who had portrayed Courtney in a negative light. Azerrad details a number of relatively minor factual errors in theVanity Fair piece and suggests that Hirschberg had failed to understand Courtney’s sardonic sense of humor. He goes on to blame Courtney’s treatment by the media on “a considerable sexist force.” In 2001, long after it became obvious that his book had painted a less-than-accurate portrait, Azerrad appeared to acknowledge the fact in a statement to the Nirvana Fan Club: “It’s true, I didn’t realize the full extent of Kurt’s drug addiction while I was writing the book. But even Krist and Dave didn’t know how much Kurt was using.” Despite its flaws,Come as You Are remains a valuable behind-the-scenes portrait of Nirvana at the peak of their career.
Because of Kurt and Courtney’s almost obsessive attempts to control the information disseminated about them after the controversy involving the birth of Frances Bean, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out which of their public statements over the following two years can be trusted and which should be dismissed as spin. Both checked themselves into rehab and made genuine attempts to kick their habits, and both apparently more or less failed. “I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed and it’s true,” Kurt told theLos Angeles Times after the couple had finally won back full custody of their baby in 1993. “I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.”
“He adored that little girl,” says Alice Wheeler. “You’d see him with the baby carrier and the diapers, the whole setup. His mood wasn’t quite so morose anymore. I think he really got off on being a daddy.” All of his friends echo this description, calling Kurt a changed man. “I was invited to Frances’s first birthday party, and I noticed how different he was. When he was with his daughter, he just lit up,” recalls Kurt’s friend, Seattle rock photographer Charles Peterson. Kurt’s grandfather remembers visiting the couple’s Seattle house when Frances was almost a year and a half. “Courtney was going out to a club or bar or something and she wanted Kurt to come with her,” recalls Leland. “But he just wanted to stay home and play with the baby. He just thought the world of Frances.”
Around the fall of 1993, something else happened to lift Kurt’s mood. Over the years, a succession of stomach specialists had failed to determine what was causing the unbearable agony in his lower abdomen. So mysterious was its source that some doctors even believed it was psychosomatic. Finally, one specialist decided to look a little further into Kurt’s early medical history and discovered that, when he was a child, he had been diagnosed with a mild case of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. He consulted the medical literature. Scoliosis can sometimes cause pinched abdominal nerves, and this is what had been causing Kurt’s pain all these years. Once the problem was diagnosed, it took a simple prescription to erase the pain.
In more than one interview over the years, Kurt had described his stomach pain as so agonizing that it made him want to “blow his brains out,” a phrase that would soon prove uncomfortably prescient. So those who knew him couldn’t help but take notice when they read the first interview where he announced that the pain was gone, in the January 27, 1994, issue ofRolling Stone, two months before his death. “It’s just that my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore,” he exults. “I’m eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice to be able to do that. And it just raises my spirits.”
To the average fan, these words are innocuous and would hardly register in the months to come. More than one reader, however, remembered another of Kurt’s quotes near the beginning of the same interview.
The writer, David Fricke, revealed that, when he caught up with his subject in the middle of Nirvana’s U.S. tour, he had expected to find what he describes as the Cobain press myth—a “pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic.” Instead, he writes, he was surprised to find Kurt in a thoughtful mood, taking great pains to explain that success doesn’t really suck—not as much as it used to anyway—and that his life was pretty good and getting better.
In the years since his death, the public has been fed a steady stream of assertions about the supposed despair that led to Kurt’s suicide. Even many of those who have never heard a Nirvana song can practically recite the factors by rote: the pop success-induced desolation, the alienation and misery that came with his fame. All the more surprising, then, to read what he told Fricke in this interview just a few months before he allegedly killed himself: “I’ve never been happier in my life.”
3
As the rumor spread through the ranks of the Seattle Police Department, its impact was the same on every officer, from the lowliest beat cop to the thirty-year veteran. On March 23, 1999, to the stunned disbelief of his colleagues, Sergeant Donald Cameron was suspended by the chief of police in connection with a two-year-old theft case. The stench of corruption had long hung over the SPD, which had been rocked time and again through the years by revelations of malfeasance, kickbacks, police brutality and close ties to organized crime. But Cameron, one of the department’s longest-serving homicide detectives, had always appeared above reproach. Now his conduct threatened to put the department under the microscope of public scrutiny yet again.
He was affectionately known among his colleagues as “Mr. Homicide.” During his thirty-eight-year career with the force, Cameron had investigated hundreds of murders and earned the respect of many, if not all, of his fellow officers for his no-nonsense approach to criminal investigation. When he pronounced a suicide verdict in the highest-profile case of his career, the investigation into the death of Kurt Cobain, Cameron’s sterling reputation was repeatedly cited to back up his claim.
Now he was being accused of helping one of his detectives cover up the theft of $10,000 from a crime scene two years earlier. At first, the story went that Camer
on had merely gently suggested to a subordinate officer, thirty-year veteran Sonny Davis, that he avoid a career-ending mistake and return the money he had stolen from the crime scene before it was discovered missing. But at Davis’s subsequent trial, his partner, Cloyd Steiger, told the jury that he believed Cameron himself had “conspired to steal money.” The accusation further rocked a department already reeling from the scandal.
After an investigation, the prosecutor publicly stated that Cameron could have been charged with a number of offenses, including rendering criminal assistance, but by then the two-year statute of limitations had expired. Cameron quietly retired from the force before he could face an SPD internal affairs investigation and disciplinary action. In the end, after two hung juries—the latter of which voted eleven to one to convict—prosecutors decided not to retry the case, and Davis was released. But the affair left a dark cloud over the department and, more important, over the reputation and career of Sergeant Donald Cameron.
The news that Cameron’s integrity was being openly questioned may have come as a shock to his many friends and supporters, but it came as no real surprise to us. A few years earlier, we had a revealing encounter with Detective Cameron, and it left us with our own lingering doubts. When Cameron closed the Cobain case in 1994, he publicly declared that he would be very willing to reopen the dossier if he were presented with new evidence pointing to homicide. Three years later, we decided to take him up on his offer. We arrived at the offices of the SPD Homicide Division in 1997, followed by a BBC camera crew. Our compendium of new evidence compiled over the three years since Kurt’s death included the polygraph of a man who said he was offered $50,000 to kill Cobain. After we told a receptionist we had important new information about the Cobain case for Sergeant Cameron, she went to deliver our message. We could see Cameron at a desk, seemingly unoccupied. Soon another detective came out to tell us Cameron was busy. We told him that we had come three thousand miles, from Montreal to Seattle, and that we would be willing to wait. The detective was implacable. “That case is closed,” he said. “Now leave.” We informed him that Cameron had promised to consider reopening the case if he was presented with credible new evidence. We said we just wanted to give him what we had. We’d even be willing to leave our file for him at the front desk. He threatened to arrest us if we didn’t leave immediately. We beat a hasty retreat.
