Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  On the BBC’s film footage, Cameron can be clearly seen peeking out from behind his cubicle. In the years since, he has consistently refused to comment on the case.

  On August 6, 2002, three years after Cameron retired from the SPD, his old friend, Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne, climbed to the top of a steep cliff in the Lauterbrunnen Valley of central Switzerland and prepared to plummet to the ground thirteen hundred feet below. A few years before, Hartshorne had taken up BASE jumping, an extreme sport version of skydiving in which participants parachute off buildings, bridges and cliffs. Oddly enough, his interest in this dangerous sport had been sparked a few years earlier when, as deputy medical examiner for Seattle’s King County, he was called to the scene of a BASE-jumping death. Fascinated, he soon tried it out himself and was immediately hooked by its walking-off-a-ledge thrill. Since then, he had recorded more than five hundred jumps and won the U.S. BASE-jumping national championship. However, Hartshorne was probably better known as the doctor who conducted the 1994 autopsy on the body of Kurt Cobain and ruled that the rock icon had committed suicide.

  His fellow BASE-jumping participants referred to Hartshorne as “Dr. Death,” partly because of his job, partly because of his penchant for investigating the deaths of his fellow jumpers. His motive was to learn exactly what went wrong so as to reduce the risks that had cost some forty lives in twenty years. But, as he hurtled off the menacing Swiss cliff, known locally as “The Nose,” his scientific prowess proved futile. His body turned 180 degrees, facing the cliff as he fell. He struck three ledges on his descent as his chute, which had opened normally, collapsed around him. He died instantly.

  We didn’t yet know if the abrupt retirement of Cameron and the sudden death of Hartshorne—the two men most responsible for convincing the world that Kurt Cobain committed suicide—represented an obstacle to getting at the truth or an opportunity to find it.

  The series of events that would inextricably link Detective Cameron and Dr. Hartshorne took place a few years earlier, when both men were still at the peaks of their professional careers. On Friday, April 8, 1994, each received a call at their desks shortly before 10:00A.M. Earlier that morning, Gary Smith, an electrician, had arrived at the Lake Washington estate of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love to install an alarm system. He and his crew had been working at the estate for several days; Smith had arrived early Friday morning to finish wiring the garage, located in a separate structure close to the main house. As he climbed to the balcony that jutted from a room above the garage, he spotted what he first thought was a mannequin through the glass of the French doors. Then he noticed there was blood in the right ear; when he saw a gun, he immediately called his supervisor at Veca Electric to report the gruesome discovery. Instead of calling the police, the company dispatcher placed a call to local radio station KXRX-FM and told DJ Marty Reimer, “You’re going to owe me some pretty good Pink Floyd tickets for this one.” At first, Reimer thought the call was a hoax, but, twenty minutes later, the news was flashed around the world: a body had been found at the residence of Kurt Cobain.

  A week earlier, on Friday, April 1, Kurt had climbed over the wall of an L.A. drug rehab center and disappeared. Although the stomach ailment that he claimed had prompted his heroin habit no longer bothered him, he was already a severe addict. By the end of 1993, Kurt no longer needed heroin to relieve the pain—he just needed it.

  During the final months of his life, one thing had become very clear to most of Kurt’s family, friends and colleagues: his relationship with Courtney was in trouble. Whereas a year earlier, they were clearly very much in love, now it was obvious to just about everybody who came into contact with the couple that a vicious and largely one-sided pattern had set in. “She was always hurling abuse at him, even in public,” recalls Peter Cleary, one of Kurt’s Seattle drug buddies. “She would call him a dumb fuck all the time. He would just stand there and take her abuse…. He was like a baby.”

  When Nirvana headed into the studio in 1993 to record the widely anticipated follow-up toNevermind, reports began to circulate that Courtney was constantly meddling in the session. She demanded that Kurt follow her advice, screamed at him constantly and nearly came to blows with both Dave Grohl and Steve Albini, the producer. Twice Albini threatened to quit, citing Courtney’s continual interference. Later he went public with his complaints, telling reporters, “I don’t feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hosebeast his wife is, especially because he knows it already.”

  In January 1994, Tad Doyle, another old friend of Kurt’s, also went public with complaints about Courtney, tellingMelody Maker magazine, “She’s outta control. Wherever trouble is, she’ll find it or make it…. She’s disgusting. And you can quote me on that.” Soon after, Doyle’s band, Tad, was abruptly dropped as the opening act for Nirvana’s January 8 Seattle Center gig.

  Even during their relationship’s finest hour, in 1992, it would be a stretch to describe Kurt and Courtney’s home life as domestic bliss. By the middle of 1993, however, the relationship had become what one observer called a “pitched battle.” Cobain biographer Christopher Sandford quotes a friend of Kurt’s who arrived at their home during this period to find “Courtney throwing everything that was loose against the wall and screaming at Kurt for being useless. His fault, as she saw it, was not being able to come up with a song.”

  Their marital troubles hit the public’s radar screen for the first time in June 1993, when Seattle police responded to a 911 domestic disturbance call from the couple’s Lakeside Avenue home. When police arrived, Courtney told them that Kurt had shoved her after she threw a glass of juice in his face during an argument. Kurt was arrested for assault and spent three hours in the King County Jail before being released on $950 bail. One witness to the incident told police that Kurt had been “provoked.” Courtney declined to press charges, and the case was dropped.

  Courtney would later claim that Kurt’s drug use was the chief source of their domestic troubles, but those close to him say that Courtney was regularly shooting up herself. She had even hired a known junkie—an ex-boyfriend from California named Michael “Cali” Dewitt—as the full-time nanny for Frances Bean. Kurt’s grandfather visited the house in January 1994 and was shocked by the scene. “Courtney and the male nanny were obviously high as a kite, and Frances was right there in the room,” Leland recalls. “I didn’t know who the fellow was at first, but when I found out he was in charge of taking care of the baby, I was very upset. There was another nanny there, too, and she was also on drugs. Later I told Wendy [Kurt’s mother] that they better get rid of those nannies, or they’re going to get Frances taken away again. She said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Because they’re both full of dope.’ She said, ‘They ain’t on dope,’ and I said, ‘The hell they ain’t. You just have to take one look at them and you can see they’re stoned to the eyeballs.’ Then a couple of months later, I read a magazine article where Wendy was saying how nice Courtney was because she was paying for her nannies to go into drug rehab.”

  Dylan Carlson, one of the couple’s prime drug sources, recalls the tragicomic interplay of Kurt and Courtney putting in their orders: “One of them would be on the phone asking me to bring them something,” he recalls. “Then I’d get a call-waiting beep, and it would be the other one asking for drugs. Each of them would tell me not to tell the other one.”

  However, friends of the couple claim that money, not drugs, appeared to be the chief source of conflict. The tension between Kurt and his bandmates had reached a boiling point in mid-1993, when he insisted on renegotiating the terms of their royalty agreement. When the band signed their first major contract with Geffen Records, they had agreed all royalties should be divided equally among them. But, afterNevermind hit number one, Courtney was said to have been furious that Krist and Dave would be receiving an equal share of the millions of dollars in royalties, despite the fact that Kurt had written most of the songs. She demanded that he do something to alter the arrangement. “Any
body can do what they do,” his friends say she nagged him repeatedly. “You’re the one with all the talent.” Reluctantly, he gave in and confronted his bandmates. From now on, he argued, 100 percent of the lyrics and 75 percent of the music royalties should go to him. Moreover, he demanded the changes be made retroactive to the first sales ofNevermind. Stunned at what they believed was a betrayal of their friendship, not to mention Kurt’s punk rock ideals, Dave and Krist initially balked at the changes, arguing that the arrangement should take effect only with the next album. But Kurt stood his ground and threatened to quit the band unless they accepted his terms. Dave and Krist blamed Courtney for their old friend’s decision to sell them out, and things were never the same again. They barely spoke, except about Nirvana-related issues.

  With the increased income, Courtney insisted that they live in a house that befitted Kurt’s superstar status. She had set her sights on the exclusive neighborhood of Denny-Blaine, where Seattle’s old-money elite resided, socioeconomic light-years from the seedy university district the couple had inhabited for almost two years. Kurt was more comfortable in the kind of dives he had grown up in, and he had no real desire to see how the other half lived. But at Courtney’s insistence, he shelled out more than $1 million for a 7,800-square-foot mansion up the hill from Lake Washington, next door to Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz and directly across the lake from where another Seattle icon, Bill Gates, was constructing his own palatial estate. His new neighbors were more likely to call the police when they heard loud music than to welcome the infamous grunge couple to their domain. Kurt regularly complained to friends that he was embarrassed by the opulent surroundings.

  To go with the new upscale digs, Courtney wanted a nice car to replace Kurt’s beat-up old Valiant. Though she didn’t have a license and had never learned to drive, she convinced Kurt to buy a black luxury Lexus. Mortified by the ostentatiousness of it all, however, he kept it for only eighteen hours before returning it to the dealer.

  Shortly after they moved into the new house, Kurt gave the go-ahead to his management company to proceed with a 38-date European tour scheduled to begin in early February 1994. He was exhausted from the band’s recently completed American tour and considered canceling the European dates, but he was still exhilarated by the absence of his stomach problems. He told friends he enjoyed playing music again without having to endure the constant pain he had experienced since he was a teenager. As his friend Peter Cleary described it, Kurt loved to tour because it provided him with a long-craved-for independence. “The thing about touring,” he explains, “is that Kurt said it’s the only time he gets to call the shots. At home, he was like an emotional cripple around his wife, but on tour it was different. He was the center of attention and he was the boss.” As an added bonus, Courtney would not be accompanying him on the European dates because she was in the studio mixing Hole’s upcoming album.

  Nirvana kicked off their tour on February 4 in Paris with an appearance on a lunchtime TV show. Afterward, Kurt—jet-lagged but cheerful—posed for publicity shots with a French photographer named Youri Lenquette, who had become a close friend during Nirvana’s 1992 Australian tour. At one point, Lenquette asked Kurt to pose with a toy gun in his mouth, as he had once seen him do at Dave Grohl’s house in Seattle. No one could have known how prophetic the pose would be.

  On March 1, two weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday, Kurt complained he was feeling ill shortly after the band arrived in Munich to play the first of two concerts at an abandoned air terminal. He had looked exhausted for weeks and had been uncharacteristically listless onstage during recent concerts in Milan and Lisbon. At one point, he even asked a member of his entourage what would happen if he canceled the tour. The band, he was told, would be held liable for any missed shows, resulting in a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Shortly before the first scheduled Munich concert, Kurt phoned Courtney, who was in London doing advance promotion for her upcoming album. True to form, the conversation ended in a screaming match. After the show, Kurt asked his agent to cancel the upcoming gig, and the following morning, he saw an Italian physician, who diagnosed a severe case of bronchitis. The doctor signed a medical slip required for insurance purposes and then recommended that Kurt take two months off to recover.

  The next day, March 3, Kurt flew to Rome to meet up with Courtney and Frances. He checked in to the city’s most luxurious hotel, the Excelsior, and waited for his wife and daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in twenty-six days.

  Details of what transpired over the next twenty-four hours are still murky. Between 6:00 and 6:30A.M. March 4, the front desk received a frantic call from Courtney asking them to summon an ambulance. She had just found her husband unconscious on the floor of their hotel room. Kurt was rushed to the Umberto I Polyclinic hospital. Back in the United States, CNN interrupted its programming to announce that Kurt Cobain had died of a drug overdose in Rome. The report turned out to be premature: twenty hours after he arrived at the hospital, Kurt opened his eyes and asked for a strawberry milk shake.

  The next day, his doctor, Osvaldo Galletta, held a press conference to announce that Kurt was recovering from a “pharmacological coma, due not to narcotics, but the combined effect of alcohol and tranquilizers which had been medically prescribed by a doctor.”

  Nirvana’s management company, Gold Mountain, issued a statement that Kurt had suffered an accidental overdose. Not a word about suicide was ever mentioned—publicly or privately. Gold Mountain was well aware that this was not the first time Kurt had overdosed on drugs. A year earlier, on May 2, 1993, a Seattle Fire Department unit had been dispatched to Kurt and Courtney’s Lakeside Avenue home, where they found Kurt “shaking, flushed, delirious and talking incoherently.” He had apparently suffered an overdose after injecting $30 to $40 worth of heroin. He was taken to the hospital, where he was treated and released.

  Courtney claims that, when the couple returned to Seattle a few days after the Rome overdose, the European tour abandoned, she banished drug dealers from the house and went to extreme lengths to ensure Kurt kept away from drugs. This, she said, sparked renewed tension between them. But, according to Dylan Carlson, it was again money, not drugs, that led to the conflict.

  Nirvana had been offered the headlining spot at the giant alternative music festival Lollapalooza, including a generous percentage of the gate receipts, which would have brought the band millions of dollars. But when he returned from Rome, Kurt flatly declared that he wasn’t going to participate in the summer tour. According to Carlson, who saw Kurt the day he returned from Rome, Courtney was furious that he was willing to turn down that kind of money.

  “She went ballistic,” he recalls. “She kept on screaming at him about how much money he was giving up and said if he didn’t want to do it, she’d be glad to take his place.”

  Courtney later took great pains to paint herself as a tender but firmly antidrug maternal figure to Kurt at this time. “When he came home from Rome high, I flipped out,” she toldRolling Stone in December 1994. She has claimed that, as a result, Kurt only did drugs behind her back because he knew she would not have tolerated any drug use. Carlson, who was still supplying them both, finds this laughable. “That’s interesting,” he says.

  Indeed, the recollections of two Seattle car salesmen paint a very different picture. On March 22, only two weeks after they returned from Rome, Kurt and Courtney took a taxi to the American Dream used-car lot, which specialized in vintage cars. When he had returned the Lexus in January, Kurt decided he wanted a vehicle more in keeping with his image. He had spotted a classic ’65 sky blue Dodge Dart at the lot, and he wanted to acquire it.

  The cabdriver, Leon Hassan, remembers that the couple had “quarreled viciously” in the backseat on the way to American Dream. When they arrived, they were served by a salesman named Joe Kenney, who says they were talking about the Lexus, with Kurt trying to convince her that the Dart could do everything the luxury car could do. After a few minutes, Courtney s
aid she had to use the bathroom. On the way, Kenney says, she dropped a handful of drugs and had to pick them up. Kenney claims he remarked to his colleague that he should get Kurt to autograph his CD soon because it didn’t look like they would be around much longer, they were so strung out. “She was really tossing down the drugs,” the other salesman recalled.

  Meanwhile, Geffen Records was terrified about the close call in Rome. Nirvana was the company’s greatest asset, worth tens of millions of dollars in profits—they could not afford to lose Kurt. Equally concerned was the president of Nirvana’s management company, Danny Goldberg, who also stood to lose millions in commissions. But Goldberg, who was Frances Bean’s godfather, had also become very personally close to Kurt and was genuinely concerned about his deteriorating state.

  Goldberg contacted Steven Chatoff, head of a prominent drug rehab center, who recommended an “intervention,” a controversial course of action that had been used with limited success on severe drug addicts. The idea was to gather friends and family members together to confront the addict about his drug use. On the morning of March 25, Kurt walked downstairs with Dylan after the two friends had shot up together, shortly after waking up. Gathered in the living room were Courtney; Michael “Cali” Dewitt, Frances Bean’s nanny; Nirvana’s new guitarist, Pat Smear; and several executives from Kurt’s management company and record label. Led by David Burr, a drug counselor, the participants took turns confronting Kurt about his drug use and demanding he seek treatment. Unless he did, the executives threatened, they would no longer work with him and his career would be ruined. When it was Courtney’s turn, she said, “This has got to end…. You have to be a good daddy.”