Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  Ernie Barth, the Seattle private investigator Grant had contracted to conduct surveillance of Caitlin’s apartment, has meanwhile taken it upon himself to head over to the Lake Washington house to set up surveillance at that location. When Courtney hears about this from Grant, she is furious and immediately instructs him to call Barth off the house.

  “Barth was a former Seattle cop, and he knew that it made more sense to look for Kurt at his own house rather than at the drug dealer’s,” Grant explains, “but, again, Courtney didn’t want him there for some reason.”

  After dropping Lanegan back home, Grant and Dylan spend most of Thursday checking out Kurt’s regular hangouts and asking around to find out if anybody has seen him. Their efforts draw a blank. Around 7:00P.M., they drive to Carnation, a small town about thirty miles east of Seattle, where Kurt and Courtney own two small cabins and several acres of property. But it’s pouring rain, night is beginning to fall and Dylan doesn’t think he’ll be able to locate the property under these conditions. They turn back, planning to try again the next day.

  Grant drops Dylan off and returns to his hotel to get a couple hours of sleep before resuming their search later that evening. Around 8:00P.M., the two head to Aurora Avenue, planning to visit some of the seedier hotels Kurt liked to frequent. They stop at a pay phone so Dylan can make a call. Back in the car, he tells Grant, “Courtney’s had some trouble. She got arrested and she was in the hospital. Something about drugs. I need to make some more calls.”

  Half an hour later, Dylan manages to reach Courtney on the phone. He says she told him the arrest was all a big mistake and that she is fine. She has a request: she wants them to return to the Lake Washington house to look in a hidden compartment of the closet for the shotgun that Dylan and Kurt had purchased a week earlier.

  “This was truly bizarre,” recalls Grant. “Cali had been staying at the house earlier in the week. I wondered why she didn’t ask him to search for the gun then, or why she didn’t tell us about it when we visited the house the night before. All of a sudden, she was instructing us to go back immediately for no apparent good reason.”

  Just after 9:45P.M., the two return to the Lake Washington house to carry out Courtney’s instructions. As they enter, they immediately spot a note in plain sight on the main staircase. It had not been there the night before. Apparently written by Cali, it reads:

  Kurt-

  I can’t believe you managed to be in this house without me noticing. You’re a fuckin asshole for not calling Courtney & at least letting her know that your [sic] o.k. She’s in a lot of pain Kurt, and this morning she had another “accident” and now she’s in the hospital again. She’s yourwife & she loves you & you have a child together. Get it together to at least tell her your [sic] o.k. or she is going toDie. It’s not fair man. DO somethingnow.

  To Grant, the note didn’t make any sense at all. If Cali saw evidence that Kurt had returned to the house, he would surely have relayed the news to Courtney. Yet Courtney had not breathed a word of this to Dylan just a few minutes earlier on the phone and had never requested surveillance at the Lake Washington estate to track Kurt’s movements. “I became convinced the note had been put there for my benefit for me to find that night,” Grant recalls. “That’s why Courtney was suddenly so anxious for us to return to the house, so we would find this note.”

  Again, they search the house, including the hidden compartment of the bedroom closet, as Courtney had requested. There is no gun, nor any other clues that might point to Kurt’s whereabouts. Again, they miss the greenhouse because of the heavy rain.

  Meanwhile, a small item in theLos Angeles Times that morning had reported that Nirvana withdrew from their headline slot on the upcoming Lollapalooza tour, and that the band was rumored to be splitting up.

  Friday, April 8

  The next morning, at a gas station on their way back to the Carnation property, Dylan makes a call at a phone booth. He returns to the car a few minutes later. He has just learned that a body has been found at the Lake Washington house. Grant turns on the radio, which is broadcasting a special news report on the death of an American icon.

  Kurt Cobain’s journey has come to an end. Tom Grant’s has just begun.

  6

  “Wait a second,” says Grant after the radio reports that Kurt Cobain has just been found dead in the greenhouse. “We were just there. What’s the greenhouse?”

  “It’s just a dirty little room above the garage,” Dylan replies. “I think they keep some lumber up there or something.”

  They turn the car around to head back to the Lake Washington house to find out more. Grant recalls being puzzled by Dylan’s attitude.

  “He just found out his best friend had died, yet he hardly had any reaction. My gut instinct from the way Dylan acted was that he already knew Kurt was dead, although I didn’t necessarily think he was involved.”

  When they arrive at the house midmorning, the place is already swarming with media. In the little park next to the house, crews fromEntertainment Tonight, Hard Copy, A Current Affair, NBC and MTV are setting up their cameras, while reporters fromRolling Stone, Spin, People andThe Village Voice arrive soon afterward. MTV’s Tabitha Soren just happens to be in town and takes command for two days of nonstop live broadcasts by the network, complementing hours of coverage by CNN, Fox News and most of Seattle’s TV stations. They feed on the collective grief of young America; Cobain had become the Kennedy of a new generation.

  While they are parking the car across the street, Dylan points out local media personalities he recognizes and tells Grant whom to avoid and whom to trust. He refuses to get out of the car, knowing that reporters will swarm him for a comment about his friend’s death the moment he emerges. “I’m not going into that zoo,” he declares. By this time, a squad of detectives from the Seattle Police Department and a team from the medical examiner’s office have arrived on the scene.

  Grant manages to make his way through the media cordon to the small building containing the greenhouse, accessible only by a stairway on the outside of the garage. What transpires next—including whatever conversations he may have had with the police officers and medical examiners who arrived on the scene—is still a mystery because he refuses to play us the tape. “I can’t go into too many details about what I learned when I arrived that morning,” he explains. “Some of those details will be very important for the prosecutor who eventually tries this case, and I don’t want to tip my hand too early.”

  In the early afternoon, Grant calls his office and speaks to Ben Klugman, who tells him that, according to the credit card company, somebody had continued trying to use Kurt’s canceled credit card until early in the morning of April 8, shortly before his body was found.

  But when Grant calls Detective Cameron of the Seattle Police Homicide Division to report this development, he finds Cameron strangely indifferent. Kurt was locked in the room by himself, Cameron tells Grant. Firefighters had to break the glass on the door to gain entry. Cameron’s implication is clear. Locked in the way he was, Kurt would have had to be completely alone when he died.

  Grant stays in Seattle for another day to interview some of Kurt’s friends before flying back to Los Angeles on Saturday, April 9. “The thing that struck me is that everybody I talked to, people who knew Kurt very well, seemed surprised,” Grant recalls. “They all said the same thing, that he wasn’t suicidal. Everybody from Mark Lanegan to Dylan Carlson to various Seattle friends and associates. It didn’t sound like they were simply in denial or anything like that; they were all adamant. But at the time, I’m not sure I was thinking it was a murder yet. A lot of strange things had happened and I was starting to have my suspicions, but I think I rationalized a lot of it by saying, ‘Well, that’s Courtney’s world. Bizarre things happen all the time.’ She’s surrounded by strangeness, so I may have rationalized all the inconsistencies at first.”

  By the time Courtney learned of the death from her lawyer Friday morning, the media were
still unaware that she had been arrested the day before at her Peninsula suite after an anonymous 911 call was placed from the hotel about a possible drug overdose.

  After paramedics transported her to L.A.’s Century City Hospital for emergency treatment, police had charged her with possession of a controlled substance (a small packet of white powder they believed to be heroin), drug paraphernalia, including a hypodermic needle, and stolen property (a doctor’s blank prescription pad). She was brought to Beverly Hills Jail, leaving her baby at the hotel with one of the nannies, Jackie Farry. Courtney was released on $10,000 bail a few hours later, after promising to appear in Beverly Hills court for arraignment on May 5. That evening, she checked herself in to the Exodus recovery center, the same rehab Kurt had fled a week earlier.

  It was there that her lawyer Rosemary Carroll broke the news of Kurt’s death the next morning. An hour later, Courtney was on a private Learjet headed back to Seattle with Frances Bean, Rosemary Carroll, Jackie Farry and Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson.

  On landing, Courtney immediately took charge. Security guards were hired to keep the media at bay, and, to thwart photographers, a tarp was placed over the greenhouse, where Kurt’s body still lay, waiting for the medical examiner to remove it for autopsy. Just before the tarp was placed,Seattle Times photographer Tom Reese managed to snap a few photos of the greenhouse through his zoom lens. One memorable shot, beamed around the world, showed a prone, jeans-clad leg, a sneaker and an open cigar box on the floor.

  Meanwhile, Kurt’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, had arrived on the scene, where she told a reporter from the Associated Press, “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club,” referring to the list of legendary rock stars, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, who had died prematurely.

  Outside the house, reporters descended on sixteen-year-old Kimberly Wagner, who sat on a garden wall crying. Nobody official was answering questions, so the media had resorted to interviewing one another about the impact of Kurt’s death, along with any fans who happened to show up. “I just came here to find an answer,” Wagner told them. “But I don’t think I’m going to.”

  Kurt’s body was removed for autopsy shortly after noon. Although police had already discreetly informed a number of reporters that he had killed himself, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office issued a statement that afternoon confirming the news.

  That morning, Courtney told a number of people, including executives from Geffen Records and Gold Mountain, that Kurt’s Rome overdose a month earlier had actually been a suicide attempt, not an accident. It was the first time they had heard this version. The news soon leaked to the media throng, who waited outside the house, desperate for any information. Before long, the media consensus was that Kurt’s suicide was tragic but inevitable. A group of distraught teenagers outside the house were attempting to come to terms with the idea. Steve Adams, fifteen, told reporters, “Sometimes I’ll get depressed and get mad at my mom or my friends, and I’ll go and listen to Kurt. And it puts me in a better mood…. I thought about killing myself a while ago, too, but then I thought about all the people that would be depressed about it.” On Seattle’s rock station KIRO-FM, one DJ snarled, “He died a coward and left a little girl without a father.”

  That night, Courtney shared a bed with Wendy and reportedly wore the corduroy coat Kurt had on when he was found. The next morning, when she agreed to talk to reporters for the first time, she began an interview with MTV’s Tabitha Soren by declaring, “Everyone who feels guilty, raise your hand.” She told Soren, “Something good can come out of Kurt’s death. I don’t know what it is yet, but something good can.” At this point, Courtney took the opportunity to plug her albumLive Through This, which was now scheduled to be released the following Tuesday. As if suddenly realizing how unseemly this might appear to viewers, she self-deprecatingly asked Soren, “How’s that for sick?”

  A few minutes later, she granted MTV another interview, speaking to Kurt Loder via telephone. In this conversation, she told Loder that in his suicide note, her husband had written, “It’s not fun for me anymore, I can’t live this life.” But when the note was made public months later, it revealed that Kurt had written no such thing, nor any other direct reference to suicide. Courtney also told Loder that the physical damage to Kurt’s body was so severe that he could be identified only by fingerprints. This, too, was later revealed to be a fabrication.

  Later that day, she visited the funeral home where Kurt’s body was waiting to be cremated. Courtney had issued these instructions soon after the body was found, despite the fact that Kurt had apparently never asked to be cremated. As she was ushered into the viewing room, Krist Novoselic was just leaving, sobbing after spending a few minutes with his old friend for the last time. Kurt was laid out in a suit, with his eyes sewn shut. Despite later media reports stating that his face had been blown off by the shotgun blast, the shell had actually inflicted surprisingly little damage. With Nirvana’s production manager, Jeff Mason, looking on, Courtney reportedly stroked Kurt’s face, methodically cut off a lock of his hair, then unzipped his pants and clipped a lock of his pubic hair. Then she climbed on top of his body and repeatedly cried out, “Why?”

  Later Courtney spoke toSeattle Post-Intelligencer rock critic Gene Stout, and Caitlin Moore was still clearly on her mind. Without mentioning Caitlin by name, Courtney told Stout that she had repeatedly called the Seattle Police Department to get them to bust Kurt’s dealer, complaining that she couldn’t shut down her husband’s drug sources. “It’s like apples in an orchard,” she said about heroin. “It’s falling off the trees. The Seattle police won’t do anything about it. I asked them, ‘Don’t you get embarrassed when you hear that Seattle is famous for grunge, cappuccino and heroin?’ ” More than a year later, Dylan Carlson introduced us to a drug dealer named “Walter,” who said that he found this particular quote ironic. “At the time she said this, she was shooting up a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of heroin a day,” he told us. “I know because I sold it to her.”

  On the afternoon of April 10, about seventy guests, including dozens of members of Kurt’s family, attended a private memorial service at Seattle’s Unity Church of Truth. On each pew, guests found a photo of six-year-old Kurt smiling up at them. Reverend Stephen Towles told the mourners, “A suicide is no different than having our finger in a vise. The pain becomes so great that we can’t bear it any longer.”

  Krist Novoselic delivered a eulogy in which he spoke of Kurt’s punk rock ethic that dictated “no band is special and no player is royalty…. If you’ve got a guitar and a lot of soul, just bang something out and mean it—you’re the superstar.” He urged the assembled to “remember Kurt for what he was—caring, generous and sweet…. His heart was his receiver…and his transmitter…. Let’s keep the music with us, and we’ll have it forever.”

  Later in the service, a black-clad Courtney read verses from the Bible and passages from Kurt’s favorite book of poetry, Arthur Rimbaud’sIlluminations. She related a confession she said Kurt had once made to her backstage: that he never really enjoyed the roar of the crowd the way Queen’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, did.

  “So why did you become a rock star, asshole?” she asked her dead husband, and then proceeded to read passages from Kurt’s suicide note, which had still not been made public.

  She told the guests that he had written, “I have a daughter who reminds me too much of myself,” and “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” The note, she said, ended with the words: “I love you, I love you.”

  After the service, Courtney invited the guests to a wake back at the Lake Washington house, but many chose instead to attend an alternative wake at the home of Krist and his wife, Shelli. Clearly, the acrimony between Courtney and the band had not diminished with Kurt’s death. According to Alice Wheeler, who attended both wakes, “I think many people held Courtney responsible for Kurt’s death to some degree. A lot
of his friends wanted to know why she hadn’t told anybody that Rome was a suicide attempt. If people had known, they might have done more to save him.” Kurt’s friend, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, echoed Wheeler’s words in an interview withRolling Stone: “I feel like I was good enough friends with Kurt that I could have called him up and said, ‘Hey, how are you? Do you want to talk?’ ”

  Keith Richards weighed in, telling a reporter, “After the cat tried to off himself in Rome, I was surprised that the people who were supposed to be taking care of him let him buy a shotgun and mope around for days. They knew he barely escaped doing himself in already.”

  Meanwhile, across town, a candlelight vigil had been organized by three local radio stations at a park next to the Seattle Space Needle. Thousands gathered to pay tribute while Nirvana tunes blared from the loudspeakers. As fans burned their flannel shirts and threw themselves in the fountain, the unmistakable voice of Courtney Love was heard from the speakers—not live, but on an audiotape she had recorded earlier that day:

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say. I feel the same way you guys do. If you guys don’t think…to sit in this room where he played guitar and sang, and feel so honored to be near him, you’re crazy. Anyway, he left a note, it’s more like a letter to the fucking editor. I don’t know what happened. I mean, it was gonna happen, but it could’ve happened when he was forty. He always said he was gonna outlive everybody and be a hundred and twenty. I’m not gonna read you all the note ’cause it’s none of the rest of your fucking business. But some of it is to you. I don’t really think it takes away his dignity to read this, considering that it’s addressed to most of you. He’s such an asshole. I want you all to say ‘asshole’ really loud.

  The crowd roared, “Asshole!” Then she started to read from the note: