Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  Within sixty hours of this telephone call, we know that Kurt flew to Rome, wrote a three-page letter to Courtney declaring he was leaving her and fell into a coma after ingesting the date rape drug, Rohypnol. Yet when Courtney described their encounter toRolling Stone, she painted a romantic scenario:

  Kurt had gone all out for me when I got there [Rome]. He’d gotten me roses. He’d gotten a piece of the Colosseum, because he knows I love Roman history. I had some champagne, took a Valium, we made out, I fell asleep.

  The story teems with contradictions, yet one thing in particular has always troubled us. If, as Grant claims, Courtney intended to kill Kurt in Rome, why did she call an ambulance after she found him unconscious, thereby saving his life? Why didn’t she simply leave him to die? In fact, we have always cited her actions in Rome as one of the primary flaws in Grant’s murder theory. And, while it doesn’t disprove the fact that Kurt was murdered, it appeared to exonerate Courtney herself in the crime.

  We are certain that Grant has no hard evidence to back up his serious allegation that Rome was an attempt by Courtney to murder her husband, and we criticized him in our first book for making this unsubstantiated allegation. In response, he offered a number of questionable theories. Maybe she realized too late that Kurt hadn’t ingested enough Rohypnol to kill him, Grant speculated, and she wanted to make herself look good by appearing to save his life. But in the years since we first aired our doubts, some additional information has surfaced, causing us to rethink our initial skepticism.

  The first and most serious disclosure comes from Courtney herself. Umberto I Polyclinic hospital has confirmed that Kurt arrived by ambulance at approximately 7:00A.M. , at which point doctors immediately pumped out his stomach. This timeline would seem to correspond with the Excelsior Hotel’s statement that the front desk received a call from Courtney’s room shortly before 6:30A.M. requesting an ambulance. Yet eight months later, Courtney told David Fricke ofRolling Stone how she had found Kurt unconscious sometwo to three hours before she called for an ambulance:

  I turned over about 3 or 4 in the morning to make love, and he was gone. He was at the end of the bed with a thousand dollars in his pocket and a note saying, “You don’t love me anymore. I’d rather die than go through a divorce”…. I can see how it happened. He took 50 fucking pills.

  Why did she wait for more than two hours before calling for an ambulance at 6:30A.M. ? Was she waiting to first make sure he was dead? Or was she simply misquoted byRolling Stone? Here is the version she toldSpin magazine:

  And so we ordered champagne, ’cause Pat [Smear] was with us for a little while, and Kurt doesn’t drink, and then we put Frances to bed. And we started making out, and we fell asleep. He must have woken up and started writing me a letter about how he felt rejected. But I’m not sure I believe that because he wasn’t rejected. We both fell asleep. Anyway, I woke up at, like, four in the morning to reach for him, basically to go fuck him, ’cause I hadn’t seen him in so long. And he wasn’t there. And I always get alarmed when Kurt’s not there, ’cause I figure he’s in the corner somewhere, doing something bad. And he’s on the floor, and he’s dead. There’s blood coming out of his nostril. And he’s fully dressed. He’s in a corduroy coat, and he’s got 1,000 American dollars clutched in one hand, which was gray, and a note in the other.

  Here she confirms that she not only discovered him at 4:00 in the morning, but also thought he was “dead.”

  When the ambulance transported Kurt to the hospital some two to three hours later, Courtney rode in the back with her husband. When they arrived at the hospital just before 7:00A.M. , the famed Italian paparazzo Massimo Sestini, tipped off about their arrival, was waiting to snap photos when the ambulance doors swung open. His widely published photo shows Courtney in full makeup. Many who have seen this photo are struck by the fact that, although her husband was dying, she had the presence of mind to apply her makeup before the ambulance arrived.

  Various media accounts have described Kurt’s first request upon awaking from his coma: a strawberry milk shake. Only Charles Cross records Kurt’s first actions. His mouth still full of tubes, he took a pencil and a notepad and scribbled a note to Courtney, who was waiting by his bedside. The first words he wrote were “Fuck You.” Then he demanded the tubes be removed from his mouth and asked for the milk shake. Presumably, only Courtney knows the significance of Kurt’s angry gesture.

  Cross’sHeavier Than Heaven provides another intriguing detail about the incident in Rome. Sometime that morning, “a female identifying herself as Courtney had left a message with the [head of Geffen Records] saying Kurt was dead.” This call was apparently why some American media outlets, including CNN, wrongly reported that Kurt had died. After an hour of panic and grief at Geffen, Cross reports, “it was discovered the caller was an impersonator.” Who discovered this? And more disturbingly, how did they know it wasn’t really Courtney who called? Did she simply deny it later on? Or by that time, had they learned Kurt was still alive and, thus, assumed the call was a hoax? Geffen won’t say, and Cross provides no source for this revelation.

  If the caller was Courtney, it shows she initially believed Kurt was dead, and therefore may have called the ambulance under the false impression that she had already succeeded in killing her husband. After all, Courtney herself later told a reporter that she thought Kurt was dead. However, this is pure conjecture and is far from convincing evidence that she attempted to murder Kurt in Rome.

  Unless a more convincing explanation surfaces, her call for the ambulance may be the most compelling indication that Courtney is innocent of the terrible accusation that has been publicly leveled against her for nearly a decade.

  For years, the murder theorists have argued that Kurt was never suicidal but was only pinned with the label by Courtney after his death. However, Kurt’s own statements suggest he had at least toyed with the idea at certain times in his life. Indeed, it was Kurt, not Courtney, who in 1993 gaveRolling Stone reporter Michael Azerrad the following explanation as to why he started using heroin:

  I was determined to get a habit. Iwanted to. I said, “This is the only thing that’s saving me from blowing my head off right now.”

  In another interview withRolling Stone a year later, he provides an equally prescient quote:

  For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah, I wanted to kill myself every day. I came close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water.

  However, it was in this very interview, published less than three months before his death, that Kurt declares, “I have never been happier in my life” because “my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore.”

  The oft-cited fact that Kurt had originally titled Nirvana’s last albumI Hate Myself and I Want to Die would also seem to suggest that suicide wasn’t far from Kurt’s mind during this period. Only after pressure from his label did Kurt consent to change the title toIn Utero. When we asked Dylan Carlson how he could say Kurt wasn’t suicidal, given the sheer volume of such references over the years, he shrugged. “That was all just a joke,” he said. “Kurt said so himself. And when he talked about blowing his brains out, anybody who knew him knew that was just how he talked when he described the pain. I don’t think he meant it literally. It was an expression he used.”

  A few months before Kurt died,Rolling Stone reporter David Fricke asked him how literally he meant the titleI Hate Myself and I Want to Die :

  As literal as a joke can be. Nothing more than a joke. And that had a bit to do with why we decided to take it off. We knew people wouldn’t get it; they’d take it too seriously. It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves. I’m thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time…. And I thought it was a funny title…. But I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand it.

  Does this explain why so many of
Kurt’s close friends and associates insistedafter his death that Kurt wasn’t suicidal, even though he had frequently made statements that could reasonably be interpreted otherwise?

  “The thing you have to remember about all the talk of Kurt being suicidal,” explains his Seattle drug buddy Peter Cleary, “is that all the talk only started when Courtney came out after the death and said Rome was a suicide attempt and the media picked up on all her examples of Kurt being suicidal. That’s when all these people started saying, ‘Of course he was suicidal, just listen to his music.’ But that’s a bunch of crap. Sure he was a moody guy and got depressed quite often. That applies to a hell of a lot of people, including me. But nobody ever talked about Kurt being suicidal before he died. Nobody. Why do you think everybody who knew him was so surprised when Courtney said that Rome was a suicide attempt? I’ve read all this ignorant bullshit in the media pointing to the fact that Kurt wanted to callIn Utero ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.’ It was a joke, for chrissake. That was his warped sense of humor. He was the most sarcastic guy you’ll ever meet. He was not suicidal, at least not when I knew him, and I knew him for the last year of his life.”

  Yet who is to say? Perhaps it is naive to dismiss Kurt’s frequent references to suicide as gallows humor or the kind of banter rockers, and youth in general, have always indulged in to shake things up. Whether his death resulted from murder or suicide, it’s hard to deny that Kurt was a troubled soul, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that, like many young Americans, he may have contemplated suicide at various times in his life.

  One of Kurt’s longtime friends, Seattle photographer Alice Wheeler, says she never knew Kurt to be suicidal. Unlike Peter Cleary, however, Wheeler firmly believes that Kurt killed himself. In fact, she says most of Kurt’s circle concluded he was suicidal “in retrospect.”

  “I went to the wake at Krist’s house after Kurt’s memorial service,” she recalls, “and there were all these people there trying to make sense of the whole suicide thing. Krist came up to me and asked, ‘How could we have missed the signs, Alice?’ And then he started analyzing Kurt’s lyrics and replaying everything that he had ever said, and saying that it should have been obvious. He really felt guilty, I think.”

  Yet did the “signs” really point to suicide, or did they signify another momentous life decision? We know that Kurt had already told his lawyer on March 1 that he had decided to divorce his wife. Janet Billig, spokesperson for his management company, confirmed that he wrote a note to Courtney the same week announcing his intention to “run away and disappear.” Krist later described this period to Kurt’s biographer Charles Cross, explaining, “There was something going on with him in his personal life that was really troubling him. There was some kind of situation.” Thus even his oldest friend was unable to pinpoint Kurt’s emotional state as suicidal during his final weeks, sensing instead that something else was wrong.

  After the Rome overdose, Dylan Carlson was the first of Kurt’s friends to see him when he returned to Seattle. He later described Kurt’s mood to theSeattle Post-Intelligencer: “Kurt was facing lots of pretty heavy things, but he was actually pretty upbeat. He was prepared to deal with things facing him.”

  After Kurt’s death, his friend Mark Lanegan, leader of the Screaming Trees, toldRolling Stone, “I never knew [Kurt] to be suicidal, I just knew that he was going through a really tough time.”

  Another of Kurt’s friends, Seattle music photographer Charles Peterson, ran into him on the street “a week or a week and a half” before he died. Kurt’s mood, Peterson recalls, was decidedly cheerful: “He seemed really happy to me, happier than I had seen him in a long time: not that he was usually unhappy, but he was often pretty sickly, and he looked like he was doing a lot better. My first book had just come out and he was really nice about it: I think he was sincerely pleased for me. He was wearing this heavy overcoat and sunglasses to appear incognito, but ironically, they just made him stand out even more. We went to the Linda Tavern and had a few beers, and he gave me his new phone number. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong as far as I could tell.”

  Kurt’s late grandmother, Iris Cobain, talked to him shortly before he entered rehab at the end of March and told theSeattle Times that “everything seemed fine” and that “he seemed to be happy.” The only thing Kurt told her about the Rome incident, she said, was that it was an accident. In this call, he made plans to go on a fishing trip with his grandfather in April.

  A number of suicide studies have found that some people seem very happy and upbeat just before they commit suicide because they have made a decision and feel relief about it. Yet studies also show that these people rarely make long-term plans. Moreover, Kurt’s mood does not appear to have suddenly shifted from depressed to upbeat only in the final days and weeks of his life. Rather, his friends insist the change in his personality happened months before his death, when his unbearable stomach ailment was finally diagnosed and treated. It was in fall 1993 that he toldRolling Stone, “I’ve never been happier in my life.”

  Did something happen between this interview and his departure from the Exodus rehab facility on April 1 to change his mood? Did his stomach ailment suddenly return? Could the intervention on March 25 have triggered something dark in Kurt’s personality? Was he especially depressed when he entered Exodus on March 30? In the two days Kurt spent at Exodus, he talked to several staff psychologists at the facility, none of whom considered him suicidal. Moreover, the last person to visit Kurt at Exodus on April 1, an old artist friend named Joe “Mama” Nitzburg, toldRolling Stone: “I was ready to see him looking like shit and depressed. He looked so fucking great.”

  In the weeks leading up to his death, then, it is clear that most of his friends, associates and even the mental health professionals who treated him did not believe Kurt was suicidal.

  Now Tom Grant produces an astonishing taped conversation he recorded with Courtney in late April 1994, proving that she, too, believed Kurt wasn’t suicidal after he returned from Rome.

  COURTNEY“People with Ph.D.s saw him the day he left [rehab] and nobody, nobody expected that he would leave, let alone that he would be suicidal,” she told Grant. “And I don’t think that he was really suicidal when he came home. But whoever he was with drove him to it.”

  This remarkable admission stands in stark contrast to what Courtney publicly told the media for months after Kurt’s death about her husband’s suicidal tendencies as well as what she told Seattle police on April 4 when she filed the missing person’s report. It also directly contradicts what she told Tom Grant on April 3, when she first hired him to find her husband: “He’s suicidal…. Everybody expects him to die.”

  By the time Courtney approached Charles Cross in 1999, it was clear that Tom Grant’s murder theory wasn’t going to go away. Although he was once mocked as a conspiracy theorist, Grant’s website was now receiving more than a million hits a year. Nick Broomfield’s BBC film about the case, moreover, had become one of the highest grossing documentaries of all time. Grant was beginning to attract the attention of mainstream media, and many credible journalists appeared to believe for the first time that there might be something to his charges. Gene Siskel himself gave Broomfield’s film a “thumbs down” because, he complained, the film hadn’t explored the possibility of murder as deeply as it should have and had left many leads unpursued. Worse still, the murder theory was beginning to take a toll on Courtney’s bottom line. Hole’s 1998 album,Celebrity Skin, had been widely expected to be one of the year’s top sellers. Instead, it was a massive sales disappointment. Many attributed its relative failure to the thousands of Cobain fans who vowed in Internet chat rooms to boycott the album. Something had to be done.

  Charles Cross was the longtime editor of the respected Seattle music weeklyThe Rocket, one of the first publications to cover Nirvana in its pages. Cross was not necessarily a friend of Courtney’s, but they had known each other for years and got along well. By the time Cour
tney approached him, he had already decided to write a Cobain biography, but he wasn’t having much luck finding a publisher. That changed when Courtney made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Kurt had kept a journal for years, and she was now offering Cross the exclusive right to read the journal and quote from it in his book. The terms of their agreement, if any, have never been disclosed, and the book is not officially described as an “authorized biography.” But when it was released in the fall of 2001, many readers were immediately struck by how carefully the book conformed to Courtney’s version of events. One reviewer at Amazon.com even wrote that the publisher “should have put Courtney as the author.”

  Indeed, the book contains scores of facts about Kurt’s death that Cross could have obtained only from Courtney herself. Although he doesn’t once mention Grant’s murder theory, it is almost as if the book is addressing and refuting each of Grant’s allegations in turn. This would be a welcome contribution to the debate if Cross acknowledged this as his intention, but he doesn’t. Instead, his book is a neat compendium of unsourced anecdotes that just happen to contradict Grant’s version of events. Unfortunately, many of these anecdotes are demonstrably false. The most glaring example concerns the events of April 7, when Cali is said to be searching the house for Kurt at dusk, even though police reports prove he took a taxi to the airport at 4:00P.M. that day to join Courtney in Los Angeles. Similarly, Courtney is exonerated for her failure to tell Grant that Kurt had been seen at the house on April 2 because the man who saw him there first thought it was a “dream.”

  Although Courtney’s version of events is tirelessly replayed throughout the book, the most egregious example of slavishness has to be in the final chapter, when Cross describes Kurt’s death. Here Cross takes Courtney’s suicide-obsessed portrayal of her husband and runs with it, creating for Kurt a near–Norma Desmond moment: