Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  Wrench’s insinuations are starting to sound like the boastings of a severely attention-starved child. Whatever shock value they once achieved has now palled. We tell him straight-out that we don’t believe he killed Kurt Cobain or Eldon Hoke, but that we suspect he enjoys the fact that people think he did. He grins and says nothing.

  The interview finished, we accompany him to his car. There, in the parking lot behind the Spunky Steer, is a white, late-model luxury Lexus. The three of us look at the car, stunned at the incongruous sight. Other than the fact that the Lexus sells for almost $60,000, it also happens to be Courtney Love’s favorite model of car—the automobile she demanded Kurt buy her in March 1994. Wrench climbs in, waves good-bye, and drives away, taking our certainties about the case with him.

  Eldon Hoke began his last day on this planet the way he began any other day: by getting drunk. The night before, the Mentors had played a gig at Al’s Bar in Los Angeles. “Duce had been more or less sober for four days before the gig,” Mentors bassist Steve Broy recalls. “He would go into a kind of maintenance level before he performed, so that he’d be able to function onstage. He was an alcoholic, so he had to maintain a minimum level of booze in his system, but he was pretty straight. Then, as we were setting up our equipment before the show, somebody offers him a drink, and that was it, he just started drinking. He was superhammered that night to the point where the gig was a complete disaster. We got home at four or five in the morning. I crashed and then around eightA.M. , I get woken up by Duce playing loud music. “

  After Broy told him to turn it down, Hoke went out to look for more alcohol. He returned an hour later with a twelve-pack of 32-ounce King Cobras, which he drank throughout the day.

  Broy replays the chain of events that led to his friend’s death: “What happened was that I was asleep in the other room. I woke up in the afternoon, and Duce was gone. Allen [Wrench] came by and said there was a street fair going on in Riverside that day, so we went to the street fair and came back around five or sixP.M., and Duce was there. He was starting a barbecue in the backyard, and he was superloaded. I was just so tired, I didn’t have the time to deal with this superdrunk guy. So I just went in and hit the sack immediately, leaving them outside. When I woke up an hour later or whatever, I saw them pulling out in Allen’s truck. Then I woke up the next morning, and Duce wasn’t there. So I assumed he was over at Allen’s because lots of times that’s what would happen. He’d go over there and hang out at Allen’s house. So around noon, the coroner came over to notify me as to what had happened, that he had been hit on the train tracks the evening before. I was kind of confused because I had it in my head that he had gone over to Allen’s house, and I said, Hmmm, there’s no train tracks over there. I didn’t realize that what had happened is that Allen had dropped him off at the store.”

  Does he believe that Wrench might have had something to do with Hoke’s death?

  “No way,” he says. “He better not have. Duce was my friend. I think it was probably an accident.” Although still a member of the Mentors, Broy now plays bass in Kill Allen Wrench and considers himself Wrench’s friend. We ask whether he thinks Wrench could have killed Kurt Cobain.

  “That’s another question,” he says. “I don’t really want to comment on that.”

  We ask him what Hoke had told him about Courtney’s $50,000 offer. Did he believe the story?

  “Naw. Why would anybody approach somebody like Duce and ask him to kill their husband? You just had to look at him to realize that he’s not your man. He was always drunk.”

  Was he equally pathetic in the ’80s when Courtney was acquainted with him?

  “That’s a good point,” he replies. “He definitely deteriorated in the last few years of his life. When she knew him, he was a lot more together. Maybe Courtney didn’t realize how bad he had become. I don’t know what to believe. He definitely hobnobbed with a lot of celebrities. Once he came back to the house and said, ‘You’ll never believe who I met and who I was hanging out with all night.’ I said, ‘Who?’ He says, ‘Tom Petty.’ I wouldn’t say he was a chronic liar or anything like that, but he could tell a tall tale here and there, so I wasn’t buying that story for a second. Then a few days later, he starts elaborating on the story and says, ‘We’re good friends,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ Then I found out it was completely true. Tom Petty comes over, and sure enough they’re friends.”

  We do some sniffing around Riverside and find a man named Chris Potter, who claims to know Allen Wrench from the local bar scene. He says he has heard “rumors” of Wrench’s involvement in Cobain’s death.

  “Who the hell knows if it’s true or not?” says Potter. “A few years ago, he starts driving around in this Corvette and waving around a lot of money. Then, all of a sudden, he has all this recording equipment, and he’s driving around in a Lexus and a truck. He never used to have a dime to his name. I don’t know where he got the money to buy that stuff. It’s not from his music, I’ll tell you that much.”

  Indeed, not long after Hoke’s death, Wrench started a band, out-fitted his house with $100,000 in sophisticated analog recording equipment—which can probably be bought used for about $25,000—and recorded his band’s debut CD,My Bitch Is a Junky.

  By the time we returned to Canada, we were more confused than ever. Though we still found the story of Wrench’s involvement far-fetched, there had been enough coincidences in the case to sway even the most skeptical observer. Most puzzling of all was the new wealth Wrench seemed to have suddenly acquired. Where did he get it? We decide to call him up and ask.

  The tone of his response was by now familiar, as was his demonic laugh: “I can make fifty grand go a long way,” he declares.

  12

  It is February 2002, and Courtney has consented to appear on her friend Carrie Fisher’s TV talk show,Conversations from the Edge, to talk about her life and career. Midway through the taping, they have already touched on a wide range of subjects—Courtney’s childhood, her parents, her daughter, her films. But one topic has been conspicuously avoided, and now Fisher is determined to raise it: “So, how did you meet Kurt? We have never talked about that.”

  Courtney’s answer is revealing. “Let’s not. I wish I’d never married him,” she replies.

  Indeed, in the years since her husband’s death, Courtney had skillfully emerged from Kurt’s shadow and established a distinct persona of her own, carving out a successful music and film career while shedding—at least temporarily—much of the bad-girl image that Americans had come to love and loathe. The transformation from thrift-shop rags to Versace and from junkie grunge musician to movie star was accomplished so seamlessly that it’s easy to see why she once described herself as a “chameleon press whore.” In late 1994, while still receiving favorable national attention as the tragic widow of a rock icon, she can be heard gloating to Tom Grant on tape about how the national media are “falling at my footsteps wanting to interview me. I have the power,” Courtney exults.

  By 1995, she had become, as Barbara Walters called her, “one of the ten most fascinating people” in America. Her mainstream acceptance had involved lying about her drug use on Walters’s show, but no one could deny that she had pulled off the heady transformation into a celebrity that all America could hail.

  The transformation didn’t happen overnight. In November 1994, Courtney was spotted wearing a floor-length slip, running barefoot after a woman on L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard and yelling, “I’m gonna kill you!” The woman was indie singer Mary Lou Lord, one of Kurt’s ex-girlfriends, who had shown up at an after-hours party Courtney was attending. Courtney had shoved her, told her to “get your ass out of here” and then taken up the chase. When asked about the incident later, Courtney toldSpin magazine, “There are five people in this world that, if I ever run into, I will fucking kill and she is definitely one of them.” Two years earlier, while Kurt was alive, Courtney had phoned Lord and threatened, “I’m gonna cut your head off and shove it up
your ass—and Kurt’s gonna throw you in the oven.” Reportedly, Courtney’s wrath had been prompted by a profile of Lord in theBoston Phoenix, which mentioned in passing that she had once dated Kurt. After it appeared, the newspaper received two faxed letters from Kurt calling Lord a “creepy girl” and claiming that he couldn’t even remember her name or her face. According to the paper’s former editor, Brett Milano, the letters were signed by Kurt but written in Courtney’s handwriting.

  “I wouldn’t say that Courtney’s insanely jealous,” recalls Lord of the incident. “She’s just insane. I have no idea if she killed Kurt, but I think she’s capable of something like that. There was a time that I was truly afraid that she was going to kill me.”

  In January 1995, Courtney was arrested after an air rage incident on a Qantas airplane during Hole’s tour of Australia and New Zealand. After a flight attendant asked her to calm down, an apparently drunk Courtney was heard yelling, “I’m allowed to do whatever the fuck I want! Do you know who I am?”

  A few months later, on the first date of the 1995 Lollapalooza tour, Hole had just finished their set when Courtney spotted Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna heading backstage with the members of Sonic Youth. Hanna had been a good friend of Kurt’s in Olympia, and it had long been rumored that they had had an affair. As Sonic Youth took the stage, Courtney marched up to Hanna and punched her in the face. When assault charges were filed, Courtney claimed that Hanna had asked her, “Where’s the baby? In a closet with an IV?” but witnesses denied that Hanna had provoked her in any way. Courtney then claimed that Hanna was “Kurt’s worst enemy in the world” and that she had done only what he would have wanted. Like Lord, Hanna’s only sin seems to have been her indulgence in a long-gone romantic episode with Kurt. Courtney later pleaded guilty in a Washington State courtroom to assault and was handed a one-year suspended sentence, ordered to refrain from violent acts and forced to take anger management classes. Outside the courtroom, she told reporters, “The judge said I can’t punch her in Grant County, but I can clock her again in Seattle.”

  Yet incidents like these barely found their way into the mainstream media, thanks to a carefully orchestrated campaign by Courtney’s PR agency, PMK, headed by the queen of celebrity publicists, Pat Kingsley, who boasted a roster of clients including Tom Cruise, Al Pacino, Jodie Foster and Tom Hanks. Before long, any reporter who wished to interview Courtney or her band was first required to sign a twelve-page agreement not to ask about the murder theories, Courtney’s drug use and a number of other contentious issues from her past. Courtney once briefly stormed off the set of theToday show, on which she was appearing to promote her movieThe People vs. Larry Flynt, when the interviewer asked about her past drug use. “Where are you going with this?” snapped Courtney. “I’m not going to talk about this on theToday show, I’m just not. It’s not a demographic that I feel like talking about this.”

  But to attribute Courtney’s success solely to her genius for media manipulation would be a mistake. Many consider Hole’sLive Through This —named album of the year inRolling Stone ’s 1994 readers’ poll—a masterpiece. Her tour de force performance inThe People vs. Larry Flynt earned her a Golden Globe nomination. To her vehement denials, Courtney bashers insisted that it was Kurt who had written the distinctive musical bridges onLive Through This, and recently surfaced evidence from unreleased studio recordings would seem to prove he did play a significant role in the recording. The charges became more pointed when Billy Corgan claimed to have written a good portion of the songs on her next album,Celebrity Skin, and publicly complained when Courtney attempted to take credit. As for her brilliant performance as Althea Flynt, skeptics pointed out that she was simply portraying an out-of-control junkie—hardly an acting stretch for Courtney. Nevertheless, the lyrics on both albums—which were indisputably written by Courtney—demonstrate genuine talent, and she more than holds her own in the films she has starred in post–Larry Flynt.

  But, while mainstream America appeared to be enjoying a love affair with the new Courtney, her old peers had a decidedly different opinion. Seattle’s original grunge band, Mudhoney, recorded a song, “Into Yer Schtik,” clearly directed at her. It contained the lyrics “Why don’t you blow your brains out too?” In his 1995 song “I’ll Stick Around,” off the first album Dave Grohl recorded with his new band, Foo Fighters, he sings, “How could it be / I’m the only one who sees your rehearsed insanity / I’ve been around all the pawns you’ve gagged and bound.”

  Her profile has been lower of late, thanks to a string of forgettable movies and the relative commercial failure ofCelebrity Skin. But in 2001, Courtney resurfaced as the target of a very bitter, and very public, legal feud with the surviving members of Nirvana over Kurt’s musical legacy. In June, Courtney sued Grohl and Novoselic to block the release of a proposed box set of unreleased Nirvana music, which was to come out on the tenth anniversary of the release ofNevermind. The lawsuit was designed to release her from the partnership she entered into with Krist and Dave following Kurt’s death. Six months later, they countersued, claiming in Washington Superior Court that Courtney’s legal action was “really about securing more money to support Love’s prima donna lifestyle. In her professional dealings, Love is irrational, mercurial, self-centered, unmanageable, inconsistent and unpredictable…. In truth, her actions are only about the revitalization of her career motivated solely by her blind self-interest…. She is using Nirvana’s music as a bargaining chip to increase leverage for her personal gain, without any regard for the Nirvana legacy. Our music is just a pawn in her endless legal battles and her obsessive need for publicity and attention.” Four months later, Dave and Krist—claiming Courtney was “incapacitated”—filed a court motion asking that she be forced to undergo a mental examination.

  The soap opera intensified when Kurt’s mother issued a statement supporting Courtney and characterizing Grohl and Novoselic as “liars and crooks.” “I am shocked and disgusted at the behavior of Krist Novoselic, David Grohl and their ‘managers’ and lawyers,” Wendy wrote. “I know that Nirvana was never a partnership of any sort. I know that in the last year of his life, my son despised his bandmates and told me many times he no longer wanted to play with them or have anything to do with them…. Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl never wrote a Nirvana song in their lives. For them to have formed an equal partnership is ridiculous beyond comprehension.”

  Few believed Wendy had written the words in the statement. According to Leland Cobain, Courtney bought Wendy a very expensive house a few years ago and provided her with a generous allowance. “I don’t know what she has on Courtney, but it must be something for her to give Wendy all that money,” says Leland. “I know that Kurt wouldn’t have wanted that. His mother didn’t want anything to do with him until he became famous.”

  Whatever goodwill once existed between Courtney and Wendy, however, appears to have finally dissipated after a widely publicized incident in Los Angeles in fall 2003 in which Courtney, apparently under the influence of drugs, was arrested by Beverly Hills police after she tried to kick in the door of her manager and ex-boyfriend James Barber while he was inside his house in bed with Courtney’s former assistant. After her release on bail, she was arrested again hours later, this time on felony drug charges, when paramedics were summoned to her home, where Courtney had reportedly overdosed on the drug Oxycontin, a synthetic form of morphine commonly referred to as “hillbilly heroin.” When it was reported that the overdose had taken place in the presence of Frances Bean, the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services marched into Frances’s school and took the eleven-year-old girl into protective custody, charging Courtney with “abandonment” of her child. The move set off a bitter custody battle between Courtney and Wendy, during which the two came to blows outside an L.A. courthouse. “Wendy went nuts,” Courtney told the New YorkDaily News, “so I slapped her like a four-year-old.”

  Dave and Krist eventually settled their lawsuit with Courtney out of court,
but the legal battles and her own dwindling commercial fortunes have stretched her financial resources thin. Since half of Kurt’s royalties are held for Frances Bean in escrow, Courtney was obliged to look a little farther afield for a source of funds. In early 2002, she sold Kurt’s unpublished diaries to Riverhead books for a reported advance of $4.5 million. A few months later, his more than twenty notebooks, full of private writings, doodles, drawings and song lyrics, were released in the form of a coffee-table book calledJournals and became an immediate worldwide bestseller.

  The publication ofJournals, however, was not universally celebrated. One reviewer called it an act of “obscene grave robbery,” while another urged a boycott because “every unsold copy gives publishers yet another reason why something as necrophilic as this should not be done again.”

  Ironically,Journals itself contains a hint at how Kurt might have felt about its publication. In one 1992 entry, he wrote:

  Within the months between October 1991 through December 92, I have had four notebooks filled with two years worth of poetry and personal writing stolen…. The most violating thing I’ve felt this year is not the media exaggerations or the catty gossip, but the rape of my personal thoughts. Ripped out of pages from my stay in hospitals and airplane rides, hotel stays, etc. I feel compelled to say “Fuck you Fuck you to those of you who have absolutely no regard for me as a person. You have raped me harder than you’ll ever know.”