Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  On April 16, 1992, Nirvana made their first appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone. Though the piece was ostensibly about the band, even the headline—“Inside the Heart and Mind of Kurt Cobain”—was evidence everything Nirvana did was focused on Kurt. For the cover photo he wore a T-shirt reading “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” The fact that the story came together at all was a testament to how hard Kurt’s managers had worked to convince him that corporate magazines didn’t suck. He had rejected Rolling Stone’s interview requests in 1991, and in early 1992 he wrote the magazine a letter: “At this point in our, uh, career, before hair loss treatment and bad credit, I’ve decided I have no desire to do an interview....We wouldn’t benefit from an interview because the average Rolling Stone reader is a middle-aged ex-hippie turned hippiecrite, who embraces the past as ‘the glory days’ and has a kinder, gentler, more adult approach towards the new liberal conservatism. The average Rolling Stone reader has always gathered moss.” He didn’t mail the letter, and a couple of weeks after writing it, he was sitting down with the magazine’s Michael Azerrad, talking once again about how he wanted a tie-dyed T-shirt made from the blood of Jerry Garcia.

  He initially had given Azerrad an icy reception, but when Kurt started reciting tales of getting beaten up in high school, Azerrad stood and displayed his five-foot six frame and joked, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” They bonded after that, and Kurt answered Azerrad’s questions, managing to get in print many of his major life revisions, including that “Something in the Way” was about the time he lived under a bridge. When asked about heroin, Kurt replied: “I don’t even drink anymore because it destroys my stomach. My body wouldn’t allow me to take drugs if I wanted to, because I’m so weak all the time. Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem. They’re no good at all.” As he spoke, sitting in the living room of the Spaulding apartment, his beloved “works box” sat like a bejeweled family heir-loom in the closet.

  Though the Rolling Stone article downplayed tensions within the band, between the time of the interview and its publication, Nirvana had temporarily ceased to exist. When the band signed their original publishing deal, Kurt had agreed to evenly split songwriting royalties with Novoselic and Grohl. This was generous, but at the time no one imagined the record would sell millions. With the phenomenal success of Nevermind, Kurt insisted these percentages be shifted to give him the bulk of the revenue—he proposed a 75/25 split on the music, with him getting 100 percent of the lyrics—and he wanted the agreement to be retroactive. “I think once Nevermind was playing itself out, Kurt began to realize that [publishing contracts] weren’t just theoretical documents; that this was real money,” observed attorney Alan Mintz. “The publishing splits meant lifestyle issues.”

  Krist and Dave felt betrayed that Kurt wanted the new deal to be retroactive, but they eventually agreed, thinking the other option was dissolving the band. Kurt had resolutely told Rosemary Carroll—now simultaneously serving as lawyer for Kurt, Courtney, and Nirvana—he would break up the band if he didn’t get his way. Though Grohl and Novoselic blamed Courtney, Carroll remembered Kurt being unmovable on the issue. “His focus was laser-like,” she observed. “He was very clear and very persistent, and knew to the penny what he was talking about. He knew what he was worth, and he knew he deserved all the money, [since] he wrote all the lyrics and the music.” Ultimately, the percentages didn’t leave as deep a hurt as the manner in which Kurt chose to handle it: As with most conflicts, he avoided the issue until he was in a rage. Several of the band’s crew members were shocked to hear Kurt talking badly about Krist, who had been one of the greatest anchors in his life.

  By May Kurt was back on heroin again, having managed to stay sober for less than six weeks. His addiction was common knowledge in rock circles, and eventually rumors made their way to the Los Angeles Times. On May 17, in an article headlined “Why is Nirvana missing from a heavenly tour season?” Steve Hochman wrote “[Nirvana’s] low profile has renewed public speculation that singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain has a heroin problem.” Gold Mountain dismissed the rumors, issuing what would become the standard denial, blaming the band’s absence on Kurt’s “stomach problems.”

  Kurt’s old friend Jesse Reed visited that month, and on the day Jesse was there, Kurt had to shoot up twice. Both times he went into the bathroom so as not to use in front of his oldest friend or Courtney, who was suffering from morning sickness and didn’t want to witness Kurt getting high. But Kurt wasn’t shy about discussing his habit with Jesse, and they spent most of the day waiting around for a new supply of heroin to be delivered. Kurt was clearly over the fear of needles Jesse remembered from their youth—Kurt even begged his old friend to find him some illegal injectable steroids.

  Jesse found the apartment not that differently furnished from the pink apartment back in Aberdeen—there was graffiti on the walls, the furniture was cheap, and, in general, “it was a shit-hole.” But one aspect of the domicile did impress Jesse: Kurt had begun to paint again, and the living room was filled with his work. “He had 100 square feet of canvas,” Jesse recalled. “He was talking of quitting music and opening his own gallery.” The art Kurt painted in 1992 showed dramatic growth. One painting was a 24-by-36-inch canvas of bright orange with a brown dog tooth hanging from a string in the middle. Another featured crimson blotches with pressed flowers in the center of the paint smears. Yet another showed blood-red crosses with ghostly white alien images behind them. One giant canvas featured an alien hanging like a marionette with a tiny nub of an exposed penis; a small cat was in a corner looking at the viewer, and in another corner Kurt had lettered: “rectal abscesses, conjunctivitis, spinabifida.”

  Kurt’s royalty checks had finally started to come in, and money for canvas and paint was no longer a problem. He told Jesse he was doing $400 worth of heroin a day, an extravagant amount that would have killed most users; part of the reason for that figure was that most dealers overcharged Kurt, knowing he could pay. Jesse detected that when Kurt fixed, there was little impairment to his motor functions: “He didn’t nod off. There was no change.”

  Jesse and Kurt spent most of the afternoon watching a videotape of a man shooting himself in the head. “He had this video of a senator,” Jesse recalled, “blowing his brains out on TV. This guy takes a .357 magnum from a manila envelope, and blows his brains out. It was pretty graphic. Kurt got it at some snuff shop.” The video was actually the suicide of R. Budd Dwyer, a Pennsylvania state official who, upon being convicted of bribery in January 1987, called a press conference, thanked his wife and children, handed an envelope to his staff containing his suicide note, and told the reporters, “Some who have called have said that I am a modern-day Job.” With the cameras filming, Dwyer inserted a gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger—it took off the back of his head and instantly killed him. Bootlegged copies of the live television coverage had circulated after Dwyer’s death, and Kurt had purchased one. He watched the suicide obsessively during 1992 and 1993—almost as often as he watched the ultrasound of his daughter in the womb.

  After Kurt’s heroin delivery arrived, Jesse accompanied Kurt on some errands. One stop was Circuit City, where Kurt dropped almost $10,000 buying the latest video equipment. Jesse left that night to return to San Diego, and gave the frail Kurt a hug as he parted. They continued to stay in touch over the phone, but though neither knew it at the time, it would be the last time the two old friends would see each other.

  In June, Nirvana began a ten-date European tour to make up for cancelled 1991 shows. By the first date in Dublin, Kurt was already complaining of stomach pain and was rushed to the hospital. There he claimed the pain was caused by failing to take his methadone pills; during other incidents he would claim methadone caused some of his stomach pain. This being the first concert on the tour, it was well attended by journalists who had interviews scheduled with Kurt: When they were told he was
“unavailable,” they smelled a story. The band’s U.K. publicist, Anton Brookes, found himself almost comically trying to shuffle reporters out of the lobby without anyone seeing Kurt leaving the hotel on a stretcher. When one reporter declared, “I just saw Kurt in an ambulance,” Cobain’s health problems were suddenly hard to deny. “I remember getting back to the office, and CNN had been on the phone,” Brookes recalled. “I’d say, ‘He had stomach problems. If it was heroin, I’d tell you. He’s on medication.’ ” To outwit persistent reporters Brookes would display Kurt’s prescription bottles. After an hour in the hospital, Kurt improved and went on to play the next day’s show without incident. But management had hired two guards to follow Kurt—and he immediately gave them the slip.

  Before a show in Spain, the band did an interview with Keith Cameron for the NME. Cameron’s article mentioned the drug rumors and questioned whether it was possible for Nirvana to go “from nobodies to superstars to fuck-ups in the space of six months.” It was their most damning press yet, and seemed to encourage other U.K. writers to include allegations of heroin abuse in their pieces, a topic previously considered taboo. But despite Cameron’s description of Kurt as “ghoulish,” the photos accompanying the article found him looking boyish, with bleached short hair, and sporting thick Buddy Holly–style glasses. He didn’t need the glasses but thought they made him look intelligent; he also wore a similar pair in the “In Bloom” video. When his aunt told him the spectacles made him look like his father, Kurt never wore them again.

  On July 3, still in Spain, Courtney began to have contractions though her due date wasn’t until the first week of September. They rushed her to a Spanish hospital, where Kurt was unable to find a doctor who could speak English well enough to comprehend him. Finally, by phone they reached Courtney’s physician, who recommended they take the next plane home. They did, and Nirvana cancelled two dates in Spain for the second time.

  When they arrived in California, doctors assured them everything was fine with the pregnancy, but nonetheless they returned to catastrophe: Their bathroom had flooded. Kurt had stored guitars and journals in the bathtub, and they were ruined. Disheartened, he and Courtney decided to move immediately, even though she was eight months pregnant; there were also heroin dealers knocking on their door at all hours, a temptation Kurt found hard to resist. Kurt marched down to Gold Mountain’s office to insist Silva find them a new place to live. Despite his increasing wealth, Kurt hadn’t yet been able to establish credit, and he left all his financial matters to his managers.

  Silva helped them locate a house, and they moved in late July, leaving all their trash in the Spaulding apartment and the word “patricide” written on the wall above the fireplace. Their new home, at 6881 Alta Loma Terrace, was something straight out of a movie; it had been used as a location for several films including Dead Again, and Robert Altman’s version of The Long Goodbye. It sat on a small bluff in the hills of North Hollywood, overlooking the Hollywood Bowl. The only way to reach the bluff, which had ten apartments and four houses, was by a shared Gothic-looking elevator. The Cobains rented their house for $1,500 a month. “It was yucky in a lot of ways,” remembered Courtney, “but it was okay. It wasn’t an apartment, anyway.”

  Distraught over his increasing stomach pain, Kurt contemplated suicide. “I instantly regained that familiar burning nausea and decided to kill myself or stop the pain,” he wrote in his journal. “I bought a gun, but chose drugs instead.” He abandoned methadone and went right back to heroin. When even drugs didn’t seem to relieve him of the pain, he eventually decided to try treatment again, after lobbying by Courtney and his managers. On August 4 he checked into the drug rehabilitation unit of Cedars-Sinai hospital for his third rehab. He had begun using a new physician—he saw a dozen different chemical dependency specialists during 1992—and had agreed to a 60-day intensive detox program. It was two months of “starvation and vomiting. Hooked to an IV and moaning out loud with the worst stomach pain I have ever experienced.” Three days after Kurt’s admission, Courtney checked into a different wing of the same hospital under an assumed name. According to her medical records, which were leaked to the Los Angeles Times, she was being given prenatal vitamins and methadone. Courtney was suffering from both a complicated pregnancy and emotional exhaustion: Earlier that week she had received a fax of a profile of her, set to appear in the next month’s issue of Vanity Fair.

  Chapter 18

  ROSEWATER, DIAPER SMELL

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  AUGUST 1992–SEPTEMBER 1992

  Rosewater, diaper smell. . . . Hey, girlfriend, detox. I’m in my Kraut box, held up here in my ink penitentiary.

  —From a 1992 letter to Courtney.

  Frances Bean Cobain was born at 7:48 a.m. on August 18, 1992, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. When the doctor announced she appeared to be in excellent health at seven pounds and one ounce, an audible sigh of relief could be heard from both mother and father. Not only was Frances healthy, she was also cute, being born with her father’s blue eyes. She cried upon birth and responded like a normal baby.

  But Frances’s birth story and the events that unfolded that week were anything but normal. Courtney had been in the hospital for ten days of bedrest, but her fame had drawn tabloid reporters who had to be shooed off. Even though she’d been ordered to stay in bed, once her contractions began, at four in the morning, she managed to pull herself up, grab the IV-stand she was connected to, and walk through the halls of the huge medical facility until she found Kurt in the chemical dependency wing. His rehab had not been going well; he found himself unable to keep food down and spent most of his time sleeping or vomiting. When Courtney arrived at his room, she pulled the covers off his face and yelled, “You get out of this bed and you come down now! You are not leaving me to do this by myself. Fuck you!”

  Kurt sheepishly followed her to the labor and delivery wing, but he wasn’t much assistance. He was in such fragile health—at 105 pounds and still hooked up to an IV—he was unable to inhale deeply enough to serve as a breathing coach. Courtney found herself turning her focus away from her contractions and caring for her ailing husband: “I’m having the baby, it’s coming out, he’s puking, he’s passing out, and I’m holding his hand and rubbing his stomach while the baby’s coming out of me,” she told Azerrad. Kurt fainted moments before Frances’s head crowned, and he missed her passing through the birth canal. But once the baby was out, suctioned off, and cleaned up, he held her. It was a moment he described as both one of the happiest of his life and the most fearful. “I was so fucking scared,” he told Azerrad. As Kurt inspected her more thoroughly and saw that she had all her fingers and was not a “flipper baby,” some of that fear subsided.

  Yet even the sweeping joy of holding his newborn couldn’t pull Kurt out of the increasing hysteria set off by the Vanity Fair article. The next day, in a scene that could have been written for a Sam Shepard play, Kurt escaped the hospital’s detox unit, bought heroin, got high, and then returned with a loaded .38 pistol. He went to Courtney’s room, where he reminded her of a vow the two had made—if it appeared they would lose their baby for any reason, they would kill themselves in a double suicide. Both feared Frances would be taken from them, and Kurt feared he’d be unable to kick heroin. He had pledged not to live with such a fate. Courtney was distraught over the magazine article, but not suicidal. She tried reasoning with Kurt, but he was mad with fear. “I’ll go first,” she finally told him as a ploy and he handed her the pistol. “I held this thing in my hand,” she recalled in a 1994 interview with David Fricke, “and I felt that thing that they said in Schindler’s List: I’m never going to know what happens to me. And what about Frances? Sort of rude. ‘Oh, your parents died the day after you were born.’ ” Courtney gave the gun to Hole’s Eric Erlandson, who was the one friend they could count on no matter how sordid things became, and he disposed of it.

  But Kurt’s feelings of despair didn’t go away; they only
increased. The next day he snuck a drug dealer into Cedars-Sinai, and in a room off the labor and delivery wing, he overdosed. “He almost died,” Love told Fricke. “The dealer said she’d never seen someone so dead. I said, ‘Why don’t you go get a nurse? There’s nurses all over the place.’ ” A nurse was found and Kurt was revived, beating death yet another time.

  But he couldn’t escape the September issue of Vanity Fair, which hit the streets that week. Written by Lynn Hirschberg, the article was headlined “Strange Love: Are Courtney Love, lead diva of the postpunk band Hole, and her husband, Nirvana heartthrob Kurt Cobain, the grunge John and Yoko? Or the next Sid and Nancy?” It was a damning portrait, calling Love a “train-wreck personality,” and painting her marriage to Kurt as nothing more than a career move. But the deepest wounds came from several anonymous quotes, obviously from a person close to the couple, which raised concerns about the health of Frances and their drug problems during the pregnancy. The allegations were bad enough; Kurt and Courtney felt doubly betrayed that someone in their organization would slander them in a public forum.

  Worse yet, the article was treated as news by other media outlets, including MTV. Kurt told Courtney he felt deceived that the network would make him famous, only to destroy him. That week he sat down and wrote a letter to MTV attacking Hirschberg and the network:

  Dear Empty TV, the entity of all corporate Gods: How fucking dare you embrace such trash journalism from an overweight, unpopular-in-high-school cow who severely needs her karma broken. My life’s dedication is now to do nothing but slag MTV and Lynn Hirschberg, who by the way is in cahoots with her lover Kurt Loder (Gin Blossom–drunk). We will survive without you. Easily. The old school is going down fast.