—Kurdt Kobain, professional rock musician. Fuck face.
For her part, Courtney was still reeling from the fact that she had so wrongly read Hirschberg. Most of the issues the article raised had already been brought up in other stories, but it was the tone of the piece that felt like class warfare. In 1998, Courtney posted the following reflection on America Online:
I had NO fucking clue how a “boomer mentality” like Vanity Fair/ Hirschberg would receive me and my family. I was sheltered from the mainstream in every possible way my entire life: Feminism, punk rock, and subcultural living did not enable me to have a value system that understood mainstream thought or that understood how us “dirty punks” had no rights to the American dream; that, plus I thought it would be neat to get famous; I had NO IDEA about the archetype I would get slammed into....But the fact remains that most of that article was unsaid and untrue.
The attention moved Kurt and Courtney out of the rock magazines and into the newspapers in the U.S., where the court of public opinion was quick to damn any parent considered unfit. The Globe tabloid ran a story headlined “Rock Star’s Baby is Born a Junkie,” complete with a picture of a deformed newborn they deceptively implied was Frances. Though Courtney wasn’t the first mother with drug problems to have a child, she was soon the most public, and “the Cobain baby” was as talked about across lunch counters and supermarket checkout lines as the Lindbergh baby had been decades before. Axl Rose, of Guns N’ Roses, even weighed in from the stage: “Kurt Cobain is a fucking junkie with a junkie wife. And if the baby’s born deformed, I think they both ought to go to prison.”
Two days after Frances’s birth, the couple’s worst fears were realized, when a social worker from the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services appeared in the hospital, holding a copy of Vanity Fair. Courtney was crestfallen, and felt—more than at any other moment in her life—she was being judged, which she was. Kurt had spent most of his life feeling judged, but this time it was his skills as a parent being evaluated and his drug addiction. The conversation between the social worker and Love immediately became testy. “Within five minutes of meeting this woman,” Rosemary Carroll remembered, “Courtney created an atmosphere wherein the woman wanted to bring her down and hurt her. And unfortunately the ammunition was there.” The county petitioned to take Frances away and to have Kurt and Courtney declared unfit parents, based almost entirely on the Vanity Fair article. As a result of the county’s actions, Courtney wasn’t even allowed to take Frances home when she left the hospital three days after the birth. Instead, Frances had to stay for observation—despite the fact that she was healthy—and only left a few days later in the care of a nanny, as the court would not release her to Kurt and Courtney.
On August 24, 1992, six days after Frances’s birth, the first court hearing was held. Though they hoped to retain custody of Frances as a couple, Kurt and Courtney were prepared for the possibility the court might put restrictions on one parent, and therefore had separate lawyers. “This is done strategically,” recalled Neal Hersh, Kurt’s attorney, “so if there is a divergence of interests or issues, you can separate the parents and make sure the child stays with family.” As it was, the judge ruled Kurt and Courtney would not be allowed to see their own child without the supervision of the court-appointed guardian. Kurt was ordered to undergo 30 days of drug treatment, and both parents were required to give random urine tests. Kurt had been clean for several days, yet he told Courtney he felt the ruling had broken his heart in two. “It was horrible,” recalled Carroll. “That child was very wanted. Courtney had gone through a whole lot to have that child. Almost everyone she knew and trusted had told her not to have that child with varying degrees of intensity, obviously excluding Kurt. She’d gone through physical pain, much more than a regular pregnancy, because of the struggles to withdraw and stay healthy, at a time when nothing around her was healthy. To go through that and have the baby, and then have the baby taken away from you....” Hersh recalled, observing Kurt with Frances, “You should have seen him with that kid. He just could sit and stare at her for hours. He was as adoring as any father would be.”
They had already planned on having a nanny; soon they developed a complex plan to put Frances into the temporary care of nannies and relatives, as required by the judge. This presented another problem: What relative? Both Kurt and Courtney had so many issues with their own families, they weren’t willing to trust Frances to their respective parents. Eventually the idea of Courtney’s half-sister Jamie Rodriguez came up. “There was no issue that they were not going to take good care of this child,” observed Carroll. “That was not an issue. The only issue was drugs. It was this insane American puritanical ‘war-on-drugs’ mentality. The assumption is that you can’t be an addict and be a good parent.”
After considerable finagling, Jamie was flown in to satisfy the letter of the court decree. “She barely knew Courtney,” recalled Danny Goldberg, “and she couldn’t stand her. So we had to kind of bribe her to pretend she gave a shit. We rented her a place right next to Kurt and Courtney, so officially she had custody for a few months, while the legal system decided it was okay for them to raise their own kid. I was frequently the one who Jamie would come to, to write another check.”
Jackie Farry, a friend of Gold Mountain’s Janet Billig, was hired as nanny and for the next eight months she would have the primary responsibility of parenting Frances. Though Farry had no previous nanny experience—and had never even held a baby before—she took the job seriously and attempted to give Frances consistent care in a situation of high drama. “It was crucial, because of what [Kurt and Courtney] were going through in their lives, that somebody always be there to take care of Frances,” Farry recalled. Jackie, Jamie, and Frances all moved to the Oakwood—the same apartment complex where Kurt stayed during the making of Nevermind—while Kurt continued in rehab, and Courtney returned to the Alta Loma house without her child.
Two days after the court hearing, Kurt flew to England. New baby, drug rehab, Vanity Fair article, and court hearings aside, he was needed onstage.
Not only did Nirvana headline the 1992 Reading Festival, Kurt essentially programmed the line-up, which included the Melvins, Screaming Trees, L7, Mudhoney, Eugenius, and Bjorn Again, an Abba-cover band Kurt adored. But most of the 60,000 fans had come for Nirvana, and Kurt was the king of this punk-rock prom.
There was more frenzy around this show than any concert Nirvana ever played. Much of it was generated by the English press, which had been reporting stories about Kurt’s personal life as if they were breaking international news flashes. Several newspapers claimed Nirvana was broken up, and Kurt was described as in ill health. “Every day there were new rumors going around that Nirvana weren’t going to play,” Anton Brookes remembered. “People would come up and ask me, every five minutes, ‘Are they playing?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And then someone else would come up and say that they’d heard Kurt was dead.”
Kurt was very much alive, having arrived in London that week. J. J. Gonson was walking through Piccadilly Circus two days before the festival when she ran into him. They chatted for a while, Kurt showed off baby pictures, then said he had to go the bathroom. They were directly in front of the Rock ’N’ Roll Wax Museum, so Kurt walked up the stairs to the entrance, and very politely asked if he could use the bathroom. “No,” the guard told him, “our restroom is for patrons only.” Kurt stormed away. In the window of the museum sat a wax replica of Kurt holding a guitar.
At the concert, anticipation built during the opening acts and rumors continued to circulate that Nirvana was going to be a no-show. It rained, and the crowd greeted Mudhoney by pelting them with mud. “The body heat was so intense,” recalled Gonson, “clouds of steam rose off the crowd as the rain continued to fall in the night.” People waited to see whether Nirvana would actually appear and if Kurt was still breathing. “The energy level was so incredibly high,” Gonson remembered. “When any figure came onstage, there was a ripple o
f shock through the audience.”
Kurt had decided to play to the rumors, and arranged to appear on-stage in a wheelchair and a disguise of a medical smock and a white wig. As he rolled onto the stage, he fell out of the chair and collapsed. Krist, always the perfect straight man, said into the microphone, “You’re gonna make it, man. With the support of his friends and family... you, guy, are going to make it.” Kurt tore off the disguise, jumped into the air, and ripped into “Breed.” “It was such an electric moment,” recalled Brookes, “it made you want to cry.”
The show itself was revelatory. The band had not played together, or even rehearsed, for two months, yet they performed a 25-song set that spanned their entire catalog. It even included a snippet of Boston’s 1976 hit “More Than a Feeling” to introduce “Teen Spirit,” appropriate since Kurt claimed in interviews he’d stolen his riff from Boston. Several times they appeared on the brink of breakdown, but always edged away from the precipice. Kurt dedicated “All Apologies” to Frances, and asked the crowd to chant “Courtney, we love you.” During a song break, the band joked about their own demise in a way that didn’t seem funny. “I don’t know what you guys have heard, but this isn’t our last show or anything,” Krist told the audience.
“Yes, it is,” asserted Kurt. “I would like to officially and publicly announce that this is our last show...”
“. . . until we play...,” chimed in Krist.
“. . . again...,” added Grohl.
“...on our November tour,” finished Kurt. “Are we going to tour in November? Or are we going to record a record?”
“Let’s do a record,” responded Krist.
It was no surprise when they ended the night with “Territorial Pissings” and demolished their instruments. They walked offstage as conquering invaders, while road manager Alex MacLeod pushed the abandoned wheelchair. “They had something to prove and they wanted to prove it,” observed MacLeod. “They wanted to stand up, in front of all these people who were saying, ‘It’s over, he’s a fuck-up, he’s useless,’ and say to them, ‘Fuck you. It’s not over.’ ”
Kurt returned to Los Angeles on September 2, but despite having wooed the United Kingdom for the third time, he was feeling less than victorious. He was still on methadone and in rehab, though he had switched treatment centers and was now a patient at Exodus in Marina Del Rey. Krist visited him at the center and found his friend looking ill: “He just laid there on the bed. He was just worn-out. He got better after that, because he’d gotten really strung-out. Everything was so heavy; he was a father; he was married; he was a rock star; and it all happened at one time. For anybody to go through all that stuff, it was a lot of pressure, but to be addicted to heroin while you were going through it is another matter.”
Kurt spent his time in Exodus attending individual therapy, group therapy, and even 12-Step meetings. Most nights he wrote in his journal, producing long treatises on everything from the ethics of punk rock to the personal price of heroin addiction. “I wish there was someone I could ask for advice,” he wrote one night. “Someone who wouldn’t make me feel like a creep for spilling my guts and trying to explain all the insecurities that have plagued me for, oh, about 25 years now. I wish someone could explain to me why, exactly, I have no more desire to learn anymore.”
Though Kurt was allowed to check out for brief day visits with Frances and Courtney, his nights seemed endless. Their marriage had the not-uncommon dynamic that when Kurt was weak and needy, he romanced Courtney more. The letters he wrote her from rehab were a combination of poetry and stream-of-consciousness ranting. He covered them with candle wax, blood, and, occasionally, his semen. One he penned during this period read:
Rosewater, diaper smell. Use your illusion. Speak in tongue and cheek. Hey, girlfriend, detox. I’m in my Kraut box, held up here in my ink penitentiary. Kinda starving and kinda bloated. My water broke. Selling my body of water every night in a full house. Sell out in dark in bed, missing you more than an Air Supply song. Doll steak. Well done.... Your milk is so warm. Your milk is my shit. My shit is your milk. I have a small man’s complexion. I’m speechless. I’m toothless. You pull wisdom from my teeth. My mom is the tooth fairy. You give me birth and dentures and fangs. I love you more than the tooth fairy.
But most of what Kurt wrote was about his struggle to free himself from heroin. Immediately prior to entering rehab, his journal entries reflected a growing state of denial, particularly in response to the media coverage of his drug problem. “I am not a heroine addict!” he penned one day, as if he were trying to convince himself. Another such entry read: “I am not gay, although I wish I were just to piss off homophobes. For those of you who are concerned with my present physical and mental state, I am not a junkie. I’ve had a rather inconclusive and uncomfortable stomach condition for the past three years, which, by the way, is not related. No stress, no fuss, and then, wham! Like a shotgun: stomach time.”
Yet as soon as Kurt kicked heroin long enough to break the physical addiction, he took on the opposite slant, displaying a hatred and disgust at himself for getting hooked in the first place. “Almost everyone who tries hard drugs, i.e. heroine and cocaine, will eventually become literally a slave to these substances,” he declared in one such self-examination. “I remember someone saying, ‘if you try heroine once, you’ll become hooked.’ Of course, I laughed and scoffed at the idea, but now I believe this to be very true.” And though when high, Kurt used his stomach as an excuse for drugs, when sober, he challenged this: “I feel real sorry for anyone who thinks they can use heroine as a medicine because, uh, duh, it don’t work. Drug withdrawal is everything you’ve ever heard. You puke, you flail around, you sweat, you shit your bed just like that movie Christiane F.” Kurt was referencing a 1981 German film about drugs.
He found more success in his own treatment when he began seeing Dr. Robert Fremont, a Los Angeles chemical dependency counselor, who was also caring for Courtney. Fremont couldn’t have been more controversial: He had once lost his medical license after prescribing himself narcotics. He eventually regained his license and started a practice treating some of Hollywood’s biggest stars for their drug problems. He was successful in a profession where rates of relapse are extraordinarily high, perhaps because he understood addiction firsthand. He believed in generously prescribing legal drugs to clients detoxing from heroin, which was the methodology he used with Kurt.
In September 1992 Fremont began to use an experimental—and at the time illegal—treatment plan on Kurt that involved giving him daily doses of buprenorphine. This relatively benign narcotic stimulates the brain’s opiate receptors, and thus can cut the craving for heroin, or so Fremont supposed. It worked in Kurt, at least temporarily. As Kurt described in his journal: “I was introduced to buprenorphine, which I found alleviates the [stomach] pain within minutes. It has been used experimentally in a few detox centers for opiate and cocaine withdrawal. The best thing about it is that there are no known side effects. It acts as an opiate, but it doesn’t get you high. The potency range of buprenorphine is that of a mild barbiturate, and on a scale of one to ten, it’s a one, and heroine is a ten.”
On September 8 Kurt received a day-pass from Exodus to rehearse with Nirvana—despite his ongoing rehab, the business of the band didn’t stop, and they were scheduled to play MTV’s Video Music Awards the next day. The VMAs were the equivalent of the grunge Academy Awards—they were the highest-profile music awards, more respected at the time than the Grammy Awards, and came complete with a ceremony that attracted the power brokers of the industry. Nirvana had been nominated for three awards, and in July it had been announced they would play the show.
Still there were doubts whether Kurt could, or should, play an awards show in his state. Kurt chose, with pressure from management, to play. “He hated going to awards shows,” explained manager Danny Goldberg, “and he didn’t always like being recognized, but he worked very hard to get nominated for those awards shows, and he worked very hard to
be recognized.” Kurt whined in interviews that MTV played his videos too much; privately he called his managers and complained when he thought they didn’t play them enough.
The huge television audience was guaranteed to sell more albums, but perhaps more important to Kurt, the awards were his first chance to stand on a podium and be recognized as the biggest rock star in the world. Though Kurt always downplayed his success and made out in interviews that he was trapped by his popularity, at every turn of his career he made critical choices that furthered fame and success; it was one of the greatest contradictions in his character. The absurdity of a man appearing on MTV and talking about how he hated publicity was lost on many of Nirvana’s fans, who preferred to see Kurt as he successfully presented himself—as an unwilling victim of fame rather than someone who had skillfully sought it. Yet even in that desire for recognition, Kurt wanted things on his own terms, as events this week would prove.
Controversy erupted from the first rehearsal. As Kurt walked into UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, he went up to MTV’s Amy Finnerty and told her, “I’m going to play a new song.” “He was all excited about it, and acted like it was a gift,” remembered Finnerty. Much to the surprise of MTV’s executives, who had expected to hear “Teen Spirit,” they cranked out “Rape Me.” It wasn’t in fact a new song—Nirvana had been playing it in concert for two years—but it was new to MTV’s brass. It had only eleven lines of lyrics, with a chorus of, “Rape me, my friend, rape me again.” It had the same catchy soft/loud dynamic as “Teen Spirit,” and with the odd chorus, it created a perfect Cobain aesthetic—beautiful, haunting, and disturbing.
Finnerty was immediately pulled into a production trailer where she was lectured by her bosses about the band’s song choice: They thought “Rape Me” was about MTV. “Oh, come on,” she protested. “I can assure you that he didn’t write the song for or about us.” Kurt had written it back in late 1990, but by 1992 he had altered the lyrics to include a slam at “our favorite inside source,” a reference to the Vanity Fair article. Though he would defend the song in interviews as being an allegory of society’s abuses, by September 1992 it had also come to represent a more personal metaphor for how he felt treated by the media, his managers, his bandmates, his addiction, and MTV (as the MTV executives had astutely realized).
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