The most vocal proponents of the Courtney-as-murderer-by-proxy theory are Hank Harrison, her estranged father, and Tom Grant, a private investigator whom Courtney hired to help find Cobain after he escaped from a detox facility in Los Angeles, four days before he died. Grant, a former undercover agent for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, has stubbornly pursued his suspicions ever since Love first found his name in the Yellow Pages. Although Halperin and Wallace are convinced that Grant “is sincere in his crusade,” they also note that he has failed to produce tangible proof of Love’s guilt. They draw a wider margin around Harrison, observing that many of his arguments are not only flaky but “subjective.” They nonetheless use him as a source, citing his incendiary remarks about his daughter in a way that could only lead a jury. (“Face it,” he gleefully tells them, “she’s a psychopath. It runs in the family. She’s entirely capable of doing something like this.”) The writers insist that their agenda is to have the police case reopened, rather than to point a finger at Love, and they concede that Cobain’s intensely symbiotic relationship with his wife, which he characterized in a lyric as an “umbilical noose,” is hard to disentangle: she not only gave him the mothering he needed but arguably expressed, in her grabbing for power, his own masked wish to control those around him. It’s clear that Halperin and Wallace have pursued this project (in spite of Love’s alternating attempts, through her lawyers, to intimidate them and bribe them out of it) because of their affection for Cobain, whom they describe, as many have done before them and no doubt many will do after them, as “the voice of a generation.”
* * *
If there are people out there who feel affection for Courtney Love—and there must be some—Nick Broomfield hasn’t found them. The British director gravitates toward unsavory subjects—earlier films of his have examined the serial killer Aileen Wuornos and the Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss—and Kurt & Courtney gives off such a stench that Love’s lawyers succeeded in having it banned from the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. (They claimed that Broomfield didn’t have the legal clearance to use two songs.) Although the film covers basically the same terrain as Halperin and Wallace’s book, its final effect is more unnerving: we begin in a sleepy Washington town, with a blond little boy who likes to sing Beatles songs, and we end up lost in the woods with no way out.
Broomfield is a skilled, if somewhat stagy, interviewer, wearing goofily large earphones and carrying his own sound equipment. The movie has its sweet moments: Cobain’s aunt Mary, who gave him his first guitar, plays tapes of him singing at the age of two. “He was a pretty loud little guy,” she says. Broomfield talks to former friends and girlfriends of Kurt’s, who portray him as unremittingly sensitive and modest (one young woman remembers his arguing with Courtney over the purchase of a Lexus, which he made her return). But with the entrance of Courtney’s father the mood of the film shifts. Harrison, a beefy man with thick features who resembles the old, untouched-up Courtney, seems harmless at first, albeit aggressively self-promoting. He stands on a sunny street next to Broomfield’s car, trying to cut in on a piece of his daughter’s action, angling a copy of his book (which is called Kurt Cobain, Beyond Nirvana) so that it will best catch the light and show up clearly on film. He chats about Love’s “almost deranged thinking process,” her “compulsion to succeed no matter what,” her “well-documented violent-outburst pattern.” Harrison at first seems paternal in an eerie kind of way, conversant with his daughter’s less attractive sides as only a father could be, although you wonder why he’s so ready to indict her.
After that, however, the negative pattern of the film is set, especially since Love refused to talk to the director and tried to block the film at every pass. (In the course of the documentary, it’s revealed that Showtime, which is owned by Viacom, canceled its sponsorship, possibly because of pressure from Love through MTV, another subsidiary of Viacom.) The film cuts between anti-Courtney revelations and a taped interview with Cobain himself, in which he looks and sounds unusually self-possessed. “I really was a lot more negative and angry,” he says of his stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off attitude. “But that had a lot to do with not having a mate.” Meanwhile, we encounter a former punk rocker and boyfriend of Courtney’s, Rozz Rezabek, who reveals an amusingly acidic side of Courtney when he describes how she offered a “scathing review” of his performance upon meeting him, yelling at him in an English accent to “lose the green checkered pants and cut out the Rod Stewart poses.” Broomfield follows Rezabek down into his basement, where he keeps boxes of Courtney memorabilia—journals and letters and papers, including some crumpled lists she wrote detailing “how Courtney will make it,” from which he quotes: “Stop working at jobs; be financed; get a deal using the new connections and old ones; become friends with Michael Stipe.” Rezabek, who seems more perceptive in his bitterness than many of the people who drifted around Love, says that she “would find out what your kink was or your peccadilloes and expound on it.” Then, in a damning finale, he directly addresses the camera: “I would’ve ended up like Kurt … fucking shoving a gun down my throat!”
* * *
At the end of the documentary, the director finally meets Love—the new, shimmering, silk-sheathed Love—when she arrives at an ACLU reception to present an award on behalf of freedom of the press. Broomfield is so galled by the irony of it, having just devoted a film to recording Love’s manipulation of her image and suppression of anyone who tries to counter it, that he takes the microphone after Love and attempts to expose her, only to be hustled off the stage by Danny Goldberg of Mercury Records, who is the president of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. Perhaps the most touching testimony comes from Frances Bean’s nanny, a gentle, frightened girl with lank hair, who quit a week before Cobain’s suicide. She says that she “couldn’t stand it up there,” because there was “just way too much … talk” about Kurt’s will, that Courtney “totally controlled” him, and that she thinks he wanted “to get away” from her. “If he wasn’t murdered,” she almost whispers, “he was driven to murdering himself.”
* * *
Nick Broomfield says he doesn’t believe in the murder theory. “There’s plenty in Courtney’s behavior to suggest she’s capable of doing it—she hasn’t shrunk from physical violence—but it’s still a step to blowing someone’s head off,” he tells me. When I ask him whom he believes, if anyone, he says he believes the nanny. Broomfield has been accused of skewed tactics, interviewing too many losers and loonies and not getting anyone to speak up for Love. He insists that he set out not to trash her but, rather, to honor Cobain, whose music he has admired ever since his ten-year-old son gave him a copy of Nevermind, and that “if she had wanted to use it positively, it could’ve been a different film. I was quite open to her persuading me that all that stuff was incorrect.” So how is it that everyone he talked to either hates or fears Love? “I didn’t find anyone who had anything wonderful to say about her,” he replies.
Hank Harrison—or Biodad, as he calls himself online—is the scariest character in the bizarre lineup of figures in Kurt & Courtney. If the pure products of America go crazy, as William Carlos Williams once wrote, then the impure products end up worse than crazy. They inhabit a shadow world with a disorienting logic all its own; it’s a world that is ultimately impenetrable to those who live in well-lit rooms. The true circumstances of Cobain’s death seem unknowable, buried in a haze of heroin and weirdness. But none of the testaments to the sick ballad of Kurt and Courtney, not even the conflicting insinuations of foul play, makes as lasting an impression as Courtney Love’s parasitic capo of a father. Broomfield interviews Harrison three times, and by the end he is out in full malignant bloom, explaining that he got pit bulls in order to discipline his adolescent daughter. Describing their relationship as “a great war,” he elaborates, “I got her number … I got her nailed.” Then, growing louder with each breath, he declares, “It’s still tough love and I’m still the father … Keep on bad-rappin
g me, I’ll keep kicking your ass.” By now, he’s really into the terrorism of it, and he points a finger at his head. “I know how she works inside,” he chants. “I know what her next thought’s going to be.”
For all the garbage that is pelted at her in Broomfield’s movie, one comes away feeling sympathy for the girl who grew up in the black orbit of this man and inherited his genes—sympathy for the hurt she must have endured, and sadness about the carapace of toughness she seems to have made for herself. But one feels a keen sense of dread as well. For if this is where Courtney Love began, and this is what she’s running from, it’s also what she seems destined to become.
* * *
Iconhood is a strange business. Who could have predicted that Elvis, fat and long past crooning when he died sitting on the toilet, would take up permanent residence in the imaginations of fans not yet born? (Cobain, according to a former girlfriend, was fascinated by “the whole idea of Elvis and Graceland.”) Until recently, however, most of the women who were considered worthy of our sustained interest were imbued with beauty, character, or some sort of tragic dignity. You know the list: Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Mother Teresa. It’s true that there have always been screen vamps, tough-talking gals like Theda Bara and Jean Harlow, but no one mistook them as prototypes for emulation. Sometime in the past decade or two, however, beginning with the rise of the ballsy Catholic girl from Michigan known as Madonna, our taste in female icons has changed: we want them less exalted and more sullied—more tossed around by life. We have moved from a hierarchical form of voyeurism, based on idealization and the envy that goes with it, to a more democratic (or merely debased) form of voyeurism, in which everyone is pulled down to the same level by the dirty secrets—the appalling history of addictions, tantrums, weight problems, and messy relationships—that it’s assumed we share.
One of Courtney Love’s claims on our attention is the way she turned an atmosphere of real-life squalor into bad-girl atmospherics, which other women—more cautious or conventional, or simply less desperate—could inhale when they were tired of being good girls. She never even pretended to mind her manners, to defer to others, to contain her huge appetites. “I want to be the girl with the most cake,” she sang, in that husky, compelling voice of hers. But it’s also the pain, discernible under all the defiant stuff, that draws women to Love—just as it was the pain, discernible under all the glamorous stuff, that drew them to Princess Di. “Someday,” Love wails, “you will ache like I ache.”
It is fair to say, I suppose, that from such hopelessness and sorrow the avenging self rises, imposing its sense of injury on others. But it is also fair to say that the transformation of a personal hell into an artistic stance requires talent as well as force of personality: Love has clearly charmed some people with her swaggering charisma, just as she has antagonized others. Indeed, in her constant morphing she may be a genuine millennial type: forever self-inventing, carelessly straddling image and reality. Still, whatever harm she has done, it seems a pity that Love has gone the way of gloss, that she has tamed the wild child who beat her fists against the straight world and given us what we surely don’t need—another movie star who’s pretty on the outside.
DAYS OF BRILLIANT CLARITY
(RICHARD BURTON)
2012
Before Brangelina, TomKat, and—God help us!—Kimye, before the culture of celebrity became the instant windup machine it now unmistakably is, with supermarket sightings, up close tweetings, and a glut of red-carpet appearances, there was one acting couple whose name was synonymous with the ineffable magic dust of star power. They were Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, better known as LizandDick, preferably said in one breath the better to underline their ensorcelled liaison and combined wattage.
From the early 1960s, when Burton and Taylor fell scandalously in love (breaking up both their marriages) while co-starring in the movie Cleopatra, on through their ten-year marriage and eventual divorce in 1974, short-lived remarriage and second divorce in 1976, they were the pair to watch. Their every move was dogged by paparazzi and crowds eager to catch a glimpse of them. They were unapologetically high living and perennially tan, dashing between yachts and luxury hotels, socializing with the likes of Grace Kelly and Bobby Kennedy, buying up jewels and planes, art and houses. In the hands of another couple, their existence might have seemed fulsomely vainglorious, but there was something about their combined magnetism—and, no small thing, their always evident senses of humor about themselves—that kept their glamour and intrigue intact.
The real source of their hold on us undoubtedly lies in the fact that underneath the extravagant surface of their union lay their extravagant passion for each other, clearly visible in photographs and documented in the haunting letters Burton wrote to Taylor, a sampling of which were included in the 2010 biography of the couple, Furious Love. Those letters, as well as snippets from his diaries, revealed a Burton who was word struck as much as he was love struck, equally passionate about language as he was about Taylor, whose breasts he called “apocalyptic” and whose beauty he termed “pornographic.” The recent publication of Burton’s diaries—still incomplete but weighing in at over six hundred pages—furthers the impression of a man with considerable literary talent as well as an incisive and relentlessly curious mind. In a television interview with Barbara Walters, done some years after Burton’s death, Taylor referred to Burton as a “genius,” which, I would wager, will not strike anyone who immerses him- or herself in these intoxicating journals as much of an overstatement.
The diaries have been scrupulously edited by Chris Williams, who also provides an excellent introduction and footnotes that are sometimes helpful but too often clarify the obvious. (Do we really need an explanation of who Christopher Columbus was? Or what Kleenex are?) They officially begin with some forty-odd pages of cursory jottings made by the young Burton in 1939 and 1940, when he was a chapel-going, exam-“swotting” schoolboy, and then jump to 1960. Here we get some intriguing if brief entries—“I hate myself and my face in particular” and a description of skiing as “an exotic, romantic and snobby sport”—but the real excitement begins with the more sustained entries that start in 1965, when Burton is married to Taylor and swanning around with famous people in luxe settings, like Gstaad and St. Tropez. On Sunday, January 3, for instance, he dines with Natalie Wood and David Niven, Jr.: “She emaciated and looks riddled with TB. Pekinese eyes. Sad case.” And on June 8, Burton muses, “It is odd, too, that I almost always think—no condescension intended—of Americans as being gifted and brave but almost always child-like.” The voice is intimate in the way of the best diarists, crackling with vigorous observation and writerly notations: “(Memo write about reaction to fame or lack of it).” We very quickly get a sense of listening in on someone of exceptional attunement who happens to have had access to people and places of uncommon interest, many of whom and much of which he finds wanting. John Huston is dismissed as a “simpleton” and a “self aggrandizing liar,” Frank Sinatra is no more than “a petulant little sod,” and a fancy, “handsomely appointed” hotel in Puerto Vallarta is keenly sized up as showing signs of wear: “Oddly enough the clientele didn’t look as if they could afford the place, and the barmen were slow and all their white jackets were soiled and sweat-marked under the arms.” The only two showbiz people who escape his generally deflating attitude to his peers are Noël Coward and Mike Nichols, both of whom he deems “instinctively and without effort and un-maliciously witty.”
Burton marks out his terrain early on: booze (at one point he refers to his diaries as “confessions of an alcoholic”), food, the allure of Jews, money, politics, celebrity and its hazards (he characterizes paparazzi as “these butterflies of the gutter”), bouts of boredom, melancholy (“black as a dirge”), and harsh self-evaluation (“I am as dispassionate as it is possible for a human being to be and not be a machine”). The charms and occasional drawbacks of his beloved “old fatty” (one of hi
s many, many nicknames for Taylor) are interwoven throughout. He and Taylor seem to have enjoyed a certain kind of edgy passion, consisting of huge rows in which they hurled insults at each other (“I said that she was not ‘a woman but a man’ and … she called me ‘little girl’”), followed by make-up sex. It must be said, for those who might be hoping otherwise, that there is not much of specifically erotic disclosure here; for such a randy and articulate character, Burton is touchingly shy about bedroom details.
We hear about actors and acting, as one would expect—“Warren Beatty seems very self-conscious and actory … He doesn’t give that feeling of vibrant power as Rex does or the lethargic dynamism of Marlon”—but what one hadn’t anticipated is the ongoing literary seminar. Burton, it turns out, is a demon reader, as avid as he is discerning, and speedy to boot: “I have just finished a very readable Life of Mussolini, which depressed me so much that I hurriedly re-read Waugh’s Vile Bodies to put me in a good frame of mind for sleep last night.” He thinks nothing of going to a bookstore on the Via Veneto and buying twenty or thirty paperbacks at a time (including “½ dozen detective stories” and a biography of Harry Truman) or of reading Auden’s “latest collection of verse” while waiting on his wife’s hairdresser, Alexandre, to get her ready for a scene. It was a habit inculcated in him as a boy in fairly desolate circumstances: “all the books I read, all the things I learned, all my early furtive shame in one little room by candlelight.” (The twelfth of thirteen children born to a Welsh mining family, Burton was two when his mother died and was sent to live with an older sister and her husband, the latter whom he came to despise.)
The Fame Lunches Page 10
