Cobain was right; the public detested Love. She was loud, brash, and took up space usually reserved for male rock stars. Her power, ambition, and calculations for greatness were too much.
Before punk rock, Love’s life was a tortured jumble: an abusive father who reportedly used pit bulls to discipline her, reform school after shoplifting, stripping in exotic locales like Japan and Taiwan, and “gyrating in G-string and pasties at Jumbo’s Clown Room, a mini mall strip joint on Hollywood Boulevard.” This itinerant and theatrical backdrop inspired Love’s sensibility. She was a well-read feminist, apt to reclaim the word “bitch” for herself or quote Simone de Beauvoir.
Her look was vagrant—“a curdled version of the all-American girl.” She favored disheveled baby-doll dresses and smudged puppet makeup, intentionally gutting the culturally celebrated little-girl aesthetic with a look that was called kinderslut or kinderwhore—and helped seed a feminist, progressive bent among one of the biggest male rock bands at the time. Amy Finnerty, a former MTV programmer credited with discovering Nirvana, told me that Love, Cobain, and his band proactively built a quality and trustworthy group of people to tour with Nirvana. “I remember the jokes backstage like, ‘No rapes on this tour,’” says Finnerty. “No one gets raped on a Nirvana tour. Nobody’s handing out backstage passes for blow jobs. That doesn’t happen in our world. We don’t treat women like that. It was such a thing that we would talk and laugh about all the time. It’s not funny, but we could see the ridiculousness. Those clichés came out of the 80s and the types of guys who would be on crews.”
Love, fronting the band Hole, claimed a place for women in punk rock, but many missed the point. “No wonder Courtney Love behaved like an absolute bitch in her baby doll phase, it’s the only way to counterbalance all the frills,” wrote the Evening Standard. She wasn’t thin; rather, she had a “bulky” body, like a “young, gothy Bette Midler,” The Observer explained. Those who believed she wasn’t conventionally pretty accused her of “taking up public space reserved for the traditionally attractive woman,” according to a feminist journal. That she deviated from traditional beauty standards threatened women who abided by them, and men who determined them.
THE MALE ROCKER ACT
Love’s bravado on stage and volatility in the press suggested she was more akin to male rock gods than female songstresses. Love’s “unpredictability” and “element of danger” were qualities “we’re not used to seeing in a woman. We’re used to seeing that from Jim Morrison, or Iggy Pop, or from Johnny Rotten in the early days of the Sex Pistols,” said music columnist Lisa Robinson. Love straddled the stage, roughhoused the mic, and propped her leg up on amplifiers during guitar solos—all male-rocker gestures that she at first mimicked, then revolutionized. Her frequent crowd-diving was another appropriation of the prototypical dude rocker act.
This bold, masculine style also came to define her sexuality and how she used it in her art. Love’s stage performances were bawdy and theatrically raunchy, unabashedly drawing from her strip club past. She’d simulate fellatio on a teenager who found his way on stage, strip to skivvies, and hurl herself into a mosh pit, where she often got groped. She aired the details of her sex life—particularly when it involved famous men like Billy Corgan and Ted Nugent. She discussed experimenting sexually with girls, and bathed naked next to a Vanity Fair writer.
No archetype is as admonished in our culture as the bad mother. From Love’s reported drug abuse while pregnant to the tortured relationship with her daughter that led courts to grant guardianship of Frances Bean to the girl’s grandmother and aunt, Love has long embodied this reviled figure. “How many drug-addled rock stars with children have been taken to task for the same behavior?” asked former rock critic Kim France. “Not Keith Richards; not John Lennon; not Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, who didn’t even acknowledge his daughter Liv Tyler until she was in her teens. Leaving behind a trail of babies conceived with groupies has long been a key to guy-rock mystique.” But for women, like Love, bad parenting was cause for censure.
Another masculine quality Love displayed was what the New York Post called her “notoriously vengeful” nature, which she mostly trained on the media and journalists who shaped her public persona. She threatened to kill Vanity Fair writer Lynn Hirschberg with Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar after the magazine printed that Love used heroin while pregnant. As for the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Tina Brown, Love quipped, “I have lurid sexual fantasies about Tina Brown. I’d like to tie her up and run her over with a car.”
Love crashed a 1995 MTV interview to talk trash to reporter Tabitha Soren. “She felt like I had some beef against her when I talked about her on MTV News,” Soren told me. “I didn’t ad-lib my opinion. I read the news. It was a feud she dredged up in her head.” Musician and Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna said Love punched her in the face backstage at Lollapalooza, for reasons she still doesn’t understand. Love later said her gynecologist told her she “had too much testosterone” and prescribed her more estrogen by way of birth control pills. “She could have held back and presented herself with more decorum. But that’s not who she is. She’s raw,” the director Brett Morgen, who made the Nirvana film Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, told me. “She lets herself go there. And that’s rock and roll.”
Though Love acted like male rockers, she was treated differently because she was a woman. Her band Hole’s song “Asking for It” was inspired by a stage-diving incident during which Love’s underwear was torn off and she was assaulted by the rabid crowd. “I can’t compare it to rape because it isn’t the same. But in a way it was. I was raped by an audience—figuratively, literally, and yet, was I asking for it?” she wondered. This incident earned her little pity. She was often called a “witch,” “vampire,” or “monster,” but never a victim of sexual assault.
Love’s original sin may have been marrying and procreating with rock god Kurt Cobain. In response to an issue of Sassy magazine that the couple covered, readers called her a “vile hag” who was “so obnoxious and pushy that she scared Kurt into going out with her.” The Washington Post said the saddest part of Cobain’s tragic tale is that “his talent and his wounded sweetness gets drowned out by the shrill and grandstanding behavior of his monstrous wife.”
Love also physically dwarfed Cobain—“three inches taller than he was, and stronger,” according to his biographer. Love had long, lean muscles, while Cobain looked frail in his fuzzy cardigans and stringy hair that he washed once a week. Love’s personality was also larger than Cobain’s. The rumpled-slacker love interest was an icon peddled to women in the 90s—from Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites to John Cusack in Say Anything. They lacked ambition and were hard to read, but women imagined they contained depths worth probing. They might not have jobs or direction, but they were in touch with emotion and would love you for who you are, or so the script went. Cobain drew many fans, particularly women, with this “new man” shtick. But there wasn’t an affable “new woman” model for Love to inhabit. In many ways, their relationship looked like traditional gender role reversal. Those who hated Love attacked her for being “the man,” and not a real woman.
After Cobain’s suicide, fans accused Love of killing him herself or driving him to it. She still contends with such hatred today—fans blame her for his death in comment threads of nearly every Instagram photo she posts. Below one image of the couple with their infant daughter a commenter wrote, “Fuck you Courtney. Be a real woman and just admit the truth. We miss him and hate you.”
RAGE IS HER OZONE
Roseanne Barr was not known for carrying a tune, so it was something of a surprise when she was invited to perform the national anthem at a San Diego Padres baseball game in June of 1990. Wearing a man’s shirt and a Cheshire cat grin, she steps to the microphone and asks when she can start.
“Right now?” she asks, seemingly in character as the daffy stentorian Roseanne Conner. She speeds through the open and drops the key a couple of times. She laughs in the middle o
f a stanza, but when she winds up to “the rocket’s red glare,” she screeches, and that’s when the boos erupt and practically drown out the rest. Her version has since topped lists of all-time worst renditions of the national anthem. (Yes, they make those.) But what incensed fans most was her sign-off. Barr spits on the field and grabs her crotch with exaggerated flair. She could piss on the home front, the economy, even lazy husbands, but America’s pastime was sacred. Ticket holders called it a disgrace. Utter contempt followed.
Moral outrage trumped satire here, and the angry mob didn’t seem to care that Roseanne Barr, a famous comedian, was joking. Her “denigration of the anthem” was “obscene” and “disgusting.” Condemnations included that her rendition sounded “as pleasing to the ear as a fingernail scratching a blackboard,” and that it warranted the many boos for the “obnoxious pig” and “ultimate vulgarian.” Opera star Robert Merrill, who had spent eighteen years singing the anthem at Yankee Stadium, called Barr’s “a national disgrace” and likened it to “burning the flag.” A spokesman for veterans claimed Barr had blemished America. President George H. W. Bush even joined the chorus, regarding the act as “disgraceful.” Headlines were irresistibly catty and many used combinations of “fat lady” and “singing” to make their point.
Barr often volleyed between “crazy bitch” and “genius eccentric” in the eyes of the public, as well as her cast and crew. “Not since the ’50s has one woman so dominated television,” oozed a January 1992 issue of TV Guide, featuring Roseanne on the cover dressed as a rogue Lucille Ball with orange hair and a manic expression. She hosted Saturday Night Live and mocked her own overexposure. But she was unwilling to cede creative control of her work. Male auteurs who do this are considered brilliant, but micromanagement earned Roseanne a reputation for being impossible to work with. Her sitcom ran through six executive producers during its nine-year tenure. When Variety asked one what he would do next, he said he intended to “vacation in the relative peace and quiet of Beirut.” A 2016 study showed that women who lead like men are perceived as “bossy, and less effective than male counterparts who behave the exact same way.” Bossy Barr became infamous for firing agents, attorneys, assistants, and others who didn’t bend to her will.
By Barr’s own account, her show’s first season was stifled by the network executives and directors who exerted control and stole credit for her work. When the show hit number one in December of 1988, she fired the people who crossed her. Their names appeared on a running hit list she kept on the back of her dressing room door. ABC sent her a chocolate “#1” to celebrate. “Guess they figured that would keep the fat lady happy—or maybe they thought I hadn’t heard (along with the world) that male stars with No. 1 shows were given Bentleys and Porsches,” she later wrote. She asked George Clooney, who appeared in the first season as Roseanne’s boss, to hit the chocolate with a baseball bat, and Barr snapped a photo and sent it to the higher-ups. When producers of her cartoon show, Little Rosey, demanded she add more male characters, instead of acquiescing she quit after one season. “Rage is Roseanne’s ozone. She creates it, she exudes it,” New Yorker theater critic John Lahr wrote.
Over time, Roseanne began to lose viewers. In response, when she tried to evolve the role she’d played for decades—the crude mocker of the domestic goddess and champion of white trash women—detractors dubbed her an inauthentic “prima donna” and fame whore. An acquaintance told Slate the show was “the only good idea she’s ever had.” Detractors claimed that fame had made Roseanne grotesque and unable to connect with her working-class fans. She was also called a fraud for not actually being the working-class woman she played on TV. Barr’s qualities that fans had found refreshing—her bawdy, take-no-prisoners humor and lack of self-censorship—were now being criticized.
In 2012, Roseanne made a bid for the Green Party nomination for president of the United States, claiming to speak for “workers, mothers, decent fucking human beings.” The 2015 documentary Roseanne for President! followed her on the trail. While many thought her campaign was a joke, she was serious. “I have bigger balls than anyone,” she says in the film. “I’ll say anything to those who need to hear it.” Anyone familiar with Roseanne knew this was no lie. “Women still take her more seriously,” Eric Weinrib, the film’s director, told me. “Men laugh her off.”
TOXIC AMBITION
Like Roseanne, Courtney Love was often called trashy, particularly in the face of tragedy. After Kurt Cobain’s death, detractors attacked Love for granting MTV News an immediate interview. In it, Kurt Loder prods her, “Did you actually get to say something nice before the end?” She shakes her head no like a scolded child.
Her husband’s death also made her ambition attract more bile. “Courtney was interested in the canon and her place in it,” Kim France, the former music journalist who covered Love, told me. She didn’t pretend to “contain her huge appetites,” wrote the New Yorker, letting her hard work and desires to achieve show. When she crossed over into Hollywood and wowed audiences with her Golden Globe–nominated performance in The People vs. Larry Flint, her ambition was deemed too male, “too mammoth to be confined to a genre,” wrote Kylie Murphy in an essay in the journal Hecate on Love’s relationship to feminism. Her “open ambition is twisted into a pathology that is communicable to everyone with whom she comes into contact,” not least of which her husband.
Love excelled at both music and film, boasting “the kind of ambition most people would associate with a male rock star,” fellow performer Justine Frischmann told New York magazine. Even organized feminism seemed to condemn Love, or at least distance itself from her antics. Love was never one to fall in line with a group or a doctrine. Perhaps as a result, her boundary pushing and rebellions weren’t celebrated. “Love’s vilification as a bitch is a caution to feminism not to despise blonde ambition,” Murphy wrote. Love was a “mad, loud, mixed-up, manipulative and unruly woman.”
Love’s musician ex-boyfriend Rozz Rezabek-Wright called her ambition toxic and even murderous in the 1998 BBC documentary Kurt & Courtney. “She thought it was a male-dominated world,” he said. “She thought the only way she could achieve stardom was through a man. She had an agenda for me. She wanted to make me into a rock star to the point where I stopped wanting to be a rock star. I wanted to do anything but get away from it. I would’ve ended up like Kurt. I would’ve ended up shoving a gun down my throat,” he says, blaming Love’s drive for Cobain’s suicide.
Rezabek-Wright’s stinging assessment of Love might have been partially correct. In the 90s, the more public space she seemed to take up, the more hate pelted her. And it was Love’s relationship with Cobain that launched her into the national conversation in a new way, garnering the couple the degree of unrelenting press coverage usually reserved for heads of state.
Love was deemed a leech, sucking the star power from Cobain. That she was only famous by association to Cobain was a common slight, but untrue. Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross notes that the two were comparably popular when they met, but that Love was likely ahead in her career. “She knew far more about the music business than he did, and Hole’s career was accelerating as quickly as Nirvana’s at the time,” Cross wrote.
Those who hated her even assumed that he was the creative genius behind Hole’s breakthrough album, Live Through This, which was released the same year he died. “That record was amazing. Everyone tells me Kurt wrote all the songs on it,” former MTV News reporter Tabitha Soren told me. “That’s a sexist assumption. I don’t want that to be true.” As these unfounded beliefs suggest, Love’s fame was considered undeserved, not only because she hadn’t earned it, but also because she had dared to want it loudly and publicly, like a man.
THE GLOSS
By the late 90s, Love succumbed to the traditional femininity celebrated in Hollywood. She reportedly lifted her breasts, fixed her nose, and had liposuction. She turned heads at the Academy Awards in classic red lipstick, a chic blonde bob, and satin reminiscent of
Marilyn Monroe. Love appeared in high fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Spin interviewed Love with the cover line “Bitch, Sellout, Murderer,” and asked her to justify modeling for Versace. In one image, she sports men’s underwear.
This new Love who had finally capitulated to the mores of female celebrity was thrown under the bus as promptly as the old one. Critics instantly longed for the bad girl of yore with her kinderslut wear. The loss of Love the rebel was mourned. “It seems a pity that Love has gone the way of the 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,” wrote journalist Daphne Merkin in the New Yorker. Love had tried to “whitewash her tarnished image as a trailer-trash junkie,” according to the Washington Post, but the nation wasn’t buying it. These critiques proved that no measure of Hollywood styling or rebirth could save Love. She had sinned too greatly and too publicly—from embodying the culture’s most hated trope, the bad mother, to baldly claiming the success she wanted and cementing her permanent place as the “black widow” to one of the world’s most famous and beloved dead rockers. Love knows this. As she told Vanity Fair in 2011: “I thought, like Madonna, I could change my persona with my look. But what I didn’t understand . . . is they’ll never let you live it down.”
Love did the misbehaving, unhinged rebel rock star as well as it’s ever been done. “When you say ‘rock star,’ one of the first things that should come to mind is a picture of Courtney Love wearing a silk slip with one leg up on the amp,” said Adam Diehl, an English professor at Augusta University in Georgia, who teaches a course on 90s female rockers. But most people don’t think of Love. They think of men—Mick Jagger, Axel Rose, and the like. The same thing could be said of Barr, who defined comedy in the 90s as much as Jerry Seinfeld or Jay Leno. But Barr and Love aren’t remembered as artistic geniuses. They’re remembered as third-degree bitches.
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