Love & Death

by Max Wallace

  This note should be pretty easy to understand. All the warnings from the punk rock 101 courses over the years, since my first introduction to the, shall we say, ethics involved with independence and the embracement of your community has proven to be very true. I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with really writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things. For example when we’re back stage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowd begins, it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury, who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration of the crowd.

  As before, the Freddie Mercury comparison seems to elicit Courtney’s particular irritation: “Well, Kurt, so fucking what—then don’t be a rock star, you asshole.” She continues:

  Which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact is, I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I could think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.

  Courtney: “Well, Kurt, the worst crime I can think of is for you to just continue being a rock star when you fucking hate it, just fucking stop.”

  Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on stage. I’ve tried everything within my power to appreciate it (and I do, God, believe me I do, but it’s not enough). I appreciate the fact that I and we have affected and entertained a lot of people. I must be one of those narcissists who only appreciate things when they’re alone. I’m too sensitive. I need to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthusiasm I once had as a child. On our last three tours I’ve had a much better appreciation for all the people I know personally, and as fans of our music, but I still can’t get over the frustration the guilt and empathy I have for everyone. There’s good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much.

  Courtney: “So why didn’t you just fucking stay?”

  So much that it makes me feel too fucking sad. The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man.

  Courtney: “Oh shut up, you bastard.”

  Why don’t you just enjoy it? I don’t know.

  Courtney: “Then he goes on to say personal things to me that are none of your damn business; personal things to Frances that are none of your damn business.”

  …I had it good, very good, and I’m grateful…

  This line suggests that Kurt decided that he no longer does. But when a copy of the note was made public months later, it turned out that Kurt had in fact written, “Ihave it good.” Some people wondered whether there was any significance to the fact that Courtney misread this passage in particular.

  …but since the age of seven, I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general. Only because it seems so easy for people to get along that have empathy.

  Courtney: “Empathy?”

  Only because I love and feel sorry for people too much, I guess. Thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for your letters and concern during the past years. I’m too much of an erratic, moody baby! I don’t have the passion anymore. Peace love, empathy, Kurt Cobain.

  Courtney: “There is some more personal things that is none of your damn business. And just remember this is all bullshit and I’m laying in our bed, and I’m really sorry. And I feel the same way you do. I’m really sorry, you guys. I don’t know what I could have done. I wish I’d been here. I wish I hadn’t listened to other people, but I did. Every night I’ve been sleeping with his mother, and I wake up in the morning and think it’s him because his body’s sort of the same. I have to go now.”

  An hour later, a twenty-eight-year-old Seattle man named Daniel Kaspar returned home from the vigil and shot himself in the head. His roommate, who had also attended, told police Kaspar had been very distraught over Kurt’s death. Ever since the body was discovered two days earlier, suicide hotlines across the country had been flooded with calls from depressed teenagers. The Seattle Crisis Clinic was fielding three hundred calls a day, 50 percent more than usual. Mental health professionals feared a rash of copycat suicides. Already, reports from around the world indicated Kurt’s death was having a global impact. In Australia, a teenage boy reportedly shot himself in homage to Kurt. The following day, a sixteen-year-old Turkish girl, who friends said had been severely depressed since hearing of Kurt’s death, locked herself in her room, put on a Nirvana CD at full volume and shot herself in the head.

  What was it about Kurt Cobain and his music that inspired this kind of emotional reaction from his fans? Seattle’s local music paperThe Rocket compared Kurt’s life and death to those of two other great artists who also died at their peak, Janis Joplin, who OD’d at twenty-seven—the same age as Kurt—and Sylvia Plath, who put her head in an oven at thirty: “All three lived lives of stunning, constant pain—which arose out of both the circumstances of their tortured lives, but even more from the sensitivity that allowed them to create their beautiful, chilling reports from the bowels of hell in the first place.”

  Yet neither their deaths nor any of the other countless rock-and-roll tragedies over the years had touched off the tidal wave of grief and despair that now appeared to be engulfing young people around the globe.

  Is it because, behind Kurt’s angst-ridden lyrics, there was a message of hope in a world dominated by baby boomers? Was Kurt really “an awakening voice for a new generation,” as theLos Angeles Times described him? Soon after the death, one fourteen-year-old boy posted his thoughts on the Internet about what Kurt had meant to him: “He was like my guru. I felt like he was leading me to something better.”

  Now, for millions of his followers, it was as if Kurt had abandoned them, as if he were telling them, “Why bother?” or, more appropriately, “Nevermind.” Andy Rooney summed it up best during his weekly commentary on 60Minutes: “When the spokesman for his generation blows his head off, what is that generation supposed to think?”

  Tom Grant was uneasy, but he was not quite sure why. When he got back to L.A. on Saturday, he knew his assignment was officially over. He had been hired by Courtney to find her husband, and now Kurt had been found. Still, he couldn’t help thinking something was wrong. On Tuesday morning, he arranged a meeting for the next day with Courtney’s attorney, Rosemary Carroll, whom he had talked to on a number of occasions during the previous week. He thought she might be able to clear up some of the confusion about the events surrounding Kurt’s disappearance.

  Wednesday, April 13

  At the time of Kurt’s death, Rosemary Carroll was more than just Courtney Love’s lawyer. For more than two years, she had simultaneously served as the attorney for both Kurt and Courtney, as well as for Nirvana. She also happened to be married to Danny Goldberg, president of Kurt’s management company, Gold Mountain, and the man often credited with “discovering” Nirvana. But the couple were much more than clients to Carroll. She and her husband had become extremely close to both Kurt and Courtney, and they had even been designated as godparents for Frances Bean. Both Kurt and Courtney said they trusted Carroll and Goldberg more than their own parents. Kurt even told friends he regarded Carroll as a surrogate mother. Rosemary knew more than a little about troubled artists. Before she met Goldberg, she had been married for many years to Jim Carroll, the notorious former junkie poet who penned the 1978 cult classicThe Basketball Diaries. Now she was one of L.A.’s most powerful entertainment attorneys and senior partner of her own firm.

  When Grant arrives at Carroll’s Sunset Boulevard law offices on Wednesday morning, he immediately tells her he is “very confused” about a number of things surrounding Kurt’s death.

  “I was sounding her out at first. I needed to find out where she stood,” he recalls. “Then, after a few minutes of talking, she lets out a sigh, puts her head in her hands and just let it all out.”

  Carroll tells Grant that Kurt’s death just didn’t make any sense, insisting that Kurt wasn’t suicidal. “I knew him too well,” she says.

 
When Grant tells her that the papers are saying Kurt had been suicidal for a long time, she responds, “No, no,” and proceeds to tell him the story as she knows it.

  Both Kurt and Courtney wanted a divorce, Carroll reveals. They were “hateful” toward each other, she says. Recently, Courtney had called her and asked her to find her the “meanest, most vicious divorce lawyer” she knew. Courtney said Kurt was leaving her. She also wanted to know if Carroll knew of any way the couple’s 1992 prenuptial agreement could be voided.

  Soon afterward, Carroll continues, Kurt called her and asked her to take Courtney out of his recently drafted will, which was still unsigned at the time of his death. It was very emotionally draining for her to be in the middle of the couple’s breakup, Carroll laments to Grant. “I loved both of them.”

  This conversation sheds considerable light on an interview granted to BBC filmmaker Nick Broomfield in 1997 by a woman named “Jennifer,” who was hired by Kurt and Courtney in March 1994 as one of Frances Bean’s nannies just after they returned from Rome following Kurt’s overdose. She quit at the end of March. In the interview, the former nanny tells Broomfield that Courtney was obsessed with Kurt’s will during this period. Before we heard the tapes, this revelation was always puzzling because Kurt didn’t leave a will when he died:

  NANNY“There was just way too much will talk. A few different times. Major will talk. Just talking about his will and…”

  BROOMFIELD“What kind of points?”

  NANNY“Courtney talking about his will and—I mean, what a thing to talk about.”

  BROOMFIELD“And was this just sort of prior to his…”

  NANNY“Yeah, I mean, the month that I was up there was like, I came home for what, a week, and then he died. I had quit for, like, a week.”

  BROOMFIELD“Why did you quit?”

  NANNY“Because I couldn’t stand it up there.”

  BROOMFIELD“And what did you think of Kurt himself?”

  NANNY“Ummm…”

  BROOMFIELD“I heard he was a very caring father.”

  NANNY [NODDING IN AGREEMENT] “Yeah, more caring than he was let to be.”

  BROOMFIELD“What do you mean?”

  NANNY“She just totally controlled him—every second that she could.”

  BROOMFIELD“What do you think he wanted?”

  NANNY“To get away from Courtney. And I think he just didn’t have a way because she…”

  BROOMFIELD“If he loved Frances so much and his family was so important, why do you think he killed himself?”

  NANNY“I’m not sure he killed himself.”

  BROOMFIELD“Do you think someone else might have killed him?”

  NANNY“I don’t know. I think if he wasn’t murdered, he was driven into murdering himself.”

  After Carroll reveals to Grant that Kurt and Courtney were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce at the time of his death, Grant tells her that Courtney had mentioned divorce at the Peninsula Hotel. He then tells her about some of Courtney’s suspicious behavior he had observed the week before and wonders why she had never told him that Cali had talked to Kurt at the Lake Washington house on April 2.

  Both Grant and Carroll also think it’s strange that Courtney did not once go to Seattle to look for Kurt during the week he was missing.

  Grant tells her that Courtney told him she had business in L.A. and therefore couldn’t get away.

  She had no business in L.A., Carroll replies.

  But it is the suicide note that troubles Carroll the most. Courtney had refused to let her see it when they were in Seattle together. Then she adds one more twist: She tells Grant that on the night Dylan called to have the alarm switched off (Wednesday, April 6), she overheard Courtney tell him to “check the greenhouse.”

  “When Rosemary told me that, I knew there was something very wrong,” Grant recalls. “Kurt would have already been lying there dead in the greenhouse at that time. I wondered why [Courtney] hadn’t asked Cali to check the greenhouse before that.”

  Grant and Carroll quickly come to the conclusion that he should fly back to Seattle to find out what’s going on. She asks him not to tell Courtney what they have been talking about: “Let’s keep it between us.”

  Grant returns to his office and books a flight leaving that evening.

  Thursday, April 14

  On the morning of April 14, Grant arrives at the Lake Washington house where Courtney has been staying since returning to Seattle the day Kurt’s body was found. A security guard posted at the door ushers him inside. Courtney is sitting at the dining room table.

  “I guess I really found the right P.I. this time,” she says to him warmly.

  Although Grant finds her words of praise puzzling since he had actually failed to find her husband, he doesn’t say so at the time. Instead, he extends his condolences and asks her how she’s holding up.

  “Not too good,” she replies.

  As Courtney gets up to get a cigarette, a woman approaches wearing a black T-shirt that says “Grunge Is Dead.”

  The woman asks Grant what he thinks of the whole situation.

  He replies that he doesn’t know what to think. What does she think? he asks.

  At this point, the woman introduces herself as Kurt’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, and says that something doesn’t seem right to her. “Why didn’t Dylan look in the greenhouse?” she asks.

  Grant tells her he’d like to know the same thing. He asks Wendy if they can get together for a talk sometime in the next couple of days. She agrees and says she’d like to talk to him more about this.

  At this point, Courtney goes over to Kurt’s mother and whispers something in her ear.

  “After that, Wendy was very evasive towards me,” he recalls, “and we never did have that talk she agreed to.”

  Grant was anxious to read the suicide note. Knowing that Courtney hadn’t let her close friend Rosemary Carroll see it, he decided he would have to trick her into letting him take a look at it.

  Courtney takes him upstairs, where they can talk out of Wendy’s earshot. They sit down on the bed she and Kurt once shared. Grant says, “I heard you read the note on TV the other day [referring to her taped address at the Saturday vigil]. I was confused about something. It sounded like the note said, ‘I’m lying here on the bed.’ If Kurt was lying on the bed when he wrote that note, why was the bed so neat when I came here the other night? It didn’t look like anyone had been on this bed.”

  “No, Tom, I was lying on the bed,” she says. “I was lying on the bed recording the message to Kurt’s fans.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you said?” he asks. “I got the impression it was Kurt saying he was lying on the bed.”

  “No, here. I’ll show you,” she says, reaching for a piece of folded paper under her pillow. “It’s only a copy. The police have the original. He wrote it on an IHOP [International House of Pancakes] place mat.”

  Grant pretends to study the note, then says, “I can’t read this without my glasses. Can I go downstairs and make a copy on your fax machine? I’ll look at it later.”

  Note in hand, he goes downstairs and makes a copy, pocketing it so that he can examine it in detail later on.

  Later that afternoon, Courtney says she wants to visit the country house in Carnation to see if Kurt had been up there during the time he was missing. Her old friend, Kat Bjelland, leader of Babes in Toyland, is visiting and decides to go along for the ride. Kat had had harsh words for Courtney in the notorious 1992Vanity Fair article, telling Lynn Hirschberg, “Courtney’s delusional. Last night I had a dream that I killed her. I was really happy.” But, apparently, all is now forgiven as they make the hour-long drive in Grant’s rental car.

  Courtney is irate about a recent news story stating she had overdosed in L.A. on April 2 and vows that she would find out who the hell leaked the story “and sue that motherfucker for libel.” She says she can prove that she was at the hotel at the time, because people saw her there. “It was a total lie,
” she says.

  It dawns on Grant that Courtney is referring to the story she had leaked a week earlier, allegedly to attract the attention of her missing husband. He reminds her that she had admitted to him that it was actually she who planted the AP story.

  “Huh? Oh,” she says, before turning her attention back to the possibility that Kurt had been to Carnation between the time he left rehab and the time his body was found. He better not have been there with some “skank,” she says to herself.

  At the Carnation property, there are two cabins, one a weathered log house filled with the used furniture that came with the house, and the other a newly constructed mansion, still bare.

  The three enter the old cabin, and Kat and Courtney go upstairs, only to descend a few minutes later, Courtney holding a cloth pouch. She opens the pouch to reveal a syringe inside, claiming it proves Kurt had recently been there.

  They head over to the new house, where they find a sleeping bag and some cigarette butts and soda cans scattered around the room. Courtney gathers the items to bring back, explaining she wants to have them fingerprinted to determine if Kurt had been there.

  On the way back to Seattle, nationally syndicated radio commentator Paul Harvey is heard on the radio reporting rumors of a suicide pact between Kurt and Courtney. She says nothing.

  “This sounded like one of Courtney’s typical planted stories,” Grant recalls. “Soon I started hearing a lot of rumors about this so-called suicide pact. For the first time, I wondered if the AP story she planted about her overdose on April 2, or her alleged overdose on April 7, the day before Kurt’s body was found, had something to do with Courtney trying to convince people that this had all been some romantic suicide pact, and that her part of the pact had simply gone wrong.”

  Friday, April 15