The Rome suicide attempt was covered up as an accidental overdose. Nirvana’s European tour was cancelled. When Kurt felt well enough, he and Courtney flew home to Seattle.
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The Emerald City was coming into bloom when the Cobains returned in March 1994, the cherry trees in blossom, the daffodils and bluebells flowering along Lake Washington Boulevard. Yet spring does not bring joy to everybody. It is in springtime, when the world is bursting into new life, that suicide rates peak.
Kurt wasn’t chastened by his experience in Rome. Rather, he remained bent on self-destruction, returning to his heroin habit with a vengeance and soon threatening suicide again. He and Courtney argued and, again, the police were called to intervene in their disputes. On one occasion Kurt locked himself in a room with a revolver, threatening to shoot himself. Again the police took away his guns. When Kurt couldn’t stand the atmosphere at home, he checked into a motel on Aurora Avenue North, a soulless dual carriageway leading out of Seattle, lined with pawn-brokers, sex shops, car rentals and fast-food outlets. As the cars hissed by his window, Kurt shot up in peace.
There was now acute concern among Kurt’s associates that he would do away with himself, one way or another, which would be sad, but it would also be the end of Nirvana, which would be bad for business. Another intervention was planned, this time a determined effort to make Kurt see sense. Danny Goldberg contacted David Burr, an older man who drew on his own experiences of substance abuse to persuade leading business figures, sports stars and entertainers to do as he had done and get clean. One of Burr’s recent clients had been the Grateful Dead, whose members had called him in when they became concerned that their leader, Jerry Garcia, was destroying himself with drugs. The Dead were terrified that they would lose Garcia as they had lost Pigpen McKernan in 1973, and this time it might mean the end of the band. This is what happened in 1995, when Garcia died in rehab of a heart attack, aged 53.
Danny Goldberg called David Burr at home in New York on the evening of 24 March 1994. Burr flew into Seattle the following morning to meet Kurt’s manager, Krist Novoselic and other key people in Kurt’s life at a downtown hotel. The interventionist asked for a history of Kurt’s life, and a timeline of his substance abuse. In his experience there was usually a familiar narrative. Famous people who became addicted to drink or drugs had often suffered a trauma in early life, which Kurt had, in common with the other principal 27s. This typically created low self-esteem, which didn’t end with success. Rather, the artist tended to believe, deep down, that they were unworthy of success. ‘It’s almost as if they think, “Well, I’ve got the world fooled …” They don’t believe it themselves.’ The wealth that came with fame was destabilising, especially when it arrived suddenly. ‘One day they were out there with $7.93 in their pocket, and the next day [they are] worth zillions, unheard of amounts. They don’t know how to act, they don’t know what to do. There’s total chaos in their life, and they don’t trust anybody.’
Drugs were a comfort. To remind ourselves of the words of Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, smack makes one feel that ‘everything is beautiful and kind of warm and dreamy’. The user comes to believe they cannot function without getting high. This is common to creative people who drink or use drugs habitually. Singer-songwriters typically argue that they can’t write or perform straight. That was part of Amy Winehouse’s problem. In fact, users will seize on almost any excuse to get high. In Kurt’s case, he blamed his stomach ache. David Burr considered this to be a bullshit excuse. Kurt was killing himself with drugs and his friends had to confront him with that fact, and the consequences. The only real leverage they had was his daughter. Kurt didn’t want the authorities to take Frances away. But he had to realise that this was a possibility if he didn’t clean up. ‘That really was the most powerful consequence, as far as he was concerned.’ As Burr discussed all of this with Goldberg and Novoselic – ‘Krist was really pissed off [with Kurt]’ – Courtney kept ringing to ask when they were coming over to the house. Things were getting out of hand.
So, the intervention party drove out to 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East, Kurt’s haunted house by the lake. They found the place in chaos. ‘It was a mad house. There probably were 25 people around there, most of whom were not compos mentis. And so the first thing I had to do was get rid of them,’ says David Burr. ‘Let’s kick them out!’ Once the hangers-on had departed Danny Goldberg chased Kurt around the property to get him to sit down and talk to Burr, but Kurt was too stoned to do that. ‘You can’t have a rational conversation with an irrational person,’ says Burr. So he waited for Kurt to come down from his high. As he did so, he looked around the house. ‘Everything was a mess. Furniture was torn and soiled, and burned. Nothing had been cleaned. It was just horrible.’
When he was finally able to talk to Kurt, David Burr found the musician to be ‘a kindly soul’ but so far down the path of addiction he felt it would be a miracle if they could save him. Burr decided that Courtney – who had her own issues – was an aggravating problem. ‘Her influence on him was very, very negative. The further away she was from him the better his chances.’ So she flew to Los Angeles, checking into the Peninsula Hotel to detox. Tentative arrangements were made for Kurt to go into a nearby rehab facility in LA. It wasn’t the place David Burr recommended, but it was as much as Kurt would agree to, having been there once before. Danny Goldberg also talked with Kurt during the intervention, trying to get him to see his problems in perspective. ‘I remember saying to him, “Man, if you just make it to thirty things are gonna feel different.” I do think there is something about the twenties that makes people more vulnerable.’
Everybody then left the house, save Kurt and the nanny, Cali De Witt. Kurt proceeded to go on a three-day heroin binge at the end of which he grudgingly agreed to go into rehab. On Tuesday, 29 March, Krist Novoselic drove his friend to Sea-Tac airport to catch a flight to LA. But Kurt really didn’t want to go. They argued during the journey and, when they got to Sea-Tac, Kurt screamed abuse at Krist and ran away. The following day Kurt went shopping in Seattle and bought a shotgun. He was clearly preparing for the end. But he wasn’t quite ready. That evening he flew to Los Angeles where he checked into Exodus, a rehabilitation centre attached to Marina del Rey Hospital, which specialised in celebrity clients.
The following day, Thursday, 31 March, Kurt was interviewed by Exodus counsellor Nial Stimson, who recalls that Kurt was pleasant but in denial about the scale of his problem. ‘He didn’t see his heroin addiction as anything other than medicating his stomach problems,’ says Stimson. ‘And he was very opposed to the Twelve Steps organised rehab sort of thing. [He told me] “I don’t want to go to any of the celebrity AA meetings, I don’t want any of that…”’ In this respect Kurt was the same as Amy Winehouse.
Stimson asked Kurt about Rome, knowing that he had tried to take his life. Kurt ‘minimalised’ what had happened at the Excelsior Hotel, saying, ‘I just had a few too many of these pills, you know, and I went into a coma, and then I was OK.’
‘Don’t you realise you almost died?’
‘Well, yeah, of course,’ Kurt snapped. He denied that he was suicidal now.
Stimson suspected that Kurt was going through the motions of rehab to placate his wife, band members and business associates, while feeling under pressure to get back to work. ‘Instead of the record company, and all his friends, saying, “We want him to get better, take as much time as you need”, it was like, “You need to get better because we’ve got things we need you to do.” And it sounded to me that he really hated having to go out on these tours. It was kind of over.’ There are echoes here of other 27s.
Kurt was also agitated about a recent lawsuit brought against him by the director of a Nirvana video. ‘He said, “If I lose this [case] I’m going to lose my house.”’ Together with losing custody of his daughter, this seemed to be his primary concern at the end of his life. ‘I think he felt he was in sort of a trapped situation,’ says Stim
son, who suggested to Kurt that he take a break from his career, go away for a year, and reassess what he wanted to do. He tried to make Kurt understand that it was very unlikely he would lose his house. He was a rich man. But Kurt couldn’t see it. He had developed the tunnel vision that suicides often have when they focus only on their problems.
Later in the day a child minder brought Frances to Exodus to see her father. Kurt saw his daughter again the next day, and spoke to Courtney on the telephone. ‘No matter what happens, I want you to know that you made a really good album,’ he told his wife. When Courtney asked what he meant by this, he told her he loved her and hung up. In retrospect it seems that Kurt had decided what he was going to do and was making his farewells on the first day of April, which T. S. Eliot called ‘the cruellest month’, for while it brings new life, spring stirs memory and emotion in the melancholy mind.
That evening Kurt climbed over the wall at the back of the Exodus wing, went to LAX and caught a plane to Seattle, arriving home in the early hours of Saturday, 2 April.
Cali De Witt and a girlfriend were at the house on Lake Washington Boulevard when Kurt arrived home. They spoke briefly. Then Kurt vanished. Cali came and went from the house over the next few days, but he didn’t see Kurt again. It was a big house and he couldn’t be sure whether Kurt was there or not. It seems that Kurt spent some of his time at the house and some of it doing drugs in a motel on Aurora Avenue. He also went shopping for shotgun shells. Now he had the gun and the ammunition. It was just a matter of choosing the time and place.
Courtney cancelled Kurt’s credit cards to slow him down and stop him buying drugs. Kurt discovered what she had done when he tried to use them in a Seattle restaurant on Sunday. Meanwhile Courtney hired a private investigator named Tom Grant to find her husband.
On Monday, 4 April, Wendy O’Connor (or Courtney posing as Wendy) reported Kurt as a missing person, telling the Seattle police he had a gun and might be suicidal. Cali De Witt, Eric Erlandson and Tom Grant all visited the mansion on Lake Washington Boulevard looking for Kurt, calling his name in the spooky, empty rooms. The old house creaked in reply, giving the impression that Kurt might be hiding somewhere. Leaving the property one day, one of Cali’s friends thought she glimpsed a pale face watching them from an attic window. Was it Kurt, or was it Death?
Nobody thought to check the garage at the back of the property where Kurt parked his car. Above it there was an attic room with glass roof panels and French windows at the gable ends. The room was small and peaceful, with views over Lake Washington. It was here that Kurt came at last with his shotgun, heroin works and suicide note.
The morality of suicide has exercised writers, philosophers and theologians through history, as it had occupied Kurt’s mind, becoming his final obsession. To be or not to be, the fundamental question asked by Hamlet, was the dilemma Kurt faced. A couple of years previously a doctor had told Kurt that he must decide, like Hamlet, whether he wanted to live or die, and Kurt had pondered the analogy, referring to it in his Rome suicide note. ‘Dr Baker [said] that, like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death,’ he wrote. ‘I’m choosing death.’ Several Shakespearean characters wrestle with suicide and, unlike Hamlet, some decide that they do not want to be, including the lovers Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the final act of that second tragedy, after Mark Antony has been defeated and taken his life, the Queen of Egypt ponders whether she should follow his example or allow herself to be humiliated by victorious Caesar. ‘Then is it sin/To rush into the secret house of death/Ere death dare come to us?’ Cleopatra asks her maids, elegantly expressing the fundamental question most potential suicides wrestle with, for suicide seems sinful to most people. Cleopatra decided it was not a sin and clutched an asp to her breast.
In general, the people of the ancient world took a more liberal view of suicide than later civilisations. Seneca the Younger argued that suicide can be a noble end: for a sick old man, say, who does not wish to burden his family; and death is never to be feared because it is inevitable. Many leading figures of the ancient world shared his view and, like Seneca, committed suicide when their options narrowed. Antony, Boadicea, Brutus, Cleopatra, Hannibal, Socrates, Terence and Zeno are among those who chose suicide. Enlightenment philosophers, including David Hume, were influenced by the thinkers of antiquity, Hume arguing that a suicide ‘bravely overcomes all the natural terrors of death [to escape] a hated life’. As we have seen, in the nineteenth century Nietzsche had Zarathustra declare that man must learn to ‘die at the right time’.
Kurt Cobain’s death would not be at the right time. He was a young man with a future he could not foretell and, crucially, he was father to a child not yet two years old, a little girl he said he adored. Seneca would not have approved of Kurt abandoning his wife and child. Friends feel the same. ‘The thing that boggles the mind is that that wasn’t enough,’ comments Eric Erlandson. ‘If that’s not enough, what is?’ Research shows that the children of suicides are more likely to kill themselves in adulthood, so Kurt’s action was actually putting Frances in jeopardy. Of course, he would also be condemning his family, band mates, managers and friends to years of angst about what they might have done differently. He may have wanted to punish some of those people. But did he want to stain his daughter’s life?
The disquiet people express when suicide is discussed is often related to religious beliefs. Most religions denounce suicide, including Christian leaders. Although the commandments given to Moses included ‘Thou shalt not kill’, nothing was said specifically about suicide, and it is not condemned anywhere in the Old or New Testament. Self-murder has nevertheless been treated as a crime in many Christian countries, the failed suicide facing the prospect of prison, the successful suicide denied burial rites, or having their property confiscated. Kurt had an interest in Buddhism, where more tolerance is shown. Some Buddhist texts can be read as an exoneration of suicide, suggesting that it might be a shortcut to nirvana. Others seem to warn against suicide as a cause of further suffering. As with most religions, the literature is ambiguous.
At some point Kurt was too weary to think further. He had reached his climacteric, and could not go on. ‘On the whole, we shall find that, as soon as a point is reached where the terrors of life outweigh those of death, man puts an end to his life,’ wrote Schopenhauer. Kurt had reached the moment critique, beyond philosophy and rational argument, for many would say that it is madness for a young man rich in advantages to take his life. And, in a sense, Kurt was mad. ‘Addiction is part of mental illness, and he was definitely suffering some kind of mental illness,’ says his counsellor, Nial Stimson. Kurt was now determined. He had made an attempt in Rome. This time there would be no mistake.
Kurt’s suicide note is our best insight into his state of mind at the end, though suicide notes can be misleading. The writer wants to leave a statement and, often, make excuses for himself, rather than face problems that defeated him in life. Kurt addressed his note to Boddah, his imaginary childhood friend, writing in a wavering hand, with eccentric spelling and punctuation, perhaps showing the effects of drug use.
The first part of the note was verbose and solipsistic. ‘Speaking from the tongue of an experienced simpleton who obviously would rather be an emasculated infantile complainee,’ he began. ‘This note should be pretty easy to understand … I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things.’ He went on to compare his disinterest to the joy that a rock star like Freddie Mercury seemed to derive from performance. ‘The fact is, I can’t fool you,’ he wrote in a note that was evidently meant for his public as well as his family. ‘The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.’ He wrote that he ‘must be one of those narcissists who only appreciate things when they’re gone. I’m too sensitive. I need to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthus
iasm I once had as a child … There’s good in all of us and I think I simply love* people too much. So much that it makes me feel too fucking sad.’
He mocked himself as a ‘sensitive, unappreciated Pisces’, before turning to his family.
I have a goddess of a wife who sweats ambition and empathy, and a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be. Full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function. I can’t stand the thought of Frances becoming the miserable self destructive death rocker that I’ve become. I have it good, very good, and I’m grateful, 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 and have empathy. 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 and so remember – it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
peace love Empathy Kurt Cobain
Frances and Courtney, I’ll be at your altar.
Please keep going Courtney.
For Frances
For her life which will be so much happier
Without me … I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU!
The final lines were written in large, wild letters, as if added at the last minute, maybe after he had taken a massive overdose of heroin. He didn’t have time to hang around, though. In the minute and a half before he passed out, he put the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger to make sure.
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Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered by an electrician installing security lights at the mansion on Friday, 8 April 1994. Kurt had been dead for three or even four days; nobody knows for sure. The date on his death certificate is 5 April.
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