In early July, Kurt and Courtney came back from the tour to discover a major disaster. With the idea that a burglar wouldn’t think of looking there, Kurt had put his favorite guitar and more importantly, several tapes and notebooks full of poetry and song ideas in the bathtub. But while they were gone, a plumbing problem had filled the bathroom with sludge, ruining everything—the guitar, the tapes, and the notebooks.
They soon found a new apartment, a comfortable two-bedroom in a relatively low-rent (“Right down the hill was a crack street,” says Kurt) neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills, near the Hollywood Bowl, with a sweeping view of the hills. Kurt simply started writing all over again.
Meanwhile, yet another band named Nirvana—a British group that had enjoyed one minor hit in the sixties—filed suit for sole rights to the name in the U.K. But when it was pointed out that Nirvana had been popular in Britain for over two years and they had done nothing about it, the case was dropped.
Also in July, Hole signed to DGC for a reported million dollars in a deal even richer and more favorable than the one Nirvana got. A Newsweek article on the onslaught of so-called “alternative” band signings in the wake of Nirvana quoted one industry maven as saying that “Sleeping with Kurt Cobain is worth a million dollars.” DGC denies this had anything at all to do with the signing. Off in the distance is heard incredulous laughter.
Except for the methadone he took on the summer tour, Kurt did heroin for months, for almost the entire pregnancy. Meanwhile, he was having to do more and more just to get the same kick, eventually working up to a four-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. He couldn’t get up any higher because that was the maximum his bank’s cash machine would dispense in one day.
“I ended up doing a hundred-dollar shot in one shot and not even feeling it, hardly,” he says. “I was just filling up the syringe as far as it could go without pulling the end off. At that point, it was like, why do it?” The next step would have been to start doing speedballs, the mix of cocaine and heroin which had killed John Belushi. With the baby imminent, Kurt checked into Cedars-Sinai on August 4 to detox, spending a total of twenty-five days there.
“He looked at killing himself on the one hand or living on the other,” says Danny Goldberg. “He decided to live.”
Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson visited Courtney and Kurt throughout the ordeal. “He totally saved our lives during that whole time,” says Kurt. “He was the only piece of reality, the only calm person who was there as an example of what life could be like afterward, once this crazy shit was over with.” In gratitude, they put Erlandson in their will.
Except for Erlandson, no one visited Kurt in the early stages of his rehabilitation. “I was in a really vulnerable emotional state, which is the first ten days of detox when you’re really fucked up and crying all the time,” Kurt says. “It messes with your mind so much—it’s like a never-ending acid trip. That’s exactly what detox is like. It’s like being on the heaviest dose of acid and not coming off of it for ten days, never sleeping. Time just stands still and anything will affect you emotionally—anything you read or see on television will make you cry. So it actually wouldn’t have been a good time because I would have burst out crying in front of them, anyhow.
“I didn’t get any support from anybody the first two times I tried, either,” he continues. “No one came to visit me or call me or anything. This time I demanded that someone come and visit me so I felt like I had some friends. So eventually [Chris and Dave] came down.”
“It was good to see him but it kind of bummed me out to see him in such bad shape,” says Chris. “He was on some kind of medication, lying in bed, and I was thinking, ‘Fuck, so this is where all this got you.’ ”
One day, Dave and Chris stopped by to discuss whether they were going to play a benefit to fight Oregon’s infamously homophobic Proposition 9, play a homecoming concert in Seattle to benefit the anticensorship Washington Music Industry Coalition, or appear on the MTV Video Music Awards. They decided to do all three.
While Kurt was detoxing and Courtney was waiting for the baby to be born, a profile of Courtney appeared in Vanity Fair.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ALL WE DID WAS CRY
Courtney originally did the Vanity Fair story believing that it would be a mostly flattering piece on her and her music. She was overlooking the fact that her band had only released one extremely modest-selling independent label album a year before, a point of little import to Vanity Fair’s upscale leadership. This bit of hubris blinded her to the fact that the article was being done by Lynn Hirschberg, well known for her unflattering celebrity profiles. Courtney thought the article would put her on the map.
It did.
She was used to an adoring U.K. music press that understood her sardonic, sarcastic sense of humor, didn’t ask hard questions, didn’t do much investigation, and kept secrets in exchange for the favor of a hip musician. Lynn Hirschberg had no such allegiances.
Courtney says the story was arranged when she was still using. “Had I not done drugs, I would have been lucid enough to see that Vanity Fair was going to stitch me up—what else were they going to do with me?” she says, adding that she thought that a hostile article in the “conservative” Vanity Fair would probably translate into a study in outlaw cool to the rock community.
The article appeared in the September 1992 issue. One of the many controversial aspects of the piece was a photo of a quite pregnant Courtney naked from the waist down in a bit of see-through lingerie. No big deal, but it turned out she had been smoking a cigarette in the photograph, and that editor Tina Brown had ordered it airbrushed out.
Courtney says they had done a marathon photo session for the piece, going through dozens of rolls of film and several costume and set changes. At one point, in the middle of changing costumes, she says she just happened to have a puff on a cigarette, and photographer Michel Comte just happened to be right there to capture it. She is, however, smoking in at least one other picture in the session. After the article appeared, magazines all over the world were clamoring for the unairbrushed photo. Courtney claims she and Kurt bought the pictures back for fifty thousand dollars, a price she calls “blackmail.”
But that was the least of it. The piece described Courtney as a “train-wreck personality” who “isn’t particularly interested in the consequences of her actions.” It strongly hinted that she had introduced Kurt to heroin, although that was not the case. Hirshberg quoted various unnamed “industry insiders” who “fear for the health of the child,” without mentioning whether these industry insiders had done any studies in teratogenic medicine.
But far more damaging was one quote in the piece. After a description of how she and Kurt went to Alphabet City to score during the “Saturday Night Live” visit, Courtney added, “After that, I did heroin for a couple of months,” which meant that she had done heroin long after she knew she was pregnant. Courtney vigorously protested that she had been misquoted; Hirschberg maintained that she had the tapes.
Although the article seems to conclusively paint Courtney as a conniver, various factual errors throughout the piece would seem to compromise Hirschberg’s accuracy. For instance, she wrote that Danny Goldberg was a vice president at Polygram Records, when in fact he was a vice president of Atlantic; the piece also claimed that Goldberg was Nirvana’s manager, but he actually had few managerial chores at Gold Mountain, where he is now merely a consultant—John Silva is Nirvana’s manager. Hirschberg maintained that Kurt and Courtney first met “eight or so years ago,” which would have put Kurt in high school. The piece perpetuated the gold-digger theory by saying that the next time Courtney met Kurt after their first meeting in Portland, “Kurt was a star,” which was not true. Hirschberg also misreported an easily verified story about the bidding war over Hole.
Most unfortunately, the piece also seemed to completely miss Courtney’s sardonic sense of humor. This is a woman who, in the course of a delicate conversation about the whole “was she or w
asn’t she” controversy, can come out with a deliberately sarcastic line like “If there is ever a time that a person should be on drugs, it’s when they’re pregnant, because it sucks” without considering how it would look in print. Spend even a little quality time with Courtney and it’s clear that an exchange she had with Kurt about firing Dave was purely facetious.
If Nevermind was a success because the band was in the right place at the right time, the Vanity Fair piece found the Cobains at the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides the nation’s continuing drug hysteria and a misguided Republican crusade for “family values,” the story also tapped into America’s sudden guilt about what it had done to its children over the past decade. Suddenly, the U.S. media became fixated on child abuse stories, from the kids who were left “home alone” while their parents vacationed in Mexico to the poor little Long Island girl who was shackled for days in an underground bunker. A mom who had allegedly done heroin (not to mention smoked cigarettes) while pregnant pressed some powerful buttons.
“I wouldn’t have thought that I could be dwarfed or squashed or raped or incredibly hurt by a story in that magazine,” Courtney says. “But the power of it was so intense. It was unbelievable. I read a fax of it and my bones shook. I knew that my world was over. I was dead. That was it. The rest of my life. Not only was I going to walk around with a big black mark but any happiness that I had known, I was going to have to fight for, for the rest of my life. It shouldn’t be that way, but I exposed myself to it. Had I not taken drugs in the first place, I would have been lucid enough to know what she was about, I wouldn’t have been candid, I would have figured out where I fit in the scheme of the Vanity Fair world.”
Courtney likes to think the story was some kind of set-up—perhaps commandeered by Vanity Fair darling Madonna, whose new record label, Maverick, she had recently spurned, and loudly.
But a simpler explanation is that Courtney made for good copy—she was an outspoken woman with a checkered past who happened to be married to the rock star of the moment. While they maintain it is a pack of lies, even the Cobains acknowledge that Hirschberg’s piece was at least an entertaining read—and the worst thing that ever happened to them.
Courtney checked herself into a hospital, she says, “because I was going to go crazy. I was going to take drugs. I’ve never been a person to take drugs in a crisis. I usually take drugs when I’m happy. I felt really like killing myself. I was eight and a half months pregnant. I couldn’t kill myself so I checked into a hospital for two weeks before the baby was born.”
Meanwhile, Kurt was detoxing and, once again, in enormous pain. Unable to eat, he was placed on an IV and got weaker and weaker for a time, then rallied. His rehabilitation was slowed by the fact that he was occasionally given morphine to kill the stomach pain. He saw a battalion of gastrointestinal specialists who took X-rays, upper GI’s, lower GI’s, CAT scans, etc. He was weak. He was ready to snap. “He’d been crying for weeks,” says Courtney. “It was nothing but crying. All we did was cry. It was horrible.”
At first, Kurt didn’t understand the implications of the Vanity Fair story. “It was obviously upsetting,” he says, “but I was in such a vulnerable state of mind and my mind was so clouded from getting off of drugs that I would have rather just let it pass for a while, but Courtney was so upset about it. She was about to have a baby—she wasn’t in a clouded state of mind at all.”
Gradually, it dawned on Kurt what the story was doing to his and Courtney’s reputation. “One day I snapped out of it and realized how awful it was,” he says. “It was definitely affecting our livelihood and our image and everything to a real extreme.” And since the Vanity Fair piece was based largely on unnamed “inside sources,” they had to deal with the profound disappointment and paranoia that arose from the fact that some of their most trusted friends and associates had betrayed them.
“We’d already been turned into cartoon characters by then and it justified everything—all the lies and rumors that had been going around,” says Kurt. “I just found it amazing that someone could get away with something like that, that she couldn’t go to jail for it or get busted somehow or sued. I thought we’d be able to sue her, but it’s a matter of having the millions of dollars to fight in court with [Vanity Fair publisher] Condé Nast, who would support her.”
“I just decided, ‘Fuck this, I don’t want to be in a band anymore. It just isn’t worth it. I want to kill [Hirschberg],’ ” Kurt says. “As soon as I get out of this fucking hospital, I’m going to kill this woman with my bare hands. I’m going to stab her to death. First I’m going to take her dog and slit its guts out in front of her and then shit all over her and stab her to death.’ ” He was too weak to do that so he says he considered hiring a hit man, then calmed down a bit and thought about asking David Geffen to pull some strings to get Hirschberg fired or else he’d quit the band. None of this ever happened.
Kurt still gets scarily angry when the subject of Lynn Hirschberg’s story comes up. “She’d better hope to God that someday I don’t find myself destitute without a wife and a baby,” he says. “Because I’ll fucking get revenge on her. Before I leave this earth, she’s going out with me.”
On the morning of August 18, 1992, Courtney began to go into labor. She stunned her doctors by picking up her IV and slamming out of the room. She marched over to Kurt’s room, clear across the hospital, and screamed, “You get out of this bed and you come down now! You are not leaving me to do this by myself, fuck you!” She came back to find that the hospital security force had “gone apeshit.” Kurt was still groggy from a dose of sleeping pills and in extreme pain, but managed to get himself down to the delivery room a little later.
At seven forty-eight in the morning, Frances Bean Cobain was born. She weighed seven pounds, one ounce, and according to the Cobains she was perfectly healthy.
Kurt didn’t witness his own daughter’s birth. He had passed out. “I’m having the baby, it’s coming out, he’s puking, he’s passing out, and I’m holding his hand and rubbing his stomach while the baby’s coming out of me,” says Courtney. “It was pretty weird,” she says, laughing darkly.
“I was so fucking scared—it was probably a classic case of what the typical father goes through,” says Kurt, who was still hooked up to an IV and in the midst of rehab. “I was just so weak and sick and afraid that something was going to happen to Courtney or the baby.”
A press release from Gold Mountain a few days later aimed to refute all the speculation about Frances. “The infant is in good condition, is feeding well and growing at the normal rate expected for a newborn,” the statement said, adding, “The vicious rumors that Frances was suffering any withdrawals at the time of birth are completely false, and in fact, she has not suffered any discomfort since delivery.”
If their baby was a boy, they were going to name it Eugene, after Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines. When they found out that they were to have a girl, they thought of Kelly’s partner in the Vaselines, Frances McKee. At the time, they weren’t thinking of Frances Farmer, the Hollywood actress who was blacklisted and hounded into insanity in the fifties, but Kurt now wishes that was the reason. He adds that the word “bean” has cropped up in both his and Courtney’s lives many times, but mostly they came up with the name after noticing that Frances actually looked like a kidney bean in her early sonograms.
Tarnished reputations turned out to be only the beginning of the Vanity Fair controversy.
Even Kurt and Courtney’s lawyer, Rosemary Carroll, believes that the Vanity Fair article prompted the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services to begin taking action against them. The agency must have seen the Vanity Fair piece—(both Carroll and the Cobains claim it was stapled to the top of the report on them). The story was so well publicized that the agency could not ignore it, even though Courtney had allegedly detoxed almost immediately after learning she was pregnant. Whether anticipating pressure from higher-ups or even public outcry, it’s not out
side the realm of possibility that the agency was virtually obligated to hassle this rock star couple.
Late in Courtney’s pregnancy, Children’s Services threatened to relieve Kurt and Courtney of custody of Frances. At a hearing in Family Court, where rules of evidence are relaxed, Children’s Services used the Vanity Fair article and what later proved to be a spurious urine test to argue that both Kurt and Courtney were multiple substance abusers and therefore did not deserve to have custody of their child. The judge agreed and ordered Kurt to go to yet another detox center for another thirty days, even though he was completely clean after his stay at Cedars.
But that was the least of it. Two weeks after their daughter was born, Kurt and Courtney were forced to surrender custody of Frances to Courtney’s sister Jamie. For a month after that, Kurt and Courtney were not allowed to be alone with their own daughter.
Kurt genuinely believes it was a conspiracy. “It was all a total scam,” he says. “It was an attempt to use us as an example because we stand for everything that goes against the grain of conformist American entertainment. It was a witch hunt. It was an outright Frances Farmer case where we were being mistreated beyond belief. Social Services literally took the Vanity Fair article and Xeroxed it and then took that pee test that Courtney took in the first trimester of her pregnancy and used that as an excuse to take our baby away.”
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