To Rome, With Love

Courtney Love grinned and tugged on her chewed-up bangs as she lurched down the red carpet that led into Hugo Boss' Fifth Avenue flagship store on June 18. A pair of nervous German reporters, a man and a woman, called out to her from behind the roped-off press area, and Ms. Love–gangly and graceful in a sheer Richard Tyler haute-couture gown with black-lace overlay–leaned in uncomfortably close. She patted the woman reporter's hands and gave her a heavy-lidded leer. "Don't be nervous," she ordered. "Just start asking me stuff."

A little bit later, Ms. Love was scheduled to sing a set of 20's and 30's torch songs at the Russian Tea Room as part of a benefit for the New Group theater company, but the Germans weren't curious about that. They wanted to know more about her dress. Then, unsolicited, Ms. Love pulled her unruly shoulder-length hair back to reveal an enormous multi-layered necklace studded with cameo images. "I have to show you this, because it's the best, best, best piece of jewelry I own," she told the Germans, as the journalists flanking them on the rope line crowded in to get a piece of the action. "It's Bulgari, it's from 1860..." Ms. Love trailed off for a moment and then impatiently tapped the hands and arms of a number of the reporters who were, at that point, obediently recording her every word.

"You see, you don't even know what it is, you're just shallowly writing this down. Now look!" Ms. Love instructed, her badly gnawed, red-painted nails glittering in the flashbulb light. She held her hair back with one hand and waved her other hand over the necklace, as if she was displaying prizes on The Price is Right.

"These are all the emperors of Rome. There's Claudius and Tiberius and Aurelius," she said. "It was made by some psycho French woman, and it's my favorite piece of jewelry I have ever had in my whole life."

Ms. Love was working up a head of steam. "These guys were bloodless, gutless murderers," she said, perhaps forgetting Marcus Aurelius' reputation as a gentle philosopher and writer and Claudius' democratic ways (even though he whacked one of his wives). "They ran a country where everything was painted white. It was a white, racist, fucked-up country and they killed Jesus."

Just as Ms. Love was getting to the point of her history lesson–possibly about the fashion potential of Pontius Pilate–she was summoned by a publicist, who pointed her toward an overwhelmed-looking Winona Ryder, gesturing wanly at the rock diva from the middle of the red carpet. Ms. Ryder was scheduled to M.C. the Tea Room event, but she seemed freaked by the responsibility. The waif-like actress was a mass of nervous ticks, girly grins and saucer-eyed shyness and looked like a one-woman revival of the decade whence she sprang. She was decked out in a "Borderline"-era black clip-on hair bow and a strapless black prom-dress number, which she kept earnestly tugging over her cleavage.

Without another word to the press, Ms. Love turned, efficiently collected Ms. Ryder, and strode out of the Hugo Boss store and into the car that would take her to the Tea Room.

Though the press was barred from witnessing Ms. Love's performance, someone who attended told The Transom that the original grungette "totally rocked the house," albeit sans the Richard Tyler dress and the necklace of thieving, murdering Romans. Congratulating the crowd for being fashionista-free, Ms. Love did her set–which included "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "California Here I Come" and "I Am Lucky"–in a red slip, red dress, black bikini underwear and torn black fishnets.

At one point, Ms. Love, apparently fed up with the stodgy crowd, urged Ms. Ryder to join her onstage, proclaiming: "We're the two most fucked-up Jewish intellectual cunts on the planet." According to the concert-goer, she also bragged that back home in Oregon, Ms. Love's dad had sold Ms. Ryder's dad $200 worth of "oregano." Ms. Love also coaxed Ms. Ryder to join her on "Long Black Veil" by pleading, "Be a good girl, let it out!"

Ms. Love spent a lot of time standing on tables and shedding clothes one piece at a time, until night's end found her in the stockings, underwear and bra with her slip half off–fiddling with her clothes while Rome burned.
 
 
 

Rebecca Traister
New York Observer, June 25, 2001