Date: April 2002
Country of Origin: UK
Pics:


 
 

Courtney Love is in the back of a limousine taking her from Los Angeles to Desert Hot Springs on a detox mission.  "I've been on a bit of a bender after 9/11," she admits.  "I've got a lot of s--- in me.  I weigh 147 pounds."  Which is why she's checking into the We Care colonic spa for five days of fasting.  Slumped low in the seat, the 37-year-old actress and lead singer of Hole is wearing baggy faded jeans, a brown pilled sweater, and Birkenstock sandals, her pink toenails twinkling with rhinestones.  On her head is a wool knit hat that looks like something she found on the street.  Last night she sat for three hourse while her auburn hair extensions were unglued and cut out. "See?" Love says pulling the cap off.  "I look like a Dr. Seuss character on chemo."  She does.  Her hair is short and tufty and sticking out in all directions.  It's a disaster.  Love smiles a sad, self-conscious smile and covers up again.  Lighting a cigarette she asks, "Why are we doing this story? I don't have a record or a movie to promote.  So I guess this is a think piece."  She shakes her head. "God, what was I thinking?"
 

 IT'S A week earlier and Absolutely Fabulous -  "Sweetie!  Darling!" blares from a big television in the master bedroom of her L.A. home.  The singer, draped across the arms of a cushy oversize chair, has her eyes on the screen, with a cigarette in one hand, a glass of white wine in the other, and a cell phone shouldered to one ear.  She is oblivious to the stylist stringing  pearls through her hair and the makeup artist armed with red lipstick playing catch-as-catch-can with her mouth.  A toddler would sooner hold still.  Jim Barber, Love's boyfriend and music manager, pads stocking-footed into the room to see if she's ready.  It's just after 7 o'clock and the duo are scheduled to attend the Vanilla Sky premiere, which starts at 7:30.  "You're wearing that suit?" Love asks, eyeing his Richard Tyler pinstripes.  Barber, 38, is slight and sandy-haired handsome, with dark circles under his eyes.  Love twirls a finger: "Give me a butt shot."  He turns and lifts his jacket.  "Okay, the ass looks good," she says approvingly.  "Now let me see the front."  He turns again, opens the jacket, rolls his eyes skyward.  "Honey," Love says, waving her hand as if directing traffic, "move your package over to the other side."

          Love gets up in search of shoes.  "Dean!" she calls out to one her two assistants, Dean Mathison.  "Bring me my diamond earrings--the big honkers!"  She moves into the large bathroom and envelops herself in a concoction of Diorissimo, Fracas, and L'Heure Bleue, or, as she calls it, "Le Whore Bleue."  A moment later she's sitting on the toilet urinating, her dress hiked up, her long milky legs spread, with Mathison on his knees between them, putting the diamonds in her pierced ears.  "Dean's seen it before," Love says, laughing.  "When I was a street kid in Portland I used to sleep on his floor."  "I had not problem sharing the floor, the couch, the bed with Miss Love," replies Mathison, a gentle, obviously patient man, who first met her in his gay nightclub, Metropolis.  She had just returned to Portland, Ore., after three years in juvenile detention centers, and she was dependent on the kindness of strangers.  He has been kind to her ever since.

          A limousine idles in front of Love's $6 million Beverly Hills mansion, formerly the residence of movie producer and Muppets heiress Lisa Henson.  Catercorner to Love's home is the house where Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie live.  Love was in contention to costar in Winona Ryder's Girl, Interrupted.  In the end, Jolie won the role - and the Oscar.  "Once she walked in the door all bets were off," says Love.  "It definitely had a little gold man attached to the part... [Winona is a good friend now, and I think she sort of revised history that if I'd have done it, she'd have gotten her Oscar... because I would have shared."  Sashaying toward the limo, Love waves in the dark to her famous neighbors.  The lights are out, nobody's home.
 
 

        The singer/actress/provocatuer doesn't have an album to push or a film to plug or lemonade to sell, but she does have a potentially precedent-setting personal and political cause to promote.  Love is suing Universal Music Group to break her contract.  A win could add ammunition to an ongoing fight to change the way the music industry conducts business.  As it stands now, major labels issue contracts based on the number of albums (usually five or seven) rather than the number of years, essentially owning an artist for most of his or her career.  Love's complaint?  Under California's labor laws, no one except a recording artist can be forced to sign a personal services contract that lasts longer than seven years.  "What that means," Love says, "is that every seven years every single artisan in California can  redo their contracts except for us."  Record executives placate their most successful stars by renegotiating their contracts for more money.

Love was doing that dance with Interscope Records after she delivered 1994's platinum CD Live Through This and 1998's lesser-selling Celebrity Skin.  She felt Skin suffered from a lack of marketing support "and it p---ed me off," says the singer, who informed the label that she would not record another CD.  In January 2000 UMG filed a lawsuit seeking damages for five undelivered albums.  Love countersued 13 months later, charging among other things that her contract with UMG label Interscope was invalid because, technically, she had never signed with them.
 

She has an interesting, if not convoluted, argument.  Back in 1992, when Love was searching for her first record deal, she signed with Geffen Records. The label's founder, David Geffen, had a reptuation for nurturing such mercurial talents as The Stone Roses, Beck and Love's late husband, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.  But through a series of buyouts and megamergers, Geffen was absorbed into UMG, putting Hole under Interscope's control.  "They f--- hate career artists," Love claims.  "Doug Morris [UMG's chairman and CEO] have always done business one way: Throw it out there and see what sticks.  Pop hits that come and go - that's what they like.

Love feels empowered in her quest to become a free agent by the recent discovery that she is part Jewish. "Think about their positive contributions in this culture: Unionizing? Jews.  Leftyism?  Jews.  So to be part of that - the Norma Rae of it - gives me confidence.  Sitting in a room with the business-affairs people at Universal Music Group, they're not looking at me thinking, Crazy girl.  They're thinking, Bonsai Jew!"
 

If Love does win her lawsuit, she could do for musicians something akin to what Olivia de Havilland did for actors 50 years ago.  The actress sued Warner Brothers to free herself from a long-opressive contract and won, upending the old studio system and inspiring a legal statute - known as the de Havilland law limiting entertainment contracts to no more than seven years.  Parallels aside, it's hard to imagine de Havilland ever referring to her nemesis Jack Warner as a "wanking, wig-wearing piece of shit."
 
 

Last night'srain sits in heavy puddles on the pool tarpaulin.  Two dogs, a golden retriever and a big mutt, splash across the top, giving the illusion they can walk and run and jump on water (in reality Mathison had to fish one out from under the cover this morning).  Another dog, a beagle, sits in a nearby fountain, lapping at the green algae-filled water.

Inside the house, Love sits in the screening room, her knees pulled up under her slip dress, watching Michael Powell's film version of Hans Christian Anderson's classic The Red Shoes for 'like, the 65th time'.  Says Love, 'I read the fairy tale as a kid, and there was no rhyme or reason to it.  But then I realised it's a metaphor for fame and addiction.  You want these red shoes.  So you put them on and you can't stop dancing.  She dances until she dies.'  Pretty awful that just because she loves something it kills her.  'Well,' Love says, entranced by the ballerina twirling, spinning out of control, ' that's life'.  She gets up, pulls a cigarette from one of three different packs and lights it off the fire in the fireplace.

Love smokes a lot, sometimes using the end of one cigarette to light another.  During last evening's premiere of Vanilla Sky she would slip behind the theater's heavy velvet drapes for a nicotine fix, watching the film through a crack in the curtain, sending plumes of smoke over the audience.  As the end credits rolled, the stars were taken to the premiere party upstairs in a loading dock elevator and escorted through a kitchen to avoid the press.

It was a big-deal party, with the usual Hollywood suspects rubbernecking the Cruise-Cruz double whammy surrounded by a phalanx of agents.  Unguarded, director Cameron Crowe graciously greeted the well-wishers and wannabe actresses who sidled, squeezed, and slithered up to him showing cast me! amounts of cleavage.

"I could never go out with somebody like Cameron," says Love, who's close friends with both Crowe and his wife, Nancy Heart of ageing MOR rockers Heart.   "I love him so much.  But he's got to say hi to to the last fucking waiter.  He's like Cruise that way.  He's got to make every single person feel important.  I have so many friends like that - Drew [Barrymore] - and they just exhaust me.  I mean, I'm a rock star: I was here, I was gracious, I was nice, I ate the potatoes - love you, babe, let's go!  Not to be selfish or nasty, but to have to stay and make sure everybody likes you is like running for office.  Rusell [Crowe] doesn't have to do it.  Mick Jagger doesn't have to do it.  And goddamn it, I don't have to do it."

The first time Love laid eyes on Russell Crowe she was stripping at Jumbo's Clown Room in Los Angeles.  She recognized him among the customers as the guy in Romper Stomper.  Twelve years later, their fortunes having grown considerably, they met again.  "Russell is a really interesting and dark guy," Love says.  "Even just holding his hand I get shivers.  He goes through hell.  But I don't know if he's seen as many dead bodies as I have."

They were friends until the tabloids reported a liaison the night of the Golden Globes last year.  "We didn't fuck," Love says.  "We hung out, wrote crazy lyrics and poetry, drank tequila.  And we had a nice thing about wanting to be friends.  And then that tabloid stuff happened."  Crowe criticized Love in an Entertainment Weekly interview for not making clear that he wasn't the father of the baby she miscarried last May.  Says Love sadly: "That really hurt my feelings.  Here I am having a miscarriage with Jim's baby, and Russell's worried about his image."

Even so, "I want to be friends with him."  She laughs.  "And I demand an apology!"

Crowe's response to the tabloid rumours hurt Love in ways only teenage girls can understand.  "It made me feel like ugly Courtney," Love says.  "You know, Ben Affleck went on a talk show and said he made out with me at a party, and there's nothing further from the truth.  Did I issue a press release saying we didn't fuck?  It's embarrassing that Russell was embarrassed."  She looks up.  "Am I a sexual pariah?"

When she doesn't have red lipstick smeared all over her face and she's walking a straight line, Love is, i fact, a highly seductive proposition.
 
 
 

With Courtney, of course, life rarely walks a straight line.  In another highly charged lawsuit going through the courts, Love is currently suing Nirvana's surviving members - Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic - to break up the Limited Liability Corporation they formed with her in 1997, making them equal partners in the lucrative Nirvana business.  Love wants complete control of the catalogue and makes the bizarre claim that both she and her lawyer were 'incapacitated' at the time and forced to sign an 'unconscionable' contract.

In an open letter, Grohl and Novoselic accused Love of acting for her own financial gain.  Since their first release, in 1989, Nirvana have genereated an estimated $500 million in sales worldwide.  Like Hole,  Nirvana were on Geffen, which means the Nirvana catalog is now with UMG - the very company Love is suing to break her personal recording contract.  Critics feel that Love is using the catalog as leverage for an even better record deal for herself, and that her stance of wanting to free artists from a kind of indentured servitude through her suit against UMG is just convenience.  Love denies this, but she does fess up to being capable of manipulation.  "Of course I'm manipulative!  Who's not?" she screeches.

 "Kurt's death was so difficult for so long and Courtney got bad advice," says Barber, a former Geffen executive.  "She feels she has a responsibility to her daughter and the rest of his surviving heirs.  In reality, Nirvana was closer to being Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers or Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band.  If Springsteen died tomorrow, should Max Weinberg have an equal say as to how his catalog is promoted and marketed?"
 

When Interscope president Jimmy Iovine called her with the news that Grohl and Novoselic were countersuing Love, 'I said "Fuck this!  I own Nirvana.  Bottom line, 75 percent of the fucking thing is mine, and you can't do shit with it without me."  Love proved her power when she blocked the sale of a Nirvana boxed set last Christmas, which included a previously unreleased song.  "When Kurt died he left behind a collection of music that is mind-blowing," she says.  "These are really insane, beautiful songs.  The point is, I have the Holy Grail of rock and roll."  Love sits back with a so there! smile.
 
 
 

The sound of a deep, phlegmy cough can be heard outside the door.  "I hear the cough of my daughter," Love says, calling out.  "What is that bronchial coughing?  Come in, Francesca!"  The door flies open and Frances Bean runs over to her mother and sits in her lap, wrapping her arms around her neck.  The 9-year-old is clearly her father's daughter, with Cobain's intense blue eyes and dimpled chin.

"Oh, when is the coughing going to stop?  When?"  Love says in a cooing, concerned voice.  "What's happening?  Are we on the antibiotics?  What's going on?  When was the last time you saw the doctor?"

"Last week."

"What did he say?" Love asks.  "Nothing in the chest X-ray?"

"He said it was fine.  He said there was nothing wrong with them."

"Well," Love says, rocking Frances back and forth.  "I only smoke in here and in my bedroom, so that's kind of good.  I had some incense burning the other day.  No more incense.  Are you okay at school?  Are your teacher's concerned?  Do you have your Kleenex and stuff for when you cough stuff up?  How many times has it happened today?"

"Twelve."

"You have to spit it up and not swallow your phlegm," her mother says.  "You've got to stop that.  You know what's nice?"  Love stands up and puts her hands on her hips.  "Handkerchiefs!  Sexy old handkerchiefs.  Like Winona [Ryder] and I got at the lace show.  I think I have some that are really pretty and have lace on them.  Frances, you've got to blow the nose."

"Where's Jim, Mommy?"

"He's in New York."

"Why?"

"He's doing business."

Frances has grown attached to Barber since he met Love more than three years ago while Hole were recording their last album.  At the time, Barber was married.  (He and ex-wife Lesley have two children.)  He declines to comment on his divorce, but Love doesn't.  "He was sleeping in the basement!" Love claims.  The divorce took two years.  "She positioned herself as this Oprah-audience-member martyr," Love says of his ex-wife.

The divorce was not without high drama.  Love filed a stalking and harassment suit against the former Mrs. Barber in December 2000, claiming Lesley had drive to Love's house and tried to run her over. "It was crazy!" Love says.  "I was like, 'All right, look, if I poached your husband when you were having a good marriage, that would be one thing.'  But the fact is I gave her a six-month warning.  I called her and said, 'I really have the hots for your husband and you're treating him like shit.'  I've never poached anybody's fucking guy!"

She reconsiders: "Maybe a one-nighter here and there."  Love takes a drag off her cigarette and exhales wearily.  "How you go from a woman with a degree in library sciences to me, I can't explain."
 
 
 

NEXT to the beds at Skipworth Juvenile Detention Center in Eugene, Ore., were clipboards stating the names and phone numbers of parents to contact in case of an emergency.  Courtney Love's read, "Whereabouts of parents unknown." She knew where they were, but she didn't want anybody else to know.  The 13-year-old convicted shoplifter was afraid that if it were discovered she had a $1,000-a-month trust fund from her grandparents, she would have to leave.

Love's mother, New Age psychologist Linda Carroll, is the adopted daughter of a wealthy San Francisco family.  'She was blue-eyed and blonde-haired,' Love says.  'And when her adoptive parents found out she was a Jew on her mother's side, they forced her into Catholic school.'  At 17 Carroll got pregnant by Love's father, Hank Harrison, a Grateful Dead follower with whom Courtney has no contact: 'He's a psycho.'

Love's birth certificate reads Love Michelle Harrison, Love says her mother always called her Courtney, after the heroine in Chocolates For Breakfast, a 1956 pulp romance novel about a teenager whose mother is a has-been actress living at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.  Love pulls the book from a shelf and reads from the jacket in a melodramatic tone: "'Courtney had a need for love that drove her on a frantic and hectic pursuit of an unattainable ideal!'"

It also turns out her mother is the daughter of screenwriter Paul Fox, brother of Douglas Fairbanks Jr (Fairbanks changed his last name).  "Douglas Fairbanks is my great-uncle!" Love says wowed. "Oh my God!  And if you think I'm going to fucking let the fact that I'm the great-niece of one of the first movie stars go down unnoticed, you are out of your fucking tree, thank you very much!" declares Love.  "Finally I got a little pedigree!"

Ayear after Love was born, her parents divorced, and Carroll embraced the '60's lifestyle, remarrying several times and  living in New Zealand with her daughter.  "She didn't really want me around," Love says. "And I didn't want to be around her."  When Love was 11 she returned to the States, and moved to Oregon with her mother's gay therapist, who was happy to let her board for three grand a month.  Two years later, Love found a more structured life by stealing her way into Hillcrest Juvenile Detention Centre and then into Skipworth.  A social worker filed a report with Oregon Children's
Services in 1980 stating "Courtney... repeatedly asks for authorities to find her a 'home.'  It is apparent that Courtney has been in search of a family life she has been deprived of for so many years.

Once out on her own, Love led an itinerant existence stripping, acting, and punk-rocking her way from Portland to Dublin to Hong Kong to Minneapolis to San Francisco to Los Angeles.  Keeping track of exactly where Love was and when is like keeping up with her current suings and counter-suings and the speculations they ensue - not easy.

By 1982 she was living in Malibu with her "first real boyfriend," Jeff Mann.  The couple soon fell into the culture of heroin, the drug on whichshe would later become dependent.  After Mann broke up with her, Love moved in with his mother, Bernadene Morgan, a Hollywood costume designer whose credits include The Eyes of Laura and American Gigolo.  Part of Love's lore is that she worked in Paramount's wardrobe department: 'The shit they were throwing out was allgoing into my closet.  I was wearing Lauren Becall's shoes, Grace Kelly's dresses, and Frances Farmer's hats.'  But it was really Morgan that worked there, letting Love tag along.  'She spent a lot of time with me there,' Morgan remembers.  'She was fascinated by the clothes and so excited when she found something genuine.'

The rest of her time was spent writing what Morgan describes as 'very deep, soulful stuff that she'd always just leave around the house.' Morgan suspected Love was still doing drugs but encouraged her interest in acting, dropping her off at casting calls for movie extras.  Her first time out she was typecast as a punk rocker.  'And when Courtney walked back into the house that day she said, "I'm changing my name."  And that's when she became Courtney Love.'
 
 

LOVE taps on the limousine's glass divider, which is  marked with a big "no smoking" sticker; and asks the driver
for a match.  She was four hours late leaving for the long drive to the We Care spa, citing 'phone drama'.  The limo is strewn with a duffel bag, books, a carton of cigarettes, and her guitar.  Love's been writing songs for months, playing them for close friends.  Written before September 11th, the original version of 'Life Despite God' might never be recorded.  'I keep not wanting to sing this one line,' Love says.  "And the plane can go down, we can all hit the ground, God knows what I've done to you..."

Love has also been fighting to keep her movie career on track.  She has just been cast in Vixens as the real-life Victoria Woodhill - the first woman to run for President.  And she's still trying to get a Janis Joplin project going: "I'm no spring chicken.  So if I don't play Janis now, I'll be almost 10 years older than the woman when she died."  When she grows up, Frances wants to be an equine veterinarian (she named her horse Charisma).  But she could well take after her mother.

"She's got a five-octave voice," Love says, proudly.  "And she's been in two school plays - Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin.  She's got range.... You know Kurt was enamored of Hollywood.  He was going to do a part in The New Age with Judy Davis.  He was entranced by the whole Hollywood thing.  He courted [director] Gus Van Sant... Nobody had any idea because they all had this picture of St. Kurt the Unambitious.  But, it's like, Oh, God, please!  He's more ambitious than Ashley Judd on latte!"

A road sign up ahead: In-N-Out Burger, one half mile.  "I'm starving," Love says, pushing a button to lower the glass between her and the driver.  "Excuse me, sir," she says.  "I want to stop at the In-N-Out Burger."  Love figures it will be her last supper before five days of fasting and colonics.  "What difference does it make?" she reasons.  "Tomorrow morning it'll be in and out of me."

Turning into the fast-food joint's parking lot, the driver informs her that the limousine is too big for the drive-through.  "Are you going inside?" he asks.  "No," Love replies.  "You're going inside.  We'll take two cheeseburgers, two fries, and two large Cokes."

Asked what their lives would be like if Cobain were alive, Love replies, "I don't think we'd still be together.  He had such a high tolerance for [heroin], always going to death's door.  By the time I stopped doing it six years ago, I'd had it. Enough."

"But I'd have found him a good wife.  I'm good at that.  I get along with my ex-boyfriends.  Edward [Norton] loves/hates me.  But I did dump him, so it's got to be tough.  He still has mine and Kurt's marriage bed, I should get that back.  Jeff Mann, dumped me, and after that I said, 'I'm never getting dumped again.'  Well, if you consider a suicide getting dumped, which I guess it is, getting dumped on an epic level."

Cobain has yet to be put to rest, in more ways than one.  His 23-volume journals were finally sold last month to Riverhead Books for a reported $2.8 million and are certain to cause a storm on publication.  And after splitting the husband's ashes with his mother, Love has yet to find the suitable spot to bury them.  "I can't get Kurt buried anywhere," Love says.  "No graveyard in Seattle wants him.  Although many in Hollywood do.  They like that kind of tourism."
 
 

After five hours on the road, not five minutes away from We Care, Love changes her mind and tells the driver to turn around.  "It's too late to go to the We Care spa tonight," she says.  "It's so grubby and gross there."   Dialing information, she calls the Ritz in Palm Springs.  "It's Courtney Love," she says. "I'm in the neighborhood and I'd like to book a luxury suite for tonight.  Do you have one with a private pool?  No?  Hot tub?  Is a masseuse available?  No?  Then open the yellow pages and get a certified massage therapist to come in and let's hope it's not a crazy old hooker or something."

The limo pulls up.  The door is opened.  And out steps "a Dr. Seuss character on chemo."  But she doesn't care.  Hat in hand, Love smiles back at the stares, lights a cigarette, and strolls through the lobby to the front desk, where the clerk, as instructed, is scanning the yellow pages.
 
 
 

One week later, "Hey, it's me," Love's voice is low and conspiratorial on the answering machine.  She's calling about an interview request I left with her mother.

"Let's not scare my scary mother, because she's scary, okay?" she says.  But that's not all.   "I have to deal with legal insanity today.  I'm being followed.  Some guy in a black SUV, and it's terrifying.  If anything should happen to me in the next month that seems untoward, don't say I didn't say anything about it... I have two phone lines, so I don't think my phones are tapped.  I've been taking pictures of the car for court.  I think they're trying to get to me. You have to remember a lot of the music business ends up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where the Sopranos really come from, so there's an aspect that's frightening, about as frightening as my mom...."