bonded with the ultimate rock chick – when she was able to get a word in edgeways…
'My daughter lives in a mansion by herself. A
17-year-old getting
$40,000 a month is outrageous to me,' says Courtney
She’s not only untidy, she’s hyperactive. She won’t sit still for a minute for the make-up artist, and as soon as the poor woman has applied Courtney’s trademark red lipstick, the lead singer of the recently re-formed band Hole, the widow of Kurt Cobain (‘He died 17 years ago: I’m so sick of my name and his name,’ she told NME. ‘I don’t know what he’d be like now. He could be into fat girls, he could be homosexual. We don’t know, he died at 27’) and the mother of American grunge has chewed the lipstick off, getting it all over her teeth. Her mouth is too busy for something as mundane as cosmetics. She simply does not stop talking. Here’s an example…
‘Should I wear the navy Balenciaga pinafore dress tonight, do you think? Amanda Harlech [the aristocratic muse of Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, and Courtney’s current New Best Friend] says I should ditch the tutu and the lace and wear more classic things. She was like, “Courtney, you got to sort it out,” and I was like, “I wanna do the Gaga thing,” and she was like, “You can’t, no,” but I don’t know. I wanted to wear the black lace dress Naomi Campbell wore, but Amanda said, “It seems a little cheap.” Shall I wear the Balenciaga? Or the Vera Wang? The Versace is more me, don’t you think? These are the only Manolos I can actually play in. I love John Rocha, he’s so generous.’
Courtney gets many of her clothes for free – ‘Half of them were purchased, some of them are gifts. Like Wang is purchased, no Wang is gifted, Gareth [Pugh] is gifted’ – but she bought the Chloé leggings on Ebay. Apparently, she has just been to Selfridges, where she browsed some Dolce & Gabbana before telling the sales assistant, ‘I’m not that slutty.’
Despite Harlech’s input, she clearly doesn’t have a stylist. ‘We don’t have the infrastructure that Gaga has: when she wakes up she goes, “I’m done with breakfast” and says to a roomful of guys, “All right, dress me.”’ Lady Gaga clearly rankles; a few weeks later, on our cover shoot for YOU, Courtney refuses to put on a pair of Cutler and Gross sunglasses, saying they are ‘too Gaga’.
Courtney in 1993 with Kurt Cobain and baby Frances; with Frances in 2009
Her skin is amazing: creamy and dewy. ‘My nose looks like a beak so I swore never to do anything again so I’ve never done Botox, no fillers, nothing.’ Her eyes are huge and green. I tell her she has Madonna’s eyes, and regret the words the moment they tumble out of my mouth. ‘No,’ she snaps. ‘I have Courtney’s eyes. I think I’m fabulous, I can’t get enough of myself. But when I was 192lb I thought I was fabulous. I thought I still looked really hot.’
I tell her she looks pretty trim now. I tell her too that I love Hole’s new album, Nobody’s Daughter, the band’s first release for 12 years. ‘What is your favourite track?’ she barks. She says that when she met Al Gore, he told her he was her biggest fan. ‘I’m like, “Yeah? Name your favourite song.” He couldn’t do it!’ Courtney doesn’t, it seems, suffer fools. I liked ‘Skinny Little Bitch’ best, I tell her, but who is it about? ‘Well, I would say it’s about Peaches [Geldof], except she’s not skinny enough!’ she cackles, and I like her even more. ‘Someone said it was about me, but I’m big, and I tend to overeat, and when I overeat I’m size 11. I’m over 6ft, so it’s not me.’
Courtney was born Courtney Michelle Harrison, in San Francisco. Her father Hank, a roadie for the Grateful Dead, abandoned his daughter soon after she was born. Her mother Linda was a therapist. All she will say about her family is, ‘They’re fat, really fat… and they don’t wrinkle, so they’re really strong and they’re really fat.’
She worked as a stripper and actress before forming several bands. In 1992, she married Kurt Cobain, the most beautiful, talented man in the world, lead singer of Nirvana (you can tell I was a fan). He committed suicide at their home in Seattle in 1994, leaving behind their daughter, Frances Bean, now 17; his suicide note read, ‘For Frances, her life will be so much happier without me.’
Courtney shocks me when she tells me Cobain’s estate ‘exceeds that left by Elvis Presley’. I can’t work out whether she is rich or poor. While Frances has 37 per cent of her father’s estate put by in a trust fund until she turns 18, when Courtney talks about her own finances, and the fund’s trustees, it all gets cloudy. ‘Sometimes they’re at war with me, it’s very complicated, and I can’t get to it [the money].’
No wonder relations between her and Frances are strained. I ask her to explain what is going on between them. Courtney lost custody in 2003, and was banned last year from even contacting her daughter because a judge deemed her too unstable. Despite the ban, Courtney reportedly tweets her daughter many times a day.
‘She is going to be 18 on 15 August. Thank God, because then this whole palaver will be done. She lives in a mansion by herself. A 17-year-old getting $40,000 a month is outrageous to me, that’s on top of them paying for the mansion. She lives with her nanny, and Grandma Wendy and Kim [Kurt Cobain’s mother and sister] live two doors down, but there’s no drug testing going on. It’s a lot of money for a normal person. It’s enough money to kill her, if she is doing drugs, enough money to be gone by the time she’s 22…
‘I’ve been paying for Wendy’s upkeep and she wasn’t in Kurt’s will, but I really love Wendy and she was a terrible mother, but she is Frances’s grandmother. I bought her a house, I bought Kim a house, restaurants, f***ing horses, and like 50 grand a month and I’m still paying it, by the way. Next thing you know it was Thanksgiving and my daughter had gone.’ Is this true? Who knows. Courtney’s lawyer once confirmed Cobain left money for the benefit of his wife, daughter, mother and siblings; where all that money has gone is anyone’s guess.
Are they in touch, beyond the Twittering? ‘We don’t speak on the phone, but we went to court so that we could start this thing called Family Wizard where our e-mails are monitored, so there’s no restraining order any more.’
It must be heartbreaking. ‘Yeah. I bought her a Birkin for her 15th birthday.’ Did she appreciate it? ‘She damn well did!’ I read somewhere that Courtney wanted her daughter to be in her band. ‘No, I said that as a metaphor, that if she was in my band we would probably relate better, because I’m so maternal towards my bandmates. Frances is so beautiful, but she doesn’t want to be famous. She was offered the part of Bella in the Twilight movies, and Tim Burton wanted her for Alice in Wonderland. But she wants to go to college: she’s very good at graphic novels. Me and her dad, we used to communicate on our satchels with cartoons, we’d do cartoons of our love life… Frances will be fine, it’ll be fine. It’s very much about her trust fund, and they [the trustees] hate me.’
Courtney is always getting into trouble with the authorities. ‘I went to court 37 times for having one Xanax, an antidepressant. Like, what did I do wrong, did I have guns? At one point there was an assault with a deadly weapon thing, but it was shut right down, it was a cell phone. You know, I’m not capable of assaulting anyone with a deadly weapon. I could probably punch somebody, and I have done.’ Is she clean now? ‘I don’t take drugs any more. I don’t take any drugs, and in America even antidepressants are drugs.’ I ask if the rumours that she recently tried to take her own life are true. ‘I had an episode a few weeks ago where I attempted to jump out of a window.’
Courtney takes a call on her mobile. I get the idea she is talking to a big-shot movie producer; she alternately shouts and coos. Apparently, a film of her life is in the works. Who would play her? ‘Scarlett [Johansson] is my buddy. She wanted to see the script, so I’d much rather have a friend do it. I’ve seen her dress up as me: she tried on a slip, everything was perfect.’
A few weeks after our meeting, Courtney split up with her boyfriend, 53-year-old New York hotelier André Balazs; he is the man who gave us the Mercer in SoHo and the Standard in Los Angeles, and had been linked with Uma Thurman. Courtney alludes to him in our interview, taking one of his shirts from her case and sniffing it: ‘I love the way a man’s shirt looks and smells, a stinky one, too. I think it’s stinky ’cause he wore it on the plane from England, so I have a stinky boyfriend, or I have a stinky whatever, if he bothered to call…’
On the day they break up, she arrives for our photo shoot in New York (she moved there from LA not long ago) five hours late, and is distracted and upset: she spends most of the shoot smoking (real cigarettes this time) and on Facebook. Newspaper reports say he dumped her because of her alleged fling with Kate Moss (‘It was just a thing that happened in Milan in the 90s,’ she told the Irish magazine Hot Press. ‘It happened and it was fun and whatever. I hope she doesn’t get mad that I outed her about it. I feel like such a kiss and tell’), but I doubt this is true. If you date Courtney Love, you’re not the sort of person to be easily shocked.
When I ask about all the stories about her affair with Gavin Rossdale, now the husband of Gwen Stefani, she is very open. ‘Gavin was my boyfriend for eight months, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing when he was engaged. There was a little something when they [meaning Gwen Stefani] started going out, but he was also going out with Andrea Corr. I mean he was playing around, I was playing around; I was going out with Edward [Norton]. Oh, Gavin was an Adonis!’
She surprises me when she tells me about all the years she was celibate by choice after ending a nine-year relationship with a man (she won’t divulge his name). ‘I said, that’s it, I’m not sleeping with anyone for the next five years and I was celibate, although it wasn’t for lack of anyone trying. It took so much energy away from me to be thinking about men all the time.’
I stand in the crowd that night to watch her perform; she chose Balenciaga, by the way. Her fans are all ages, both sexes, all devoted, all grungy (Paltrow seems too clean to rub shoulders with us mere mortals). I had asked Courtney what keeps her going, how she has the energy to get out on the road and perform again; I imagine she does it because she needs the money, but maybe she needs the love from her fans even more. ‘Billy Joel can do three and a half hours – it’s just a matter of exercising. I’ve been doing pilates, I’ve been going to yoga…’ Courtney Love treating her body like
a temple. Whatever next?
Courtney’s album Nobody’s Daughter is out now on Mercury Records
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