"What does the man that I married have any fucking thing to do with my experience as a woman? Other than completely destroying half my life?"
"Kim Gordon [of Sonic Youth] sits me down and says, 'If you marry him your life is not going to happen, it will destroy your life.' But I said, 'Whatever, I love him, and I want to be with him!'" Love hesitates. "It wasn't his fault. He wasn't trying to do that."
Love me do
She's been a stripper, an actor, an addict, a rock star and, since 1994, the seriously troubled widow of Kurt Cobain. Here, she talks to Laura Barton about her 'transgressions', the day Johnny Depp saved her life, and why she's been blacklisted by Hollywood.
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- The Guardian, Monday 11 December 2006
- Article history
Burning, but not out ... Courtney Love in 2004. Photograph: Scott Gries/Getty
She is wearing a pussycat-bow blouse, sipping lapsang souchong, her eyes tilted down demurely over her china cup. Poised in all her silken finery, the figure once described by Rolling Stone magazine as "the most controversial woman in the history of rock" is barely recognisable. As much as we think we know who Courtney Love is, nothing prepares you for the sprawling intelligence or the keen beauty of her. Love is not like most female celebrities. She is bigger than that. Her hands are meaty and her eyes enormous, her bosom has been surgically enhanced and her lips swollen with collagen. She looks as if someone has coloured her in and strayed beyond the lines.
But Love has always been about crossing lines. She has been a delinquent, a stripper, an actor, a drug addict, a rock star, and since 1994, the widow of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who committed suicide at the height of his fame, leaving her with a two-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, and a note that claimed: "It's better to burn out than fade away."
"Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt," she says today with weary exasperation, and she lights a cigarette. Her voice is a threadbare drawl. Love, 42, has just returned from an appearance on Radio 4's Woman's Hour where she was dismayed to find that the interview lingered on the suicide of Cobain. "It was this lovely woman in a grey sweater, but it was so fucking awful. She asked me, 'Had you any intimation that Kurt was going to kill himself?' And, you know, sometimes I don't know how to just do that. I thought it would be more of a feminist thing." She sits crotch-forward in her short skirt, legs splayed wide. "What does the man that I married have any fucking thing to do with my experience as a woman? Other than completely destroying half my life?"
Even before his death, Cobain had dominated Love's life. They met in 1989 at an L7 concert, when they were both fledgling musicians with burgeoning drug addictions, but by the time they married, in 1992, Nirvana had become one of the biggest bands in the world. "Kim Gordon [of Sonic Youth] sits me down and says, 'If you marry him your life is not going to happen, it will destroy your life.' But I said, 'Whatever, I love him, and I want to be with him!'" Love hesitates. "It wasn't his fault. He wasn't trying to do that."
By the time of his death, however, Love had become something of a hate-figure in the eyes of many of her husband's fans, and in the days, weeks, years of its aftermath, she has been accused of everything from driving Cobain to suicidal despair to hiring a hitman to kill him. Death threats have been made, abuse hurled and shotgun shells thrown on stage at her shows. Such was the level of devotion Cobain inspired, that Love was not allowed to own his death like other widows - she had to share it with his grieving public. Though she does, she points out, own his ashes. They are kept in a bank vault in Los Angeles. "No cemetery in Seattle will take them."
The most obvious comparison is Yoko Ono, whose own art has been for ever overshadowed by the death of her rock star husband. Indeed, on the song 20 Years in Dakota, Love draws her own analogy: "She spent 20 years like a virus/ They want to burn the witch who's inside us/ Well you, you don't fuck with the fabulous four."
Why, I wonder, did Cobain have the success and not her? "Cause the complete phenomenon happened," she shrugs. "After 20 years of people trying to find the next thing, to follow REM, he happened to be the one with the talent and the looks." Yes, but so did she. Love is momentarily quiet. "Yeah, but you know, I'm a woman."
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