Kurt and Courtney

1989 was the first time Kurt and Courtney had ever met. “We bonded over pharmaceuticals. I had Vicodin extra strength, which was pills, and he had Hycomine cough syrup. I said ‘You’re a pussy, you shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach.” Kurt always referred to Courtney as “that junkie from L.A.”

Courtney became friends with Nirvana’s drummer, David Grohl. She told him she had a crush on Kurt and Dave said he had a crush on her too. Courtney gave Dave a present to give to Kurt. A Heart Shaped Box filled with seashells, pinecones, a miniature doll and a set of tiny teacups. Heart Shaped Box would later become a Nirvana song. In response to the gift, Kurt didn’t even thank her. He was cautious when it came to being involved with Courtney. “She seemed like poison,” he said.

Right after "Pretty On The Inside" was released, Nirvana released their second album, "Nevermind", which went on to sell eight million copies. Kurt Cobain was now a rock star. One night, Courtney and Kat were sitting at a bar when Nirvana’s Nevermind album came on. “So we sat there and we drank and drank and drank and got really mad. We realized no girl could have done that. I wanted to write a really good record and I hadn’t done it yet.”

One night Courtney went to see a Nirvana show right after her ex-boyfriend kicked her out of his apartment. She went to the after hours party looking for Kurt while she carried around a big bag of lingerie. Kurt put on the lingerie and pranced around in it. Kurt and Courtney spent that entire night together.

A few months later, Kurt and Courtney again bonded, only this time it was while using heroin. Kurt and Courtney went on so many heroin binges that after so long they would get sick without it. After they had bonded so much over heroin trips, they were became a real couple.

One of the reasons Kurt and Courtney hit it off so well could be because Courtney was Kurt’s opposite. She loved attention; he hated it. She was loud; he was quiet. She was a namedropper; he hated the whole idea of being famous. She was materialistic; he was anything but. Kurt once said, “It’s like Evian water and battery acid. It doesn’t matter weather she’s a male, female, or hermaphrodite, or a donkey. We’re compatible.”

They did have some things in common though. They were both slobs. Neither of them cooked. They were both feminists, and they both loved heroin. Kurt found an intellectual equal who could debate any topic with him. Her intelligence matched his. The two of them could sit around in bed all day singing and writing lyrics. Both Courtney and Kurt knew the pain of abandonment from their families. Courtney had power that Kurt liked, because her power enabled her to serve as a buffer between him and the outside world. He also liked how Courtney would mother him all the time, something he had longed for since his childhood. Many people also put Nirvana and Kurt down for becoming so famous and selling out but Courtney never minded the money and stardom. Courtney also served as endless entertainment. She had a great sense of humour, and she could go from crazy to seducing in a matter of minutes.

In January 1992, Courtney found out she was pregnant. Despite fears that the baby would suffer due to Courtney’s heroin use in the early weeks of her pregnancy, the baby was perfectly healthy. Kurt and Courtney started to refer as the growing child inside Courtney as “The Bean,” because of its kidney shape on the sonogram.

Kurt and Courtney flew to Waikiki and on February 24, 1992, Kurt and Courtney were married on a cliff. Kurt wore pyjamas and Courtney wore a green dress that once belonged to the actress Frances Farmer.

Courtney now had everything she had ever wanted. She had money, fame, a band, and love. Her and Kurt were truly happy for once in their lives; the only drawback was the fact that most of the public hated them both. Or at least, they hated Courtney. They hated her for marrying Kurt, their rock and roll icon, and many accused her of being nothing but a gold digger, and a Yoko Ono of the nineties. Little did the public know they would hate her a thousand times more two years later when Kurt Cobain would commit suicide. Nearly everyone blamed Courtney, and still does today for Kurt’s death.

“So me and Kurt get married and we’re peers-his band was always ahead, but they started before us. Then suddenly his band gets real successful and we're not peers anymore. He's involved in free trade in America, and I’m not making much of a dent.” (186) Courtney’s jealousy started to kick in again, much as it did in the old days with Kat Bjelland. She felt she was more important than Kurt was because “I’m more culturally significant.” She was sick of being just the wife of a rock star.

Courtney felt she was being put down so much simply because she was a powerful female. The media only seemed to become preoccupied with her only after she married Kurt Cobain. “I resent being a role model for marrying a rock star. I wanna slap girls when they say that to me. That’s disgusting.” (Kurt Loder MTV interview.)

On August 18, 1992, Kurt and Courtney’s daughter, Frances Bean was born. As the legend goes, when Courtney went into labour she wheeled her IV stand with her all the way to Kurt’s room (he was in the hospital for rehab trying to kick his heroin habit) and demanded he join her for the birth of their child. In the delivery room, Courtney was trying to comfort Kurt while she was giving birth because he felt so sick. He passed out as the baby pushed out while Courtney chanted “You will only have one head.” A perfectly healthy baby, despite all the tabloids claiming Frances was born as a mutant.

Right after Frances was born, child services said they would take her away because of a Vanity Fair article, which claimed Kurt and Courtney were unfit parents. The article also claimed Courtney knowingly did heroin while she was pregnant. Two months after Frances was born, Kurt and Courtney lost custody of their daughter. Kurt was ordered to go back to rehabilitation for thirty days. $240 000 later in legal fees, Kurt and Courtney got their baby back.

Despite the number of times Kurt Cobain went into rehabilitation, he never completely quit his drug use. He would come home many times high, and Courtney even had to call an ambulance a few times; he pulled through each time. She saved his life many times by rushing him to the hospital, and by being there for him whenever he threatened to kill himself. “He would of left this world many years ago if he hadn’t met Courtney,” said Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg.

In June of 1993, a drug dealer came to Kurt and Courtney’s Seattle home to deliver drugs to Kurt. Courtney chased the drug dealer away and Kurt got angry. He hit her so she than threw orange juice in his face. They began to scream at each other and wrestled. Courtney than called the police and said Kurt was pushing, grabbing and choking her. When the police got there however, Courtney claimed nothing happened. But the police confiscated three guns they found in their home after Courtney told the police about them, while Kurt tried to deny it. This could have been an attempt on Courtney’s part to keep guns out of Kurt’s reach as much as possible.

Kurt and Courtney often expressed their love for each other through shouting matches. They had a love/hate relationship, and even though they often fought about everything, they both claimed they were happily married to one another.

Courtney finally got so disgusted with Kurt’s drug habit that she quit her own. She went to Narcotics Anonymous and bought an expensive juicer and would blend up healthy vegetable mixtures to detoxify herself. She than decided she was going to get Kurt to kick his drug habit as well. But Kurt had a mind of his own, and by late 1993, it was rumoured that Kurt’s drug habit was around $500 a day.

While Hole was on tour, Kurt would stay home and try on Courtney’s clothes. Sometimes he would even answer the door wearing one of Courtney’s famous baby doll dresses. The Hole song “Beautiful Son” came out in 1993 with the lyrics “you look good in my dress…/he had ribbons in his hair/and lipstick was everywhere.”

Kurt didn’t like being famous. He hated touring, he hated the attention and he hated being chauffeured around. “Kurt didn’t have one atom of rock star attitude, and he needed it.” Said Courtney to Kurt Loder of MTV. He had lost many of his friends because they all either thought he sold out, or security guards would tell them to leave. His friends got the impression Kurt thought he was too good for them now. Kurt was also worried Courtney was having an affair. All these things sent Kurt in a deep depression.

Nirvana was doing a European tour, and Hole was busy in the U.S with publicity for their upcoming album, “Live Through This.” After two months of being apart, Courtney and Frances finally joined Kurt in Europe in March of 1994. To celebrate their reunion, Kurt booked them into a big, expensive hotel room and filled it with roses and statues. He also bought Courtney lots of jewels. When Kurt and Courtney went to bed, Courtney fell asleep after complaining she was too tired. When she woke up at 6:30 in the morning she found Kurt on the floor looking blue and he had blood coming out of his nose. She also found an eight-page suicide note. Courtney called the paramedics and Kurt was rushed to the hospital. Kurt was in a coma for twenty hours before he woke up. A press release claimed the coma was due to mixing prescribed painkillers and alcohol.

On March 18, Kurt locked himself in a room again threatening suicide. Again, Courtney called the police after she tried to break the door down with a fire extinguisher. And again, the police confiscated three guns and 25 boxes of ammunition and some unidentified pills.

Courtney threw one of many interventions for Kurt in late March in another attempt to get her husband off drugs. His band mates, both their managers, and the few friends Kurt still had left were all telling him he had a problem and urged his to stop using drugs. They tried the tough love routine on him. Courtney begged “You’ve got to be a good daddy.” The interventionists told Courtney to leave, so she listened to them. Thinking it was best for Kurt, she flew to Beverly Hills without saying goodbye to her husband. Kurt felt like his wife was abandoning him.

Kurt agreed to go to the Betty Ford clinic in California. After two days he disappeared from the clinic. Before he left, he called Courtney and said, “No matter what happens, I want you to remember I love you.”

After Kurt disappeared, Courtney filed a missing person’s report. Courtney also hired a private investigator to track Kurt down. The private investigators name was Tom Grant. Courtney called various drug dealer houses looking for her husband and wanted to go to Seattle because she thought Kurt would go back there. But the interventionists told her to stay put in Beverly Hills, so she did. “I didn’t listen to my gut,” she would later say.

On April 8th, 1994, an electrician found Kurt Cobain’s body in their Seattle home. Kurt had injected himself with a lethal dose of heroin and shot himself in the head two days earlier on April 6th. “How can you replace a prince? Kurt was a prince. People say, ‘Oh, she was so lucky.’ Yeah, damn right I was lucky.” (Kurt Loder interview.)

A few days after Kurt’s body was found, Hole’s new album “Live Through This” was released. The album had an appropriate name. “I’m not physic but my lyrics are.” (Kurt Loder interview.)