The object of some adventures, of course, is fame. "We're in a culture where everyone is told they need to be famous," says Love, surrounded by overflowing orchids in the creamy living room of her house in Beverly Hills. "It's sort of like the gold rush. Not everybody is gonna come out to California, stick a pan in the river, and be able to go build a palace. Do you know what I mean? The California gold rush, the idea of rivers of gold, literally changed the global economy forever because all of a sudden, there was an idea of a shortcut. Prosperous farmers threw everything away to come out here. And not everyone needs to speculate like that."

An inherent renegade, Love stuck her pan into the river. Her ambition is pop-culture legend: "It never occurs to me that I can't be president," she says. "Never occurs to me." her life is a willful adventure: The heroin years might have been - however improbably - Method rehearsal for her seamless portrait of a junkie in The People vs. Larry Flynt. And her mastery of self-invention is an art: When she stole a Kiss T-shirt from a department store at age 12 and landed in juvenile hall, she gave up the bourgeois daughter-of-professionals cliche (her mother is a shrink, her father an author) and voluntarily took herself out of the middle class to join what she calls the proletariat. Today from her rarefied perch behind a locked gate, she rattles on about having come from nothing, having struggled, having been a pauper (once the trust fund set up for her by her family ran dry). She romanticizes her rock-and-roll past, citing her "Marxist training" and her punk-rock education. She blows long and hard about an "aesthetic" and considers herself a member of the so-called cultural elite. Evidently Love has given herself a lot of thought.

And why not? Afger all, she is fascinating. Paradoxical and at times a gasbag, but fascinating. Every move, every decision, is measured - from her small part as an East Village groover in next month's 200 Cigarettes ( a movie about a group of peers in New York in the '80s) to the comparative accessibility of Celebrity Skin, the Hole record that came out in September. She wants to win an Academy Award. She wants to sell a lot of records. She has a plan.

She has had it from the start. During adolescence, she developed an ugly nose. It was big and wide and her brothers got it, too, but it looked good on them. Her friends told her she should have it fixed. She said, "Fuck you. I'm going to celebrate my own generic faults." Then when she was first fronting Hole in 1990, she saw herself on the cover of the fanzine Flipside.. "I said, 'This isn't going to work,'" says Love. "This is not fair and not right and not in the plan. I just want to be serviceable and be able to do what I need to do. If I'm gonna speak and use my voice and my ability to communicate a character and a naunce, I have to be someone pleasing to look at. I don't want to play best friends and kooky villains. So I whacked it."

She went to the cheapest plastic surgeon she knew of - Wesley Harline in Utah, who was known for doing strippers, porn stars, and country singers - and she had her nose fixed.

"It was the best thing I ever did," says Love. "After that, my life was just a lot better because the human response when you walk into a room is just one thousand times better. You're gonna be perceived. You're gonna be able to speak and be heard. Nothing's gonna mar you or get in your way. Does that make sense? I mean, that's just reality."

Love wasn't entirely satisfied with the first attempt, so after wrapping Larry Flynt, she went to a posh New York surgeon to have a bump on the bridge of her nose fixed. This retooling, and the changes her face went through as she stopped doing drugs, led to a lot of speculation about what else she had done. Cheek implants, chin adjustment, fat injections? For the record, Love says she's had the two nose jobs and also had breast implants after pregnancy made them sag. "I'll tell you my philosophy," says Love. "One of the reasons that we tend to accuse people of plastic surgery - because it is an accusation - is because if you do, you're altering your appearance. You're lying. You're lying about your DNA! You're not advertising correctly. You weren't born with that partician nose, goddamnit.

"I'm concerned about symmetry and fine bones," she goes on. "When I have more progeny, I don't want to bring forth anybody who's - I mean, I will love anybody, it's my child - but I want to kind of guarantee the aquline thing so that they can just have a better life. So people won't treat them shitty. That's all."

In Portland in 1988, before Love (or the world at large, for that matter) even knew who Kurt Cobain was, Love admired his nose. "I was like, 'Goddamnit, who's that down here in the lower classes? Where'd that nose come from?' It was all about the nose. I had to have it."

Have it she did, famously and tragically. In advance of an interview with Love, journalists are instructed to avoid the subject of Cobain. But in conversation, it comes up. And in Love's house, it wanders in. Frances Bean, now six years old with flashing platform Sketchers and a high blond ponytail, is clearly her father's daughter. If she were a couple of feet taller, she might even be mistaken for Cobain. Love has a nice rapport with Frances, proudly getting her to repeat the word "hisbiscus," which she recently said in school, and telling her that she can have some of the marzipan cake that Love is serving for tea if she eats it "fancy" (on a plate with a fork).

Courtney Love was completely vilified after her husband shot himself in the spring of 1994: It was her fault, she drove him to it, she hired someone to kill him, it was the best career choice she ever made - depending on whom you talked to. Granted, Cobain's death was a defining moment in Love's life. But it was also one of the few things over which she had no control. "He was the coolest, hardest, most antisocial guy," she says. "And I was the coolest, hardest, most antisocial girl. Of course we were going to go out. It was like antipopularity. I was always gonna survive it. And he was always not gonna survive it."

These days while Love tries to balance music and movies (she's currently working on Man On The Moon, the Andy Kaufman story she's in with Jim Carrey), she's still trapped in an image that others have of her. The music press wants to canonize Cobain and somehow freeze Love in time too. A chill went through the rock-crit halls when Love turned up at the 1997 Academy Awards in a Versace gown with her hair straight and flaxen. "Rock is not redundant," she says. "It has no rules. That's the point of it, so fuck you for telling me I have to behave like Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain or your fantasy of Kurt Cobain, who never lived to be a man, so we don't really know what he would do, do we? You didn't even know who he was. You didn't what a glam-rocking, eyeliner-wearing, roach-scoring, feather-boa-wearing person he was at that point, so just shut your mouth. We don't know what he would have been like if he had given all taht shit up and had gotten strong and clean."

Obviously a lot has changed for Love since she got strong and clean. She brought a friend she's known since she was 15 down from Oregon to be her cook. She has dinner with Madonna, has lunch with Jim Carrey, plays parlor games with Ben Affleck, and finds herself in studio production meetings if she happens to be around. She calls Drew Barrymore one of the greatest friends in her life and her bassist Melissa Auf der Maur ("a virgin redhead queen") her opposite. Love "juices." And she does Kundalini yoga - the form that works the mind as much as the body - which she credits for her lean 138 pounds. "That's the irony," says Love, "because when I was a junkie, I was big." She has become part of Hollywood, but according to her, she's still an outsider. "I'm not arrogant," she says." "I'm not arrogant at all, as a matter of fact. I think I have a lot of humility, but I will not acknowledge - nor do I think I should have to - power structures that have been patriarchally put in place by people other than myself. Reality, laws, yeah, OK. You have to accept these things. But the laws of Hollywood? Post-Ovitz? Fuck you. I don't even care what they are because you can get into them and they are such a scary gothic facade and they are so scary and stupid and gross."

She tells a story about a studio executive coming down to the Man on the Moon set. He swaggers in, wearing some kind of suit, tanned, and too good-looking. He obviously went to an Ivy League school. He's talking to Jim Carrey, talking to the producer, really annoying Love. "It was just like, uh-uh-uh studio executive on the set," she says." And I just froze up. I had to do a scene and I just froze up. Well, check it out. I go to my friend's birthday party and I'm having a margarita and I'm talking to this guy. He's kind of cute and he's wearing like a femme-y corduroy kind of old coat with frayed edges, and I realize it's, like, Kevin Mishner, the same guy! And I was like, Dude, wait! You have to stop using Mike Ovitz as your role model because you're never gonna get access to fertile brains like mine if you're working that St. Bart's three-piece thing. It doesn't work." As Love herself will tell you, she's out to change the landscape.

"I had to go to Portland a week or two ago," she says. "I was at the hotel I'd been at for years, and I was looking over at Mary's Topless, where I used to have to work.And I was like, Mary's Topless. My first strip club. And I was thinking, I'm so glad I ran away to Los Angeles because it makes me not from here. My home is L.A. It just works for me. I want rain, I want culture. But I have culture, and I wake up every morning and it looks like the Roman Empire out here. Out in the valley. This is like Babylon. Within the text of no context, I find a lot of soul. Los Angeles is just so schizophrenic about context. You've got your Moorish next to your Mediterranean next to your modern next to your British expatriate next to your aspiring starlet next to your ex-madam now action-movie transsexual post-op next to your triple-A writer ex-crackhead Spanish-Chinese nursery owner. Here, it's like I'm the luckiest person alive. I know who I am."

That, it appears, would be a 34-year-old mother who screams her heart out behing an amplifier, slings her guitar really low, rubs elbows with the ocassional golden boy, makes a huge living off the adventure, and is at once wide-eyed and jaded. That, it seems, would be the perfect product of our time.