*Till Death Did Them Part [From People Magazine]*

"He told me he loved me, 

and i know that he does," Courtney Love wrote, 

girlishly, soon after she and Kurt Cobain began thier 

romance in 1991. "I want to spend a long time with 

him." Her dream, of course, was not to be: Less than 

three years after the couple started dating, Nirvana's 

messianic lead singer killed himself at 27, a victim 

of drugs, rock and roll, and his own inscrutable 

demons. Tormented by chronic stomach pains and by the 


pressure of his bands enormous, almost cultlike 

success, Cobain turned increasingly to herion use, But 

neither the drugs deadly solace nor the wife and baby 

he adored were enough to bind him to life. The 

following excerpt from the book Courtney Love: The 

Real Story by Poppy Z. Brite, a former friend of 

Love's, is to be published by Simon &Schuster, Inc. It 

offters a harrowing look at one rock star's end and 

the anguish of the woman he left behind.



In 1993, after recording Nirvana's In Utero album in 

Minnesota, Cobain was hospitalized for a near drug 

overdose. After his release he bought several guns, 

driving a wedge of fear between him and his wife, who 

worried not only for her husband's safety but for that 

of thier daughter Frances.


By early 1994, Kurt's stomach ailment had come back, 

and with it, a crushing depression. He started taking 

Klonopin, a tranquilizer. And he started using heroin 

again, The combination made him paranoid and caused 

him to have hours-long blackouts.


In the midst of all this, the Cobains were house-

hunting, On January 19, 1994, they paid $1,485,000 for 

a gray shingled house on Lake Washington in Seattle's 

quiet Madrona neighborhood, There was also a garage 

with a small apartment above it, looking out on the 

lake. Courtney would soon have the apartment converted 

into a greenhouse.


At the beginning of Febuary, against all his wishes, 

Kurt boarded a plane to Europe to begin Nirvana's 

grueling European tour. On the first of March, in 

Munich, his voice went out completely. He was 

diagnosed with laryngitis and bronchitis, and the 

tour's remaining shows were postponed. Kurt flew to 

Rome and checked intothe Excelsior Hotel. Courtney 

joined him the next day.


Kurt bought Courtney roses, champagne, even a peice of 

the Colosseum. They began kissing, but somewhere along 

the way Courtney took a Valium, and she fell 

asleep. "I turned over about three or four in the 

morning to make love," Courtney later told various 

media "and he was...at the end of the bed with a 

thousand dollars in his pocket and a not saying. 'You 

don't love me anymore, I'd rather die than go through 

a divorce.'" Kurt had washed down fifty tablets of 

Rohypnol, a strong tranquilizer, with champagne. He 

was comatose when he arrived at Umberto I Polyclinic 

Hospital. Courtney was there when he opened his eyes. 

Later, beside him in the hospital bed, she 

whispered, "I'd never divorce you. Your crazy." They 

made love. They had to. They'd almost lost their 

chance forever. "He's not going to get away from me 

that easily," Courtney said afterwards. "I'll follow 

him through hell." She was about to.


When they got back to Seattle, Courtney banned heroin 

use in the house. Kurt could do it, she told him, but 

he had to go to a hotel. He went to a hotel. After two 

nights of this, Courtney was so insanely worried that 

she forbade him to do heroin anywhere but the house.



As well as heroin and Klonopin, Kurt had started doing 

speed. Never a big bather, he stopped washing 

altogether. He didn't sleep for a week. He seemed to 

have gone over the edge; nothing he did made sense. He 

dressed in hunting gear-boots, a heavyjacket, a cap 

with earflaps-and roamed the house with a shotgun.


On March 18, Courtney called 911. Kurt had locked 

himself in the bathroom with a bunch of guns, and she 

was sure he was going to kill himself. The police 

confiscated four guns, twenty-five boxes of 

ammunition, and a bottle of pills. On March 25, in 

desperation, Courtney staged an intervention. Kurt's 

old friend Dylan Carson, bass player Krist Novoselic, 

guitarist Pat Smear and three of Nirvana's managers 

came to the house and took turns talking to him for 

five hours. They threatened to abandon him, to fire 

him. Afterwards, Courtney could see that the session 

hadn't worked. Kurt had been waiting for then to shut 

up so he could go take drugs. At that point she knew 

that, barring a miricle, her husband was going to kill 

himself.


At last she convinced him to enter the Exodus Recovery 

Center, a detox clinic in Los Angeles. The clinic 

agreed to send an ambulance for Kurt, but when it 

arrived he refused to get in. The attedants wrestled 

him out of the house. Courtney followed them outside 

and saw Kurt spitting in any face that came near his, 

screaming at the top of his still-formidable 

lungs: "FUCK YOU!!!"


One of the attendents from Exodus pulled Courtney 

aside, "Legally, we can't force him to go," he told 

her. "If you love your husband, you'll go to L.A., and 

he'll follow you."


Courtney saw that there was a car waiting for her. She 

saw Kurt's blond head whipping furiously back and 

forth. She didn't want to go, but she knew she 

couldn't stay either. "Goodbye," she called out to 

Kurt, but she didn't think he heard her.


Courtney checked into the Peninsula Beverly hills 

hotel, installing Frances and Jackie, her nanny, in an 

adjacent suite. Kurt called several times over the 

next few days. He would nod off on the phone, then 

become lucid and say, "Yeah, I'm gonna come check in." 

Instead, he wandered around Seattle, looking sick, 

hollow, gastly. On March 30, Kurt and Dylan Carson 

went to Stan's Gun Shop and boughta Remington Model 11 

20-gauge shotgun. Despite the fact that he had been 

present at the intervention, Dylan says he had no idea 

Kurt was suicidal, and believed him when he said he 

wanted the gun for protection.


Kurt went home and stashed his prize. While he was at 

the house Courtney called, and this time she persuaded 

him to come to L.A. Perhaps it was easier for him to 

go to Exodus knowing he had a gun to come back to. 

Courtney was forbidden to visit him for three days. 

She was too desperate to fight; she just wanted Kurt 

to get better. "I was actually listening to the grown-

ups," she says. On April 1, Jackie brought Frances to 

visit her father. He played with her, then telephoned 

Courtney. "No matter what happens," he told her, "I 

want you to know that you made a really good record."

"What do you mean?"


"Just remember, no matter what, I love you."

He hung up. A few hours later he climbed over the wall 

at the rear of the hospital grounds. Then he made his 


way to LAX and flew to Seattle. When Courtney found 

out Kurtped the fence, she assumed he was still in 

L.A. She got on the telephone, calling rock stars to 

get drug dealers' numbers, calling drug dealers, 

driving to their houses to make sure Kurt wasn't there.


In Seattle, Kurt had gone straight home. On the 

morning of April 2, he took a cab downtown to purchase 

25 shotgun cartridges at Seattle Guns. He tried to 

call Courtney but was blocked by the hotel 

switchboard, even though she had told them to hold all 

calls except those from her husband. On April 5 he 

took Chim-Chim, a treasured plastic monkey he had 

shown a decal of to Courtney when the first met, and 

put it in a secret spot, where Courtney would find it 

months later. He left the TV on. He retrieved the 

shotgun ans climbed the nine wooden steps to the 

greenhouse above the garage, where he locked one set 

of French doors and wedged a stool beneath the knobs 

of the other.


Looking out over the dreary Lake Washington, Kurt 

smoked six cigarettes, drank some root beer, and 

scratched out a note to "Boddah," an invisible friend 

from his childhood. Then he injected a trible dose of 

heroin, and before it could incapacitate him, he took 

the shotgun's barrel into his mouth and pulled the 

trigger. The noise was shattering, but the silence was 

endless.


Over the next two days workmen and delivery people 

entered and left the house and grounds, but no one 

looked in the greenhouse. Night came and shrouded the 

ruin; daylight glitened upon it's cooloing surfaces.



On the morining of April 7, Courtney thought she might 

be having an allergic reaction to a new prescription 

and, in a sleepy voice, called downstairs at the 

Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for some Benadryl. The 

desk clerk sent up a security guard, who judged 

Courtney to be "agitated" and called the paramedics 

and police. The officer in charged reported that they 

searched Courtney's "vomit-and-blood-splattered room" 

and found a syringe and a packet containing a 

substanced they believed to be heroin. (It turned out 

to be Vibbhuti. Hindu goof-luck ashes.) The officer 

took her to Century City hospital, where a doctor said 

she was not high.

Nonetheless, when David Geffen, the head of her record 

company, learned of the incident, he urged her to 

check into Exodus herself. She acquiesced; maybe 

everyone would leave her alone there.. And maybe Kurt 

would turn up. She was terribly afraid for him. She 

and Kurt had always shared the same dreams-not detail 

for detail but interwoven somehow. But for the last 

two nights, Courtney hadn't had any dreams.



She woke up in Exodus on April 8 and turned on the TV 

to the hospital channel, a tape of soaring birds and 

crashing surf, She was about to flip through the 

channels when her lawyer Rosemary Carroll came in, 

From Rosemary's face, Courtney knew. But she assumed 

Kurt had died from a drug overdose. Despite the guns, 

she had always thought that was what would 

happen. "How?" she asked; Rosemary told her.



Courtney's counselor at Exodus tried to prevent her 

from leaving, but it was like getting in the way of 

anearthquake. They took a Learjet back to Seattle-

Courtney and Frances and Roesmary and Jackie. Kurt's 

body had been taken away, a couple hours after the 

electrician found him, and someone had picked up the 

dentritus of his skull. But no one had cleaned up the 


blood. Courtney forbade anyone to do so.



She climbed the stairs to the greenhouse and stood in 

the doorway. Thre blood was an enormous Rorschach blot 

in which she could see all the loneliness ahead of her 

in the world. She knelt and put her hands in it, Then 

she stretched out in Kurt's blood, seeing what he had 

not seen, the creeping-in of night and the chill blue 

of the dawn. Sometimes she slept, sometimes she sang. 

And always, always, she searched for him and could not 

feel him.


The thought of Frances got her up off the floor. She 

search the room for any trace of Kurt and found a 

single, filthy scrap of hair held together by a tatter 

of scalp. She took it into the house and washed it, 

and washed herself. She put on one of Kurt's sweaters, 

crawled into bed and swallowed any drug that anyone 

brought her.



An endless stream of people flowed in and out of the 

bedroom. Courtney remembered very little of it. Jackie 

brought Frances in, but the 20-month-old was too young 

to comprehend what was going on. She didn't understand 

why her mother couldn't stop crying.


At one point, Courtney went to view Kurt's body. His 

eyes were sewn shut. The hardest thing to part with 

was his hands. She had always thought they were so 

beautiful, and they had taught her so much: had guided 

hers on the guitar strings, had groped wildly for her 

in the dead of night, had bruised her. His hands were 

still beautiful. Courtney had plaster casts made.


Kurt's body was cremated later that 

day.