Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [179]
Talking about a day last January when her husband Kurt Cobain’s band, Nirvana, appeared on Saturday Night Live, the 26-year-old singer is quoted as saying, “Then, we got high and went to SNL. After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.”
The shocker is that Love, the lead singer of the group Hole, was pregnant at the time.
Could she have knowingly put her future child at risk by taking drugs, especially heroin?
EVERETT TRUE Courtney would phone me up and tell me all this stuff she was telling Lynn Hirschberg from Vanity Fair. I’d be like, “I’m not sure this is a good idea. You can tell me that. I’m a music critic. This woman isn’t a music critic; she’s a professional journalist, and there’s a very big difference.”
JANET BILLIG I don’t want blame it on my age, but I didn’t have experience in this, I didn’t know. Vanity Fair is doing a feature article, it might be a cover—she has music, she has movies, she’s pregnant, and she’s married to this big rock star. All is good, why would it be bad? Courtney of all people is always so good at the spin, I never thought twice about, Should we or shouldn’t we?
COURTNEY LOVE Janet said to me, “You may never get another shot at Vanity Fair,” when I knew I’d get all the Vanity Fair covers I fuckin’ wanted. I’m gonna get 20 fuckin’ Vanity Fair covers if I want. But there was this haunting voice in my head: “You’ll never have this chance again.”
DANNY GOLDBERG Why even be in Vanity Fair? You’re a punk-rock singer. Courtney had this yearning for mass-culture acceptability and just couldn’t say no to something like that. I had a sense of foreboding about it, but I had no idea it was gonna be as bad as it was.
Courtney’s done a lot of stupid, self-destructive things, but I don’t believe that she screwed around with her pregnancy. All those allegations were anonymous. They were “Sources say …” and “Friends say …”
SUSAN SILVER Danny Goldberg called me at one point, saying, “I’m just calling on Kurt and Courtney’s behalf. They really want you to stop talking to people.” He didn’t specifically say Vanity Fair. Somebody else told me that I was supposedly a quote-unquote source, which I wasn’t.
There was one time when I spoke to an English female journalist that had come to Seattle. I can’t remember her name, Victoria something. She was so lovely and disarming that it felt like I was just talking to a girlfriend, saying, “I’ve seen some crazy shit that doesn’t make any sense to me.” After Courtney hooked up with Kurt, it was the first time that anyone had ever publicly trash-talked anybody in the community. It was really awful to have somebody with this addict behavior of conquer-and-divide. We had this really lovely, cohesive, supportive community, and this tornado came and started blowin’ things apart.
LOS ANGELES TIMES (“POP MUSIC: The Ruckus over the Vanity Fair Profile,” by Steve Hochman, August 16, 1992) In a statement by Love and Cobain that was released through the couple’s management company, they declare:
“The Vanity Fair article … contains many inaccuracies and distortions, and generally gives a false picture of both of us, including our attitude about … drugs.”
Addressing the allegation that she was using heroin after knowing she was pregnant, they continue, “We unequivocally deny this.… As soon as Courtney found out she was pregnant, she immediately contacted an obstetrician and a doctor specializing in chemical dependency and has been under their care since then and has been assured that she can expect to have a healthy baby.”
ERIC ERLANDSON I was known as a “chipper” for 10 years. Not all heroin—I was never a big fan of heroin—but just a bunch of different things. I was just dabbling. I was the guy who didn’t get strung out. Unfortunately, people around me didn’t have that capability. So that’s why I was more like the glue, the stable person in that craziness.
I was there at the hospital when Courtney was giving birth. It was an intense time. I was the only one around. I was the caretaker. Courtney