Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [216]
ANTON BROOKES Taking an overdose is a pretty big cry for help, so everyone did what they could to help. Everybody. There’s no one in the Nirvana camp with blood on their hands. No one whatsoever.
COURTNEY LOVE It’s only known to the inner circle that Kurt’s first suicide attempt with a note was in December of ’93. It was at home, around Christmas. I did all that shit you do, like CPR, like punching, poking, cold water. He wrote a big note, it was like a few diary pages, a list of reasons why he shouldn’t be alive and blah blah blah and how he could never stop doing heroin. It’s like, It’s the fuckin’ ’90s. The ’90s are going to be gone. Keith Richards does dope or did it for as long as … Whatever, it’s your lifestyle.
The inner circle? Janet knew about it, Rosemary knew about it, Danny knew about it, David Geffen knew about it.
SUSAN SILVER Courtney and I had touched base several weeks before Kurt died, after there was an incident. She had reached out and said, “You have to help, you have to help, he’s gonna kill himself.” So I hooked them up with a person that we’d been dealing with, with Layne for intervention. They ended up not using him. They did do an intervention, but it didn’t go particularly well.
COURTNEY LOVE Before that last intervention, Kurt dropped the kid. He dropped Frances. Not on her head. He didn’t drop her from a great height; he stumbled, he fell, he was too high to be holding the kid, and you don’t do that. And I was like, “That’s fuckin’ it! You can’t drop the kid, you don’t drop my baby!” I was just fucking outraged.
The great thing about our relationship is that we wouldn’t fight at all. We would have eruptions. We had three physical altercations. Around that time, he dragged me by my hair, dragged my cheek on the gravel. He’s stronger than me, and I’m strong. He was a tough fucker.
DANNY GOLDBERG Courtney had called and asked for some of us to do another intervention, saying that she felt Kurt was out of control. I was at Atlantic Records and living in New York at the time, so I flew to Seattle with Janet. She found some guy, a big Paul Bunyan kind of guy with a beard, and I think Silva came up and I forget who else was there. Kurt’s thing was “Courtney is more fucked up than I am. She should go into rehab, too.” “That’s not a great excuse for you being fucked up. You can’t solve these problems with the way you’re fucked up.” You know, a regular intervention-type thing.
I wanted to get back to L.A. because I have two kids there and had been away from them. Maybe I should have taken a later plane—I could have had a personal conversation with Kurt. When I did get home, I talked to him on the phone and he was kind of depressed. I put my daughter on the phone—Kurt liked kids a lot—and they talked for a minute. And that was the last I ever spoke to him. I don’t know what we could have done, if anything, that would have changed his decision to kill himself, but I’ll never stop wondering.
JANET BILLIG The last intervention was bad. It just went on for hours and hours and hours. It was inside, and then it was outside, at the Lake Washington Boulevard house. Everyone said their piece. I can’t remember everyone who was there—Silva and Danny and Rosemary, and I think Dylan, Cali DeWitt. We were trying to get them both into rehab. Courtney went to rehab, and Kurt went, too.
JENNIFER FINCH I saw Kurt at Exodus. Just getting him in there and visiting him. He was very disturbed. Very upset. By the way, he never jumped over a fence. Exodus has a no-locked-door policy. You can leave. He chose to leave, and Courtney did her best to try to get someone to find him, cut off all his credit cards.
MARCO COLLINS In ’98, I ended up going to rehab at Exodus, the same place in Los Angeles that Kurt went to. There was a little courtyard there where people go out to smoke, where he jumped over the wall to escape. It was a horrible situation, but it’s somewhat humorous that Kurt jumped the fuckin’ wall instead of just walking