The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [153]
Did Kurt’s suicide note make any sense to you—that he’d found any kind of peace in what he was going to do?
He wrote me a letter other than his suicide note. It’s kind of long. I put it in a safe-deposit box. I might show it to Frances—maybe. It’s very fucked-up writing. “You know I love you, I love Frances, I’m so sorry. Please don’t follow me.” It’s long because he repeats himself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll be there, I’ll protect you. I don’t know where I’m going. I just can’t be here anymore.”
There’s definitely a narcissism in what he did, too. It was very snotty of him. When we decided we were in love at the Beverly Garland Hotel, we found this dead bird. Took out three feathers. And he said, “This is for you, this is for me, and this is for our baby we’re gonna have.” And he took one of the feathers away.
What about Frances? On the tour bus today she seemed like a happy, bouncy, normal toddler. But how much does she really know about where her father is?
I don’t know. On some nights she cries out for him, and it freaks me out. And I thought she didn’t know anything. [Long pause] So every couple of days I mention him. But it’s when she’s gonna be six and seven. . . . People are gonna make fun of her, make fun of her dad, and she’s gonna feel like she’s not good enough for him, and she’ll probably feel ugly.
He thought he was doing the right thing. How could he fucking think that? In his condition he was so fucked up to think that. If I could have just spoken two words to him . . .
And then he would have OD’d when he was about thirty-four or thirty-five. But at least he would have had those seven years to make his decision to be a heroin addict forever. Or whatever the hell it is he wanted.
Let’s go back to your life before Kurt. On the tour bus today you were talking about Frances growing up on the road, how she thinks everybody plays in a band. What do you remember about your childhood environment?
Guys in stripy pants in a circle around me, and my mother telling me to act like spring. Then to be summer and fall. Interpretive dancing.
People in tents with wild eyes, painting my face. I remember a really big house in San Francisco and all my real father’s exotic girlfriends. We’d drive down Lombard Street in a Porsche my father probably borrowed from the Dead.
We went to Oregon pretty quick, and I was in Montessori school. Then things got a little more straightened out. Mother remarried and went to college in Eugene [Oregon].
What was your relationship with your mother like?
A lot of it was—I believe in my heart—a projection that my mother made on me because of a repulsion she felt for my father, for which I don’t blame her. But it is something she denies to the death. If I had a child, and I was repulsed by the father, I would have a difficult time. Knowing the history of my father, I don’t know if I would try and make up for it.
There is some irony in the fact that given your own very public problems, your mother is a well-known therapist.
When Newsweek found out she was my mother in the middle of the Katherine Ann Power thing, she was just mortified. Because people have met me who were her clients: “If that’s your product, my friend . . .” The only advice she ever gave me in my life was “Don’t wear tight sweaters. They make you look cheap.”
But I’m not out to make a public forum of my relationship with my mother. It is what it is. She didn’t have an abortion, and that’s what counts. I’m here. I’ve survived.
Where was the picture of you as a barefoot young girl on the back cover of ‘Live Through This’ taken?
It was taken in Springfield, Oregon, when I was living in a tepee in a communal environment. There was an outhouse. And I had to go to school just like that that day. I know it’s very Freudian narcissism to use pictures of yourself. But my purpose was to say, “Well, that’s who I am.”
When I talk about being introverted,