Spending time with Courtney Love is at once thrilling and exhausting. I’m at
the Style photo-shoot in downtown Manhattan, but we may as well be on stage
at Carnegie Hall. Love’s new album, Nobody’s Daughter, is playing and she is
whirling around, throwing layers of her white chiffon dress up and down (it
looks as if it has been dipped in vermilion; she calls it “the tampon”).
Love, 5ft 10in, plus 7in heels, is chucking her skinny frame about as her
eyes — part Princess Diana, part vampire — roll back in her head. What will
she do next? She falls out of her dress, baring her breasts like war wounds.
It’s the stripper in her, of course.
Someone who has lived many lives in one — tragic, gory, beautiful — Love, now
45, once wrote: “I was raped by the crowd, but I asked for it.” She was
abandoned as a child and grew up in reform school; fame has become her
security. The photographer has given up trying to direct her; she is doing
her own thing and doing it well. She can’t have had much sleep, I know I
haven’t — I didn’t leave her hotel room until 4am. And we saw all of
Manhattan before I even got there.
We met in the afternoon at Geminola, her friend’s vintage shop. Lorraine Kirke
does what Love calls upcycling: mixing bits of vintage clothes together. “I
have been making ruffles out of old flannel shirts,” says Love. “I use the
sewing machine like I play the guitar.” Scooping up lots of dresses, we get
in her limo to ride round the corner to Kirke’s house. The limo driver
wonders why she didn’t walk. That’s because she’s wearing 8in Louboutins.
The driver is promptly fired. Love tells me the story of the Louboutins: she
went to a shopaholics anonymous meeting. Only one. And one overeaters’
meeting. The latter worked; I’m not sure about the shopping one. They tell
you to buy things in cash in small bills. She paid for the $900 shoes in $10
bills.
At her friend’s house, Love makes us all tea. She is proud of her tea-making
skills: she once made a cuppa for Prince Andrew. However, I never get to
taste it as Love drinks from all three cups, her dark-pink lipstick leaving
its mark on all of them. She didn’t mean to drink everybody’s tea, of
course, it was just that she was talking with such passion, she didn’t
notice.
She stops for frequent lipstick breaks, applying several coats, without a
mirror, and says it’s not affected — it’s just how she does it. Again she
puts on her album, which is due for release in January, and tells me she was
inspired by Leonard Cohen. Out of the limo come mood boards featuring Marie
Antoinette and Cinderella slippers covered in blood. One song, Samantha, has
the lyric, “People like you f*** people like me.” When she was trying it
out, she got Mariah Carey to sing it. She loves Carey because she’s the
opposite of her. “We kind of cancel each other out.” She mumbles something
about the biopic based on her and Kurt Cobain, and says she’ll never watch
it, even though she’s involved in getting it made. “I don’t want to relive
it. My husband killed himself with a gun. We all know the Titanic sank. This
is the story.”
Love moved to a New York hotel four months ago after a stint in LA, where
things seemed to go bad, money being one of them. Talk to her about how to
write a rock song or how to dress and she is articulate. Talk to her about
money and she is incomprehensible. “Messing with me is a pastime in LA, but
don’t mess with my kid. The country wouldn’t stand for it. She is beloved,
because she is rock royalty.”
From what I can grasp, she made some branding deals that turned out to be not
real. She says the Beverly Hills police department were not exactly fair. “I
went to court 38 times, for nothing. Since then, I’ve not been able to make
a report — I could have a knife in my neck and they wouldn’t do anything.”
Thirty-eight times for nothing? “Well, once I was caught with Xanax. Then
the police lost my prescriptions. Of course I was being a bad girl at the
time, but I wasn’t caught for that.”
What she was addicted to was OxyContin, which she says is better than heroin.
Her love affair with it ended when the courts threatened to take her
daughter away unless she went to rehab. Since then, she has rediscovered
Buddhism, reclaimed all the friends who care about her, been compulsive with
her music and redirected her neurosis into songs. So when she talks about
being saved (as she often does), does she mean financially, physically or
psychologically? “Nobody has ever loaned me money. I mean, I was going to
die on a few occasions. Johnny Depp gave me CPR on one. That’s as close as I
ever got. I was watching that movie where he plays Dillinger, and I was like
‘Motherf***er, I never had myself any JD except CPR.’”
She is not liking the way the album is sounding on the Mac (we can’t find a
soundsystem in her friend’s flat), so decides we should listen to it in her
limo (new driver). We drive around the city, listening to her raw songs of
survival, destruction and rage. She lies back, cigarette in one hand, legs
outstretched, foot on the open window. She is singing along to her own tunes
and tells me this is better than drugs. Down at Ground Zero, we admire the
hole. Then she needs a sugar fix, so we go to an all-night cafe called
Insomnia for warm vanilla cookies. It’s the only thing I see her eat.
We go back to her hotel room, which is filled with vintage clothes and
textiles, magazines, flowers, shoes. In one corner, there is a Buddhist
altar, in another a blender. “I was on a juice trip to put on calories. I
have lived on cookies and superfood.” She says she is supposed to have
protein shakes to gain weight. “I got so skinny. I was 102lb. I got neurotic
about eating. That’s not right for a 5ft 10in person. I do not have
dysmorphia, but I think I experienced it a bit as I got bigger.” What does
she weigh now? “I think it’s 125.” She jumps on the scales. “It’s 130.
Awesome.”
It is nearly 3am. I’m jet-lagged and I can’t remember why. Courtney is in her
underwear — a black bra she doesn’t quite fill and printed panties. She is
complaining she let Joe Corré stay in her apartment for months rent free and
he won’t give her any underwear from his company, Agent Provocateur. She’s
had to buy a seven-pack from American Apparel, which she complains are like
diapers.
Love went from being a stripper to working with clothes. “My first boyfriend’s
mother was in wardrobe and I was her assistant. The first film I worked on
was Mommie Dearest. I used to measure people nipple to nipple. The first
line I heard from Miss Dunaway was: ‘Who is that fat girl in my eyeline?’ I
was terrified. Funnily enough, when I became a movie star for five seconds
[in The People vs Larry Flynt, for which she won critical acclaim], Sharon
Stone called me and said, ‘Welcome to the industry. When I got here, Miss
Dunaway welcomed me.’ And I was like, ‘Miss Dunaway has welcomed me
already.’”
She is moving into a loft soon and says it will be clean, tidy, uncluttered.
Right now, she is happy at the hotel. They bring her hot chocolate at about
4am. “They are the best staff in the world. When my bank account got
frozen, we had $14.32 a week, so we lived off the kindness of strangers. The
guy at the travel agency put his credit card down for the hotel. How
insanely nice is that? And we are on the sixth floor. Not love nor money
will buy you this floor. Russell [Brand] can’t get on the sixth floor — he
has too much traffic.”
We gossip about who is gay and who is not, about who she has had sex with and
who she has not. Not Brand, apparently. “I don’t do younger. It’s not my
thing.” The last time we met, three years ago, she was just getting over “a
thing” with Steve Coogan. “It was not a love affair. There was a lot of pain
to it. It was humiliating.” It was part of her penchant for chasing people
who she knew would abandon her, because abandonment is what she knows. And
if they didn’t abandon her, like Ed Norton, she would abandon them. My take
on Coogan is that she wanted to save him because she didn’t know how to
save herself.
She’s incredibly proud of her work on the new record, which she says has given
her the confidence to be who she is again. She acknowledges the fact that if
you are going through pain, you may as well put it into a good song. “I used
the pain, absolutely. But now everyone who reads this is going to say, ‘Oh,
my God, Alan Partridge. She did that.’ And the only way I can justify that I
found him sexy is the fact that he goes there. What else was I going to do?
He was there. Anyway I need to get in touch with Trudie [Styler]. I need her
to match me.” Because she was so skilful with Madonna? “Well, that doesn’t
matter. But the thing is I don’t have a pool to choose from, I only have a
bucket.”
I’m not sure if Love is ready for a boyfriend. She seems strong when she is
just being a rock star on her own. “I feel like I’m rebirthed out of that
Alan Partridge situation and I can tap into my own resources. I have been
up and down on the rocket twice. It’s huge and it’s phenomenal. I was never
in Nirvana, but I was around it. And the same thing happened [on set] with
Larry Flynt.”
Both those rockets came down, and her world shattered. Straight after Cobain
killed himself, she went on tour. It was ironic and not at all fun, because
she almost wasn’t living — the love of her life, her best friend, her
security, the only happy family she’d ever known, destroyed. Of course she
was going to go loopy. After the second rocket came down, all the bits of
her life that she’d been running away from imploded. “Oliver Stone paid
$750,000 for my insurance on The People vs Larry Flynt. I had a 24-hour
minder. Oliver has been nothing but good to me. Not many people in that
business believe in me, but he gets me.”
One thing Love never jokes about is her daughter, Frances, now 17. She speaks
of her with lioness pride. As much as she wants to protect her, she also
seems to revere her. “Frances Cobain is not somebody who is trained to
grovel.” Why would she be? She has a multi-million-dollar trust fund and a
gene pool that must inform her as rebel, genius and life force. Love recalls
when Frances was about nine, there was an awards ceremony that Michael
Stipe, her godfather, was singing at, and Bono was picking up an award.
“Frances was holding Stipe’s and Bono’s hands and she goes, ‘You guys are
jealous of each other, aren’t you?’ It was the craziest moment. It was so
brilliant. Genius. I was so proud of my child at that moment.”
It’s nearly 4am, time for Love’s hot chocolate and me to get in a taxi. By
now, I am delirious with tiredness, but my life enriched. That limo ride —
it was really rock’n’roll.
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