Love And Other Catastrophes
Face Magazine
November 1998
By Philip Weiss
She’s a psychopathic control freak. She won’t talk about Kurt. She’s the most hated woman in America. You think you know about
Courtney Love. But spend time with her, get to know her and you’ll find she’s more frightening than you ever imagined.
Courtney Love was talking about Al Gore. Vice President of the United States of America. “He goes, ‘I’m a really big fan,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah right, name a song Al,’ ‘I can’t name a song, I’m just a really big fan.’”
You said that!
“Yeah, I went to this big fancy producers house. There were about 14 of us invited to dinner with Al Gore. And I said why am I here, because the only other famous person there was Kevin Costner. He said “We’ve done our research and we want your vote,” and I was just so proud. There are pictures of it. Edward has them. For some reason I looked really wholesome that night, and when the pictures got developed, its like me and Al, and we’re dancing a little, and we’re fighting. I was throwing my hands at him. I brought them up to my mother-in-law at Christmas and framed one for her. I was really impressed, which happens very rarely.”
Love drew another cigarette out of the pack on the kidney shaped table. Edward was Edward Norton, the actor with whom she has been romantically linked.
You’re jaded I said.
“No, yeah, its because really early on, living in Los Angeles, when I first hung out with Eric”-Erlandson, Hole’s guitarist-“We’d see a famous person and he’d gawk, and I’d say, Eric, that person is no better than you, don’t gawk… So in order to catapult to where I wanted us to be, we had to deal with people we were really impressed by, like Kim(Gordon) and Thurston(Moore, both of Sonic Youth) – or Michael Stipe, you have to be able to afford that person the consideration that they and their fame are very, very separate. I just learned to do that from an early age.”
Love finished her cigarette and got up to go to an alcove, and I heard a blender going, slicing through organic vegetables. This was late at night in the green room of a recording studio off Times Square in New York and she was working on Hole’s new record, Celebrity Skin. She came back wearing a moustache of purple green juice. It set off the black, fashionable outfit that she had put on for her meetings with movie people that day.
“Madonna was talking to me about responsibility” she said. “Our responsibilities. Some of what she says I think is a load of hogwash, and some of what she says is true. A 17-year old girl comes up to you and tells you that she does drugs because you did drugs. I mean that’s like a heavy, negative and social responsibility. How do you atone for that?”
"That girl is doing drugs because she wants to," I said.
Love would have none of this, “I see pictures of how I looked. Its disgusting, I’m ashamed. There’s death and there’s disease and there’s misery and there’s giving up your soul, there’s this creaky old man phenomenon that happens to you. The human spirit mixed with certain powders is not the person, it’s the demonic presence.
“If you want to go back to Madonna for a moment, a quote from Vanity Fair. ‘She doesn’t have a destructive bone in her body’ Well I have many” –Love gives a mature wheezy laugh –“and I’ve broken a bunch. I think self destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think that self destructiveness can also mean self reflection, can mean poetic sensibility, can mean an empathy, it can mean a hedonism and libertarianism and a lack of judgement. But when you’re living the fantasy of someone else’s shadow, you’re not light. Everyone’s scared of you, you can’t really make any friends, they want to have a big Hollywood meeting with you just so they can stare at you for ten minutes. You know what I mean?”
She slumped on a couch and lit a cigarette.
This spring and summer, as Hole prepared their third album,
Courtney Love was under attack everywhere. The film, Kurt and
Courtney, aired accusations that Love played a role in the 1994 death of her husband, Kurt Cobain, and while even film maker Nick Broomfield said he didn’t believe the claims, they were treated seriously in the press. The movie tapped into what appeared to be a widespread hatred of Love. She was a Yoko figure, demonized for sucking the life blood from Kurt Cobain. Once an icon of uncompromising female rage, she now seemed grasping and shallow, hungering for fame and acceptance as a movie star, putting on designer gowns to attend the Academy Awards and posing for Versace ads. Was she anything more than just desperately ambitious? And as for her music, rumour had it that Hole’s long delayed new album had abandoned the hard edge of the classic Live Through This for a deracinated California sound. Could she do anything right?
Linear Mode
