Never Fade Away

That was Friday, March 18th; that weekend, Courtney and Nirvana bassist Chris Novoselic led the delegation of friends and family who intended confronting Kurt over his continued drug use — and delivering the simple message: shape up or ship out. As Tammie Blevins, a Gold Mountain spokeswoman, explained, “people close to him definitely did not want him on drugs.”

Steve Chatoff, head of the Stypic Chemical Dependency and Mental Health Facility north of L.A., was intended to moderate the intervention — if everything had gone according to plan, Chatoff would have returned to California with Kurt by his side. But it didn’t. Someone reportedly warned Kurt that he was going on, and that particular meeting was cancelled.

“There was no sense in my going after that,” Chatoff later reported. “You need the element of surprise, to break through denial.” And as another family friend told the L.A. Times’ Robert Hilburn, “Kurt is so much in denial about a drug problem it’s unbelievable.”

The intervention went ahead regardless, a week later at Kurt and Courtney’s home in Seattle’s exclusive Madison Park district. It was strictly informal, simply a gathering of the ten or so people who cared most about Kurt, who just wanted to sit down with him for a while and talk. Courtney and Chris; Danny Goldberg, now head of Atlantic Records; Pat Smear, the guitarist who had been working with Nirvana on and off since the previous fall; Dylan Carlson, one of Kurt’s closest friends.

“I told him, ‘you’ve got to be a good daddy,’” Courtney said afterwards. “We’ve got to be good parents.”

But Kurt wasn’t interested. He would sit there for a while, quiet and seemingly acquiescent, his gaze passing from face to face — but he didn’t give a damn, not even when he heard that Gold Mountain had added their weight to the warning, reportedly by informing him that he would be dropped from their roster if he didn’t clean up. Instead, he told Smear that the band was through, and went down to the basement to rehearse.

Courtney left Seattle on March 25th and checked into the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, her base while she was in Los Angeles promoting her band Hole’s new album release, the now-ironically titled Live Through This.

The group had long since outlived the once-constant suggestions that Hole’s own success was built around Courtney’s husband. Although they now shared both a record label (Geffen) and management company, Hole had consistently delivered the goods — first on 1991’s Pretty on the Inside, on Caroline Records, which predates her relationship with Kurt; then touring with the Lemonheads to almost universal acclaim; and finally serving up an album which, under almost any other circumstances, would have been instantly adjudged a classic.

As it was, it came close. Like Spin magazine said in its profile “Love” in the issue which hit newsstands while Kurt’s death was announced: “Junkie, star-fucker, gold-digger — Courtney Love took the blows, but through it all she did it her way.” Now, with 1994’s best album, Courtney has justified our love.

Even as she ironed out the last details of the release campaign, however, she readied for the onslaught which inevitably awaited her in London. Hole’s next port of call, Courtney’s mind was elsewhere. She had left Kurt behind in Seattle not out of choice, but out of necessity. He could be stubborn as a mule when his mind was set on something, and all she could hope to do was simply get over, do her job, and maybe check out a rehab clinic she’d heard wonderful things about — the Exodus Recovery Center in Marina del Rey.

Finally, Kurt gave in. He’d be down, he said, on March 28th, and he’d swing by the clinic and see what was happening.

Courtney told a friend a few days later, “I was so proud of him.”

The day before he left for L.A., Kurt apparently posted a lengthy message on the Internet computer network. It was mostly inconsequential (“So this is the information highway our illustrious VP has been jawing to the nation about?”), but did include a few tidbits about his plans for Nirvana’s future — a “revamped” version of the last album In Utero and the upcoming European tour. He also mentioned plans for a single, the “calmer, moodier” album they’d start work on in the fall.

“If you’re expecting the same verse-chorus-verse — you have but one choice. Don’t buy the new album… or get used to the fact that the band is changing. Longevity, folks.”

He made only one reference to his recent personal crisis. “I’m still a little freaked over the Rome thing, and need some time to rest and get over it. You’d think they could make a good milkshake, but no.”

It wasn’t only Kurt’s health which concerned Courtney, however — even though that in itself would have been enough. The couple were still reeling from their 18-month-old encounter with the California child-welfare authorities, swinging into action following a Vanity Fair article which claimed that Courtney maintained her own heroin habit while she was pregnant with their daughter, Frances Bean.

The crisis was averted, but it was still raised in conversation — even Spin brought it up when they’d talked earlier in the year.

“Innocent,” Love replied. “Isn’t that obvious?”

Almost precisely one year before, on March 23rd, 1993, having spent the previous three months submitting to regular urine tests and checkups from social workers, the Cobains were informed that the authorities would be taking no further interest in Frances.

But as Courtney was well aware, it wasn’t just her conduct during pregnancy which had come under the microscope. It was her future behavior as well — and not only hers, but Kurt’s too. Among the threats she hurled at her husband as she begged him to check into rehab was the knowledge that social workers could return and take her baby.

“If we lose Frances… it’s over.”

Once Kurt was in the center, everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief. He was going to be okay. Two days later, Courtney’s whole world came crashing down again.

The time Kurt Cobain spent in rehab remains undocumented — hardly surprising, of course. More than a week after he checked in, the Daniel Freeman Hospital, with the Exodus Center he was affiliated, had still to confirm that he was even a patient.

But whatever happened, whatever treatment was meted out to Cobain, it doesn’t seem to have made much difference. He appeared to have vanished into thin air. Even Courtney was left in the dark.

“I didn’t know where he was. He never, ever disappeared like that. He always called me.”

Instead, she was left with the memory of his last phone call, shortly before he vanished.

“No matter what happens, I want you to know you made a really good record.”

She asked him what he meant — what was likely to happen? But he wouldn’t say.

“Just remember — no matter what happens, I love you.”

On Sunday, April 3rd, according to a source close to the band, Courtney and Geffen arranged for private detectives to be hired to trace Kurt. It was their belief that he would probably head back to Seattle.

Kurt was, in fact, already there. He arrived on Wednesday, March 30th, the same day he left the rehab facility, and contacted his old friend Dylan Carlson, guitarist with Olympia's band Earth, and the best man at Kurt and Courtney's marriage two years before. Kurt asked Dylan if he would go with him to buy a shotgun. "He said he wanted it for protection," Dylan explained later, which seemed reasonable enough.

So did Kurt's request that Dylan make the actual purchase. He was worried, Dylan said, that if he bought it in his own name, the police would simply come around and confiscate it. He and the Seattle Police Department had quite a history in that respect, as Dylan himself knew the Taurus .380 which had been taken away just a couple of weeks before, had been registered in Carlson's name. It was also one of the guns which had been temporarily impounded the previous June. The pair set off for Stan Baker's Gun Shop, on Lake City Way NE-Baker later remembered wondering "what the hell are those kids going to do with that shotgun? It's not hunting season." But it was not his concern, either. Dylan purchased the weapon, a 61b Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun, and the two left the store. Dylan later asked Kurt if he wanted him to keep the rifle at his condo. Kurt told him no. That day was to be their last meeting.

Where Kurt went from there may never be known for certain. Later on Wednesday, he was in a downtown gunshop buying second box of shells. He did spend at least one night at a property he and Courtney had bought the previous year, a little north of Carnation, a township 40 miles northeast of Seattle. Courtney would tell Seattle's Post Intelligencer newspaper that it looked as though he'd had company, as well. Balled up by a fireplace, in the still unfinished two story house which the couple were building, lay a blue sleeping bag which she had never seen before. A nearby ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts some, she recognized as Kurt's brand, but as for the others, she'd not seen them before either.

On Monday, the day after the private detectives were taken on, Courtney was interviewed by the L.A. Times' Robert Hilburn. She spoke of the horror of finding Kurt spread out on the floor in Rome, blue and still. "I don't ever want to see him ... like that again. I thought I went through a lot of hard times over the years, but that was the hardest."

It was the last scheduled interview she would do. The following afternoon, callers were informed by the hotel switchboard that her room was not accepting any calls whatsoever. An interview with the Seattle Rocket was cancelled without warning, although Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson explained simply that Courtney was feeling unwell. He promised that he would try to reschedule the telephone interview for later that evening. He didn't.

In fact, Courtney probably wasn't even at the hotel. Instead, she was combing the streets of L.A., searching for her husband. Back home, Cobain's mother, Wendy O'Connor, was instituting a search of her own, filing a missing person's report with the Seattle police department on Monday. Word had reached her that her son had bought a shotgun; in the report, she described him as armed, and possibly suicidal. But somewhat mysteriously, he was not considered dangerous.

Back in L.A., Courtney was voicing similar anxieties. "I'm really afraid for him right now," she told a friend.

In the days that followed, the Seattle police departmentpaid several visits to the Cobains' Madrona home. There was no sign of life. They would also check out the address on Seattle's Capitol Hill, where O'Connor claimed her son bought his drugs. Again, however, there was nothing.

Courtney remained in L.A., wrestling now with both her own conscience and the calm advice of friends. Every instinct in her body was screaming she should return to Seattle to join the search for Kurt. But other people, she admitted later, counselled her simply to sit tight.

They knew as well as she did how volatile Kurt could be when he wanted, how he would so often do one thing when he was asked to do another. The last thing anybody needed was for him to storm off in a fit of contrariness and maybe do something stupid. "I listened to too many people," Courtney confesses. "I'm only going to listen to my gut for the rest of my life." At the time, however, the advice seemed sensible. The private detectives had apparently made some headway in their search for Kurt-contact had been made, but Kurt refused to be taken back to L.A. Instead, he turned and fled.

He remained in sight, though, and while the idea of physically harnessing Kurt was reluctantly dropped from the gameplan, according to a source, a friend was directed to keep tabs on him.

Also on Monday, a music industry insider is said to have run into Kurt, and pleaded with him to check into a local rehab center. Cobain refused. Other sources claimed to have seen him out in search of drug dealers. 

There was even a rumor, reported one week later in the L.A. Times, that he actually telephoned a friend to say he'd bought a shotgun. What he needed to know now was, what was the best way to shoot yourself in the head? The friend's response does not appear to have been recorded.

By Tuesday, tension within the Nirvana camp was palpable, although the precise state of affairs remained a closely guarded secret, a decision which may or may not have been wise. It is easy to say that the knowledge that he was the subject of a major private manhunt might simply have driven Kurt further underground. But it is also possible that the more people who searched for him, the more chance there was that someone might find him.

Instead, the only news which had leaked out concerned the aftermath of the unsucessful intervention. Rumors spread first that Gold Mountain had indeed dropped the band from its books, then that Nirvana had just broken up, both possibilities which were only reinforced two days later, when it was announced that contrary to previously published information, Nirvana would not be headlining this summer's Lollapalooza.