The vanishing of Courtney’s beauty was among the least of her worries in a childhood characterized by frenzy and motion. “It was autumn in San Francisco, the season of the witch, 1964” is how the legend begins in Brite’s biography. Her father, Hank, was already ambivalent about his pregnant wife, Linda, who “nurtured her fetus in a heady broth of fear and sugar” as she was drawn to sweets but increasingly repulsed by her own reflection. The prenatal potion in which Courtney was forged was the first of many odd pairings in her early life: a cripplingly attached mother who was hopelessly inept at child care, and a mostly negligent father who gathered his attention together for Courtney just long enough to dose her with LSD at the age of four, a claim that her father denies. After her parents’ divorce, she was shuffled around the globe, her life spent with a network of friends and relatives and punctuated by time in boarding schools and in the juvenile justice system. Brite’s biography features detailed reports from the institutions where she stayed. Her disruptive anger and penchant for obscenity make frequent appearances, but the most consistent remarks are about Courtney’s exceptional intelligence and her chillingly brilliant imagination. “Courtney dreamed about keeping tiny people in jars and starving them, about starting a farm for women where she would beat them and make them beautiful” is among the more colorful descriptions from Courtney’s otherworldly mind.12
The 1980s were Courtney’s stumbling apprenticeship through social climbing that prepared her for the more ambitious scaling she would perform in her wicked prime during the ’90s. “Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love first locked eyes on each other at eleven in the evening on Friday, January 12, 1990, and within 30 seconds they were tussling on the floor” is how Charles R. Cross introduces their courtship in Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain.13 Both have infamous eyes: Courtney’s were described in Spin in 1994 as “perpetually startled blue eyes capable of great ferocity,” while the “cornflower blue” of Kurt’s eyes is well-documented.14 Michael Stipe recalled during Nirvana’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, “The first time I looked into his eyes I just went, ‘I get it. He is all that. He is a very special person.’”15 This fact did not go unnoticed by Courtney. “He was super cute but he carried himself like someone who didn’t know it. That was part of the charm,” Courtney would later recall in the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.16
A fan who attended a 1992 show at Australian National University told music critic Anwen Crawford about seeing Courtney on the side of the stage. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her, because she was transfixed on him. It was such a romantic, fucked up, rock ’n’ roll thing.”17 “By far the most frequently mentioned physical distinction of the witch was the possession of unusual eyes or an uncanny gaze,” Professor Owen Davies writes in Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951.18 Operative witchcraft manuals frequently refer to witches training to fix their gazes on objects or persons in order to manipulate or control them. What if Courtney was not projecting a signal of infatuation with Kurt but siphoning his psychic energy, his genius, his very will to live with her gaze?
Like a bird accidentally crushed in the hands of a child, it is tempting to blame their unraveling on intemperate love rather than actual malice. Details of their courtship read like those of precocious goth teenagers: He gave her a heart-shaped box full of dolls that looked like dead children; they exchanged love letters characterized by mutual devotion that would read as saccharine if you cut out all the allusions to death. In Montage of Heck, there is a sequence showing the two clearly strung out, playing with children’s toys in their filthy apartment and exchanging loving non sequiturs. “Why do you think that everyone thinks that you’re the good one and I’m the bad one,” Courtney wonders aloud. “Because I know how to use my illusion,” Kurt replies, a clever play on Use Your Illusion, the album title of Kurt’s chosen nemesis, Guns N’ Roses front man Axl Rose. He says this with clarity, but it is ultimately without meaning. It is a turn of phrase that seems like it was pulled from some more ancient, prescient literary source but is every bit a piece of 1990s hollowness imbued with more profundity than it holds.
Later in the film, Kurt appears wearing what looks like some combination of a prom dress and a communion dress, a black rectangle taped over his lip slightly longer than a Hitler mustache. As Courtney reads an angry letter written to Sassy magazine by an irate reader calling herself “Stacy, the Kurt Slave,” Kurt moves his mouth to keep rhythm with Courtney’s reading, miming the outrage of the reader and gleefully submitting to being a literal puppet for Courtney. The performance is meant as a mockery of Stacy, who is incensed that the magazine printed a feature about both of them rather than just about Kurt, but the humiliation is entirely Kurt’s here. The gag is at once mean-spirited toward the teen girl at which it is directed and humiliating to Kurt himself as he performs it.
Kurt’s behavior during their relationship is a study in surrendering control of one’s identity. Concert footage in Montage of Heck shows Kurt standing onstage in front of thousands and lamenting that Courtney thinks people hate her. He then commands them to shout, “Courtney, we love you.” The crowd obeys him without hesitation, submitting to the disgrace of professing love for a woman they believed to be destroying him. Kurt writes in a note to Courtney, “Fuck of all fucks, let me live forever with you.” He not only exalts her, he seeks permission to take his own breath. “I love you more than my mother. I would abort Christ for you. I’ll make myself miserable to make you happy,” he writes in another letter. But mere submission to her brutality would not do; Courtney required his commitment to an all-out war on God. And he certainly made good on the promise.
After Kurt overdosed in Rome in early March 1994, Kurt and Courtney returned to Seattle, where they had a series of fights that were occasionally punctuated by urgent calls to their lawyers. Kurt wanted a divorce and to write Courtney out of his will. Courtney responded (and I’m ad-libbing here), “The fuck you are.” Kurt was apparently preoccupied with the circumstances of the overdose, and Courtney staged an intervention—that peculiarly empathetic yet humiliating ritual extended to addicts believed to be at or nearing rock bottom. It is a cleansing surrender for those who truly are and a brutal mind game to those who are not. In either case, Kurt was disempowered. And he wasn’t an especially powerful boy to begin with.