Serving the Servant : Remembering Kurt Cobain (9780062861672) by Goldberg Danny

Author:Goldberg, Danny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

Ten

Vanity Fair

In “Territorial Pissings” Kurt warns, “Just because you’re paranoid / Don’t mean they’re not after you.” Courtney probably should have kept this in mind when she decided to talk to Lynn Hirschberg for a feature about her in Vanity Fair.

Hirschberg usually wrote about celebrities a cultural universe removed from punk rock, but Courtney had no reason to assume that her entry into mainstream media wouldn’t be another triumph. For the previous couple of years, she had been on a roll. She had traveled an extraordinary distance, from living on the margins of society and eking out a living as a stripper to signing to Caroline, securing Kim Gordon as her producer, being warmly embraced by the rock press, falling in love and marrying Kurt, and getting signed to DGC/Geffen. By the alchemy of her intelligence, talent, persistence, Buddhist chanting, and good timing, she seemed to have cracked the code for the life she wanted.

Long magazine profiles are months in the making. Late in the process Hirschberg called me and I gave her a few quotes, but I was careful in choosing my words. Courtney, alas, was not. I had a wave of anxiety one day when I saw her animatedly chatting with Hirschberg, turning the establishment journalist on to a Riot Grrrl fanzine. Rosemary laments, “Lynn seduced her, obviously. Courtney thought that she had charmed her. She thought that Lynn was eating out of her hand and that it was going to be a great article.”

The piece was published in mid-August. An advance copy circulated by fax a week before it hit the newsstands and it was devastating. In a few passages, the piece captured Courtney’s wit, but overall Hirschberg’s polished writing was curdled by condescension and contempt. She barely acknowledged that Kurt and Courtney were both visionary artists but instead depicted them as amoral and decadent people with the depth of cartoon characters. In pursuit of her character assassination, Hirschberg relied predominantly on unattributed “quotes” from “friends” and “people in the business.” I didn’t doubt that Hirschberg had found some Courtney haters to give her their opinions, but that didn’t mean it was intellectually honest to take such gossip at face value.

What made the Hirschberg piece a nightmare rather than a mere PR mistake were two paragraphs:

In the circles she travels in, Kurt Cobain is regarded as a holy man. Courtney, meanwhile, is viewed by many as a charismatic opportunist. There have been rampant reports about the couple’s drug problems . . . they are expecting a baby this month, and even the most tolerant industry insiders fear for the health of the child. “It is appalling to think that she would be taking drugs when she knew she was pregnant,” says one close friend. “We’re all worried about that baby.”

Even more damaging was this:

Twenty different sources throughout the record industry maintain that the Cobains have been heavily into heroin. Earlier this year, Kurt told Rolling Stone that he was not taking heroin, but Courtney presents another, extremely disturbing picture.

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