Free Love & Death by Max Wallace

article disclosed, such a condition would be a given if the mother was regularly using methadone at the end of her pregnancy. The article quotes the director of a nearby drug rehab center saying that babies born chemically dependent must go through methadone detox, but that “babies go through that well.”
    The fallout was devastating. On August 20, two days after the birth, an L.A. County child services social worker, brandishing a copy of Hirschberg’s article, arrived at the hospital to interview Courtney. The new mother was scheduled to leave with the baby the next day, but, after interviewing Courtney, the social worker recommended that Frances stay in the hospital for observation. Four days later, at a state-ordered custody hearing, a judge ruled that neither Kurt nor Courtney would be allowed to see their new baby without the supervision of a court-appointed guardian.
    The couple’s lawyers persuaded the court to allow Courtney’s half sister to act as Frances Bean’s guardian. “[The half sister] barely knew Courtney,” admitted Danny Goldberg, the president of Kurt’s management company, “and she couldn’t stand her. So we had to kind of bribe her to pretend she gave a shit.”
    The ordeal was taking an especially hard toll on Kurt, who had so been looking forward to fatherhood. “I felt as if I had been raped,” he later revealed. For her part, Courtney was out for revenge, and all her wrath focused on Lynn Hirschberg. In 1995, Courtney admitted to Select magazine that she had indeed taken heroin while she was pregnant, “or else I would have sued [Hirschberg’s] ass off.” However, that didn’t stop her from firing off repeated threats to Hirschberg, Vanity Fair and the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast. Hirschberg later revealed that she had received repeated death threats from Courtney, as well as a promise to cut up her dog. Hirschberg still refuses to talk to journalists about the article, claiming she is “terrified for my life.”
    She wasn’t the only one. A few months before the article ran, Kurt had given the go-ahead to two Seattle-based British music journalists, Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins, to write a book about Nirvana and had even sat for a number of interviews with the two writers. As the longtime girlfriend of the legendary Pogues front man, Shane MacGowan—with whom she had briefly split—Clarke was well connected in the music industry and was herself no stranger to tempestuous rock relationships. MacGowan, who is considered by many as a musical genius in the same category as John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, had recently been thrown out of the band he founded because of his own self-destructive drug and alcohol use. Clarke believed she could offer a unique insight into Kurt’s world.
    Courtney had always revered MacGowan, with whom she had starred in the ill-fated movie Straight to Hell. So for months she had been all too happy to cooperate with his girlfriend. However, several weeks after the publication of the Vanity Fair article, she apparently heard that Clarke had attempted to meet with Hirschberg to get her side of the story and possibly obtain the tape of the original interview. That set off a chain of events that has left both Collins and Clarke terrified ever since. One day in late fall 1992, Victoria Clarke returned to her Seattle apartment to find an hysterical message on her answering machine from Courtney. The tone of the tape is chilling:
    I will never fucking forgive you…. I will haunt you two fucking cunts for the rest of your life…. Going and interviewing Lynn Hirschberg is called rape…. Fucking bitch…. You’re going to pay and pay and pay up your ass and that’s a fact…. You’re going to wish you’ve never been born!
    The next day, with Courtney’s voice egging him on in the background, Kurt himself left a series of messages that sounded even more threatening:
    If anything comes out in this book that hurts my wife, I’ll fucking hurt