LOVE LANDS ON THE MOON LOS ANGELES -- She has her father's eyes. It is the intense stare of Kurt Cobain that greets visitors to Suite 1206 at the Four Seasons Hotel. Those eyes are sad. Seven-year-old Frances Bean Cobain has her reasons to be depressed. She digs into the pockets of her blue jeans, looking at her mother in complete despair. "Honey, you owe me a quarter, right this minute," says Courtney Love. Love is practicing tough love--even if the rocker, who fronts a band called Hole, isn't always a paragon of virtue. "I make my daughter pay me a quarter every time she says a naughty word. And today she said j-e-r-k," Love says with a sigh, spelling out the word. This comes from a woman who used to prance around in torn, dirty, baby doll dresses. Once, she jumped into a mosh pit and fans tore off all her clothes. "Many nights, I curl up with my little girl and we watch the Disney Channel," Love says, noting your wide-eyed expression. Has Love mellowed? Well, yes and no. The new, soft Courtney says she might even get married again. Then the details pour in: "I have a great boyfriend, and he has a great wife. His name is Jim, and I love him. I'd get married if he ever gets divorced." On screen, we're definitely seeing a softer side. "Give me the angriest girl in the world, and I'll give her some training on how to be a rock star," she explains. "I get rid of a lot of that rage on stage, but that doesn't interest me in cinema. "In movies, I'm interested in the warm fuzzy of it all. I'm a cheeseball," says the woman who lists her favorite films as "Bringing Up Baby," "Jerry Maguire" and "His Girl Friday." She plays Andy Kaufman's girl, Lynne, in "Man on the Moon," opening Dec. 22 in Chicago. "Obviously, I turn girlfriend roles down a lot," says Love, whose voice becomes suddenly defiant. "I want to drive the ship. I want to kill the aliens. I wanted Ed Norton's part in `Fight Club.' But with this movie, [director] Milos Forman said, `You will come and be the soul of empathy! As I know you are. Nobody knows about how sweet you are and compassionate. Come give this to me!' " That Love can come to a movie set at all is the triumph. Little-known fact: Director Forman, Oliver Stone and Woody Harrelson pooled their own money to personally buy her insurance, so Love could be cast in "The People Vs. Larry Flynt." At the time, she was quitting drugs. How did Love clean up her act? "Milos said to me, `I want to put you in this movie "Larry Flynt." The studio is absolutely against it. Tell me you're going to stop doing drugs.' "Now, what am I going to do? Just sit in Seattle or go be in a Milos Forman movie? I remember Milos saying to me, `Give me your word.' And I have always been a woman of my word," says Love. How did Forman know he could trust her? "She gave me her word and I just trusted her. And she never betrayed me," he says. "Twice I found her shaking like a leaf from withdrawal symptoms. That is why I admire this woman so much. Through great adversity, she became a normal, healthy person. She is also a very vulnerable and fragile creature, which is why I cast her as Lynne in `Man on the Moon.' " Yes, Love is fragile, which is precisely why she identifies with Andy Kaufman, who attracted the scorn of many audiences. Love felt that kind of hatred after the suicide of her husband in 1994. Many thought she was capitalizing on his name or felt she was somehow culpable for his death. Others found it unseemly that she should move forward with such a high-profile career. But Love didn't seem to blink. Is she that tough? Love has insisted, "I'm like a cockroach-- the one that survives the nuclear blast." Now the bravado is somewhat tempered. "Yeah, well I am tough. But I'm not as tough as Andy, who loved it when all of America hated him. Honestly, I felt like such a wuss because I didn't like that phase. It really hurt my feelings. It was horrible," says Love, who admits that her stage behavior became even angrier during this period. Love says it was just her demons surfacing. She resented being identified as just Cobain's widow. "It's like who you used to sleep with has something to do with who you are forever. That's just retarded. If you shag someone or marry someone, then you are this person that society wants to make you into forever. WHAT? Stop that!" In other words, she is much more than Cobain's widow. "Look, my mother was a feminist. I grew up in a tepee. I was very sheltered from mainstream sexism." Born in San Francisco to prominent therapist Linda Carroll and publisher Hank Harrison, Love spent a big chunk of her childhood in Oregon. "I lived in a tepee for a while in Eugene. Not forever. But for a year," she says. At 12, she was in a juvenile detention home for shoplifting. Love remarked that she was "the angriest girl in the world," which was fitting with her rocker image. Is she still that girl? "No, I stopped being that years ago. I think that also had to do with the male figures in my life. Maybe there was a point where my anger came from the fact that I didn't like men too much. My response was that I treated men just as badly as they treated me. "Then I met men like Milos and my good friends [R.E.M. singer] Michael Stipe, Edward Norton and [director] Cameron Crowe, who treated me beautifully. Now I love men." She is also in love with little Frances. All decisions are based on Love's little girl. "I have to think, `I'm not going to play this concert naked because it will get back to my daughter's first-grade class, who will tease her about it.' " Frances Bean's friends are respectful about her late father. Love says she discusses Kurt with her daughter every single day. "We go through therapy," Love says softly. "I tell my daughter, `Lots of worse things have happened to other people.' " Love also has explained to her daughter that Daddy was a very special man, but he was also sick and hurting, which is why he died. Love says that her daughter "hears" her father. "She'll be talking to somebody who's not there, and I'll go over to her and say, `Who are you talking to?' And she'll say, `My angel.' That's how we refer to Kurt." - Cindy Pearlman, Chicago Sun-Times, December 14, 1999 - - - - - - - - - - - - -