TRUE LOVE
Courtney Love holds forth on her plastic surgery, her new movies, and
the laws of Hollywood.
When Courtney Love was nine years old, she was watching the Academy Awards on TV.
Tatum O'Neal, who was ten, won an Oscar. The next day, Love packed up and headed
for Hollywood to win one for herself. "I'm an adventurer," says Love. She got
about 50 miles before she was found and taken back home.
The object of some adventures, of course, is fame. "We're in a culture where
everyone is told they need to be famous," says Love, surrounded by flowering
orchids in the creamy living room of her house in Beverly Hills. "It's sort of
like the gold rush. Not everybody is gonna come out to California, stick a pan in
the river, and be able to build a palace. Do you know what I mean? The California
gold rush, the idea of rivers of gold, literally changed the global economy
forever because all of a sudden, there was an idea of a shortcut. Prosperous
farmers threw everything away to come out here. And not everyone needs to
speculate like that."
An inherent renegade, Love stuck her pan in the river. Her ambition is pop-culture
legend: "It never occurs to me that I can't be president," she says. "Never occurs
to me." Her life is a willful adventure: The heroin years might have been -
however improbably - Method rehearsal for her seamless portrait of a junkie in The
People vs. Larry Flynt. And her mastery of self-invention is an art: When she
stole a Kiss T-shirt from a department store at 12 and landed in juvenile hall,
she gave up the bourgeois daughter-of-professionals cliché (her mother is a shrink,
her father an author) and voluntarily took herself out of the middle class to join
what she calls the proletariat. Today from her rarefied perch behind a locked gate,
she rattles on about having come from nothing, having struggled, having been a
pauper (once the trust fund set up for her by her family ran dry). She
romanticizes her rock-and-roll past, citing her "Marxist training" and her
punk-rock education. She blows long and hard about an "aesthetic" and considers
herself a member of the so-called cultural elite. Evidently Love has given herself
a lot of thought.
And why not? After all, she is fascinating. Paradoxical and at times a gasbag, but
fascinating. Every move, every decision, is measured - from her small part as an
East Village groover in next month's 200 Cigarettes (a movie about a group of
peers in New York in the '80s) to the comparative accessibility of Celebrity Skin,
the Hole record that came out in September. She wants to win an Academy Award, she
wants to sell a lot of records. She has a plan.
She has had it from the start. During adolescence, she developed an ugly nose. It
was big and wide and her brothers got it, too, but it looked good on them. Her
friends told her she should have it fixed. She said, "Fuck you. I'm going to
celebrate my own genetic faults." Then when she was first fronting Hole in 1990,
she saw herself on the cover of the fanzine Flipside. "I said, 'This isn't gonna
work,'" says Love. "This is not fair and not right and not in the plan. I just
want to be serviceable and be able to do what I need to do. If I'm gonna speak and
use my voice and my ability to communicate a character and a nuance, I have to be
somewhat pleasing to look at. I don't want to play best friends with kooky
villains. So I whacked it."
She went to the cheapest plastic surgeon she knew of - Wesley Harline in Utah, who
was known for doing strippers, porn stars, and country singers - and had her nose
fixed. "It was the best thing I ever did," says Love. "After that, my life was
just a lot better because the human response when you walk into a room is just one
thousand times better. You're gonna be perceived. You're gonna be able to speak
and be heard. Nothing's gonna mar you or get in your way. Does that make sense? I
mean, that's just a reality."
Love wasn't entirely satisfied with the first attempt, so after wrapping Larry
Flynt, she went to a posh New York surgeon to have the bump on the bridge of her
nose fixed. This retooling, and the changes her face went through as she stopped
doing drugs, led to a lot of speculation about what else she'd had done. Cheek
implants, chin adjustments, fat injections? For the record Love says she's had the
two nose jobs and also has breast implants after pregnancy made them sag. "I'll
tell you my philosophy," says Love. "One of the reasons that we tend to accuse
people of plastic surgery - because it is an accusation - is because if you do,
you're altering your appearance. You're lying. You're lying about your DNA! You're
not advertising correctly. You weren't born with that patrician nose, goddammit.
I'm concerned about symmetry and fine bones," she goes on. "When I have more
progeny, I don't want to bring forth anybody who's - I mean, I will love anybody,
it's my child - but I want to kind of guarantee the aquiline thing so that they
can just have a better life. So people won't treat them shitty. That's all."
In Portland in 1988, before Love (or the world at large, for that matter) even
knew who Kurt Cobain was, Love admired his nose. "I was like, 'Goddammit, who's
that down there in the lower classes? Where'd that nose come from?' It was all
about the nose. I had to have it."
Have it she did, famously and tragically. In advance of an interview with Love,
journalists are instructed to avoid the subject of Cobain. But in conversation, it
comes up. And in Love's house, it wanders in. Frances Bean, now six years old with
flashing platform Skechers and a high blond ponytail, is clearly her father's
daughter. If she were a couple of feet taller, she might even be mistaken for
Cobain. Love has a nice rapport with Frances, proudly getting her to repeat the
word "hibiscus," which she recently said in school, and telling her that she can
have some of the marzipan cake that Love is serving with tea if she eats it
"fancy" (on a plate with a fork).
Courtney Love was completely vilified after her husband shot himself in the spring
of 1994: It was her fault, she drove him to it, she hired someone to kill him, it
was the best career choice she ever made - depending on who you talked to. Granted,
Cobain's death was a defining moment in Love's life. But it was also one of the
few things over which she had no control. "He was the coolest, hardest, most
antisocial guy," she says. "And I was the coolest, hardest, most antisocial girl.
Of course we were going to go out. It was like antipopularity. I was always gonna
survive it. And he was always gonna not survive it."
These days while Love tries to balance music and movies (she's currently working
on Man on the Moon, the Andy Kaufman story she's in with Jim Carrey), she's still
trapped in an image that others have of her. The music press wants to canonize
Cobain and somehow freeze Love in time too. A chill went through the rock-crit
halls when Love showed up at the 1997 Academy Awards in a Versace gown with her
hair straight and flaxen. "Rock is not redundant," she says. "It has no rules.
That's the point of it, so fuck you for telling me I have to behave like Eddie
Vedder or Kurt Cobain or your fantasy of Kurt Cobain, who never lived to be a man,
so we don't really know what he would do, do we? You didn't even know who he was.
You didn't know what a glam-rocking, eyeliner-wearing, roach-scoring, feather
boa-wearing person he was at that point, so just shut your mouth. We don't know
what he would have been like if he had given all that shit up and gotten strong
and clean."
Obviously a lot has changed for Love since she got strong and clean. She brought a
friend she's known since she was 15 down from Oregon to be her cook. She has dinner
with Madonna, has lunch with Jim Carrey, plays parlor games with Ben Affleck, and
finds herself in studio production meeting if she happens to be around. She calls
Drew Barrymore one of the greatest friends of her life and her bassist Melissa Auf
der Maur ("a redhead virgin queen") her opposite. Love "juices." And she does
Kundalini yoga - the form that works the mind as much as the body - which she
credits for her lean 138 pounds. "That's the irony," says Love, "because when I
was a junkie, I was big." She has become a part of Hollywood, but according to her,
she's still an outsider. "I'm not arrogant," she says. "I'm not arrogant at all,
as a matter of fact. I think I have a lot of humility, but I will not acknowledge
- nor do I think I should have to - power structures that have been patiarchally
put in place by other people other than myself. Reality, laws, yeah, OK. You have
to accept these things. But the laws of Hollywood? Post-Ovitz? Fuck you. I don't
even care what they are because you can get into them and they are such a scary
gothic facade and they are so scary and stupid and gross."
She tells a story about a studio executive coming down to the Man on the Moon set.
He swaggers in, wearing some kind of suit, tanned, and too good-looking. He
obviously went to an Ivy League school. He's talking to Jim Carrey, talking to the
producer, really annoying Love. "It was just like, uh-uh-uh, studio executive on
the set," she says. "And I just froze up. I had to do a scene and I just froze up.
Well, check it out. I go to my friend's birthday party and I'm having a margarita
and I'm talking to this guy. He's kind of cute and he's wearing like a femme-y
corduroy kind of old coat with frayed edges, and I realize it's, like, Kevin
Misher, the same guy! And I was like, Dude, wait! You have to stop using Mike
Ovitz as your role model because you're never gonna get access to fertile brains
like mine if you're working that St. Bart's three-piece thing. It doesn't work."
As Love herself will tell you, she's out to change the landscape.
"I had to go to Portland a week or two ago," she says. "I was at the hotel I'd
been at for years, and I was looking out over Mary's Topless, where I used to have
to work. And I was like, Mary's Topless. My first strip club. And I was thinking,
I'm so glad I ran away to Los Angeles because it makes me not from here. My home
is L.A. It just works for me. I want rain, I want culture. But I have culture, and
I wake up every morning and it looks like the Roman Empire out here. Out in the
valley. This is like Babylon. Within the context of no context, I find a lot of
soul. Los Angeles is just so schizophrenic about context. You've got your Moorish
next to your Mediterranean next to your modern next to your British expatriate
next to your aspiring starlet next to your ex-madam now action-movie transsexual
post-op next to your triple-A writer ex-crackhead Spanish-Chinese nursery owner.
Here, it's like I'm the luckiest person alive. I know who I am."
That, it appears, would be a 34-year-old mother who screams her heart out behind
an amplifier, slings her guitar really low, rubs elbows with the occasional golden
boy, makes a huge living off the adventure, and is at once the wide-eyed and
jaded. That, it seems, would be the perfect product of our time.
- Christian Wright, Allure, January, 1999
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