Skip to content
News

Courtney Love’s Five Most Outrageous Moments

110930-courtney-love-2.png

Courtney Love is writing a memoir. According to the Associated Press, the leader of alt-rockers Hole and widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain plans to “set the record straight” in an as-yet-untitled book scheduled for fall 2012, HarperCollins Publishers imprint William Morrow has revealed. The news arrives just days after the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. (Check out our complete Nevermind coverage here.)

Love has already published one memoir, 2006’s Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love,which compiles everything from hand-written notes and diary entries to a Mickey Mouse Club rejection letter.

In the meantime, who needs a tell-all book? As those of us trying to hold onto our appreciation of her greatest songs are all too aware, Love’s life in the spotlight has already provided plenty of memorable — and often outrageous — moments. Here are five that come to mind.

1. SMACKED OUT AND PREGNANT?
In 1992, a Vanity Fair profile alleged that Love used heroin while pregnant. The story was by Lynn Hirschberg, of M.I.A.-“truffle fries” kerfuffle fame. Three years later, at a party, Love grabbed Quentin Tarantino’s best director Oscar award for Pulp Fiction and threatened to pound Hirschberg with it.

2. BIKINI KILLAH
As two of the toughest female frontwomen in alternative rock, Love and Kathleen Hanna might have been expected to find common cause. On the first stop of the 1995 Lollapalooza tour, however, Love belted the then-Bikini-Kill singer — and earned herself a one-year suspended sentence for assault. Love called Hannah “Raface” and accused her of enedlessly stalking Cobain while he was alive. “I still don’t like her,” Love told SPIN in 2005.

3. LIKE A PRAYER
At least one of Love’s more bizarre misadventures is memorialized in perpetuity on YouTube. During the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, host Kurt Loder was interviewing Madonna, when Love hurled her compact in the pop star’s direction. An awkward train wreck ensued. “Courtney Love is in dire need of attention right now,” the Material Girl pronounced.

4. DEVASTATING OVERDOSE
In October 2003, Love lost custody of her daughter with late husband Kurt Cobain, Frances Bean. Child services took Bean away not long after the singer overdosed on Oxycontin in front of the child. At first, Love maintained she had only taken anti-anxiety drug Xanax, but later she acknowledged her use of “hillbilly heroin” in an interview with People magazine. “That’s the only time my daughter has ever, ever, ever pitched in on one of my little crises,” Love was quoted as saying. “I made it fun.”

5. ‘TWILIGHT’ FIGHT
Love can also claim the dubious honor of having been taken to task by Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson. In April 2010, Love told an interviewer that the idea of casting the English actor as Cobain in an upcoming biopic would be “so stupid.” Shortly thereafter, the big-screen vampire bared his fangs: “And you see all these comments, like from Coutrney love, saying, ‘What the fuck! He’s totally wrong for it.’ And I’m like, ‘I fucking said no, you dick!’ I didn’t get offered it.”