#75: Courtney Love’s Heroin Binge

Courtney Love sat down with Vanity Fair writer Lynn Hirschberg to debut herself as Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain’s wife with a rock star career of her own, but she ended up temporarily losing her newborn infant. “We went on a binge,” she told Hirschberg. “I did heroin for a couple of months.” The catch: her “binge,” in January1992, overlapped with her pregnancy.

When the article hit newsstands in September 1992, Children’s Services of L.A. removed baby Frances Bean from the Cobain household. After several months of legal wrangling (and a voicemail from Cobain calling Hirschberg and another reporter “insane c*nts”), the couple regained custody.

Despite her father shooting himself in the head when she was a toddler, being taken away yet again from her mother for 15 months when she was 12 (after Courtney’s 2003 overdose), and having an “alter ego” named Cherry Kookoo, Frances Bean appears to be relatively stable. In 2008 she became an intern at Rolling Stone, following in Hirschberg’s footsteps.