#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.

Many rockers shed their earthly vessels too soon. When the body of Rolling Stone founder Brian Jones was discovered in the bottom of a swimming pool in 1969, it kicked off a disturbing trend, with many prominent stars checking out for the great gig in the sky at the age of 27.

Following Jones’s mysterious death, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Doors’ Jim Morrison all died within two years of each other, all aged 27. Many wondered if the curse hadn’t been started by Robert Johnson, a legendary bluesman from the 1920s who had been poisoned when he was 27. Ironically, Johnson’s eerie records had inspired Jones to start the Rolling Stones.

In the 1990, rock stars began dropping again. Kurt Cobain was the most notable casualty, killing himself with a shotgun at age 27. Kristen Pfaff, the bassist in Cobain’s wife band Hole, overdosed on heroin at the same age. — Charles Bottomley