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1991: Kurt emerged from his dressing room with his seven-months-pregnant wife, Courtney Love, clad in a trailing, too-tight tea dress, ripped right across the ribcage, on his arm. Everyone kept their distance as he escorted her up the steps to the stage, where they stand all alone, waiting for the Screaming Trees to take the stage.
Experiencing mild contractions in Spain, she became terrified that she was about to miscarry. "Of Course,"says Kurt, "she had them right before we had to play a show so I had to play a show wondering if Courtney's going to die or if she's going to have a baby." After the concert, Kurt raced to the hospital. "It was the most groaty, disgusting hospital I've ever seen- dirt on the walls, the nurses were screaming in Spanish at Courtney, telling her to stay down," Kurt says. They moved her to a clinic, where they called their obstetrician, who believed there was no serious problem, but advised them to take the next plane home just in case. "We had to buy two seats in first class so Courtney could lay down,"Kurt says. "Of course it was reported as two rows."
They arrived home to find that a pipe in their bathroom had burst, drenching Kurt's favorite guitar and a bunch of his tapes and notebooks in black sludge. This plunged him into depression, and abandoning the methadone therapy he'd been on, he started shooting up again.
Two weeks before the baby was due, Courtney joined her husband in Cedars-Sinai.
One day Kurt dragged himself to Courtney's room and sat on the end of her bed crying from the pain. He said he was breaking up the band, and that they would leave town as soon as Frances was born. "Two years in the Dakota,"he kept saying, referring to John and Yoko, "twenty years stuck inside the Dakota, I won't let that happen to you."
Courtney went into labor in the early hours of August 18, 1992. She hauled herself out of bed and wheeled her IV stand all the way to Kurt's wing of the hospital with an anxious battalion of doctors and nurses trailing along behind her. She yanked Kurt's covers off and screamed into his face, "You get out of this bed and you come down now! You are not leaving me to do this by myself, fuck you!"
Kurt dragged himself to the delivery room and made a valiant attempt to watch his daughter being born. I'm having the baby, it's coming out, he's puking, he's passing out, and I'm holding his hand and rubbing his stomach while the baby's coming out of me,"Courtney recalled. "It was pretty weird."
Frances Bean Cobain was born at 7:48 A.M. She weighed seven pounds, one ounce. "The infant is in good condition, is feeding well and growing at the normal rate expected for a newborn," a press release from Nirvana's management would announce a few days later. "The vicious rumors that Frances was suffering any withdrawals at the time of birth are completely false, and infact, she has not suffered any discomfort since delivery."
After the Vanity Fair article, Children's Services went after the Cobains with a vengeance. When Frances Bean was two weeks old, Courtney and Kurt were forced to surrender custody of her to Courtney's half sister Jaimee.
For two months, Kurt and Courtney lived in the apartment next to Jaimee's while they fought to keep their daughter. They saw Frances every day, but they were never supposed to be alone with her.
The Cobains were finally allowed to take Frances home after paying a total of $240,000 in legal fees, but only on the condition that they submit to frequent urine tests and visits from a social worker. On September 22, Courtney's new doctor, Robert P. Fremont, M.D., wrote a letter stating, "Starting September 9, 1992 [Courtney] has been giving random urine tests which have all been entirely clean. She is seeing a drug counselor, a clinical psychologist, attending aftercare meetings at CPC Westwood and is examined in my office weekly. She seems determined to succeed and her prognosis is very good with the above safeguards in place."
Courtney faxed Kurt the following note:
you've only been gone a day but today her turtle tooth came IN, I mean YOU CAN SEE IT, a little pearly girlrazor right where it's supposed to be, in the middle on the bottom, I was crying in the bath with her for nearly a half hour straight, and she kept looking up and grinning, looking up and rooting, and I'd sob and sob and feel so guilty to burden her, and she reached up and put her arms around me and comforted me! TOOK TIME OUT OF HER BUSY TEAR AND ROOT SCHEDULE! Queen Narcissus herself!... |
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