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years, she had been obsessed with the infamous bleached blonde whose life so closely paralleled her own. Nancy was an upper-middle-class girl turned groupie, stripper and heroin addict, whose tempestuous relationship with the notorious Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious—a tortured working-class youth turned punk legend—culminated in both their deaths, one mysteriously murdered, the other from an overdose. To friends, Courtney liked to claim that she had modeled her life after the so-called punk rock Juliet. A few years before she met Kurt, she had even auditioned to play the lead in Alex Cox’s film biopic Sid and Nancy and, although failing to land the role, ended up playing the smaller part of Nancy’s best friend, Gretchen.
    For her part, Courtney thought Kurt looked like Dave Pirner, the front man for Soul Asylum. At their initial encounter in the Portland club where Nirvana had just opened for the Dharma Bums, she flirted with the boyish blond musician for a while and later kept tabs on the progress of Kurt and his band—even sending him a little heart-shaped box as a gift after the Nirvana buzz started to grow louder. But, like Nancy, Courtney was a self-proclaimed groupie, and Kurt was still a relatively unknown musician. By the time they met again a year later, shortly before the release of Nevermind, that had changed. The band had signed a major record deal and was obviously on the verge of something big. The two were attending a concert in L.A. when Courtney spotted Kurt downing a bottle of cough medicine. She chided, “You’re a pussy; you shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach,” and offered him one of her prescription painkillers. “We bonded over pharmaceuticals,” she later recalled. They went home that night and had sex for the first time. “She had a completely planned way of seducing me and it worked,” said Kurt, telling friends it was the best sex he had ever had.
    But Courtney’s boyfriend at the time was Billy Corgan, whose band Smashing Pumpkins had opened for Guns n’ Roses the same week she slept with Kurt for the first time. For now, Corgan was still more famous than Kurt Cobain. Nirvana and the Pumpkins both had albums scheduled for imminent release; Nevermind and Gish shared the same producer. When the albums were released, they both exceeded expectations, making Cobain and Corgan instant rock stars. On the Billboard charts, however, there was no contest. By the time Nevermind hit number one in late December 1991, Kurt and Courtney were inseparable.

    She came from a broken home and had a mother who rejected her, but that’s where the similarities ended between Kurt Cobain and the woman who would soon turn his world upside down. If we were going to obtain the clues to make sense of Courtney Love’s early years and discover whether she was really capable of committing the heinous act of which she had been accused, we would have to head as far afield as California, Oregon, Australia, Japan, England, and New Zealand. For economy’s sake, we decided to confine our quest to the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
    Courtney Love Michelle Harrison was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1965—O. J. Simpson’s eighteenth birthday. A little while after she made her appearance, Courtney’s father, Hank Harrison, headed over to share the good news with the members of the small San Francisco band he managed. They were still known as the Warlocks, but within a few months they would take on their more familiar name—the Grateful Dead. Harrison couldn’t decide which of his friends he would ask to be the godfather. Jerry Garcia was good with kids, but Hank’s roommate, bassist Phil Lesh, was the only one home, so Lesh received the honor. Instead of passing out cigars, Harrison broke out a couple of tabs of acid, and they celebrated the birth of the little rock-and-roll princess. Meanwhile, her mother’s adoptive family—heirs to the Bausch & Lomb eye care fortune—marked the