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However, private detectives hired by Carroll’s family had dredged up a number of other skeletons in Harrison’s closet, including arrests for pot possession and petty theft while he was still in college. “They tried to portray me as a bad influence, and I just didn’t have enough money to fight it, so Linda got full custody,” he recalls, admitting that his father was indeed somewhat anti-Semitic but saying “that’s the only true thing about her Barbara Walters story.” Courtney has frequently claimed she has seen her father only a “few times” since her parents divorced. But he pulls out a trove of letters and photos of them together during various phases of her life to prove that father and daughter have at times been very close.
    Clearly we can’t trust anything Courtney said about her father, and we have already resolved to take most of what Harrison says with a grain of salt. But as he continues to pull scrapbooks and folders out of the boxes, including hundreds of letters and poems written by Courtney, as well as photos and documentation pinpointing the facts about various chapters of her life, we realize that we have discovered a valuable insight into her turbulent early years and a clue to the supposedly imminent train wreck that millions would later watch with voyeuristic fascination.

    Courtney Love may have been too young when her parents split to blame her troubled childhood on the trauma of her parents’ divorce, as Kurt’s family did to explain his own downward spiral, but by the time she was seven, Courtney’s mother had already divorced her second husband, Frank Rodriguez, and married husband number three, David Menely. They moved to a mansion in Oregon, where Linda and her new husband ran a free-spirited commune. Linda followed a strange assortment of gurus during those years, and, depending on the spiritual flavor of the moment, she and Menely might be chanting, meditating or screaming at the tops of their lungs while little Courtney was left to her own devices. She would later recall an assortment of “hairy, wangly ass hippies” running around doing Gestalt therapy. On the back of her album Live Through This is a photo of a waiflike little Courtney from this period. “We were living in a tepee and I always smelt like piss,” she recalled.
    When Courtney was seven, Linda and her new husband suddenly decided they were going to move to New Zealand and raise sheep. Linda told friends it was easier than raising her daughter; consequently, Courtney was left behind. In therapy for a pattern of misbehavior since she was three, Courtney was sent to live with one of her therapists, an old friend of Linda’s in Eugene. “It was all done behind my back,” recalls Harrison. “I would have been very glad to have her come live with me, but I was never consulted and there was nothing I could do. Courtney would always say in later years that she had never felt so abandoned.”
    It was during this period that Courtney became, in her own words, a “demon child.” The brash young delinquent proved unmanageable for her surrogate mother, therapist or not, and she was soon shipped off to join Linda in New Zealand. She didn’t last long there. Linda quickly sent Courtney off to test the compassion of another friend in the region, who in turn ended up banishing her to a Catholic boarding school in Australia. It was the first of a series of schools over the next few years that would expel her with dizzying alacrity. Courtney then headed back to Oregon, where she was shuttled from one of her mother’s friends to another—each time overstaying her welcome when she was caught shoplifting, stealing money or smoking pot.
    By 1977, Linda and her husband had tired of sheep ranching and returned to Oregon, where Courtney went back to live with them, mainly because Linda could no longer find anybody willing to take her in. But when she was caught shoplifting from a local Wool-worth’s at the age of