The road back

“I just don’t know how to answer these questions.” It’s Courtney Love on the phone, but the voice doesn’t sound like the smeared-lipstick rock hellion. This Courtney Love sounds smaller, sadder. “It’s so dark. Dark, dark, dark. I didn’t used to be scared of these things, but now....”

This is a season of anxiety for Love, and in someone usually recklessly outspoken, her reticence speaks volumes. For years, her life has been an unmade bed, but now the most extreme reports make it seem more like a mattress on the freeway -- tattered, hazardous and in need of police attention. The rock star is a defendant in three criminal court cases and has lost custody of her child. Her summer tour has been canceled and her new album is not faring well. Last month, on her 40th birthday, a judge signed her name to a bench warrant because Love failed to make it to a court date.

Love knows what people are saying about her, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons she agreed to speak this week to The Times. In words that veered from contrite to bold, witty to angry, the star spoke of philosophy, poetry, rock music politics and celebrity-era jurisprudence. Even before fame, Love’s life odyssey saw her as a student at Trinity College in Dublin and a stripper in Alaska, and any conversation with her is a festival of colorful tangents.

She repeatedly made the point that her well-publicized court hearings are echoes of a life she was leading months ago.

“The court cases are like a lagging indicator in economics. They show where I was, not where I am .... I’m doing OK. I’m doing well, as a matter of fact. It’s so stupid, but I even enjoyed the martyrdom,” she says with a raspy chuckle. “I’m program girl now.”

She offers that statement knowing that, at this point in her career, her skeptics would fill more arenas than her fans, and even those fans may admit some Courtney fatigue. But Love says the sources of her anxieties are now more serious than any concerns about album sales.

“To stand there and receive this, ‘The state of California vs. Courtney Love Cobain....’ I almost fell to my knees. I don’t think I have ever been that scared.”

Love has kept tabloid writers and attorneys busy.

In October 2003, Love was arrested at the home of Jim Barber, an ex-boyfriend and former manager, after an alleged break-in. She tested positive for cocaine and opiates. That arrest led to a case that ended with a judge ordering Love to spend 18 months in rehab, but she has until late October to enroll. Hours after the arrest at Barber’s house, paramedics were called to Love’s house, and the rocker was treated for what appeared to be a painkiller overdose. That incident led to another volley of drug charges -- and the loss of her daughter.

In March, hours after the singer repeatedly flashed her breasts on “Late Night With David Letterman,” a 24-year-old fan at a Love show at the Plaid nightclub in New York claimed he was whacked by her microphone stand, and that has led to misdemeanor assault charges. In April, Kristin King, a 24-year-old L.A. musician, told police that Love attacked her with a liquor bottle. King was staying at Barber’s home.

The most serious of the cases, in terms of potential punishment, is the alleged assault with a deadly weapon in the King incident. Love failed to appear at an arraignment (leading to the bench warrant issued on her birthday) but has since entered a plea of not guilty. The maximum sentence, if she is found guilty, would be three years and eight months in prison.

Last month, she was photographed on a gurney as New York paramedics carried her from a New York apartment after responding to a 911 call that records show was a report of a woman suffering a miscarriage. The New York tabloids had already collected and passed on quotes from neighbors who say Love has been wandering the sidewalks, muttering words of paranoia.

“We see Courtney come through over and over, more than other celebrity,” says Lisa Bloom, daytime co-anchor of Court TV, the docket-watching channel. “It’s gotten pathetic. People see her face on TV now and just assume she must be in trouble again.”

‘Now she’s back’

With all of that, it’s easy to imagine that the day-to-day life of Love might seem like the alleyway scenes in “Trainspotting” or “Barfly.” In recent weeks it’s been more like “13 Going on 30,” according to Lisa Leveridge, the guitarist in Love’s band, the Chelsea. The two gal pals have gone on coffeehouse visits, boutique shopping expeditions, trips to the gym -- even a jaunt two weeks ago to Black Market Music in Los Angeles where the pair “played every guitar,” giggled a lot and wrote a few songs right there on the floor.

Leveridge isn’t offended when asked if she expects people to actually believe these reports about the sneering star who, more than any other, gave the MTV era a Janis Joplin figure of its own.

“I know, I know. Look, she was on vacation for a little bit and now she’s back. It was a bum vacation, it was stressful and awful, but now she’s back. It’s just that everybody doesn’t know it yet.”

Another friend offered this appraisal: “The problem with Courtney is that her falls and failures are so public,” says Janet Billig, a music industry veteran who has been Love’s friend for more than a decade. “Everyone wants her to do well. Everyone wants her to be well.”

On the phone, “program girl” herself at times sounds sunny and self-aware. “I want to be Liza Minnelli right at that one moment in ‘Cabaret.’ Just that moment. How great would that be?”

She says that “all of this hasn’t hurt me to the point that I can’t get tables at restaurants” and then laughs long and hard at herself for the unintended pretension. More than once she says, simply, “I feel well.”

She has a full-time minder in Warren Boyd, a substance-abuse counselor hired to help Love stave off the behavior that has haunted her for years. “He’s my guy. He knows where I am all the time,” Love says.

Boyd worried that a judge’s decision to give Love until Halloween to enroll in a rehab program would give her too much time (“A prerequisite to a disaster,” Boyd thought initially), but he said this week that Love “has taken the initiative and she’s in a program and she knows what needs to be done.” Boyd says that the court cases represent a spasm of dark living that is over. “This is sort of like the sonic boom that catches up with the plane.”

Love just played a show, booked long ago, in Japan, and Leveridge was giddy afterward about the first chance in months to get on stage and think about chords instead of depositions. Love is hugely popular in Japan (there is even an anime graphic novel about an alien princess that is based on Love), and the foreign press reviews of her show at the Fuji Rocks Festival were good.

“It’s amazing to be in a healthy and happy band,” Leveridge says. Did the show give Love a chance to prove herself? “She doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody.”

Married to an icon

Love has taken on many roles in the public arena -- rock hero, movie star, artist-as-activist -- but the first was an icon’s wife. Her 1992 marriage to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana gave her a Yoko Ono-esque sort of fame. To some fans, she was the undeserving lover of their idol. To others, her romance with Cobain seemed to channel Shakespeare or, at the very least, a latter-day Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

When Cobain died in a shotgun suicide in 1994, the polarized views of her only became more extreme. A fringe fan element has even proffered a theory that Cobain’s death was directly or indirectly the fault of Love. There were inextinguishable rumors, too, that her best music was actually his work, at least in part. The venom was enough that, within a year of Cobain’s suicide, an AOL forum dedicated to the topic of Love was shut down because of death threats against her.

Charles R. Cross, author of the highly regarded Cobain biography “Heavier Than Heaven,” said the music video of Love’s life has been played out to the point that she can hardly get a fresh listen from the public.

“Not to defend her obviously messed-up life over the past few months, but if your neighbor down the street lost a husband to suicide and your neighbor still seemed screwed up a decade later, would one have some sympathy for that? Because Courtney is such a public figure -- and at times her own worse enemy -- I think we judge her harsher than we would the neighbor across the street. Being close to someone who kills himself is a messy business, and it’s messy for everyone involved. It is not something that is easy to get over or move away from or forget, especially when the person is as famous as Kurt.”

Love has righted herself often and seemed especially strong in the late 1990s, when her Hollywood career earned strong raves for roles in “The People Vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man on the Moon.”

There is one aspect of Love’s life that somehow stayed off center stage: Frances Bean Cobain, her daughter with Kurt. “I don’t like to talk about her much,” Love says coolly when the subject is broached.

‘That’s bogus’

During a phone interview for this story, another voice came on the line. “Can you hang up, Franny?” Love asked her daughter cheerily, but there was an edge in her voice a minute later when she discussed a private school that recently turned Frances down.

“My problems become her problem too,” Love said. “The consequence she suffered is that she didn’t get into a school that she wanted to get into. But the two girls who ended up going into that school have ended up in rehab, so there.

“I believe that socially that’s the one blow I suffered. The people at this school were hard on my daughter because of me. That’s bogus.”

The girl was in Love’s Beverly Hills home last October when the rocker overdosed on prescription pills. In the weeks that followed, the child was removed from her mother’s care and placed with her paternal grandparents. It is the second time Frances Bean has been shuttled through protective care proceedings, the first time following publication of a Vanity Fair article in 1992 that quoted Love as saying she used heroin during her pregnancy with Frances. (Love has maintained she didn’t know she was pregnant at the time.)

“She lives in Beverly Hills with my nanny and [a relative], and it’s ridiculous. And I live in Beverly Hills, where I can see her house. My house -- and I live in a hotel. I pay the hotel and she comes across the street and sees me all day and we hang out. That’s what we do.”

Even though a Los Angeles assistant district attorney recently described Love as a danger to herself and society, Love insists she will have the custody matter resolved soon. She says the stakes are too high for her to lapse into drug use again.

“I went to this rehab place. I had a really rough time. I had done that once, after her dad died, and I did it again. I did it because you know what? It’s not worth it to be on any pills. As long as I take nothing, nothing bad can happen to me. And I wasn’t doing it for everyone else [although] there’s a lot of people here swimming in my stroke.”

Virgin Records, the new band Chelsea, the people who work for Love -- these are the people in her stroke, but at the moment her career is floating unpredictably. With her band Hole, Love had a sway that matched her snarl with the 1994 album “Live Through This” and the 1998 disc “Celebrity Skin,” combining for 3 million copies sold. “Live Through This” was so highly acclaimed that when the Village Voice performed its annual poll of 600 music critics that year, it was far and away the winner of the best album honor.

“A decade ago Courtney made an album that was a classic, and then she went on tour and delivered a series of very strong performances to back it up,” says Joe Levy, an editor at Rolling Stone. “She did this at a time of tremendous turmoil in her life. She went on tour with her baby daughter after the suicide of her husband. She turned her pain into art.”

And now? Love released a solo album in February that has sold only 100,000 copies. “Certainly, Courtney can matter again,” Levy says diplomatically.

Love says she is writing music again and she isn’t sure how good it is, but she can hear it more clearly than any time in memory.

“I never did drugs when I was working, I held the writing part of me above the drugs. But the thing is I was never scared before. That’s the new thing.”

There’s a click on the phone line and Love checks with the new caller. “Hold on for a second. It’s my lawyer. He’s going to yell at me for talking to you.”

She adds in a playful whisper: “Be judicious.”