The people vs. Courtney Love

Courtney Love -- rock star, publicity whore, feminist -- has scrapbooked her life in the spotlight. Has the self-proclaimed fame junkie lasted past her expiration date?

By Lisa Levy

Read more: Courtney Love, Punk Rock, Hole, Celebrities, Grunge, Life

Photo: AP/ Luis Martinez

Courtney Love arrives at the Whiskey Blue Bar on June 25, 2006 in Westwood,Ca.

Nov. 6, 2006 | Open "Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love" to almost any glossy page and you will see a picture of Love, or some simulacrum of her: a smear of lipstick, a doodled self-portrait, a poem, ephemera of her band, Hole, scrawled lyrics, a Polaroid, an artifact of her very productive and self-absorbed imagination. Calling the book a diary is a ploy to prey on the desire for access to Love's private thoughts. It's actually closer to a yearbook for a school with only one graduate; or maybe Love, albeit in the coolest, most punk-rock way, has succumbed to that most Martha Stewart of pastimes: scrapbooking.

The release of "Dirty Blonde" is an occasion to assess, after an absence -- she's not coy about where she's been; it's rehab, no Mariah-style "exhaustion" euphemisms for her -- where Love belongs on the topography of celebrity now. This is not to list her on the silly A-through-D high-school popularity scale that the proliferation of magazines and television shows devoted to the worship of fame have made the lingua franca, but to consider why Love provokes such a strong reaction.

Why we should care about Love's private thoughts given her blatant lust for publicity is the more pressing question that her book raises. There are several reasons Love is a touchstone: She calls herself a feminist when it is a label many women, famous or otherwise, do not wear proudly. But feminists are reluctant to champion her, as her choices have often been embarrassing -- or worse -- from playing Larry Flynt's wife in a controversial film to allegedly using drugs while pregnant with her daughter. Love also commits what amounts to a mortal sin by overestimating her own beauty, talent and achievements, believing utterly in herself in a culture where women's self-esteem is undermined at every turn. And then there are the lingering doubts that she earned that fame at all, having been married to a man more successful than she was, and having refused to fade away graciously after his death. Instead, she has held on even tighter, trying ever harder to prove her worth through her music, her film roles and now her book.

Love is adamant in her author's note about the fact that she "really hasn't written a book." She will find no argument here. This is a pastiche, an assemblage, the most Barthian of texts. Yet it is undeniably a reflection of Love's psyche, confirming that Love's allure lies in her glorious disarray. As they say in the South, she's a hot mess. She is not from the starlet factory where they mint Jojos and Rhiannas and other girls who can do that sweet-yet-sexy-yet-a-little-tough thing. She comes from an era when women played their own instruments and wrote their own songs, but she's not one of those Jewel-ish whiners or Sheryl Crow lite rockers. She's the real deal: a grungy girl punk rock star. And she can't quite shake that aura no matter how high her heels or how fancy her borrowed designer gowns.

Even when she tries hardest to be glamorous and ladylike, there is something askew. It may be a trick of the eye, but in the slickest photos one looks for the slipped nipple, the reddish blemish, the mascara clump (and, yes, they are all here).

The book's inclusion of fashion designers Gianni Versace and Marc Jacobs -- a picture and remembrance of the former and a personal note from the latter -- is almost touching in its aspirational, please-make-me-over appeal. Just imagine Love begging them to hose her down and fix her up, commanding them to make her pretty on the outside. The first album Hole released, "Pretty on the Inside," paid ironic homage to precisely this idea: In a culture obsessed with appearances, especially for women, who cares if your insides are ugly or angry? If you still put on your makeup and go through the motions of being a good girl, will anyone notice? Implied, of course, is that the reverse is devastatingly true: Appearing in public with your messed-up insides showing -- something Love frequently does -- definitely gets noticed.

She's characteristically blunt about deserving attention, male and otherwise: "I love being famous. I fucking enjoy it so much. Why do I have to explain that? Because no one else has it. Because it's a fight. Because its psychicly [sic, sic] charging. Hey. Because I get off on it." She's a fame junkie, and evidence of her ongoing habit is everywhere: In her friend Carrie Fisher's introduction there is a jotted list of celebs who have called her that day, and in the acknowledgments ("Trudie and Sting," "Edward Norton," director "Brett Ratner," etc.). To revel in being famous is unseemly, though it seems almost quaint since the arrival of the Paris Hiltons of the world -- those skinny things who have become famous for just being famous, whereas Love has actually garnered critical acclaim for performing music and acting in films. Still, she is branded with the label given to those who enjoy the spotlight a little too much, derived from the world's oldest profession: publicity whore. It's precisely the combination of the patent enjoyment of her fame and her decision to act as if she were beautiful despite reports to the contrary -- thus the title of her early 1990s zine "And She's Not Even Pretty" -- that makes Courtney Love the object of sustained scorn and outrage.

Of course, there is also the idea that she has lasted past her expiration date. Some would say she has merely parlayed a personality into a career, coasting on the coattails of her dead husband, Kurt Cobain, thus suffering the wrath of millions of Nirvana fans, who can't (or just won't) forgive her for his suicide in 1994. Did she merely turn her train wreck of a marriage into fodder for her celebrity? The Cobain tragedy makes Courtney hard to love. Rock stars marry models, beautiful, silent creatures, not women like Courtney Love. Being smart, reckless, drug-addicted, outraged, independent, creative -- that's men's work, and she's got some nerve doing it.

Next page: Pipsqueaks like Christina Aguilera and Pink would not be possible without Courtney Love