RIOT GRRRL

News and Gossip












Home | Biography | lyrics | News and Gossip | discography | Related Links | Comments | videos





Courtney Love's Family Feud
courtney_love.jpg
PARENT TRAP Love
With a memoir and a promising new album on the way, Courtney Love finally seems to be getting her act together. But will a legal fight between her attention-hungry parents ruin her comeback?

Earlier this month, Hank Harrison, Love's estranged father, sent a letter to Random House/Doubleday, which is publishing Her Mother's Daughter, a memoir by Love's mom, Linda Carroll. The letter, addressed from the law offices of Melvin Belli, Esq., accuses Doubleday of issuing a press release about the book that prompted Fox News to air "defamatory and libelous language designed to hurt our client." The false statements, according to the letter, include claims that Harrison, a writer of New Age books, painted graffiti on Love's naked body when she was a child and plied her with "magic pills."

"This implies illicit and abusive drugs and further implies our client is evil," reads the letter. "Doubleday's failure to fact check comments like the above and to slant the comments toward our client is clearly designed to purposefully and maliciously defame his reputation."

Despite all this verbal fist-shaking, Harrison's attorneys aren't yet seeking damages, but only that Doubleday remove the disputed claims from the book, which comes out in January. Doubleday didn't respond to requests for comment, but a source who has read the finished version of Carroll's book says the changes appear to have been made, possibly even before the threat from Harrison. "Everything Carroll writes about him reads as if it had been carefully lawyered," the source adds. (Harrison didn't return messages, meanwhile, and the only attorney Radar found by the name of Melvin Belli insisted he'd had nothing to do with the letter, raising the possibility that Harrision had faked it.)

Love's own book, Dirty Blonde, contains virtually nothing about her father and not much more about her mother among its scrapbook-like entries. In a recent interview with the Times of London, she says, "I don't really have parents. I have never had parents. I haven't spoken to my father in 25 years. My mother claims I have spoken to her, but I haven't."

But knowing their daughter wants nothing to do with them won't shut Harrison and Carroll up. Notes the source, "He's a slimeball who wants publicity and would take any occasion to get his name into print, and she hates her daughter and wants her to die."




























COBAIN'S PYJAMA SHOCK

FRANCES BEAN COBAIN stunned photographers on a new Elle magazine photo shoot when she turned up wearing her late father KURT COBAIN's old pyjamas. The shoot featured celebrity offspring wearing the clothes of their rock 'n' roll parents - with KIMBERLY and RUBY STEWART sporting old lumberjack coats belonging to their dad ROD, and MIDGE URE's daughter MOLLY LORENNE modelling the coat her father wore in the ULTRAVOX video for VIENNA. But 14-year-old Bean Cobain's apparel, first worn by the tragic NIRVANA frontman on his wedding day to COURTNEY LOVE, was a more bizarre choice. She says, "He got married to my mom in them in Hawaii in 1992 so I thought it'd be cute if I wore them today."
03/08/2006 07:53






Courtney Love's Father Threatens To Sue Over LSD Allegations

Blabbermouth

According to Britain's Sunday Times , Courtney Love's father, a former rock manager called Hank Harrison, is preparing to sue her and Faber & Faber, publisher of Love's upcoming book (entitled "Dirty Blonde") based on her "intimate" journals, if she alleges that he put her on the road to drug addiction by giving her LSD as a toddler.

"Courtney is a brilliant artist with a photographic memory and a mass of talent, but she can also be a mean bitch, although I put a lot of that down to her mother," Harrison said.

"I have been told she was given a $1 million advance for her book, and for that it will have to be pretty detailed. I know she has told other people that I gave her drugs when she was three years old, which she cannot possibly remember and is absolutely untrue as I was an anti-drugs counsellor in the 1960s. But I do fear what she might write now to make the book sell.”

"Dirty Blonde", due to be published in November, is based on Love's journals of life with late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, as a rock star with her own band Hole and her acting career, which peaked with her role in the 1996 film "The People vs Larry Flint




























The ultimate million little pieces: Courtney Love's mom writes book

 

 

Linda Carrol, Courtney Love's mother

CORVALLIS, Ore. — The world knows various Courtney Loves — she's the rocker who growled into the microphone as the bandleader of "Hole," one-half of the couple who defined grunge, the actress who delivered an award-winning turn in "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and a tabloid regular.

But Linda Carroll knows Love as the baby daughter who saw angels in the clouds and the 7-year-old who started a letter-writing campaign to free a zoo-owned bear from his too-small cage.

Carroll knows, too, the Courtney who wished for death when she was denied a Popsicle, who wandered into a field at age 12 and cut her arms until they bled, who declared emancipation from her family at 16 and was off like a shot to the world beyond.

All of those Courtneys are on display in Carroll's new memoir, "Her Mother's Daughter," (Doubleday, 304 pages), which begins with Carroll's childhood in San Francisco as the adopted daughter of a distant couple, and ends with her search for her birth mother, who turned out to be novelist and children's author Paula Fox.

In between, though, there is Courtney. Carroll has led an adventurous life, rich in friends and full of husbands (four) and children (five). But the book's central struggle is between a young mother and her difficult daughter.

"For the first time in my life, I had a blood relative," Carroll writes of the day Courtney was born. "Even her smell felt familiar to me. I would pass some of myself on to Courtney, characteristics I would recognize as she grew ... Courtney and I would be enough for each other."

An exercise in catharsis

Carroll, who has the same blond hair and water-blue eyes as her famous daughter, now lives in Corvallis and works as a psychotherapist. Her cozily cluttered home is full of family pictures.

But for years, every so often, the phone would shatter the ordinariness of her life and on the other end would be Courtney, or news of Courtney, Carroll said — she was in rehab, or out again, had lost custody of her daughter or was fighting to regain it. Sometimes came word that Love had lashed out against her mother, telling journalists that she'd been forced to live in a chicken coop, or abandoned at a young age.

Carroll said the book was an exercise in catharsis, prompted by her hope that she could help others not to repeat her own mistakes. "I know the power of hearing other people's stories," she said