COVER STORY : The Love Machine : Courtney Love has been a celebrity widow, an occasional near-OD case, a meltdown in the making. Don’t think it doesn’t take a lot of work.

It’s nearly 3 p.m., but still early morning by Courtney Love’s clock. Rock’s most vola tile woman is lounging under the covers on her hotel bed and talking about one of her favorite topics: madness.

To much of the pop world, she’s already demonstrated her firsthand expertise in the subject.

“I understand that I fit a cultural archetype: the tragic female, the bitch goddess,” she says, wearing the flannel pajama top of her late husband, Kurt Cobain.

“It’s the whole Blanche DuBois-Zelda Fitzgerald-Sylvia Plath-Anne Sexton tradition of going so far out there that you wonder if you are going to implode because you start believing those voices in your head are going to stay.

“The problem is tragic places a mark on you if you are a woman. When male rock stars go near madness and come back, people look on them as somehow brilliant. But when women do it, they are seen as merely mad. They are written off as crazy.”

The label stings because Love, 30, has been written off in just that fashion by many who have read about her self-destructive, combative attitude.

Though “Live Through This,” her album with her band Hole, was voted the best release of 1994 by the nation’s pop critics, some detractors see her flamboyant behavior--including rumored drug overdoses and acidic ramblings on America Online--as just an act. To her critics, Love is in the spotlight only because of the morbid curiosity resulting from the shotgun suicide last year of her husband.

At a recent Lollapalooza concert in Pittsburgh, someone threw a spent shotgun shell casing on stage. In this month’s Esquire magazine’s cover spread, “Women We Love . . . and a Few We Don’t,” the ugly message to Love: “Next good career move: Choke on your own vomit.”

Against this backdrop, Love has gone through what she describes as her own form of madness. It included a few months so bleak after Cobain’s death that she tried to commit suicide herself, she admits for the first time during an interview that covers nearly her entire day--from her late breakfast to the Lollapalooza concert here, a few hours in a bar and back to the hotel.

But she says that the worst is over; that she has learned her lesson. She’s even thinking about taking Prozac to control her mood.

“I’m like a cockroach--the ones that survive the nuclear blast,” she says proudly.

But there are moments when she is clearly vulnerable.

One is when I mention that her comments about being a survivor remind me of what Janis Joplin once told me about her own self-destructive image.

“People seem to have a high sense of drama about me,” Joplin said in 1969. “Maybe they think they can enjoy my music more if they think I’m destroying myself.”

Love pauses only briefly at hearing the words, but they stick. An hour later in the lobby, she asks: “How long was it between the time Janis Joplin told you that and when she OD’d?”

When told that Joplin died within a year, alone at a Hollywood hotel, Love becomes uncharacteristically subdued as she heads to the limo for the ride to tonight’s Lollapalooza concert, where she will again go through the hysterics onstage that will make some in the crowd wonder how this woman ever makes it through 24 hours.

I made my bed, I’ll lie in it

I made my bed, I’ll die in it

--Courtney Love

*

‘W elcome to the road,” Love says, good-naturedly in her hotel room at the start of a midafternoon interview. “What’s going on in L.A.? Heard about any good acting roles?”

This is the Love that the public never sees.

On show days like today (Detroit is an early stop on the Lollapalooza tour that continues Monday and Tuesday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre), she is normally awakened around 2 p.m. and eats breakfast in her room. French toast is a favorite.

Putting down the copy of a play that someone has written based on her on-line postings, Love tidies the bed by pushing newspapers onto the floor and lifting an ashtray filled with two packs of cigarette butts onto a nearby table.

Lying in bed, she talks about her late husband and their daughter, Frances, who will turn 3 on Friday and is with a nanny elsewhere in the hotel.

As the day progresses, Love’s mood will change frequently, a shield finally going up as she becomes, in her own words, the fiery bitch goddess onstage--someone hard-boiled and physical enough to suggest a champion mud wrestler. At other times, she can also be wickedly funny. Now, however, she seems tender and unguarded, a woman trying to regain her emotional balance.

“You know,” she says softly enough that you have to lean forward to hear her. “I was over the idea of romantic love long before I met Kurt. I had had so many bad experiences that I just figured it wasn’t for me. I had been a stripper and I had heard every line in the book. But Kurt got to me--he was a good man.”

Love hopes through her study of Buddhism to learn about communicating with her husband.

“I want to learn about where Kurt is and how I can help him,” she says. “I think his daughter hears him. Sometimes she almost looks guilty when you see her. She’ll be talking to somebody who’s not there. I’ll go over to her and say, ‘Who are you talking to?’ And she’ll say, ‘My angel.’ ”

Love brushes away tears. “That’s how we refer to Kurt. Sometimes, she’ll ask why Daddy isn’t with us, and I tell her: ‘Because Daddy is special, but he was sick, he was hurt. That’s why he’s an angel. He watches everything you do.’

“Then she’ll look at me and say, ‘Are you sick, too, Mommy? Are you going to be an angel?’ ”

She looks out the rain-stained window at the threatening sky.

Without breaking her gaze, she adds: “The worst thing is sometimes at night, I still hear that gun going off. . . .”

Love Michelle Harrison had a troubled childhood that taught her to depend on herself. After spending part of her early teens in foster homes and reform school, Love began a journey in the mid-’80s in pursuit of her rock dreams.

The singer--who adopted her current surname during this period--moved from San Francisco to London, going in and out of bands and appearing in two Alex Cox films. To help support herself, she sometimes danced in strip clubs.

Love formed Hole in 1989 with Eric Erlandson, a Los Angeles guitarist, and, before her relationship with Cobain, released an album on Caroline Records that was widely acclaimed in underground rock circles.

Once Nirvana’s album “Nevermind” propelled Cobain to stardom, Love was seen by much of the mainstream rock world as just a wanna-be trying to capitalize on her husband’s fame.

Rumors of their drug use were cemented in the public consciousness by two events: a Vanity Fair article in 1992 that quoted Love as saying she took heroin while pregnant with Frances (Love maintains she didn’t know she was pregnant at the time she took the drugs) and Cobain’s near-fatal March, 1994, drug overdose in Rome. A month later he was dead.

Asked during the interview about how she dealt with Cobain’s death, she says: “I don’t know . . . I’m still trying to deal with it. I tour. I write songs. I always knew I had to keep going. It was the only way to survive. If I was at home, I’d be slamming drugs. When we are on the road, I don’t get drugs--bad drugs, anyway.”

Because of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs in Seattle in June and her erratic behavior on stage, some in the rock world have looked upon the current tour as a sort of death march. After all, Hole’s bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a drug overdose just two months after Cobain did.

Love acknowledges the appearance of a problem.

“On this tour, that’s apparently the belief because I’m usually surrounded,” she says. “I’ll suddenly wake up at 8 in the morning or something and find someone [from the tour crew] checking on me to make sure I’m OK. I also get my medicine in increments so to avoid another accident.”

Before getting in the limo around 6 p.m. for the ride to Pine Knob Music Theatre outside Detroit, Love--who delights in celebrity gossip--stops at the hotel newsstand for the latest dirt. She seems disappointed by the small selection, settling eventually on the National Enquirer and Vanity Fair.

She’s wearing a stylish black wool dress and matching sweater, giving her a far more sophisticated--and softer, prettier--aura than the tattered baby doll outfits she favors onstage.

Slipping into the stretch limo, she thumbs through the Enquirer, stopping briefly at a story on the Hugh Grant prostitution arrest. Rather than read it, she just comments: “Would someone please tell me who this guy’s press agent is? I mean, have you ever seen so much written about so little?”

Then she turns to Vanity Fair.

Love was so upset over its 1992 profile that many were caught off guard when she agreed to do another interview for the magazine’s June issue.

“I’ll tell you why,” she says, dropping the magazine--this one with Keanu Reeves on the cover--onto the limo floor. “They swore on the blood of the lambs that they would make everything up to me. When I first heard about it, I rolled around on the floor laughing. I thought, ‘[Expletive] off.’

“I was ready to send them fish Fed Ex--mackerel. They wanted to make up and they wanted to sell magazines, and it did sell really, really well. They said they got lots of really good letters, and they did. Did you see them?”

She looks down at the photo of Reeves, who is touring with his rock band between films, and she’s reminded of her own film goals.

“Why can’t they find better scripts for me?” she says. “I mean, every script these days seems to have either a stripper, a whore or an addict in it-- no stretch !”

As Love enters the dressing room backstage at Pine Knob around 7, she can hear the crowd outside chanting to the music of rappers Cypress Hill, the act that precedes Hole each night. The rest of the band--including bassist Melissa Auf der Maur and drummer Patty Schemel--have already been at the venue for two hours.

“Anyone seen the ashtray?” Love asks, lighting another in her endless chain of American Spirit cigarettes. After making a sandwich from the modest deli plate, she rests for the show by curling up on a sofa with a cup of iced coffee and Bailey’s Irish Creme.

She picks up Sherwin B. Nuland’s bestseller “How We Die” and turns to a chapter on suicide. She reads aloud a passage about how the official suicide rate may be too low because it doesn’t include deaths caused by self-destructive behavior, including drugs and dangerous sexual habits--activities that, the author says, rob society of the contributions of the victims.

Without warning, Love throws the book to the floor and shouts: “What the hell! [Expletive] you. So, I smoke, I [expletive], therefore I am not contributing?”

The reaction is part of a nightly, almost ritualistic transformation that energizes Love for her sometimes hellish stage performances. She’s soon into her stage lingerie and pacing, going through the cigarettes even more rapidly than usual. The rest of the band members gather and walk to the stage.

From the audience, Love appears to be stumbling as she walks to the microphone, and the show is punctuated with surreal moments when she seems to drift away emotionally. Some fans whisper that she must be on drugs.

They later gasp when she challenges a heckler in the front row, eventually throwing her guitar at him as the set comes to a close around 9 p.m.

From the tone of her hourlong performance, you’d think Love would be angry and unapproachable backstage, but 20 minutes later she is back in the wool dress, lying on the dressing room sofa with Frances on her tummy.

Love and Drew Barrymore, who has been going with guitarist Erlandson for more than a year, are trading favorite lines of dialogue from “The Breakfast Club,” which Love calls the “defining film of my generation.” They are as gleeful as sorority sisters.

Asked later what triggered the outburst onstage, Love asks, “Was I upset?”

Reminded about the heckler in the audience, she says, “Oh, the jock? He kept yelling, ‘Who’s your next victim?’ and then he started naming all these rock star guys that I’ve been involved with or allegedly involved with--my husband, the rest of them. He is pretty well-informed at least.

“It was just hard to concentrate, hearing all those names, so I was just trying to get him to [expletive] shut up. . . . Sometimes they hold up T-shirts in the front row with pictures of Kurt on them. They abuse me, I abuse them.”

In a biting review of the opening Lollapalooza concert in Washington state last month, a Newsweek critic branded Love’s behavior as offensive to the audience and to some fellow musicians, noting that Love allegedly punched Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna in the face during Sonic Youth’s performance. (Hanna subsequently filed an assault complaint.)

But Love defends the shows as “cathartic.”

“I spent a lot of time with Sinead [O’Connor] before she left the tour, and she said my music was joyous,” Love says. “She said it was expressing the anger that she couldn’t express--and I think that’s what a lot of people feel.”

About the incident with Hanna, she adds: “I’m not physically as violent as everybody thinks. If you count up everyone I’ve clocked since grade school, there’s only about four or five people.”

A fter unwinding from the show for about an hour, Love kisses Frances good night and waves as her daughter leaves with her nanny for the ride back to the hotel. Love’s going to a bar with Erlandson, Barrymore and others from the tour party, but first she wants to sign on to America Online.

Although she often spends time in industry insider and Hole chat “rooms,” tonight, using a laptop in a production trailer backstage, she looks only at her e-mail. Love types rapidly with two fingers, not bothering to correct errors.

“Never look at anything sent by anyone who uses Cobain in a sign-on name,” she advises as she speeds past dozens of names. “They’re usually the crazies. I don’t need that.”

Finally, she spots a message from a friend who had earlier told her that she was sending Love a copy of a lengthy document placed on the Internet by a private investigator who has claimed for months that Cobain’s death wasn’t suicide but murder and that Love was somehow involved.

After reading his lengthy essay, Love sends e-mail to an American Online executive, complaining that people can say virtually anything on-line without liability.

“What if I started calling you a pedophile?” she writes in one note to the executive.

She had planned only to sign on for about 10 minutes, but she stays on for more than an hour--despite gentle reminders from the tour manager that the other band members are waiting for her. In her only visible flare-up of the evening, she barks, “This is important. How’d you [expletive] like to be called a murderer?”

Asked how much her bill runs a month, Love laughs as she steps out of the trailer.

“Nothing,” she says. “I get it free. [Expletive] yeah. I’ve probably got 100,000 people to sign on--all the publicity about me signing on and all. That’s a lot of money for someone.”

Love is flanked by her band members and two security guards as she walks into a noisy, anonymous bar in Pontiac shortly after midnight and takes a stool in the center of the room. After ordering a beer and a shot of tequila, she is ready to talk again.

If Polly Jean Harvey, the British singer-songwriter whom Love greatly admires, is obsessively private, Love thrives on public confession.

“Sinead thinks I use interviews as therapy, and maybe she’s right,” Love says.

This tendency to bare her soul will focus enormous attention on the next Hole album, due next summer unless Love postpones it to work on a film. Everyone expects the album to be filled with reflections on Cobain.

Love shakes her head.

“Everyone expects me to write the big suicide/survivor/Kurt album, but it’s so private to me,” she says. “I want it to be cryptic rather than [literal]. People read about me and they think they know everything, that nothing is held back, that I’m incapable of not saying everything that is going on in my life. But there is part of me that no one knows or will know. There are parts of my personality that aren’t for sale.”

As she starts talking about the months after her husband’s suicide, however, it’s hard to imagine what dark secrets are held back.

“I was in shock,” she says above the din, oblivious to the young men who are trying to catch her eye. “I thought about dying for a few days--that maybe it was the only honorable thing to do.”

Several musicians contacted her after Cobain’s death to offer support, she says, but R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe proved the most comforting.

“He was really helpful, without turning it into something sexual,” she says. “If he had turned it into that, it would have been completely destructive, but he didn’t.”

Love says she did, however, get involved intimately with three other people, though she doesn’t want to name them.

“I realize now that I wanted my husband,” she says angrily. “A lot of women trade sex to be held, and the only way I felt I could be really held was through my sexuality.

“I took a lot of drugs and I [slept with] everybody--until about three months ago. I tried to trust people, I tried to love people--and it was a disaster. All they wanted was to be Kurt or go where Kurt had been or whatever.

“I will not ever do that again. I am not a 15-year-old idiot. No way, not in a [expletive] million years will I humiliate myself like that again. I would rather have a loveless life. I had four goddamn years of bliss, and most people don’t get 10 seconds of it. If I can’t draw on that, then [expletive] it.”

What about her daughter during those moments of despair?

Love sometimes seems to talk so freely that you wonder if she hasn’t forgotten that a tape recorder is on. This time, however, she leans into the microphone as if speaking directly to the world.

“I want everyone to know that if I am on drugs, my child is with my mother-in-law or her grandparents and two nannies,” she says forcefully. “No way in this world will my child ever be subjected to any of my self-destructive behavior. She’s never seen it, never been around it, never in three [expletive] years.”

Love says despair over one of the relationships led to a suicide attempt around the first of the year, an incident that never became public even though she was rushed to a hospital.

She insists, however, that another, much-publicized hospital dash from her home in Seattle in June was due to an accidental overuse of a prescription drug.

“When I woke up in the hospital the second time, I was scared because I didn’t do that on purpose,” she says. “I was scared and very grateful.”

A s closing time nears in the bar, Love reflects on what might have been if Cobain hadn’t killed himself. Surprisingly, she doesn’t offer an idyllic picture.

“I think we might have had to separate because of the drugs,” she says, staring across the room. “After a while, we just weren’t on the same wavelength. I had to live through his deaths--like the time in Rome, where he was dead for 22 hours and I was throwing myself on the floor, praying to every god there is.

“He didn’t have to live through his deaths. He didn’t know. He’d come out of it and go like, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’

“Well, honey , you’ve been on life support for 22 [expletive] hours, that’s what the fuss is about.”

Thirty minutes later, the van pulls up in front of the hotel and the passengers step into the damp night. Love pulls a scarf tightly around her neck as she walks toward the lobby.

She stops for a final question before stepping onto the elevator for the ride to her room, where she’ll probably be up for another three or four hours, watching movies on TV or trying to write some songs or read a book.

The woman whose music deals so convincingly with anger and disillusionment sighs when asked to name the best things in her life?

“My daughter. The band,” she says softly. “That’s it.”

Is that enough?

“Nope,” she says, as she stands in front of the elevator. “But it’s enough to keep you alive.”

*Hilburn On-Line

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