All Better Now

Don't call them her drug years. Courtney Love was "out sick."

It's a concept she says she got recently from friend Gwyneth Paltrow, who, along with Trudie Styler, was among a handful of friends Love says were "kind to me through thick and thin. You really know who your true friends are when you're down and out."

The former Hole singer and widow of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain says she's patiently treading on a long-term trek back from her own personal hell of drug addiction, bankruptcy, identity theft and legal troubles. She has been clean and sober for three years, the singer says, "but it will be another two years before my memory is back to normal" because of her heavy drug abuse.

With her first solo album since 2003 due later this year, Love says, "I know how to play the game now. I have to navigate the system, follow the rules and stop being a rebel. I can't afford to be a 43-year-old rebel."

She says her life today is focused on her music and album, Nobody's Daughter, and her daily regimen is filled with Buddhist chanting, Pilates and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She also meets regularly with a therapist and a drug addiction specialist, and watches daughter Frances Bean, 15, play soccer.
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"I'm really just a Beverly Hills soccer mom who wants to be a real estate mogul and design clothes," she says with a laugh.

Still, Love's penchant for candor and honesty continues to create controversy. Love says she was "goaded and manipulated" into making statements about Steve Coogan supplying drugs to actor Owen Wilson, whom she says she has met twice. And speculation about her 60-pound weight loss and plastic surgery has made Love a tabloid favorite.

She says she currently weighs 136 pounds, but prefers to be 125, so she can fit into designer sample gowns. She admits to two nose jobs, some painful dental surgery and an ill-advised lip-plumping procedure that left her with a "crazy chop mouth" that she's trying to fix to "restore my face to a natural look."

Love's love of fashion is also a hot topic for her; she says it's a necessity for today's female artists. Selling CDs and touring, she says, doesn't pay the bills.

Artists today, she says, make money by marketing their brand in fashion lines and fragrances, and Love says she has thrown herself into books and marketing conferences to prepare for that step.

But the timing isn't quite right, she says. "No one wants to smell like Eau du Controversy."

Adapted from an article appearing in USA Today on September 18, 2007 by Karen Thomas.