The Downward Spiral

Once at the Seattle airport, though, Cobain changed his mind and refused to board the flight. Love had hoped to coax Cobain into flying to Los Angeles with her so that the couple could check into rehab together. Instead, she wound up on a plane with Billig. (The couple's daughter, Frances Bean, and a nanny followed the next day.) Love would say that she regretted leaving Cobain alone ("That '80s tough-love bullshit, it doesn't work," she said in a taped message during a memorial vigil for Cobain two weeks later). After a stop in San Francisco, Billig and Love flew to Los Angeles, and on the morning of March 26, Love checked into a $500-a-night suite in the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, and began an outpatient program to detox from drugs (Gold Mountain says it was tranquilizers).

Back in Seattle that evening, Cobain stopped by a woman friend and drug dealer's house in the upscale, bohemian Capitol Hill district. "Where are my friends when I need them?" she told a Seattle newspaper Cobain said to her. "Why are my friends against me?"

Cobain stayed in Seattle five more days before agreeing to go to Los Angeles for treatment. Before leaving, he stopped by Carlson's condominium in the Lake City area of Seattle to ask for a gun because Carlson, who was the best man at Cobain and Love's wedding, says Cobain told him there were trespassers on his Madrona property. "He seemed normal — we'd been talking," Carlson says. "Plus, I'd loaned him guns before." Though there is no registration or waiting period for shotguns in Seattle, Carlson believes Cobain didn't want to buy the shotgun himself because he was afraid the police would confiscate it, since they had taken his other firearms after the domestic dispute that had occurred 12 days earlier.

Cobain and Carlson headed to Stan's Gun Shop nearby and purchased a six-pound Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun and a box of ammunition for roughly $300, which Cobain gave Carlson in cash. "He was going out to L.A.," Carlson says. "It seemed kind of weird that he was buying the shotgun before he was leaving. So I offered to hold onto it until he got back." Cobain, however, insisted on keeping the shotgun himself. The police believe that Cobain brought the weapon home and stashed it in a closet. Novoselic reportedly drove Cobain to the airport. Smear and a Gold Mountain employee met Cobain in Los Angeles and drove him to the Exodus Recovery Center, in the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital, in Marina del Rey, Calif. Cobain had spent four days detoxing at Exodus in 1992 but left the center before his treatment was completed.

Despite his inability to proceed with his plan, Chatoff says he spoke with Cobain by phone several times before Cobain left for Los Angeles. "I was not supportive of that at all," says Chatoff of Cobain's admittance to Exodus, "because that was just another detox 'buff and shine.'"

Cobain spent two days at the 20-bed clinic. He talked to several psychologists there, none of whom considered him suicidal. Though Frances Bean and her nanny visited him, Love never did. On April 1, Cobain called Love, who was still at the Peninsula. "He said, 'Courtney, no matter what happens, I want you to know that you made a really good record,'" she later told a Seattle newspaper. "I said, 'Well, what do you mean?' And he said, 'Just remember, no matter what, I love you.'" (Hole were due to release their second album, Live Through This, 11 days later.) That was the last time Love spoke to her husband.

According to an artist known as Joe Mama, a longtime friend of the couple's who was the last to visit Cobain at Exodus: "I was ready to see him look like shit and depressed. He looked so fucking great." An hour later, Cobain, in Love's words, "jumped the fence." Actually, it was a six-foot-plus brick wall surrounding the center's patio.