Her father hardly an angel himself since he abandoned her in childhood has likened her to Charles Manson
Her father, hardly an angel himself since he abandoned her in childhood, has likened her to Charles Manson. Her first husband, a transvestite punk rocker called Falling James Moreland, once accused her of stealing his career and said that if they had stayed married he too would have “wound up like Kurt, shoving a shotgun down my throat”.In the long-running legal dispute she recently settled with the surviving members of Cobain’s band, Nirvana, she found herself accused in court papers of being “irrational, mercurial, self-centred, unmanageable, inconsistent and unpredictable”. In this context, the fracas that got her arrested this week on a Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles to London looks like awfully small potatoes. It wasn’t even the first time she had been arrested on an aeroplane.
(In 1995, she got into a fight with a Qantas crew after they asked her not to stick her feet on the wall. “Go the fuck ahead and arrest me,” she said, so they did.) The mid-air events of last Tuesday were nevertheless indicative of her volatile, fractured, utterly unpredictable personality – the same kind of see-sawing that has permitted her, across her career, to mutate from a haggard, angst-ridden, junked-up punk rocker to a Versace-clad, crimson-lipped, full-bodied Hollywood glamour-puss.We should perhaps overlook the delicious irony of Courtney Love, of all people, flying on Virgin Airlines. (As the late night chat-show host Jay Leno remarked, you can fill in your own joke.) The fact was she was travelling at the invitation of Virgin’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, to appear at a celebrity fund-raiser for the Old Vic. Apparently, she lost her temper – and then some – when the cabin crew told her she could not invite a friend in economy to join her in the first-class cabin. She swore like a sailor and refused to put on her seatbelt when it was time to land at Heathrow.
The upshot: the pilot radioed ahead to have police meet her at the gate.She was detained for nine hours, then took the first opportunity following her release to speak her mind all over again. “This is my second time on Virgin and my first time wasn’t so great either,” she told reporters. “I think that I have been flying British Airways for a long time and I will continue to do so.”Extraordinarily, this did not spell the end of her relationship with Branson. In fact, by the next night they were sharing cocktails and making light of the whole thing. Love said sorry, and Branson said he was proud to own an airline that made special dispensation for eccentric rock singers.
