Frances Bean Cobain

Frances Bean Cobain
Born	August 18 1992 (1992-08-18) (age 15) Los Angeles, California

Frances Bean Cobain (born August 18, 1992) is the only child of the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and Hole frontwoman Courtney Love. She was born at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California at 7:48 AM, weighing 7 lb 1 oz (3.2 kg).^[1]

Biography

Frances is named after Frances McKee, front woman of Glasgow group The Vaselines. ^[2][3][4]. The Vaselines were Kurt Cobain's favorite band. The middle name Bean was chosen because Kurt thought she looked like a kidney bean on the ultrasound.^[5] Her godfather is R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, and Drew Barrymore is her godmother.^[6] Prior to Frances Cobain's birth there were rumors suggesting that her mother, Courtney Love, used heroin during her pregnancy with Frances. This scandal intensified when Vanity Fair published Lynn Hirschberg's article "Strange Love" that alleged Love admitted to taking heroin even after learning of her pregnancy. The response to this article caused serious damage to Love's public standing, and many parenting groups called for Frances to be removed from her parents' custody immediately after birth. Along with Cobain, Love maintained that Vanity Fair took her words out of context. This continued after her birth, with tabloid reporters wanting to know if Frances was born addicted to drugs. The notoriety of the article resulted in child welfare services launching an investigation into the couple's ability to parent. The investigation was eventually dismissed, but not without a significant amount of legal wrangling and two-week-old Frances being removed from her parents' custody for a short time, placed into the care of Love's sister. Tool front man Maynard James Keenan wore a T-shirt which read "Free Frances Bean" in reference to the situation.^[7] April 1, 1994 was the last time Frances saw her father alive while visiting him at Exodus Recovery Center, the L.A. rehab clinic he had entered the previous day.^[8] The two of them played, and Kurt sang to her. Kurt Cobain was found dead in his home, ruled by a suicide of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, on the morning of April 8, 1994. Frances was still only 1 year old at this time. The following fall, Love enrolled Frances at Happy Medium School in Seattle, now called Giddens School. To date, Frances has only given three official interviews. In September 2005, at age 13, Cobain gave her first ever interview to Teen Vogue where she discussed her personal style and mentions her parents.^[9] The second interview appeared in i-D magazine in January 2006, where she spoke out against the tabloid "lies" about her mother. In August 2006, she was photographed for ELLE in her father's famous red cardigan and his pajama pants that he got married in. "I wore his pajamas because he got married in them to my mom in 1992 in Hawaii so I thought they would be cute if I wore them today ... he was too lazy to put on a tux so he got married in pajamas!" she said. She also said that she wears his clothes now and then, and owns more than 137 pairs of shoes, 200 pairs of jeans, and many designer bags. According to her mother, Frances is set to inherit "a sweater, a guitar, and the lyrics to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'" from her father's possessions. ^[10] Many other possessions will be sold in an upcoming auction held by Courtney Love. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the title and cover photograph for Sliver: The Best of the Box, the latest posthumous Nirvana release, were chosen by Frances^[11]. The cover photograph shows a pile of Nirvana and Cobain tapes strewn about, including a copy of the "Fecal Matter" demo.

Notes