Courtney Love (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
By Sarah Grant
While Courtney Love’s former contemporaries in Nirvana score a nomination for entry into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame, Love, 49, will end 2013 nomination-less, but nonetheless moving forward. The GRAMMY- winning singer/guitarist just finished touring with members of her band Hole (currently performing under Love’s name) with plans to release a new album and her memoir for Macmillan, Courtney Love: My Story, in the coming months.
In less than 20 minutes on the phone, the Love careened from one topic to the next from depression in the Hamptons to fixing trade lines to her bitter take on hip-hop. Most surprisingly, the loquacious front-woman talked about business advice she’s sought out and learned (the hard way) in her quarter-century career. Love is hardly the Lean In archetype, but she is proof that if you sit at enough tables — if you refuse to leave enough tables — you may eventually find yourself sitting square next to Warren Buffett, just as she did.
Read on for that story and plenty more on how Love earns her credit in the straight world.
I wanted to talk about business.
Business?
Yeah. What’s the best business advice you received?
I sat at Le Bernardin with Richard Johnson, who was editing Page Six, and I was sort of sick of how Page Six was treating me. I wasn’t being a bad girl or anything. He said [to me]: “New York is a 13-mile island and you only want to live in three of it, so even if you’re going to get a divorce, make sure it’s polite, because you’re going to see that person — again and again and again and again.”
Business advice? I am so close to understanding mortgage fraud entirely, but we’re not getting into that. However, I can fix your credit without breaking the law if you’re making under half-a-million, you only own one house, and you skipped a mortgage payment or something? I can get you up to $800.
The most important thing is personal finance, because corporate finance is something that happened to me while I was sleeping in the ‘90s and on a lot of drugs. So corporate finance, I had a vast, vast amount of wealth that I had no idea I had, because it was in different entities and LLCs. The most important thing, I think, is to keep three credit cards on the go, make those payments on time and watch every one of your trade lines.
The most useful thing is to have a couple CEOs as buddies. I have one major politico as a buddy, I have one major litigator — who is like, the closest voice to God there is in Manhattan — as a buddy, I have one LVHM CEO as a buddy, one hotelier as a buddy. We make big money, but they steal it all from us.
What’s it like owning Cobain’s estate? Find out at Radio.com.
