Frances Bean Cobain, the daughter of grunge superstar Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and his controversial rock star widow Courtney Love, has finally found happiness after a messy first marriage and one of the most notorious early childhoods in pop-culture history.
The self-described model and visual artist just embarked on her second marriage at age 31 — to Riley Hawk, the 30-year-old son of skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.
A year ago, Frances celebrated her 30th birthday by triumphantly posting “I made it!” on Instagram.
But the odds were against her from the start.
An infamous 1992 article in Vanity Fair alleged that her parents were junkies and that Love was shooting heroin when pregnant with her. Because the charges in the story were deemed so serious, Frances was removed, temporarily, from her parents’ care shortly after she was born.
Life didn’t get easier after that. Kurt Cobain shot himself to death when his daughter was about 20 months old. Frances’ relationship with her mother, the Hole frontwoman and Golden Globe-nominated actress who has struggled with drug addiction and seemingly endless legal battles, was reportedly troubled for years.
In 2009, Frances filed a restraining order against Love in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging they had gotten into a physical fight. Frances, then 17, testified at the time that her mother “exists on … Xanax, Adderall, Sonata and Abilify, sugar and cigarettes” and allegedly caused the death of two family pets because of her “hoarding” and “addiction.”
“She rarely eats,” Frances said in court testimony, as first reported by The Fix, a now-defunct site devoted to sobriety. “She often falls asleep in her bed while she is smoking, and I am constantly worried that she will start a fire (which she has done at least three times) that will threaten our lives.”
After initially denying that she used drugs while pregnant — and once blaming the Vanity Fair article in part for Kurt’s suicide — Love came clean in 2011.
“Yes, it’s true, I used heroin in the first three weeks of my pregnancy — but so f–king what!?,” Love told The Fix. “I didn’t even know I was pregnant at the time! I also took a few puffs on a cigarette when my belly was out to here, but most of those nine months, I walked around with nicotine patches all over my body. When you have a baby inside you, you’re not going to do drugs or something stupid.”
In 2003 Love lost custody of Frances for a second time after the singer was arrested for breaking into her then-boyfriend’s home and, according to People, overdosed on pain pills and made a suicide threat. At that time, Wendy Cobain, Kurt’s mother, became Frances’ guardian and Kurt’s sister Kim also helped care for the girl, then 11 years old. Love did not regain custody until two years later, after a stint in rehab.
In 2018, Frances revealed she herself had been sober for two years, writing on Instagram: “It is an everyday battle to be in attendance for all the painful, bazaar, uncomfortable, tragic, fucked up things that have ever happened or will ever happen.”
Frances went through chaos when she married aspiring rocker Isaiah Silva in 2014 -— and wound up in a messy divorce from him in 2016. She lost an explosive court battle over one of her father’s most famous guitars, which he played during Nirvana’s MTV “Unplugged” performance in 1993, when a judge supported Silva’s claim that Frances had given it to him as a wedding gift.
The guitar sold at auction for a record-breaking $6 million in 2020.
“We had 11 billionaires bidding for that guitar,” said Darren Julien whose auction house handled the transaction. But Julien told The Post he was impressed with Frances, saying she handled the loss with aplomb.
“She’s lovely, an amazing human being,” Julian said. “She’s had struggles but she has her act together now. I’m sure it’s was difficult growing up with two famous parents but she’s come out ahead.”
Frances has an even bigger fan in longtime LA private investigator John Nazarian, who worked for Courtney for years and who was hired in 2016 to escort Frances back to the home she had shared with Silva to retrieve some of her belongings.
“Frances is one of the most intelligent, well-spoken, even-tempered people I’ve ever met — the polar opposite of her mother,” Nazarian said.
Nazarian brought some off-duty LA police officers to the home, where, he said, Silva was living with his mother and sister. There, Nazarian said he encountered a “total s–tshow.”
There, he clashed with Isaiah’s mother when he opened a metal gate at the house and she accused him of hitting her with it.
“Then the mother runs back into the house and we hear glass shattering and they call the police,” Nazarian told The Post. (He later settled with the woman for $25,000.)
Frances, however, was “cool as a cucumber” during the whole scene, Nazarian said.
The showdown at her home took place in the backdrop of an even messier situation that allegedly involved Love and her manager at the time, Sam Lutfi — who also famously managed Britney Spears for a while.
Both Silva and his ex — a TikTok influencer known as Jessica Sullivan before transitioning to a male known as Jesse and who at one point was living with Frances and Silva — sued Love and Lutfi.
In the lawsuit, Silva alleged Lutfi and others had broken into his home and kidnapped him in an attempt to get him to surrender Kurt’s guitar. No charges were ever filed. Love settled the lawsuit with her former son-in-law last year but the details were not disclosed.
The Post has reached out to Silva and his family.
Despite her rocky past, people who know Frances — including a source close to new husband Riley Hawk’s family — say she is “surprisingly normal and well-adjusted.”
It’s not clear how much Frances, who controls the rights to her late father’s name and image, is worth at present. Kurt, who committed suicide at his and Love’s Seattle home, died without a will, and his estate is estimated at about $450 million; in 2010, Frances reportedly inherited 37% of the estate.
And while Nazarian may have said Love is the “polar opposite” of her “even-tempered” daughter, he also has praise for her.
“Courtney has had a lot of ups and downs, and I knew about a lot that went down with her because we’ve had hundreds of conversations over the years, sometimes in the back of limos,” said Nazarian, who’s worked for hundreds of Hollywood VIPs including Frank Sinatra during his lengthy career. “She is a great f–king human being. She has a brilliant mind, and she’s a brilliant writer, and she knows how to make things happen.”
Nazarian insisted that Frances had a much better upbringing than most people probably think — and has fared better than her mother, who was estranged for decades from her own father, the late Hank Harrison, and her mother, psychotherapist Linda Carroll.
“Frances was protected and taken care of by the people she was with,” he said. “She was kept out of the limelight, she got a great education and she was loved. There were a few bumps in the road with her mother, but Frances was always loved and she loves her mother.”
Frances, who sold two homes she owned in LA, has relocated to the San Diego area, where Riley Hawk’s family lives. He had Frances began dating in 2021, four years after her split from Silva.
Hawk, born Hudson Riley Hawk to Tony Hawk and his first wife, Cindy Dunbar, is a professional skateboarder like his legendary father, but is categorized as more of a street skater. He also fronts the punk band Warish.
R.E.M frontman Michael Stipe, Frances’ godfather, officiated at Riley and Frances’ low-key wedding last month.
Last year on her 30th birthday, Frances sounded surprised that she was still alive and thriving.
“Honestly, 20 year old Frances wasn’t sure that was going to happen. At the time, an intrinsic sense of deep self loathing dictated by insecurity, destructive coping mechanisms & more trauma than my body or brain knew how to handle, informed how I saw myself and the world; through a lens of resentment for being brought into a life that seemingly attracted so much chaos and the kind of pain tied to grief that felt inescapable,” she wrote on Instagram.
She also posted an inspirational note to herself and her 1.5 million Instagram followers on her 31st birthday in August, writing in part:
“Forgive yourself & others for not always knowing exactly how to human. let go of what you can’t control, which is almost everything. embrace having control over what you can like your perspective & choices.”
