By Brian Pera

IF JONBENET RAMSEY is the Lindbergh baby and River Phoenix is James Dean, then Kurt Cobain must be JFK and Courtney Love a cross between Jackie O. and a smoking gun. Ten years after the fact, the events surrounding the Nirvana figurehead's death are either an open-and-shut case or a trail of clues leading directly to his widow, depending on whom you consult. Cobain was either a suicide or a murder victim, a poster boy for early-'90s anomie or the casualty of a grasping dragon lady's bottomless greed. Rolling Stone, while inferring Love is something of a shrew, calls the conspiracy theories baseless. Tom Grant, a private investigator once hired by Love to find the missing husband he now contends was dead in the garage all along, possesses shocking proof of her duplicity – or so he says. Max Wallace and Ian Halperin last weighed in on Grant's conspiracy with 1998's Who Killed Kurt Cobain? Now they've returned to the grassy knoll, that ever fertile mountain or molehill, with Love and Death: A New and Explosive Investigation into the Murder of Kurt Cobain.

Imagine Jackie O. as Tricky Dick in drag. Included in Love and Death are excerpts of the tapes Grant made from innumerable conversations with his client, in which Love alternately connives, finagles, bullies, and coos. Though for a time she cleaned herself up, staging a very visible transformation, Love's private and public sides now seem interchangeably self-aggrandizing – and equally revealing. Her appearance on Late Show with David Letterman earlier this year was an even more spectacular embarrassment of riches than Farrah Fawcett's guest spot had been, as if Love had studied that performance and calculated a messier, more meticulously riveting fiasco to topple it in the ratings, ensuring herself a lifetime of reruns. A shameless self-promoter who drops names as if trying to buoy her way out of quicksand, Love talks repeatedly in Grant's tapes about getting press by any means necessary.

"My record's coming out in eight weeks and all publicity's good publicity," she rambles, debating what to do in regard to a phony coma story she planted about herself a few days prior to Cobain's famous flight from detox. "What should I tell the Associated Press?... If it goes in and I deny it – and I can deny it all the way to the bank – and people will believe me if I deny it and say it never happened.... What I can say is that [Kurt] left rehab, and I had to come down to L.A. with the baby and our nanny to support him, and when he left, I got very depressed and had to be hospitalized for some sort of nervous breakdown ... that way, there's no drugs involved and Kurt doesn't get in any trouble because it looks like he wasn't meant to be in rehab in the first place and he felt pressured and jumped over the wall. I mean, how's that for spin?"

What's most amazing about a muckraking tome that aims to implicate Love in her husband's death is how believable she sometimes makes its theory seem. Then again, inconsistent behavior and facts that don't add up have become the most reliable part of our everyday experience. The half-shrewd, half-casual combination of secrecy and calculated disclosure Love personifies cuts a culture-wide swath, surging high and low, from Letterman's Late Show to so-called reality television, from your next-door neighbor to MTV's Cribs, all the way to the White House.

President George W. Bush, like Love, exploits it with consummate, apparently artless precision. He was – literally – born into his performance. He's no Ronald Reagan, as Ron Reagan Jr. recently pointed out, but Bush too knows his money shots. As do his appointees: Attorney General John Ashcroft is an even bigger camera hog than Bush enemy Michael Moore (himself a crowd pleaser given to sweeping platitudes and hasty transitions). In Worse Than Watergate, John W. Dean, one-time counsel to Richard Nixon, compares the Fortunate Son and his erstwhile employer as if judging best performance by a male lead. "While there is some truth to these Nixon and Bush images," he writes, "they are also deceptions – for neither man is really his crafted picture, just as no actor is the character he or she portrays onstage or before the camera." Like Nixon, "Bush plays the role of being President (sometimes well and other times poorly)."

"I thought I was marrying the female Johnny Rotten," James Moreland, Love's disillusioned first husband moans in Love and Death. "Instead I got this right-wing Phyllis Diller." As with any public figure, Love's carefully crafted image hasn't always corresponded with the self she reveals privately, an inconsistency that seems to sit comfortably enough with her. "She would also say that me and other knee-jerk liberals don't know what we're talking about," Moreland continues, "because she had slept with generals at this army base in Alaska and they had a lot of secret information which proved that the wars they got us into were really for our own good."

"Some people say 'secrecy, secrecy, secrecy, secrecy,' " Vice President Dick Cheney recently sneered in reference to a White House energy task force that might have benefited Enron, the Southern Co., and Halliburton. Cheney added, with an implicit humbug, "You can't run the government if you don't have the ability to talk to people in confidence." Every cover-up has an ostensibly sound explanation. Often, this means a theatrical media exclusive and a fraudulent air of confession, during which actor interrupts scene with a heartfelt, Brechtian aside. Arrogance, a sort of brazen pride in performance, factors in, as does indignation. Thus OJ Simpson – himself celebrating a 10-year anniversary of oversaturation – scoffed at the settlement owed the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. "I didn't commit the crime," he told a perky, backlit Katie Couric. "I don't think they deserve anything." He did, on the other hand, openly acknowledge having been unfaithful to Nicole. While conceding that he lied under oath, and characterizing his own marital infidelity as "a terrible moral error," Bill Clinton referred to the impeachment process, at least in his case, as "an abuse of power." His autobiography, the title of which, My Life, telegraphs "open book," purports to tell all about the "parallel lives" he has led. More accurately, in its bid to rewrite history, it seeks to establish the former president's legacy on his own terms.

The justification for Love's multitude of behind-the-scenes sins has most often been the enormity of her suffering and loss. Toward this end, she adds and deletes and blurts out corroborating and contradictory information – in public, in the press, even posthumously, as in her husband's journals. "I won't talk about this," she recently wept to Howard Stern and his listeners when the banter veered into unscripted territory. She seemed genuinely unhinged about losing custody of her daughter, which is to say, she was convincing. Gone was the composure of several years prior, when, citing demographics, she coolly refused to discuss rumors about her past on The Today Show. In a prerecorded audiotape aired at Cobain's memorial, she publicized his suicide note, interjecting her own commentary. "Then he goes on to say personal things to me that are none of your damn business," she shouted, shaming the audience for her need for them to know. After a dramatic pause, she proceeded to the next paragraph.

Imagine Phyllis Diller as Tricky Dick in a baby-doll dress, with ratty pigtails and Mary Jane shoes. It took Bette Davis more than 30 years to make it to Robert Aldrich. Courtney Love has resigned herself to the Grand Guignol of America's Sweetheart after only four records and a six-year hiatus from making music. There is, in the public persona for this latest release – in the coinciding temper tantrums; in the use of a teen pop production team; in the airbrushed promotional art, which takes its cues from her surgeries – a girly infantilism reminiscent of Baby Jane. Love's music once had depth and texture, reflecting a complex personality and a formidable, conflicted intellect. The compression on America's Sweetheart is so airtight that it suffocates her voice and removes much of the clarity from her words. All that's left is the screaming, effectively silencing her. It's not such a stretch, picturing Diller in that baby-doll dress. The consensus seems to be that Love has regressed into a parody of a parody.

The real story, and real murder mystery, involves a pug-nosed, flat-chested, overgrown juvenile delinquent whose angry desperation to participate in her culture's spectacle of vapidity outlasted her late husband's desire to reflect back its mediocrity. Love's talent, such as it is or was, has become secondary, if not beside the point. The cover-up concerns a near total, systemic devaluation of integrity. The idea of someone obsessed enough with exposure to surgically erase the identity she was born with, to suffer one indignity after another just to get air time, to erode whatever distinguishes her in favor of that which broadens her appeal, is a day in the life of America, as any night of prime-time scheduling makes perfectly clear. The rants recorded by Grant are an entire culture's near-psychotic narcissism, top to bottom, where self-absorption is so commonplace that to consider anyone else is a death wish, if not career suicide. Imagine Courtney as a mirror. In her own words:

"Other than answering yes to the question 'Do people stare at you in the supermarket?,' I'm as sane as anybody."