Courtney Love — stripper, actor, rock star, widow, drug addict, Nelson College for Girls alumna, deadbeat mom, author, litigant, blogger, vintage enthusiast, and all-around Bad Girl — is an individual who seemingly has an uncommon devotion to making bad choices.

Times writer Eric Wilson, the latest cannon fodder for the fusillade of Love's personality, was sent to document the Hole frontwoman's apparent delivery into Hermès-toting middle-aged respectability. The piece isn't a take-down — Wilson scrupulously notes examples of Love's intelligence, and states outright that she is canny enough to use the fashion industry and its media just as much as they are using her — but if one were looking to paint a picture of Love the victim, Love the pathetic "train wreck," she serves up plenty of raw material. Ahem:

Shortly after 8pm, Ms. Love burst into the room with the Marchesa dress slung on one arm and the noted German Neo-Expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer on the other. She was entirely naked. She made one lap around the room, walking in front of a photographer, an assistant, a hairstylist and me. She pulled over her head a transparent lace dress that covered up nothing, and demanded my assistance — "Not you," she said to Mr. Kiefer, who was bent over trying to help her — to stuff her feet into a pair of black Givenchy heels that were zipped up the back and tied with delicate laces in the front. Then she applied a slash of red lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth.

And:

At one point, she took me upstairs to her room to show me some clothes. The bed was unmade, and there was an overflowing ashtray on the night stand next to five prescription bottles and some junk food. "These are my wakeup cupcakes, some anti-depressants and a cellphone book," she said without embarrassment.

"I speak to you as someone who doesn't want to be perceived as a train wreck," she said.

Now that the descriptor "polarizing" is, like everything else, getting defined downwards by our controversy-chasing hyperbolic media, it's bracing but not altogether unpleasant to encounter a figure actually worthy of the term. Of the woman who wrote, for starters, "Doll Parts," "Miss World," and all of Celebrity Skin, I will forgive a lot.

But even apart from the undeniable force of her talent — and even I accept, or at least I know rationally, when I'm not actually listening to "Violet", that it's specious to argue that talent alone is a fig leaf for the mad, bad, and/or dangerous behavior that it so often accompanies — Courtney Love is important. If you caught me good and drunk, late at night, I might even argue she is in certain ways admirable. What other woman in recent memory, having been given (hell, earned) the media's Bad Girl label, has snarled at the designation — and then continued on her own, misguided but apparently basically contented, way? (Angelina Jolie wriggled out of her "reputation" with supermotherhood and charity photo-ops; Juliette Lewis found God, or at least Scientology.)

Courtney Love is unwilling to become boring — I don't think carrying a Birkin and telling André Leon Talley about how high she was on Letterman counts — and for that alone, it seems some must condemn her. Perhaps she realizes that women are judged for their personal lives in a way that men in the public eye rarely are — where male rock stars who are neglectful parents with histories of drug abuse are concerned, the press narrative is, shall we say, markedly different — and that trying to please those strangers who have come to feel they have a stake in her family, her personal life, or her choices is a losing game. Perhaps, as Wilson writes, Love has an "apparent inability to neither ignore the public expectation of another outlandish performance, nor to resist the temptation" to give us what we want. Perhaps she just doesn't give a fuck. Courtney Love has been the subject of vicious takedowns and spirited defenses for over twenty years. The vastly different interpretations served up, I would suggest, say more about the journalists who write them and the audiences who consume them than they do about Love herself. For Love presents a conundrum: even at her most drug-addled, she's as cheerful and self-secure as she is self-destructive. We truly don't have enough women capable of or willing to play the bad girl with a smile — and without a trace of victimhood.

So even though she is a bad singer (the point of Courtney Love is kind of that she's a bad singer) and (probably) a bad mother, and even though her Twitter was like a harrowing download from her Id, and even though I do not really understand what she was doing wandering a hotel naked with Anselm Kiefer and I do not believe that "a combination of Zoloft and a cocktail" really explains it, I love Courtney Love. Because she's not a role model — and, even more, because she has never aspired to be. Because she's not passive. Because she's a woman who takes issue with the view that she ought to be defined by who she used to fuck in the early 90s and who she gave birth to as a result. Because she auditioned for the bloody Mickey Mouse Club at age 12 by reciting Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." Because she is subjected (and subjects herself) to industrial-strength moral and legal scrutiny at every turn and still gets up in the afternoon, applies lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth, and faces the world. Are these achievements too small to cheer? In a world that still orders up sacrificial pop virgins — Britney, Lindsay, Demi — to swallow down whole, I'd argue they're anything but.

Courtney Love: "I'd Like To Be Trusted Again" [NYTimes]
Strange Love [Vanity Fair, via The Black Hole]
Love Conquers All [Spin, via Google Books]

Rue McClanahan—who passed away today—is best remembered for her Emmy-winning role on The Golden Girls. Blanche Devereaux was a notch in the bedpost of sex-positive feminism because—for the first time—a self-involved, slutty, older lady was endearing, not repulsive.

In McClanahan's 2007 memoir My First Five Husbands…And the Ones Who Got Away, she wrote:

People always ask me if I'm like Blanche. And I say, 'Well, Blanche was an oversexed, self-involved, man-crazy, vain Southern belle from Atlanta—and I'm not from Atlanta!'

Unlike other actors who portrayed beloved iconic pop culture figures, Rue really related to her character. In fact, Rue was initially offered the part of Rose on GG, but when she received the pilot script she instantly knew that she and Blanche "were made for each other," which is a funny thought, considering that the character was often referred to in the dialogue—mostly by Estelle Getty's character Sophia—as "slut," "Sheena, Queen of the Slut People," and (my favorite) "slutpuppy." But Rue loved it. Writing about her time on GG, she says:

I decided right away that Blanche would laugh whenever Sophia shot a poisoned arrow her way…After all, putting up with that sot of thing was, as Blanche breezily put it, 'the curse of every devastatingly beautiful woman.'

And perhaps it was that choice of self-acceptance and confidence that made her character so lovable. In the stiflingly conservative sexual and political climate of the late '80s—during which some felt that the AIDS epidemic was a punishment for sexual promiscuity—a 52-year-old woman saying that she related to a fictional character who shamelessly and genuinely enjoyed her active sex life and spoke frankly about condoms was progressive to say the least. In fact, she felt so strongly about the part, that she agreed to begin shooting the series with a salary based on her previous project (Mama's Family), which she says was tens of thousands less than that of Betty White and Bea Arthur.

One of Rue's favorite exchanges from the series is also telling of her own admitted free spirit:

ROSE: Is it possible to love two men at one time?
BLANCHE: Set the scene. Have we been drinking?

In 1987, she won an Emmy for her role as Blanche, and gave one of the most notorious acceptance speeches in the history of the awards show:

My agents told me I'd never work on TV, that I wasn't photogenic. My mother told me life was a lot of kicks and a lot of boosts... I won't mention who gave the kicks, but you know who you are—and you'll be in the book.

Although McClanahan's career spanned more than half a century—acting in films and Broadway productions—she didn't find mainstream success until she hit primetime TV in 1972 on Maude, a seminal show in the canon of pop cultural feminism, starring Bea Arthur. Playing title character's best friend Vivian, Rue portrayed a sort of silly woman who—with the help of Maude—found liberation from traditional gender roles. Later, on Mama's Family, Rue played a "spinster" freelance journalist.

In her real life, Rue had married five times (as chronicled in her memoir), was a staunch democrat, and was one of the first celebrity spokespeople of PETA. She always had a love of animals.

Rue—an undeniable gay icon—was also a longtime supporter of GLAAD, and long before the organization was founded, she publicly associated herself with gay acceptance. In 1971, she starred in the little-known film Some of My Friends Are…, about a group of gay men who meet up with their female friends at a bar in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve.

In the first season of GG, Dorothy gets mad at Blanche about something, and spits, "You, Blanche, are a self-serving, amoral, backstabbing Jezebel."

As someone who made no bones about enjoying her life as a gay-friendly, animal-loving, sex-positive, imperfect woman, we can only hope we grow up to be half the Jezebel that Rue McClanahan was.

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