Courtney Love has settled in New York, and she’s going through that quintessential New York nightmare: trying to find a place to live. “I’ve been here for a year looking for a house. I live here. I am a member of your society,” the rocker told us last night at the fall 2010 presentation of ArgyleCulture menswear, Russell Simmons’s Macy’s line. Specifically, Ms. Love wants to buy a house in Greenwich Village. “It has to be in the Village. I am not going to the New Museum Building, goddamn it! If I go there, you know, it’s just too easy. I’ve done Soho. The Village is definite.” But she’s not overly picky. “It doesn’t have to be Gold Coast; you know, west of Sixth is fine. But it has to be in that part that’s really quaint and lovely.”
While looking, she’s been living in the Mercer Hotel, not entirely drama-free. “I have been sitting at the hotel that has been my home for like a year now, with, like, four months off to rent a Tribeca loft from the Portmans — Natalia Vodianova and Lord Portman have this loft in Tribeca. But I thought we would trade up for a West Village house, because when I landed, I had enough money and financing for a house. And then, I got a lawsuit [Ed: Maybe this one?], and my assets got frozen. All my assets. And so because the Mercer staff are so great, and the owner, they let my family stay there for like, $200,000 worth of staying there. I mean, Über-crazy generous, and at a great rate, until the assets were unfrozen. So that was incredibly nice. And then the assets got unfrozen, and then Frances, like, ran away from home and did that crazy thing she’s doing. And now, I’m not looking at the same house.”
Now Love has her eye on Milla Jovovich’s place. “Milla has a house on Greenwich, fucking beautiful. So I don’t know that I’ll buy it, but I will certainly lease it. And I might buy it, because our taste is, like, almost the same. And it has enough room for Frances if she wants to come home. And it’s very, like, Edith Wharton. It’s on a bit of a busier street than I was looking for, you know, it’s not leafy. But I’m not in Brooklyn, it’s okay.” Sounds perfect?
Not so fast! There are kinks in this plan. “So for two weeks, between us having the same manager, Jason Weinberg, and between my Realtor, I can’t fucking find Milla to save my life. And I even go [online] to see, like, who her friends are because I lost her number years ago. And finally this guy Nur Khan — you know who Nur Khan is? — Nur Khan, he comes up with where Milla is. She writes him that she’s filming — this is today — [and] she might use the house this year.”
So unfair! “They showed it to me! I didn’t go look at the rest of the little houses in the Village because that was great.” So Love has resigned herself to looking at other little houses in the neighborhood. “I had a meeting with this woman who owns a house in the Village next door to Anna Wintour,” she told us, winding down. Sadly, Love griped, Anna’s neighbor rejected her. “And my references are impeccable!”
Finally, Love summed up this New York rite of passage: “Now, do you know the saga of trying to find a house in the city? It’s like Tama Janowitz 1985 all over again. People stay together because of the real estate. It’s fucked up.”
Amen.
Related: Courtney Love Recalls the Time Anna Wintour Snubbed Her [The Cut]
