Inside Frances Bean Cobain's Unique Private World With Riley Hawk

Frances Bean Cobain couldn't help being iconic upon arrival.

"I get it, I really do, but at the same time, it's creepy," the only child of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love told Harper's Bazaar in early 2008. "It's creepy to see fan sites about me."

And not just because the now 32-year-old artist—and mom to 2-week-old son Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk with husband Riley Hawk—was only 15 at the time. Rather, she didn't feel as though she'd earned her thousands of online mentions just yet.

"These people are fascinated by me, but I haven't done anything," Frances said. "I'm famous by default. I came out of the womb and people wanted to know who I was because of my parents. If you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents. People need to wait until I've done something valid with my life."

Foreseeing the nepo baby tag even then, she noted, "I'm lucky enough to have a life where a lot of doors are going to be opened for me, so I'm taking my time. But I get asked what I want to do all the time because of my parents, because of the life I live."

Still, the self-described "attention whore" did enjoy performing. At 15 she already had nearly two dozen musical theater productions under her belt after getting over the initial so-I-guess-I'm-a-singer-like-my-parents trepidation, and she'd done some modeling.

Roughly 13 years after her debut photo shoot at 5 weeks old, tucked in her dad's arms in September 1992 for a Spin cover story, Frances gave her first-ever interview to Teen Vogue in 2005 ("I don't like to look sloppy," the grunge-eschewing fashionista said, "I'm a girly-girl") and posed for Elle UK at 14 in the pajamas her father wore on his wedding day.

"He got married to my mom in them in Hawaii in 1992," she explained to the British publication, "so I thought it'd be cute if I wore them today."

But, she told Harper's Bazaar, despite being "always kind of a badass," lots of the time she just just wanted to be alone. And she wasn't a big partier like some of her fellow famous celebrity offspring, she noted, because she didn't want her "picture in every single tabloid."

Subsequently, Frances added, "I can count on one hand how many people I trust."

By then she was living with her mom again ("We're very yin and yang of each other," she said of Courtney) after spending part of her childhood in Olympia, Wash., with her paternal grandmother Wendy O'Connor, who she called "the most constant thing I've ever had." (Wendy passed away in 2021.)

"I've had a different perspective on what real drama is," Frances said. "I'm not a fantasy-type person. I'm really pessimistic. It's horrible."

The real drama began long before she was born on Aug. 18, 1992, when her mom and dad were not just alt-rock royalty but also the subject of nonstop speculation about where their love train was going and just how big the wreck would be when the ride was over.

A week before her birth, Vanity Fair had published what was considered a devastating profile of Kurt and Courtney that called their fitness as parents into question.

"Kurt's the right person to have a baby with," an expectant Courtney told the magazine. "We have money. I can have a nanny. The whole feminine experience of pregnancy and birth—I'm not into it on that level. But it was a bad time to get pregnant and that appealed to me."

The couple subsequently sat down with Spin magazine for a family photo shoot that September featuring a sleepy-eyed, robe-clad Kurt holding Frances in bed. At one point, he scribbled "family values" on Courtney's bare stomach.

Courtney told Spin that her biggest fear for Frances was that she would "be stigmatized by this media circus" as she grew up.

"Other than that," the Pretty on the Inside artist added, "she's guaranteed a 100-percent perfect childhood. We knew we could give her what we didn't get—loyalty and compassion, encouragement. We knew we could give her a real home and spoil her rotten."

Having come from a "really dysfunctional family," Courtney said, she wanted stability for her daughter. While the singer had been married once before (her 1989 union with James Moreland was annulled), she said she believed marriage "should be forever" and she wanted "to have kids by the same person and stay with the same person."

But Kurt became increasingly self-destructive and Nirvana performed for what turned out to be the last time on March 1, 1994, in Munich. The 27-year-old was hospitalized two days later in Rome after overdosing on Rohypnol and alcohol. 

He briefly went to rehab, but on April 8, 1994, Kurt's body was found at his Seattle home, three days after he'd taken his own life.

Frances, who last saw her dad on April 1, was only 20 months old when he died—and she didn't know how it happened until she was 5. She said in 2019 that Courtney sent her to therapy for a year before telling her, "so that I could be eased to that conversation."

And having only so many of her own memories, Frances was left to compile her own impressions of Kurt's short life through home movies, interviews and the music he left behind.

"Kurt got to the point where he eventually had to sacrifice every bit of who he was to his art, because the world demanded it of him," Frances, an executive producer on the 2015 HBO documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, told Rolling Stone (where she also had a summer internship as a 15 year old) when the film premiered. "I think that was one of the main triggers as to why he felt he didn't want to be here and everyone would be happier without him."

Having a dad, though, she added, "would have been an incredible experience."

The Bard College alum was already a veteran artist, having a solo L.A. gallery show of her drawings (the collection was called "Scumf--k") in 2010 when she was 17.

"Most of my artwork is geared towards being humorous in some light," Frances, who was showing under the alias "Fiddle Tim," told Interview at the time. "I thought every piece was funny, but I’m delighted to discover that it was only funny to me."

When the documentary came out five years later, she told RS, "Oddly enough, being 22, it’s the first year a fire has been lit under my ass—not because of the documentary, just personally. I have this motivation and ambition that I didn’t have before."

The hardest part of "doing anything creatively is just getting up and doing," she added. "Once I get out of bed and get into my art room, I start painting. I'm there. And I'm doing it."

In the meantime, Frances had also married Isaiah Jones Silva in 2014, quietly swapping vows with her love of five years without telling mom Courtney of the plan. But she filed for divorce in March 2016 and, two years later, they reached a settlement that included Isaiah getting to keep the 1959 Martin D-18E guitar that Kurt played during Nirvana's November 1993 MTV Unplugged session.

Frances pressed on, adding film photography to her list of passions and releasing original music in 2018, but she was reluctant to call herself a musician.

"There's kind of this dirty association with musicianship in my family," she explained on RuPaul and Michelle Visage What's the Tee podcast in 2019, "just because it hasn’t ended particularly well."

"But what I think is making me and pushing me to kind of go for it," she continued, "is that I don’t sound or act or am anything like my parents' artistry. When I sing, it's a definitive sort of own space that I'm making for myself." (Frances was on the record with Rolling Stone saying, "I don't really like Nirvana that much.") 

And she was super-conscious of the oftentimes mediocre results when celebrity kids tried to follow in their parents' footsteps.

"It’s hard to submit yourself into that world because it's so pretentious and s--tty," Frances said. "It's filled to the brim with the worst people I've ever met. But when you weed out certain types of people and certain people that want to utilize where they're from as a means to justify their own bulls--t, then you can find really beautiful people."

Some of her celebrity scion friends include Carrie Fisher's actress daughter Billie Lourd and musician Sean Lennon, who was 5 when his dad John Lennon was killed.

But Frances found professional skateboarder Riley Hawk—the eldest son of legend-of-the-sport Tony Hawk, no pressure—to be a particularly beautiful person.

She took a year-long break from social media, writing upon her return in February 2022 that she found the hiatus to be "exceptionally good for my mental, emotional & spiritual health." And in that post she confirmed with a few sweet photos that she was in a relationship with the athlete.

And after they wed in San Diego County on Oct. 7, 2023, in a ceremony officiated by the bride's godfather, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, it was her father-in-law who posted the first photo a few months later on his son's 31st birthday.

"I am thankful he found the love of his life and a healthy, disciplined approach to adulthood," Tony captioned his Dec. 7 post. "And that he is inspiring his younger siblings by example. We had a blast at the wedding and we love you Riley! (Frances please show this to him since he's no longer in the Insta bubble)." (Riley has since returned to the bubble.)

When Ronin, his first grandchild, was born, Tony was quick with the granddad humor, commenting on Frances' announcement, "My favorite grandson!"

And on Sept. 29, Tony posted a photo to his Instagram Story of himself looking adoringly at the newborn propped on his knees.

Frances had kept her pregnancy private, so the palpable emotion from the tribute she posted to her father on April 5, the 30th anniversary of his death, is all the more intense in hindsight.

"In the last 30 years my ideas around loss have been in a continuous state of metamorphosing," she wrote alongside a series of pictures, including two from the last time she and Kurt were together. "The biggest lesson learned through grieving for almost as long as I've been conscious, is that it serves a purpose. The duality of life & death, pain & joy, yin & yang, need to exist along side each other or none of this would have any meaning. It is the impermanent nature of human existence which throws us into the depths of our most authentic lives."

She added, "As It turns out, there is no greater motivation for leaning into loving awareness than knowing everything ends.

In a way Frances sounded much like the eerily profound 15-year-old who told Harper's Bazaar that the glass wasn't half full or half empty. "More like a glass is just there," she observed.

But the teenager who was admittedly "really scared" of growing up because life was chaotic already so what must the future hold, was hoping for the best.  

"I want to be sublimely happy," Frances said. "I want to be able to live in a way that isn't too hectic. Calm. And I want those around me to be sublimely happy as well."

Watch E! News weeknights Monday through Thursday at 11 p.m., only on E!.