We’re speeding through the English countryside, Courtney Love and I, on our way to the Glorious Goodwood Ball. It’s an annual event that takes place at 314-year-old Goodwood House, seat of the Dukes of Richmond; our host will be Charles Gordon-Lennox, the Earl of March and Kinrara. “We’ve been extended to the house,” Courtney says with a triumphant gleam. “We’re being butled.” Sitting beside me on the backseat, Courtney is long and lean and iconic-looking, with an energy about her that crackles like a jolt of electroshock; she’s wearing oversize sunglasses, slacks, heels, and a vintage peach bed jacket with shoulder pads she worries makes her look “too Mommie Dearest. ”

“Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, the 70s pop-punk band, is playing on the radio. Courtney asks her driver to turn it up. “That’s what I love about this country—they love their music,” she says. “My plan to make it was always about getting in through the back door here.” Pretty on the Inside (1991), her band Hole’s first album, topped the charts in the U.K. before anywhere else; the U.K. music press loved her brash style and sardonic wit.

Now, 20 years later, Courtney has been talking of her desire to marry into the British aristocracy and become “Lady Love.” She’s developed a fascination with the royals and keeps a worn copy of Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage on her coffee table in New York. “I’m sick of dating people who are poorer than me,” she says, by way of explaining her sudden interest in becoming a character out of Henry James. “It would be really nice if someone I dated had really great lawyers. Johnny Pigozzi”—the Italian multi-millionaire—“[jokingly] said, ‘We should get married, ’cause you’re only two lawyers away from being richer than me.’ ”

This is a reference to her infamous financial woes, an imbroglio so epic Courtney says her half-sister Jaimee, a lawyer, calls her “the human Enron.” For years C...