Vice girl turned millionairess Divine Brown can't thank Hugh Grant enough
Last updated at 17:54pm on 5th July 2007
He was in a white BMW convertible. She was standing on the sidewalk in scarlet stilettos. The place was Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the date June 27, 1995, the time around 1.10am - and one of the biggest showbusiness scandals of recent times was about to unfold.
Under different circumstances, we might never have discovered the identity of the celebrity who was later described as sounding like "the Prince of Wales"; or the hooker who performed a $60 (£37) "trick" for him.
But their encounter was interrupted by a tap on the window. The beam of a torch was shinning in their eyes and a voice was telling them to "please step out of the car".
Outside were two police officers. They were on a routine patrol in the red light district of the Strip. Their attention had been drawn to the BMW because the brake lights kept flashing "on and off" ... "on/off" ... "on/off "...
The driver, you see, kept pushing his foot down on the brake pedal during his illicit tryst with the prostitute. "I guess he was having a really good time," she says. The prostitute in question was Divine Brown and the foot belonged to Hugh Grant.
Thank Hugh!: Divine Brown celebrates what may well be the most profitable tryst ever
Tens of thousands of words have been written about what happened that night 12 years ago, but, until now, Ms Brown has never spoken about the almost farcical scene that preceded their arrest for lewd behaviour. The revelation emerges in an interview with Ms Brown to be broadcast on ITV1 tonight.
She and Grant were "acquainted" for barely half an hour. Yet, as she reveals, the effect on their lives could not have been more dramatic - or different.
For Grant, then 34, the star of Four Weddings And A Funeral, the episode led to personal humiliation. The News of the World, which published an "exclusive" with Ms Brown (real name Stella Marie Thompson), put her on the front page in a Versace safety-pin dress like the one that delivered fame to the star's girlfriend, Liz Hurley.
Grant's relationship with Hurley did not survive the fallout (to add insult to injury, Divine Brown revealed that Grant liked her taste in perfume. And no, she gloated, it was not Estee Lauder, promoted by Hurley for an estimated £1.5 million; Brown found that "too sweet and sickly".)
But what of Divine Brown? Surely she sunk without trace having been outed to the world as a prostitute? Well, the truth is rather different, and begs the question of just who the real winner was in this sorry episode.
Divine was 25 when she appeared in that Versace dress. Today, she is 37. Her hair is styled, her fingernails manicured and her eyebrows plucked in a perfect arch. She calls her liaison with Grant a "blessing", adding, mischievously: "What happened that night made him 'famous' in the States, and made me famous overseas."
Indeed her five minutes of (in)famy - or should that be 30 minutes - she says, made her a millionairess. Even if she was exaggerating, her meeting with Grant will surely go down as the most lucrative $60 "trick" in history.
Her two daughters, Cheyenne, now 18, and 17-year-old Brianna, were put through private school with the fortune she made from newspapers and TV companies. Even now, the interest in her appears not to have waned: her own DVD about her life is due to be released soon.
The now-infamous mug shot: Hugh Grant
In fact, what happened to Divine Brown reads like an X-rated version of the movie Pretty Woman. She tells how she moved from a modest apartment in her native Oakland, California, to a fourbedroom home (with three bathrooms) near Beverly Hills with her "manager" (she refuses to call him her "pimp") and father of her children, one "Gangsta" Brown.
At one time or another, according to tonight's episode of Hollywood Lives, the garage housed a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes Benz. She bought a mink coat on Rodeo Drive and wore diamond earrings, and diamonds around her neck, ankles, even on her feet.
"Everything turned out for the better," she says. "It helped me turn my life into something positive. I was blessed that it could get me out of that lifestyle."
Today, she and "Gangsta" - known to his mother as Alvin C Brown - are friends but are no longer a couple. In fact, she says she is engaged to a man who runs his own record label.
Today, little remains of the old Divine Brown. She was one of six children raised by a single mother in one of the poorest districts of Oakland.
"I just wanted the best for my children and I didn't want them to struggle as hard as I had, so I did what had to do," she says. "I wanted to make money, you know do the right thing ... go home and raise my children and just have a good life, a good quiet positive life."
She turned to prostitution when her daughters were small and she couldn't pay an electricity bill. One night she went to Union Square in nearby San Francisco and made around $1,000 (£500) in five hours.
It was the first link in a chain which years later would bring her to Sunset Boulevard.
On Friday nights, like the one when she encountered Grant, she could expect to make $2,000 (£1,000). Ms Brown had flown in to Los Angeles earlier in the day from her home in Oakland, where a babysitter was looking after her girls.
"I went out and pampered myself," she recalls. "I got my hair done, I had a facial and a pedicure and bought a pair of hot shoes."
Her nickname on the Strip was "Little Red Riding Hood". Anyone who saw Ms Brown would understand why; she had a shock of red hair and was wearing pink lipstick and those vertiginous scarlet heels.
Soon, Grant's white BMW began cruising the district. The driver flashed his lights and she went into a side street to meet him. She did not recognise the man behind the wheel; a blue LA Dodgers baseball cap was pulled down over his eyes; he said his name was "Lewis".
'He said me: "You're so gorgeous," she recalls. The actor then made a fateful decision. For $100 (£62) he could have enjoyed the privacy of Ms Brown's hotel room. But he said he only had $60. So she got into his car. This rather ill-advised cost-cutting measure by the millionaire star was to cost him more dearly than he could ever guess.
He asked if she could kiss him. Most prostitutes regard kissing as intimate; it is for lovers, not clients.
She refused. "So he said 'Well, can I kiss you?' I told him he could, so he leaned across and nuzzled me, he said, 'You really smell beautiful'."
Then they drove somewhere quieter. Unfortunately, the ignition was still switched on when Ms Brown, so to speak, got down to business.
As a result, Grant's frequent application of the brake pedal, she claims, attracted the attention of the police.
She says that when the officers eventually tapped on the window, she could hear them "laughing ... we were in the driver's seat and he was pushing on the brakes.
"I had no idea the lights were coming back on and off. I told him to say that he hadn't given me any money, nothing was exchanged, and that's what he did."
But the actor's fate was sealed. He was taken to the police station in handcuffs. Later, that notorious mugshot of him was made public. By the time Ms Brown arrived back in Oakland, reporters were waiting for her. Only, then, she says, did she realise who her client really was.
Grant was fined £800 and ordered to join an Aids awareness programme and put on probation for two years after entering a plea of "no contest".
Afterwards, he went on the Jay Leno show to make a public apology. Divine Brown, meanwhile, saw her chance to make considerably more than $60 a time, and went on almost any other chat show dishing the dirt. She reportedly made $1.6m from publicity alone.
Gangsta Brown, her former "manager" and the father of her two children, who also features in Hollywood Lives, had been angry that night that she had been working the street, and not the hotel room he had rented for her. "I went from miserable to the best night of my life," he says.
"The money poured in, poured in, poured in. She had interviews, food, lingerie, and lipstick commercials. We bought a new house, new cars, everything you could think of.
"I love Hugh Grant. Hugh Grant put my kids through school, gave us a chance of the life we probably would've never reached. We had a chance to travel on private jets. If I can meet him and shake his hand all I would like to say is: 'Thank you. I appreciate you, and if there is anything I can do in return I would love to be a friend'."
Sentiments shared by his former lover, though one hardly dares think what the actor's response would be.
How different things might have turned out for both Hugh Grant and Divine Brown if he had kept his foot off the brake pedal on the night that turned an obscure and unfortunate woman into a very happy hooker.
•
Hollywood Lives, ITV1 at 10pm tonight.
Vice girl turned millionairess Divine Brown can't thank Hugh Grant enough | the Daily Mail
Linear Mode
