Caroline Sullivan was excited when Courtney Love e-mailed wanting to film her book, but things went downhill from there.
I wish I'd saved the e-mails. There were eight, spanning December 1999 to April 2002, all written in unpunctuated lower-case. But there was a flatteringly confiding tone ("stipe and i are going to the erin brokovich premiere," she would write, and I'd be wildly chuffed that she'd told me) that made it easy to like her. Actually, I'd have liked her, anyway - she'd just optioned a book I'd written, Bye Bye Baby: My Tragic Love Affair with the Bay City Rollers, for a film. But there was a special little frisson every time "Courtney Love" pinged into my inbox.
Sadly, it's true: people turn into dribbling sycophants in the presence of celebrity. I certainly did. And when you figure in the thrill of friends asking, "Is it true that Courtney Love is making a movie of your book?", it's easy to understand why celebrities excite the same reaction as a seal begging for a fish.
Because she liked Bye Bye Baby, a story of boy bands and girl bonding, I assumed we would become friends. It certainly seemed so when her first e-mail arrived, just before Christmas 1999. It ambled along as if we'd known each other for years, and even included her home phone number in Los Angeles. Hey, Courtney, I thought - it's you and me. Buddies. Think Thelma and Louise. Think Michael Jackson and the rat in Ben.
I had had modest aspirations for the book, and the idea of anyone at all wanting to make a film of it didn't occur to me as I was writing it. The fact that Love, who'd blossomed into a rock star and actor since the death of her husband Kurt Cobain, did was so improbable that I just laughed, slightly hysterically, when I found out.
I hadn't even known she'd read the book. It transpired that someone at the Glasgow Herald knew she was once a Roller fan, and when Bye Bye Baby was published, sent her a copy in the hope she would write a review for their pages. Instead, as her manager said in the fax, "she has been looking for a project to direct for some time, and she sees this as her directing début". Not only that, her mate Michael Stipe of REM had launched a production company, and was apparently keen to get involved.
By now, small pieces were appearing in the press, and I'd begun daydreaming about what I'd do with the money. In fact, I thought about it a lot. So did my friends, who grumpily said, "Suppose you've made a fortune out of this".
They'll be happy to know that I didn't. The real money, I discovered, comes not from selling an option, but from the movie actually being made. Most authors are lucky to receive £2,000 for an option, but can expect a chunk when (more likely, if) it becomes a film. Only 5 per cent of all optioned books do. But Love's high profile and Hollywood contacts made it seem a better than average bet. So there was potentially a small fortune in it, and I spent many happy hours imagining the pad I'd buy. A south London version of Lenny Kravitz's op-art Miami mansion appealed.
The 13-page contract was finally signed in April 2000, and Love's e-mails, which had chattily discussed various actors for the role of me - someone was going to play me! - stopped. Once the deal was done, I suppose she felt she no longer had to woo me.
At around the same time, the Express and Telegraph ran features in which I'd idly said I wouldn't mind Leonardo DiCaprio and Ewan McGregor playing Rollers. Well, of course I wouldn't. But once it appeared, other papers printed it as fact. By October, the Sunday Times was writing: "Ewan McGregor has expressed interest in portraying the charismatic lead singer Les McKeown. Leonardo DiCaprio has, however, turned down the opportunity to portray the guitarist Stuart Wood." Now magazine said: "Roseanne star John Goodman is in line to play a major part in an upcoming movie about the Bay City Rollers . . . Courtney's thought to favour Keanu Reeves in the role of Les McKeown instead of Scots-born Ewan McGregor." The thing was taking on a bizarre life of its own.
As far as I know, the film never got beyond the talking stage. Courtney renewed the option in 2001, and in August of that year invited me to LA - "Get your ass over here and help me write this script" was the way she put it. But September 11th intervened. I heard from her once more last April, when the option was up. "I've got every frame of this film in my mind!" she wrote encouragingly. Then, to everyone's surprise, she failed to renew the deal, and that seemed to spell the end of my celebrity friendship.
Love, meanwhile, has taken up residence in the British tabloids since her much-reported air rage incident. She followed it up by appearing naked on the cover of Q magazine and appearing at an Elton John charity gig in a Donald Duck outfit. A friend who met her at the last asked if she still had plans for Bye Bye Baby. "She looked at me like a slightly cross-eyed deer, not quite focusing, and said, 'Yeah, it's great, but if I'm gonna start making films, I've got to take so much blow that I'd be running around the room for hours. And I've got an album to do first.' "
