After the Oscar-winning film made about her, Erin Brockovich has been through the wringer, including being hit on for money by two of her ex-husbands. She talks to Duncan Campbell about her new book and the future struggles she hopes to win
Life has not stood still for the woman who inspired the film which won Oscars this year for its star, Julia Roberts, and its director, Steven Soderbergh. Since the events about which the film was made, there have been extortion attempts and palimony suits, brushes with politics and offers from Playboy, more lawsuits and enough twists and turns to make at least one meaty sequel.
The latest event is the publication of Brockovich's first book, Take It from Me: Life's a Struggle But You Can Win, which is part autobiography, part motivational manual. In it, Brockovich lays out - with the sort of cheerful openness portrayed by Roberts on screen - a life that has never been dull, and the lessons she has learned from it.
Born Erin Pattee in Lawrence, Kansas, to an outspoken, down-to-earth engineer father and a mother who worked first as a schoolteacher and then for the Kansas University alumni association, she went to business college in Dallas before taking various odd jobs over the years, in the K-Mart chainstore and for an engineering company, a brokerage firm and an advertising agency. In the period before the events in the film took place, she had been crowned Miss Pacific Coast 1981, produced three children, had an abortion and acquired and got rid of - but not quite - two husbands and a biker boyfriend. With that wealth of life experience behind her, she cajoled her way into a job in the law firm of Masry and Vititoe pretty much as the film presented it.
She is anxious to point out, both in the book and in person, that the real story is not about her but about the historic lawsuit that forms the core of the film, brought on behalf of the citizens of Hinkley, California, against Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). The suit, in which Brockovich's persistent investigative skills on behalf of the law firm played a crucial part, yielded a settlement of $333 million for the plaintiffs, who had suffered cancers, miscarriages and digestive and skin disorders as a result of the company dumping contaminated waste into ponds that seeped into the town's drinking water. Fifty of the plaintiffs have now died.
In the course of her investigations, Brockovich had suffered whiplash in a car crash and told her woes to the chiropractor who treated her. As it was California, her chiropractor told another patient who was married to a film producer who . . . and so on until opening night.
Brockovich is the first to admit that the case changed her life. For a start, she received $2.5 million as part of her fee from the settlement, which meant she was able to move out of a cockroach-infested dive into a mansion in Agoura Hills, in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles, complete with sweeping circular staircase, grand piano and pool. But the money and the subsequent film that told her story brought troubles in their wake: both her elder children, still teenagers, have been to rehabilitation clinics as a result of habits acquired after the money came in.
"Sometimes I think this house is a curse," she says, flopped down in leather jacket and jeans in her living room at the end of a long day. "My children weren't used to this kind of home. It was like going from rags to riches overnight, and I think it catapulted them into a faster lifestyle than they were used to, a peer group that they weren't used to, material possessions, experimenting with drugs. I was so guilt-ridden, having been gone and working, that I found myself going overboard, and giving and giving and giving."
The fat cheque soon went, with £1 million in taxes to pay and $250,000 in rehab fees. Then her exes, in the shape of her first husband, Shawn Brown, whom she met and married when he was a young housepainter, and her ex-boyfriend, Jorge, who features in the film as the bandana-wearing biker who looked after the children while she was carrying out her investigations, came calling.
They hired a lawyer who threatened to tell the media that she had been a bad mother and had had an affair with her boss, Ed Masry (played by Albert Finney in the film), unless she came up with $310,000. Both claims were lies, so Brockovich went to the police, and the trio were arrested after a meeting between them and Brockovich was bugged by the police. The lawyer was convicted, jailed for six months, fined $10,000 and disbarred for life. Charges against the other two were eventually dropped.
Brockovich was disheartened by the whole process, not least because Jorge had already brought a $3 million palimony suit against her after they broke up, which she settled with a "one-time, so-long-Charlie bonus in the form of a $40,000 cheque". She threw in a $20,000 custom-built Harley-Davidson motorbike when her money from the legal action came through, so was doubly aggrieved that he had come back for more.
"That extortion really pissed me off. I hope they have a good life and they find the riches that they so want, and they can move on. But I don't want to be a part of anything that they do, ever . . . What really floored me was the twisted sense of entitlement."
Her second husband, Steve Brockovich, who was in the brokerage business, does not win many Brownie points either, but husband number three, Eric Ellis, a sunny local boy from Burbank and a country and western DJ and actor, rates as one of the top three men in her life, alongside her father and Masry. She and Ellis were married in Hawaii in 1999.
But Brockovich's main preoccupation remains her work on suits against corporations. One case, Kettleman against PG&E, also concerns chromium six, and she is representing 1,000 claimants. "That's twice as many as with Hinkley and we will fight just as hard," she says. She hopes it will be concluded within a year.
Aren't companies wary of taking on cases in which she is involved, fearful of the powerful brand name she represents as campaigner for truth against the big guys? "I don't know. I think there's an arrogance within corporate America, and they're not frightened that easily. In some instances, it may make them gear up even more for a fight; and in some instances, they'll take a look at the publicity and say, 'We could get dragged into some media blitz here' and may be be forced to settle."
After the film's success, there were many offers - some, like the Playboy centrefold, turned down. "I didn't want anything about my work to be perceived as a novelty or as the chick running around with the big boobs and the short skirts, so I was cautious about what I did."
She is on the lecture circuit and in the process of making two television pilot shows, one based on Challenge Anneka and another, for which she has just been filming, on fear of flying, from which she suffers.
In the book and in life, she is candid about the problems she has faced, whether childhood dyslexia, adult anorexia or the lack of self- confidence which led to her decision during her second unhappy marriage to have breast implants, a part of her past about which she has no regrets: "I decided the best way to boost my confidence would be to get my chest lifted . . . and believe me, it worked."
Hollywood came calling, offering bit parts, but none appealed because she prefers fact to fantasy - films such as The Insider, for example, and of course the one that carries her name. But there will not be an Erin Brockovich II unless someone takes her up on what she writes near the end of her book: "I am not into idolising those who don't exist. I would rather idolise the real people of the world, the unsung heroes fighting the evils of corporate America, those who have no choice but to live in a world that others seek to take advantage of. It would make one hell of a movie, don't you think?"
- Guardian service