It has been nearly 20 years since Hugh Grant was arrested in Hollywood. His famous mug shot β the shrugged shoulders, the sheepish grin, the glasses tucked casually into the collar of his polo shirt β seems like a fading, distant memory. You see, I was there on that summer day in , witness to it all.
Well, not all, but near enough. At the time, I was a young writer for Entertainment Weekly magazine. So I flew from New York to Hollywood to spend a couple of days interviewing him. In a coincidence straight out of a hokey Chris Columbus comedy, I happened to check into the same Beverly Hills hotel where Grant was staying, and ended up in the room right next door to his suite.
I discovered this first thing in the morning, when I opened my door and found the actor, in a hotel robe, collecting the wicker baskets of neatly wrapped overnight laundry in front of his entrance. When we met officially in the lobby a few hours later to start the interview, it took Grant a beat but he recognised me. Grant seemed relieved. As it turned out, the map was riddled with errors. There was a parking lot where Pierce Brosnan was supposed to live. He wanted to see the spot in Brentwood where, only a year earlier, Nicole Simpson had been slain.
When we pulled up at the correct address, we were both surprised to see yellow police tape still blocking off the walkway to the house. I used to dream about Gorbachev before he lost power. What would a psychologist make of that, do you suppose? But then he got busted for picking up a hooker. As a journalist, I should have been thrilled. It was the sort of lucky break that reporters dream of. Newspapers and television networks on both sides of the Atlantic covered it as if it were the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And I, as the last reporter to interview Grant before his big bust, was the closest thing there was to an eye- witness to history. Obviously, Grant had behaved reprehensibly.
