Hella Nation - Evan Wright [143]
At the end of our meeting Dollard offers to become my manager. “Seriously, dude, I could get something set up for you like that,” he says, clapping his hands to indicate how fast he is going to make a deal.
But Dollard never becomes my manager. In the coming weeks, he breaks several appointments. One day he phones. Rapid, shallow breaths come across the line. “Dude, I am so, so, so fucking sorry for not calling you.” No explanation is required, but Dollard offers one anyway. “I was fucking kidnapped.”
Dollard claims that members of an AA meeting abducted him after promising his wife to get him sober. Instead, they held him prisoner at a hotel in Palm Springs while plying him with call girls and coke. Meanwhile, they used his credit cards to charter a yacht and a plane for business deals they were conducting. The story is incredible, but Dollard’s fourth wife later confirms its essential truth, adding, “I’m sure those AA people started with good intentions, but Pat twisted their intervention around until they thought the right thing to do was buying coke and hiring prostitutes for him.”
On Election Day 2004, I receive an urgent phone call from Dollard. I must come to his office immediately. When I show up, two agents from Relativity are on the couch. Dollard paces, making introductions at a rapid clip.
His eyes are glassy. He speaks with those shallow breaths I’d heard when he phoned after the “kidnapping.” I get the feeling he may be seriously messed up. The two agents slink from the room.
Dollard reveals why he asked me over. New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, a friend of mine, has completed a book on directors of the nineties, Rebels on the Back Lot, for which she interviewed him. He wants to know if he is quoted in it. I tell him Waxman mentioned to me that he is.
Dollard summons an assistant. “I want you to take a letter for me,” he tells her. “Send it to all my clients. Tell them I might be quoted in Sharon Waxman’s book. I don’t recall what I told her. I was on drugs and I retract my quotes.”
“HOLLYWOOD YUPPIE FAGGOT”
THREE WEEKS LATER Dollard leaves for Iraq. He persuaded a former client—a director who had previously won accolades at Sundance for a small, gritty film—to accompany him. The director says that when he first glimpsed Dollard on their way to the airport, “he looked like he was detoxing. He didn’t have any proper gear. I knew this would be a disaster.”
As it turned out, disaster befell Dollard’s partner. Shortly after their arrival, he was severely injured in a Humvee accident and had to be medevaced home. Dollard decided to push ahead on his own. The military embedded him with Marines at a forward operating base about twenty-five miles south of Baghdad in an area troops christened “the Triangle of Death.” About two hundred Marines occupied the camp, a dusty crater surrounded by concrete blast barriers and razor wire, which insurgents showered with mortars every other day or so.
Dollard wandered the camp befriending anyone who would talk to him. Sergeant Brandon Welsh, then twenty-two, recalls their first encounter. “He came up and said, ‘I’m Pat Dollard from Hollywood.’ He talked fast, was all uppity and shit. We thought he was a cokehead.”
The troops nicknamed him “Hollywood Yuppie Faggot.” Welsh’s section leader, Sergeant John Callan, says, “Pat came up with these stories about partying with movie stars and rock stars and models, and the Marines just ate it up.”
Dollard pulled the ultimate trump card. Using his sat phone, he called Lucy Walsh, daughter of former Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh. Lucy, a client of Dollard’s, had toured as a keyboardist for Ashlee Simpson. Dollard managed to catch her when she was visiting with Simpson. Callan says, “Pat put this kid from West Virginia on the line with Ashlee Simpson. I was told she was like, ‘Well, thanks for going