Hella Nation - Evan Wright [158]
When I sit down, Megan is reading a cheap romance novel. “One of my vices,” says Megan, who has been known to often carry one in her purse. But her worst vice, she allows, is still caring about her soon-to-be ex-husband.
From the moment Megan met Dollard it was as if his almost super-naturally good luck was working on her, only in reverse. She was twenty-one, about to graduate from college in Baton Rouge, when early one evening she burned down her apartment trying to heat potpourri on the stove—something she’d read about in a magazine article. After the firemen left, Megan walked to the bar where she worked part-time as a waitress to commiserate with some coworkers, who plied her with free drinks. Soon she was plastered. Then her girlfriend pointed out that there was a celebrity in the bar, Billy Bob Thornton, who was in town filming.
Megan’s friend dared her to say hello. At that moment Billy Bob happened to be sharing a cigarette with his former agent, Pat Dollard, who was in town visiting his ex-wife Alicia. Megan approached Billy Bob and said, “I’m Megan. Want to drink some martinis with me?”
Billy Bob declined the invitation. He was due to pick up Angelina Jolie at the airport and excused himself. Megan was alone with Dollard. She admits that by this point “I was too drunk to know anything.” (Dollard claims, “Megan was so drunk she thought I was Billy Bob.”) All Megan knows is that when she woke up the next day she was smitten. A couple months later, they flew to Las Vegas, where Soderbergh had just wrapped the location shooting for Ocean’s Eleven at the Bellagio, where Dollard was comped a suite. According to Megan, “Our second night there Pat was like, ‘Hey, you want to marry me?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah,’ and we got married at the Little White Wedding Chapel.”
A few days later she moved into Dollard’s Bel Air home. “My first week in L.A.,” Megan says, “I met Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Pat introduced us on the Ocean’s Eleven set, and Brad gave me this knowing look and said, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ And I was like, Holy shit, Brad Pitt has heard about me? Then I went to Cannes with Pat, and I hung out with Julia Roberts. I would call my friends back home every night and I’d be like, ‘Guess who I just met tonight.’”
Megan tamps out her cigarette. “It was very surreal, for sure.” She adds, “I grew up with very little, and Pat offered me this total fantasy of staying at home, not working, and raising children.”
The fantasy quickly bumped into the realities of his addictions. Initially, Megan was prepared to help. She encouraged him to attend AA meetings and opened their home to informal gatherings of recovering addicts. It didn’t work. Once, she says, she saw “a vagrant walking around” outside the house who turned out to be “Pat’s drug dealer leaving coke underneath the rocks.”
The relationship went terminal soon after Dollard began “sponsoring”—serving as a 12-step adviser to—a young, recovering female crack addict he’d met at an AA meeting. “Pat told me it would help him stay sober if he was helping another addict,” Megan explains. Dollard got his “sponsee” a job and moved her into their house. Megan moved out and later discovered e-mails Dollard had written his “sponsee” in which he suggested that both their lives would be better off if she killed Megan. (Dollard says, “Anyone who knows me knows I was only joking.”) As the controversy played out, Dollard made his first trip to Iraq.
Megan now works as a waitress at a swanky Sunset hotel. As a result of her three years of marriage to Dollard, she is left with tens of thousands of dollars in debts. “Pat told me when we first got married that it would help build my credit if we put everything in my name,” Megan says as we enter his building. “As awful as this sounds,” she confesses, “sometimes I wish he was dead.”
Dollard greets us at the door. He is