Meet the real Erin Brockovich

Hollywood is often accused of exaggeration and fakery when real characters are portrayed on screen. With Erin Brockovich, the $1,200-a-month filing clerk and single mother who became the gritty heroine of that big budget, Oscar-winning Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts, the opposite is true.

Where Roberts's Brockovich was brash and vulgar, the real Erin Brockovich is brasher and more vulgar. Where Roberts wore short miniskirts, the real Brockovich wears them shorter. And where Julia Roberts wore a push-up bra to highlight her cleavage, the real Brockovich has no need for a push-up bra. Her cleavage is actually the fake one; she had breast implant surgery a few years ago. At 41, Erin Brockovich is all front. There are the big fake boobs, the big laugh, the big dyed-blonde hair, the big smile and the big attitude. Here is a woman who, you think on first acquaintance, is brimming with self-confidence. But, scratch the brittle American surface and Brockovich is a tossing sea of self-doubts, only slightly sedated by the millions she has made in the past few years and the fame that has turned her into a shopping mall celebrity. Hence the boob job, the anorexia, the panic disorders, the failed marriages, the loneliness, the fear ...

Sitting today in the living room of her big, new Los Angeles home - wearing a very tight pink sweater, butt-hugging black jeans over yellow (yes, yellow) cowboy boots - she embodies the triumph of a very particular kind of American attitude: if you don't have it, fake it. If you don't know it, just keep yakking.

If only Brockovich had taken the money and run. We saw the very best of her in the movie, the tale of how she overcame personal and corporate obstacles to help win $333 million for 634 residents of Hinkley, California, whose homes and lives had been afflicted by the pollutant chromium 6.

But now Brockovich and her handlers - she is festooned with agents and publicists - are trying to parlay her iconic status into hard cash. (She got $2.5 million from the Hinkley settlement, but only $100,000 for the movie rights.)

So, Brockovich has been revamped as an " inspirational speaker" on the lecture circuit, where she gets as much as $25,000-a-pop. She is being primed to host a TV talk show on women's issues. She may be hosting the American edition of Challenge Anneka. And she has written an autobiography, titled: Take It From Me: Life's a Struggle But You Can Win.

What's really a struggle is wading through the detritus of Brockovich's life, a life which she and her misguided publishers have transmogrified into a bizarre self-help guide. The book is filled with such numbingly banal aphorisms as: "Stop complaining or feeling sorry for yourself about what you don't have and, instead, ask yourself what you truly want!"

So, what does she want her readers to come away with?

"It doesn't matter who you are in life," she says without hesitation. "Every one of us is going to face an obstacle. But things can be how you perceive them, and as big a cliche as it is, a glass is half full or half empty. I hope people walk away after they've read the book thinking, 'I could be really down in the dumps and I may not have a lot of money, but I too could get out there and make a difference'. We are all heroes. We really are. We've just forgotten that." Brockovich hopes that her book will have a particular resonance with women. "If you can take a look at yourself and have a conversation with yourself and believe in yourself, that's very important for women," she says. "Even if you're a few pounds overweight, whether you're large-busted or small-busted." Ah. We're back to her boobs.

What's really disturbing about her book, and her lecture-circuit spiel, is the way Brockovich parades the private lives of her adolescent children so she can illustrate what a great mother she is. Both kids, one 19, the other 17, were, according to Brockovich, addicted to drugs and alcohol a couple of years back. (Brockovich blames genetics: their father had addiction "issues".)

"I've spent a quarter of a million dollars rehabbing my two drug addicted children," is how she so charmingly puts it. Both kids are named and photographed in the book.