The $50 Trick (or how Divine Brown turned an encounter with Hugh Grant into her fortune)

It was early evening on 27 June 1995. Dusk was falling over Los Angeles, obscuring the seamier aspects of Sunset Boulevard and cloaking its nocturnal visitors in darkness. Standing in the shadows, prostitutes stood waiting for a flash of headlights or the winding down of a window; cars made their way slowly down the strip, scouring the sidewalk for a reason to stop.

For Divine Brown, strutting in a pair of brand new scarlet stilettos, it was just another evening. The then 23-year-old had flown in specially that night in the hope of making the £1,000 she badly needed and which, on a Friday night like this one, was a reasonable expectation. She had left her two young girls with a babysitter in Oakland, California, and got on a plane to LA following an argument with her "manager" and former lover Gangster Brown. Ignoring advice to use her hotel room, she had gone straight to work with a friend and was hoping that, at last, she would strike it lucky.

He scared her to begin with, the slightly nervous-looking man in a sparkling BMW with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. "I didn't know if he was a stalker," she recalls. But when he flashed his lights again, she went into a side street to meet him.

She had no idea that this customer was any different from any of the others, and, when the police crept up under the car window and interrupted her tryst, she thought it was just another police bust to make her lose out on her nightly income.

Back at the Hollywood police station in handcuffs, she could hardly have believed this brief, $50 encounter would turn her into a millionaire. So, when the police released her without charge, she took the opportunity to head straight back onto the Los Angeles streets.

But as she set off back to the Boulevard, her photograph was being circulated on news channels around the world and reporters had already arrived at her family's house in Oakland. By the time she arrived back at her apartment the next day, the press were waiting. The world was agog: it wanted to know all the gory details of what exactly had gone on between her, the quintessential Sunset Strip hooker, and the Hollywood heartthrob superstar who had in the space of one evening fallen so ignominiously from grace.

For Hugh Grant, the episode led to personal humiliation and (albeit temporarily) professional disaster. But for Divine Brown, it was the $50 deal that made her a millionaire. Now, for the first time, the former sex worker has told the story of what happened to her after she hit the headlines twelve years ago. Explaining how the "lewd act" she performed on Hugh Grant took her from prostitute to Hollywood icon, Ms Brown has given a series of interviews in which she expresses her gratitude to the foppish British actor who unwittingly brought her stardom.

What happened to Grant following the news is well-documented: his public apology on the Jay Leno show and his acrimonious split from Liz Hurley filled the press. But whilst the star of Four Weddings and a Funeral was trying to deal with the biggest PR disaster of his career, Ms Brown was clutching her ticket out of the ghetto.

The story could have come straight out of Pretty Woman, except that Grant's contribution to her meteoric rise amounted to just a few minutes of company and a $50 bill. "Everything worked out for the better," she tells ITV1's Hollywood Lives. "It helped me turn it into something positive ... I was blessed that it could get me out of that lifestyle."

In the days following Grant's arrest, Ms Brown appeared on almost every chat show going, including Jerry Springer, Judge Judy and The Howard Stern Show, and reportedly earned $1.6m from publicity alone. But the real money came from British newspapers, who were hungry to get a scoop on the misdemeanours of one of the country's best-loved actors. The News of The World flew her and her then-partner and manager to Palm Springs to talk over a deal for the story.

Gangster Brown can still recall the persuasive way in which the Sunday paper wooed them. "We stayed in Palm Springs for maybe two days," he tells the documentary. "They came and talked to us, and, I can say this, programmed us what to say. The exact words were: 'We not trying to destroy this artist. We want him to make it. And we need you to say positive things. Because what happens is when there's a Hollywood scandal he can be turned out like Pee Wee Herman. We don't want that for our artist, and we'll pay.' And I say 'Well we'll keep it positive.' So the questions that they asked were good questions for a good answer."

Not everyone, however, was so keen on good PR for the king of repressed upper class comedy. Other lucrative marketing deals for Ms Brown came from the soft-porn industry, with semi-nude photos for magazines such as Penthouse and Centrefold causing further embarrassment for Grant. And in 1996 she even made an X-rated docu-drama of the events with pornographer Ron Jeremy, called Sunset and Divine: The British Experience.

Gangster Brown, her pimp and father to her two girls, had been angry that night that she was working in the street and not in the hotel room he'd rented for her. But he quickly changed mood when news of the potential windfall reached him. "It went from miserable to the best night of my life," he says. "The money poured in, poured in, poured in. She had interviews, meal commercials, lingerie, lipstick, several things. We worked with the Betty Boo commercial, and we had a lot of money. We bought a new house, new cars, Rolls Royce, everything you could think of."

As well as the splurge on an array of luxury items that would put even the most spendthrift WAG to shame, the couple managed to put their daughters through private school.

And Gangster Brown is under no illusion that their change of fate can be put down to anything other than those few moments in Grant's BMW. "I love Hugh Grant," he says, "Hugh Grant put my kids through school, gave us a chance of the life we probably would've never reached. I had a chance to travel on private jets. If I can meet him and shake his hand all I would like to say is: 'Thank you. I appreciate you, and if anything I can do in return I would love to be a friend.'"

In 1995 Divine Brown's life on the streets was tough, but after news of Grant's escapades reached the press, she was able to cash in on such a scale that it eventually took her out of the sex industry altogether.

Now the former prostitute says that her days in that industry are long gone "history", but acknowledges that her encounter with Grant has given her the wealth to pursue the career she had always wanted in music. Working as a producer and record label executive at her new fiance Richard Fettuccini's company, Fettuccini records, she claims to have three hit songs out on American radio.

Raised by a single mother in the ghettos of Oakland, California, it never looked as though making a living would be easy for Divine. One of six children, her early years were a constant struggle, and it did not take long for her to be tempted onto the streets. "My mum raised all six of us by herself," she says. "I just wanted the best for my children and I didn't want them to struggle as hard as I did, so I did what I had to do. I wanted to make money, you know do the right thing ... go home and raise my children and just live a good life, a good, quiet, positive life."

It was a $133 electricity bill that finally turned her to prostitution. With two young children in tow, and fears that the bailiffs would come any minute, Ms Brown, who was born Estella Marie Thompson, decided that it was a risk worth taking.

Her friends had been making money from prostitution. She saw how quickly their finances improved and decided to follow suit. "I just kind of drove myself into it. I had a couple of friends that got into it, and they did really well with it, and I felt that I could do the same. They lived really well, and lived in nice pretty homes and took care of their families and college tuition for their children and stuff like that."

After a chance encounter in a ghetto corner store with pimp Gangster Brown, she was quickly drawn into the sordid Californian underworld. She made £500 in her first job, doing just five hours of work in Union Square, San Francisco and she soon got into a routine. It seemed as though there would be no way to escape a life of crime and danger. Working Tuesday to Saturday, she spent Sundays counting and hiding her takings in a fake cherry oak Bible.

These days she has swapped her treasure-chest holy book for the real thing and says she "thanks God" for how far she has come. But it is the philandering deity of Hugh Grant whom she should really thank for giving her the chance to raise herself from the ghetto and give her children the life she missed out on.

The episode of Hollywood Lives featuring Divine Brown will be aired on ITV1 at 10pm on Thursday, and her own DVD will also be released soon.