She’s Already Written the Book of Her L.A. Life

All Helen Fielding craved was a “haven” in Los Angeles and a little peace and quiet following a grueling international book tour promoting her clever “Bridget Jones” novels. So she plunked down $1.38 million in November 1999 for a hideaway in the Hollywood Hills.

Just three months after escrow closed, the leaky roof collapsed during a rainstorm, bringing the ceiling down with it. Echoing a scene from her second “Bridget Jones” book, the British author was left with a gaping hole in her home. So Fielding is doing what any red-blooded American would. She’s suing.

“It’s life imitating art,” she said recently. “If Bridget had bought a house in L.A., this would have happened to her.”

Fielding’s Bridget is an endearing, never-married, weight-obsessed 30-something who consumes cigarettes, chardonnay, self-help books and men who are bad for her. She has a knack for getting into excruciatingly embarrassing situations, which she records in her diary. In England, she’s been as popular as the Spice Girls.

Bridget’s romantic misadventures have been dramatized in the upcoming film “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” produced by the people behind “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” It stars Renee Zellweger, who pudged out for the part, and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, who didn’t. The film, due in theaters April 13, is a hoot--especially the fistfight between a caddish Grant and a brooding Firth.

Fielding’s next step toward becoming a bona fide Yank was to hire a publicist, who wasn’t keen on allowing her client to speak to anyone wanting to ask about the lawsuit.

Anyway, we had already met the 40-something Fielding a few weeks ago at a spiffy Talk magazine lunch at Asia de Cuba. Initially guarded, she warmed up as lunch progressed, spearing us a slab of chicken and telling war stories about her days as a journalist. There was a decade at the BBC and a couple of newspaper stints. She said she quit one London newspaper job in a huff after the editors injected “poison” into her profile of James Gilbey, the Princess Di swain at the center of the “Squidgy-gate” scandal. “I woke up the next day with no job,” she said, laughing.

Fielding, an Oxford graduate, found work at another paper, the Independent, writing features and then a regular column about an urban working “singleton,” a much nicer word than “spinster.” Reluctant to reveal too much about herself, she created an alter ego--Bridget Jones--in 1995. A year later, the columns became the basis for “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” a novel that borrowed heavily from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

People constantly compare her to, and confuse her with, Bridget. Even Fielding isn’t quite sure where the line can be drawn.

Last year’s sequel, “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” offers continued parallels between the author’s art and life. For starters, there’s a running joke about Firth, who stars in the upcoming movie in the role of suitor Mark Darcy.

Firth, who also played Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” is an object of desire for Bridget and her friends: “We all fell silent then, watching Colin Firth emerging from the lake dripping wet, in the see-through white shirt. Mmm. Mmmm,” Bridget writes. Later, Bridget interviews Firth in Italy. Although Firth is eager to promote a new movie, Bridget is fixated on the lake scene: “When they had to do another take, did you have to take the wet shirt off and then put a dry one on?”

Fielding’s current domestic difficulties also were foreshadowed in the book. Gary, a London contractor, takes $3,500 from Bridget and knocks open a wall, never to return. Her diary records the catastrophe: “Gaaah! Gaaah! Gaah! Is bloody great hole in side of flat! Is left open to outside world in manner of gaping precipice and all the houses at the other side can see in.” She sics a barrister on Gary.

The sequel ends with a hint of what is to come for the author. Bridget contemplates moving to Los Angeles with her man. “It’s very warm and sunny there, and they have swimming pools,” Darcy pitches. Bridget capitulates: “Hurrah! Am going to America to start again, like the early pioneer . . . Will be fantastic in California with sunshine and millions of self-help books . . . and Zen and sushi and all healthy stuff.”

Fielding has dived into our swimming pools and eaten our sushi. But she’s also run headfirst into some less glittering facts of L.A. life: Somebody’s always happy to take your money. (Incoming millionaire singleton! Ka-ching.) And it’s not always sunny and warm. It can rain buckets, which it did on Feb. 21, 2000, the day the ceiling of her new house fell in. Gaaah! Is bloody great hole! And the pool house is sinking, the toilets back up, and the heating system and front gate don’t work. Gaaah!

Fielding became a real live litigating Angeleno last month when she filed her legal papers in Superior Court in Santa Monica. According to the suit, she told her real estate agent she needed a house in move-in condition so “she could continue to write, entertain persons in the publishing and movie business, and concentrate on her professional and personal life.” Instead, she claims that she was duped into paying an inflated price for the house and that real estate agents covered up structural flaws by patching up cracks and water stains. Named as defendants are the agents involved in the transaction and Prudential John Aaroe & Associates, Pickford Realty Inc. and Reliance Home Inspectors. Fielding seeks unspecified damages, alleging that she “sustained lost earnings” and had to seek counseling.

Peter Solecki, general counsel for both real estate entities, declined to comment. The home inspector, George Baral, said it would be difficult for him to spot defects if someone had taken pains to hide them. “If they cover the spot on the roof with gravel, then the visual inspection cannot determine that there might be a leak there,” Baral said. “The water goes in through places you can’t really see.”

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City of Angles will appear Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Sandy Banks’ column now will appear Tuesdays and Fridays. Chris Erskine continues to run on Wednesdays, and Al Martinez writes on Mondays and Thursdays.

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Times staff writers Gina Piccalo and Louise Roug contributed to this column. Send e-mail to angles@latimes.com.