5 fev 2017 ano - THE SUNDAY TIMES Johnny Depp Yo ho ho! It’s the jolly big spender

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Johnny Depp has earned hundreds of millions but an ultra-extravagant lifestyle is allegedly draining his coffers. There are the homes, the islands and the art, not to mention the £24,000 a month on wine and £160,000 on jets. Julia Llewellyn Smith gets out her calculator

Fame and austerity are rarely words that are seen together. Take Bono’s $1,700 (about £1,400) plane ticket for a hat he’d forgotten, Elton John’s £293,000 flower bill or Beyoncé’s purchase of £80,000 golden leggings.

However, few celebrity profligates, it seems, can top Johnny Depp, who last month sued his former business manager, the Management Group (TMG), for £20m, accusing it of fraud.

Depp’s financial adviser struck back, claiming that the actor’s depleted bank account had nothing to do with the company’s investment decisions but owed everything to the star’s “ultra-extravagant lifestyle that often knowingly cost Depp in excess of $2m [£1.6m] per month to maintain, which he simply could not afford”.

In court papers TMG alleged that Depp spent more than £60m on 14 homes around the world, not including the expense of upkeep and staff. Among them was his chain of islands in the Bahamas, boasting six pristine beaches and a variety of residences.

Then there was his 37-acre Provençal estate dominated by a 12-room mansion with two rooms allegedly devoted to housing Depp’s hat collection. The house looked down on a “hamlet” of stone cottages, a skateboard park, two pools (one surrounded by sand) and an ersatz “village square” where facades of traditional French businesses concealed children’s playrooms and guest accommodation.

After Depp, 53, decided Gallic taxes were too high, his family decamped to his turreted Hollywood mansion, originally built for Bela “Dracula” Lugosi. For a change of scene they could descend on their Hawaiian bolthole, their Kentucky ranch or their Venetian palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal.

More than £14m went on Depp’s 156ft yacht, the Vajoliroja, a name that clumsily winked not only at the Pirates of the Caribbean paydays that funded it, but also combined the names of Depp, his former partner the French actress Vanessa Paradis and their children Lily-Rose and Jack.

The boat, with its Edwardian-styled interiors, regularly hosted guests such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who cruised the surrounding cays enjoying pizza made by the on-board chef and dropping anchor at whim to enjoy “world-class” snorkelling in Depp’s waters.

Then there were Depp’s 45 luxury vehicles, “world-class jewellery”, 70 collectable guitars, a “massive and extremely expensive art collection” — including works by Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani and Andy Warhol — and 12 storage warehouses of Hollywood memorabilia relating to stars such as Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe that cost nearly £1m alone to archive.

His 40 full-time employees meant a £240,000 monthly wage bill while round-the-clock security guards for the family necessitated another £120,000 a month.

Private jet travel cost him almost £160,000 a month and about £24,000 every month went on wine “that he had flown to him around the world for his personal consumption”.

Then there were the one-offs such as the £2.4m that was spent scattering the ashes of Depp’s gonzo journalist mentor, Hunter S Thompson, from a cannon. To further honour the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Depp named one of his Bahamian beaches Gonzo, ordering its powdery sands to be scattered with glass tables etched with images of Thompson’s face.

Few of these revelations surprised fans, who over the years had studied countless fawning interviews by hacks plied with £1,500 bottles of Château Haut-Brion while admiring Vajoliroja’s authentic Honduran mahogany panelling.

They gawped at Depp’s collections of original manuscripts by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac’s old typewriter and a glass-encased replica of the Elephant Man’s skeleton (Depp denied “owning” such items, preferring to describe himself as their “guardian”).

Why shouldn’t Depp spend his money? After all, he was one of the biggest film stars in the world, worth an estimated £320m from playing gurning Captain Jack Sparrow in the multibillion-pound Disney Pirates franchise.
Despite being Disney’s cash cow, Depp managed to maintain a renegade reputation boosted by his penchant for floppy fedoras, verses of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry tattooed on his back and friendships with the likes of the late Brando, who declared him “the most gifted actor of his generation”.

He boasted a string of heartbroken exes such as the actress Winona Ryder (when they split up he altered his “Winona forever” tattoo to “Wino forever”) and Kate Moss, with whom he once notoriously shared a bath filled with £750 of champagne.

Gradually circumstances changed. Five years ago Depp split up with Paradis. Fans noted that cheekbones that once looked razor-sharp had been subsumed by bloat. His jet-black locks seemed less a sign of his Cherokee roots than a mishap with Grecian 2000.

His pirate outfits were no longer confined to the screen but became everyday apparel. On the red carpet, where he once sported hipster boots, he now wore waistcoats that strained over his dad-tum, accessorised with tinted shades that recalled EastEnders’s Frank Butcher circa 1993.

Last year his image shifted from oldest swinger in town to outright weirdo after his 15-month marriage to the American actress Amber Heard — 22 years his junior — ended acrimoniously, with her alleging domestic violence and accusing Depp of drink and drug abuse.

A string of his films tanked (although 2015’s Black Mass brought in a respectable profit), leading Forbes magazine recently to calculate that he was the most overpaid actor in Hollywood, an unhelpful label for someone who clearly still requires a steady income to pay the bills.

Despite Depp demanding £18m a film, TMG claims he was reduced to borrowing money to fund his fripperies. He allegedly responded to requests to cut down “by rebuking and cursing . . . while increasing his extravagant spending and demanding that his business managers find some way to pay for it all”.

Depp’s retort has been to accuse TMG of being “reprehensible” and “victim blaming” in a “transparent attempt to save their own skin and deflect away from their malfeasance”.

Whatever the truth, there’s no denial that Depp’s existence today is considerably more cosseted than his childhood in blue-collar Kentucky, the son of a civil engineer and a waitress who painstakingly counted out the coins from her tips every night. “They went into, like, a quadruple bankruptcy every Christmas,” he recalled.

Aged 20 he moved to California hoping to become a rock star, surviving by telemarketing pens. Having made his film acting debut being gobbled by a bed in A Nightmare on Elm Street, he won the starring role in the teenybop television cop show 21 Jump Street, something at odds with his avant-garde aspirations.

“It sure ain’t the Clash, it ain’t Iggy [Pop] and it ain’t [David] Bowie,” he moaned about his image appearing on school lunch boxes.
Freed from his contract, he rejected the leads in blockbusters such as Titanic and Speed in favour of offbeat parts in independent films such as Cry-Baby, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Edward Scissorhands.

Off-screen, he shunned the squeakiness of his matinee-idol peers: playing guitar in rock bands, getting into punch-ups with paparazzi and smashing up hotel rooms — once blaming the carnage on an escaped armadillo. He then morphed into a devoted family man, most content while holed up painting and tending his vineyards with Paradis and their beautiful babies.

He had won the credibility he craved but then Depp confounded everyone by signing up for Pirates, a film inspired not by Robert Louis Stevenson but by a decidedly unhip Disneyland ride. “I said: I’m in,” he recalled of Mickey Mouse’s offer. “My agent was sitting there and she was really shocked. I was a little shocked myself.

“It wasn’t like selling out to me. It was like I had infiltrated the enemy camp and stuck my flag in and now it’s taken root and you’re on the ride, so let’s see where it goes. Friends of mine were going: Jesus, man, isn’t that a little mortifying? And I said: f***, no! I think it’s great. It’s funny to me.”

At first Disney executives failed to see the funny side of Depp’s pantomime performance, modelled on his buddy Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

“Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time . . . was quoted as saying: ‘He’s ruining the movie,’” Depp recalled. “It was that extreme — memos and paper trails and madness and phone calls and agents and lawyers and people screaming and me getting phone calls direct from, you know, upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, ‘What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?’”

Convinced the film would tank, the studio happily promised Depp a share of profits that it thought would never materialise. But the movie, released in 2003, brought in more than £500m at the box office. The three subsequent films earned almost £2.5bn, reportedly giving Depp — to date — a £280m cut.

In between swashbuckling he played the Mad Hatter in his old collaborator Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, another film that hit the magic $1bn mark, making the former self-styled maverick one of the most bankable stars in the world.

While Depp’s coffers were buoyant, his artistic integrity was shrinking. Critics slated his increasingly mannered performances. He retorted that he was following the advice of Brando, who in 1978 accepted the then astronomical sum of $4m for a cameo in Superman, a film he made clear meant nothing to him.

“Basically, if they’re going to pay me the stupid money right now, I’m going to take it,” Depp said. “I have to . . . It’s ridiculous, yeah, yeah. But ultimately is it for me? No. No. It’s for the kids.”

With his heirs safe from destitution, Depp hardly denied himself.

“Johnny’s sweet enough at heart, but he became a pampered brat,” says one film insider who worked with him. “He’d charter his jet to go to — say — Madrid for dinner with his entourage, then nobody would be allowed to go to bed because Johnny still wanted to party. The pilot’s shift hours would end and they’d have to find a new pilot to get them all home at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds.

“It’s completely normal behaviour from a megastar, but Johnny’s constant insistence that he was ‘keeping it real’ made it just that bit more wearying.”

Recently there appear to have been half-hearted attempts at parsimony. Two years ago Depp sold his yacht for £22m to the Harry Potter author JK Rowling (who less than a year later flogged it for £15m). The disposal was quite a blow to a man who once mused while snorkelling from its bows: “Money doesn’t buy you happiness. But it buys you a big-enough yacht to sail right up to it.”

Last year, shortly after he’d splashed out £3m on a small Greek island, TMG alleges Depp texted his manager, saying: “I am ready to face the music, in whatever way I must. I know there’s a way to dig ourselves out of this hole and I am bound and determined to do it.”

Already he had auctioned two of his Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings for almost £9m at Christie’s. His French estate — currently valued at £50m — is on the market, as is his Venetian residence for more than £8m.

His five downtown Los Angeles penthouses, previously put together as a love nest for him and Heard — whose divorce settlement last month came to a piffling £5.6m — are being flogged off separately at a total cost of £9m.

Will the islands go next? Analysts now fear that, tainted by his very public divorce, Depp’s box-office appeal may be flagging: 51% of film-goers cited his presence as the reason for seeing Alice in Wonderland, but only 35% for watching last year’s sequel, Through the Looking Glass.

“Depp is a fantastic actor, thus will always have a draw with the right project,” says Jeff Bock, a US box-office analyst with Exhibitor Relations. “He needs to do what he always does . . . another pirate adventure and another team-up with his creative twin, Tim Burton.”

Depp appears at least partly to be heeding such advice, returning in the fifth Pirates film this year. He has also signed to star in The Invisible Man, part of a new line in Hollywood remakes of classic chillers.

First, however, comes the court battle with TMG, the people supposed to make Depp’s life easier but now on the attack. “On those few occasions when Depp said he was ready to change his ways, he never did,” reads the company’s countersuit. “He always went back to his uncontrolled spending.”

All over the world, wine merchants, private pilots and estate agents, not to mention Depp’s family and friends, will be praying that there will at least be some change from the legal fees left over for them.

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