DISGRACELAND - Heath Ledger: Cowboys, Junkies, and Maniacal Clowns

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Heath Ledger’s preparation for and disappearance into his movie roles is legendary, and it’s what helped him play repressed cowboys, junkies, and maniacal clowns equally well. His research led him to junkies who taught him how to properly shoot up using a stolen prosthetic arm and fake blood, and to a personal diary full of cut-and-paste madness. The paparazzi, however, mocked Heath’s method, and took their public quarrel with him to duplicitous lengths.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about Heath Ledger are insane. He was taught how to shoot up by an aging Australian junkie with a stolen prosthetic arm and fake blood. He was baited with cocaine by two paparazzi intent on getting revenge. He fell so deep into the dark psychology of his on-screen characters

that he got Batman to kick his ass, for real. He was so deep. so good at disappearing in the movie roles that he eventually disappeared beyond the point of no return. Which is a shame, because Heath Ledger was a great actor who made great movies. Unlike that loop, I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't from a great movie. That was a preset loop for my Melotron called Montuno Madness MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to crack a bottle by Eminem,

Dr. Drey and 50 Cent. Why would I play you that specific slice of let your body waddled cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February 22, 2009. And that was the day that Heath Ledger beat such luminaries as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Downey Jr. To win a posthumous Academy Award for his iconic portrayal of The Joker. On this episode, stolen prosthetic arms, vengeful paparazzi, a dark night ass kicking, body waddled cheese, posthumous Oscars, and Heath Ledger. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. Heath Ledger got to Prague early, more like an over-anxious kid on his first date than Hollywood's next leading man.

Columbia Pictures wanted him to take horseback lessons, and it wasn't until he got to Prague that Heath revealed that he grew up on a farm outside of Perth. It was half bullshit, half swagger. Heath was a prep school brat, grew up playing hockey, performing Shakespeare, but Americans didn't know the first thing about Australia. They were dazzled by anything Heath said in his lifting upspeak that turned every sentence into a potential question. He pulled out a fucking diddery do at his audition and the director looked at him like he

was some aboriginal shaman. Heath told his friends back home it was the ditch that got him the roll. It was the summer of the year 2000. Prague had only opened its doors to capitalism 10 years before. Half a million protesters brought a peaceful end to four decades of one-party rule. So peaceful, they called it the Velvet Revolution. The new president was a dissident poet. Everyone in Prague was a poet or an artist or a musician.

The whole city was drunk on cheap, free. him, cheap beer too. Twelve cents American for a Stein the size of a bucket. It was a dream city for a 21-year-old kid, and Heath had it all to himself. It was a shame that he had arrived before his co-stars. He wanted to share the experience with him. So Heath Ledger did what he always did when he was alone. He called up his mates.

Back in L.A., Heath had a massive apartment that served as a landing pad and flop house for any Aussie that came to California looking to hit big. People came and went, crashed on couches overnight or for months on end. When new Aussie actors showed up at Hollywood auditions, casting directors asked, So are you one of the ones staying at Heath's place? It was the kind of stardom he thought he wanted, something he could share.

He grinned through parties of friends and strangers, but often retreated to take his spot behind the turntables. He played Nick Drake covers on guitar. while other Aussie actors paced the hallways running lines. From Prague, Heath phoned the flop house in L.A. He told his friends to come over, like he was at the bar down the block and not halfway across the world. Come now, it's cheap, everything's practically free.

He phoned Columbia Pictures and got phone numbers for his co-stars on a night's tale. The movie he was in Prague to shoot, most of whom he hadn't met yet. He called them up too. In the movie's about a group of friends, he said. Let's get together, get to know each other. easy for him to say. The other actors were all scraping by, and none of them was getting the kind of money Heath was for this job. It's cheap, Heath said. Everything's practically free. If their definition of

practically free was different from his, so be it. He would buy them all plane tickets, and that's exactly what he did, refusing to take no for an answer. The entourage landed in Prague. Heath booked the whole floor of a hotel for next to nothing. They ran through the streets by night, until the bars kicked them out at closing. American coins rattled in their pockets. They could have been kids on a gap year fuck about in Eastern Europe with all the time in the world, but Heath had a sense of urgency. When he left Perth at age 19 to break big in Hollywood, he told his dad it had to be now, because he wasn't going to be here long. He wasn't sure how he knew, but he did know that this movie, A Night's Tale, would be huge. And it wouldn't just make him the star. His co-stars, they were going to be

big too. Saturday night before the rest of the crew arrived, Heath and company had dinner at a family pizza place off Nerutva Street. A rosy-cheeked check girl, not two years younger than Heath, brought them bread and endless bottles of Hungarian wine. Sugary sweet stuff Heath knew he'd feel in the morning. The girl's mustachioed father grinned toothily from the kitchen, drenched in sweat from the hundred-year-old brick oven. Other patrons paid their bills and left, some out the front and some down a dark staircase in the corner of the restaurant. The Hollywood entourage called for more wine, and the chipmunk-cheek girl brought it.

If she wished she could sit down with them, follow them out into the night, into all that cheap freedom she kept hearing about. Her mother, a woman built to survive harsh winters, grunted at her from the corner. As the restaurant emptied, he kept watching that staircase in the corner, where one of his friends caught him looking.

There's a burlesque club in the basement, she told him, straight up kitsch like the Weimar Republic, like stepping into cabaret. They all looked to Heath, even the waitress standing ready with another bottle. Heath was the youngest, but he was also the one who put this gang together and the one who held them together. His hotel room was a miniature of the flop house. People came and went, slept on the floor, fucked in the bathroom, did lines off the coffee tables.

They came by just to be around Heath, and people told him he was an old soul and he smiled cryptically. If he had it on him, he would have pulled out his didgeridoo like a fucking mystic and make a drone in its weird song. Americans ate up that Aussie bullshit. Let's go then, he said. They were out, down the stairs for group bonding. PG-13 times, strip teases and oompa bands. Except that the burlesque show was on weeknights. Saturdays were a different show.

It wasn't some straight out of cabaret and nudge-nudge wink. this was a full-on sex show, the kind of thing that made Michael Corleone squirm in the Godfather Part 2. Was this even legal? Did the poet president allow this on his watch? Everyone looked at Heath, but Heath was inscrutable, a Zen monk with a beatific grin. It was cool by him.

He and his friends were exactly where they were supposed to be, as long as they were in it together. The next morning, the first day of shooting, the actors showed up on set, exhausted. hungover. The crew of Hollywood vets side-eyed them. What do these nobody kids think they were, the fucking brat pack? Heath would have said no, we're something new. We're going to be huge, all of us. They stayed tight after the shoot, back in L.A. Heath stayed friends with everyone, even exes, of which there were already several. You couldn't be mad at him even when he fucked up

and had too much or went too far. Publicity for a night's tale ramped up, and posters and billboards appeared all over L.A. Instead of using photos they took together as a group in Prague, the billboards had only Heath's face, 20 feet high, stern, and Hollywood handsome. He will rock you, the tagline read. Heath was horrified. This wasn't the movie they made. This wasn't who he wanted to be. He called his friends to apologize, but none of them were pissed. They were proud of him. They knew what their roles had been in the movie. They were merely support for the so-called white knight, so he can make it big. and he was about to, and before long, his face would be everywhere. A couple was happy, and the paparazzi were sick of it.

Storybook shit didn't sell papers, and Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams were in a fairy tale. They had met on the set of Brokeback Mountain and the Canadian Rockies, a meet-cute captured on film. And now they were taking their very public victory lap gushingly in love in that way that made other couples uncomfortable. Brokeback Mountain was a revolutionary Hollywood movie, a love story about two gay cowboys. Gus Van Zant was attached to direct but couldn't cast a tense jawed repressed lead role. Brad Pitt passed and ditto for Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, and Joaquin Phoenix, they passed too.

So Van Zant dropped out and the project fell to Ang Lee, whose red-hot success of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon had cooled off considerably after his follow-up flop with the Hulk. The gay cowboy script found its way to Heath, who loved it. He'd been playing small parts, weird parts, since The Night's Tale, anxious to avoid being typecast as nothing more than a pretty face. Heath saw an opportunity to make a bold move, like River Phoenix playing an narcoleptic gay hustler in Van Zance,

my own private Idaho, shedding his pretty boy persona and establishing himself as a real actor. After they made the movie, Heath and Michelle moved in together in Brooklyn, of all places. Not the hipster loft scene in Williamsburg, the quiet row houses of Borum Hill. No one in Borum Hill gave a shit if you were famous. Brooklyn was in L.A. Brooklyn left you alone. Heath and Michelle got married at City Hall in secret, and they never referenced the rings on their fingers at premieres or gala. And that October, three months earlier, they had a baby, little Matilda.

Heath was over the moon. He said Brokeback changed his life, and he wasn't talking about his breakthrough performance or the award nominations. The movie brought him Michelle, gave him his baby daughter. It was the best thing that ever happened to him. But at that moment, Heath and Michelle weren't in Brooklyn.

They were in L.A. at the Shrine Auditorium for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, facing off against paparazzi, who had no time for that bridge and tunnel shit. Heath and Michelle were far from home and there were scores to settle. Australian tabloids had infamously dubbed the couple Surly and Surly. Heath regularly threw eggs at the photographers who camped outside his house back in Australia. Just one year prior in Sydney, a photographer shouted flash as he snapped a picture during a take on the set of candy.

The first film Heath had shot in Australia in four years. The photographer didn't give a fuck that he just ruined the scene. Gotcha, Ledger, he screamed. I'll see ya at home. Heath broke character and took off after the photographer, all the way down the street, so far down the street that the two of them were the only witnesses to what happened next.

The photographer ended up with a scraped knee and busted elbow. He went to the police, said Heath Ledger tackled him for no reason. According to Heath, the poor bastard fell on the chase, with no one else there to see it, and the cops didn't press charges. Candy, the film Heath had been shooting when the photographer made his move,

was about two heroin addicts. The Aussie Rags made sure they portrayed Heath as an actor who did a little too much research for his role. The stories Heath told were strange enough. He and co-star, Abby Cornish, met an old junkie at a Sydney Narcotics Anonymous meeting who took them back to his apartment. And the attic took out a rifle case. Inside was a prosthetic arm with a bag of fake blood attached at the shoulder. The blood bag ran into two tubes that ran into two fully functional veins that ran the length of the arm. It was an educational prop for nurses to learn to draw blood.

The junkie had lifted it from a hospital and used it to show newbies how to shoot up safely, how to shoot up right. You slide the needle up the vein, and don't go poking yourself like a fucking amateur. He showed Heath salivating and Pavlodian response when Heath sunk the needle into the prosthetics arms vein, fake blood shooting up the dropper's neck.

Heath got so good at it that he figured he'd be able to do it for real, maybe even without flinching, not that he actually would. It was one thing to disappear into a roll and another thing to disappear completely. But no matter how many roles there were to disappear into, the paparazzi didn't forget that Heath Ledger used to throw eggs at them from his porch, that he allegedly tackled one of their own, and they certainly didn't forgive. When Heath, Michelle, went back to Sydney for the brokeback premiere, paparazzi sprayed them with super-soakers.

They apologized to Michelle, but not to Heath. They claimed it was payback, but the biggest payback was about to come. Los Angeles, 2006. After the Screen Actors Guild's Ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium, Heath and Michelle went back to the Chateau Marmont, where they'd left their daughter with a sitter. Michelle went up to the room to see the baby and get some sleep. Heath mingled in the lobby.

He was wound up, anxious, not much for sleeping. The Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard was legendary. Harry Cohn, co-founder of Columbia Pictures, told William Holden, If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont. James Dean jumped out a Chateau Marmont window to, quote-unquote, audition for Rebel Without a Cause. John Belushi wrote a speedball injection out of this world in Bungalow 3, and those were just the stories you heard about. The Chateau kept its secrets.

If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmonde. Darren Banks and Eric Munn were photographers for Splash News and Picture Agency, a global network of paparazzi. They came to the Chateau Marmont with cocaine, which they had bought with the news agency's money. And they were there with Banks' girlfriend, a reporter for People magazine, who'd be listed as Jane Doe in the legal proceedings that came later. They zeroed in on Heath, wandering the crowd, edgy and listless, alone.

without his storybook wife or his fairy tale baby, and they had revenge on their minds. Tough loss tonight, Banks said. He was incognito. He didn't tell Heath what he did for a living. Yeah, yeah, said Heath, thanks. He'd forgotten about the award show. He didn't give a shit about awards.

The whole process ground on him, made him wish he'd never taken the part. He felt the gravity of his wife and his daughter pulling at him from upstairs, but something kept him down here in the muck of this party. lead ghost of an old self that he couldn't shake. You want to get out of here, Banks House? My girlfriend's got a room. He did want to get out of there. He needed to get back to his wife and daughter, back to Borm Hill where no one gave a fuck who he was. He was too visible in L.A.

Even though everyone pretended so hard not to see him. This town used to be fun, back when he had the massive apartment that served as a landing pad for friends. That was five years ago. He looked around the party and all he saw were dead eyes, plastic smiles, all of them pretending to have fun. But underneath, they were all so serious. Upstairs, Jane Doe watched as Banks and Mun carved the Coke into lines and presented it to Heath like he had won an award. Fuck. He was going to get serious shit for Michelle.

He shouldn't even be here. In the one place where people famously went to get into trouble. The undercover paparazzi gave Heath a nudge and showed off that quality coat purchased just for him. Heath dove into old habits, dove into those lines like he woke up from his fairy tale life and he had been in the Chateau Marmont the whole time. Munn excused himself to unpourer his nose.

He went around to the balcony and crouched down with a camera. Jane Doe saw him do it. She hadn't signed on for this shit. Maybe she bought Heath's good husband, good dad, shtick. And maybe she got suckered by that smile. She wouldn't be the first. Jane Doe knew the paparazzi wanted revenge on Heath.

She just didn't think it was right. She demanded that Mon and Banks tell Heath exactly who they were. Banks approached Heath, hands up, palms out, like he would a rabid animal. Because Heath no longer looked like the goofball new dad right now. He now looked like the guy who had chased down and tackled a photographer just last year in Sydney. It's cool, said Banks.

I'm going to go get us some more, a peace offering, and no more pictures, a promise. He didn't mention that his partner had been shooting video. Heath calmed down a little. Banks made a call, scored them some more on the company's tab. Before too long, it was a party again.

But every few lines, Heath remembered the setup and lost his shit all over again. Mon attempted to calm Heath down. He was going to destroy the photos. Swear to God, they would never see the daylight. Mon went out to his car. He swapped the memory card for one in his glove box. one containing red carpet shots any hat could take.

He snapped the red carpet card in half, shut the glove compartment, and went back upstairs. See, he said, showing off the broken memory card. All gone. The video never did see daylight, while Heath was alive anyways. Banks and Mon knew he'd come back at them, make them look like the assholes.

Plus, Heath Ledger wasn't news. Not yet anyway. He retreated to Borum Hill. People got cell phone shots of him with his daughter on his shoulders. and the photos ended up in the back of People magazine. The celebrities who were just like us schlock, filler, not the shit that sells magazines. Heath was a stay-at-home dad and he loved it.

He passed up roles on the regular just so he could spend more time with his daughter. But one more role was waiting, one that would take his Hollywood smile and twist it, and it would lead Heath Ledger to a dark place. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Christian Bale surveyed the wreckage. He had to pivot on the heel of his boot, and the neck wasn't as stiff as the one Michael Keaton wore.

And the suit didn't have fucking nipples, thank God, but it was limiting enough. Bale couldn't keep his head on a swivel. He took a slow 360 rotation, broken glass, upended steel table, ceramic tiles shattered. Shit, Bail thought, did I do this? If he was in a throwdown that did this much damage, he ought to know about it. He'd have his knuckles dusted, a coppery tang of blood in his much. mouth, fuck a room up this bad. It should be scars, bruises, a memory of what happened. He ran gloved fingers over the jagged edge of a broken tile. It made the director rigged a detonator,

or made the tile implode. Didn't make sense. Didn't seem possible. Christopher Nolan was a master of physical effects and leave the CGI to amateurs. Let the hack directors fix shit in post. Nolan wanted it on camera. Bale had bruises and scrapes to prove it. They hadn't talked. He knocked explosives in rehearsal, and Nolan wasn't the kind of director who sprang shit on you to get some authentic reaction. Not like Hitchcock turning the shower ice cold so Janet Lee's shock was authentic when the knife came down, down, down. Lee never forgave Hitchcock, but you can't argue with the results. The complex stunts and physical effects Nolan used required trust from his actors. Pulling tricks wasn't his bag.

A shard of ceramic, about the size of a baby tooth, came loose and clattered on the concrete next to Bail's boot. We did this, he thought. The details came back to him, fuzzy, like waking up in a stranger's bed and piecing together the night before. He remembered going through the fight choreography in rehearsal, a careful, exacting dance of violence. He and Heath Ledger went over it again and again until they had the steps right. But in rehearsal, Heath didn't do the voice. He did A-voice, of course. And like Bale, Heath drowned his accent and store-brand American ketchup for most parts.

Heath landed on something Midwestern, Chicago, generic, and he was good at it. His voice blended into any Friday night crowd at the Clark Street bars in Wrigleyville. In rehearsal, his voice was average, aggressively normal. Bale growled his lines, a rasp that left his throat shredded, left him sucking mullfuls of lozenges after every take. Heath held something back until the cameras rolled. Then, he came at bail with that nasal fucking wine, that sound that crept under Bail's skin that needleed at him. Why so serious, Christian?

With that voice, that fucking voice, itching away at his brain, all the choreographed violence, all the practiced dance steps of the fight burned away in red rage. Bail had smacked his forehead onto the metal desk, banged it like a gong, and Heath laughed, A wheedling he-he-he-he-he. Hit me, he said. Go on. Hit me. He kept talking in that voice, that fucking voice. Only wasn't Heath Ledger anymore, he was a demon, an agent of pure chaos. Bale had to get answers, how to beat the answers out of him. He picked Heath up by the Kelly Green vest

and slammed his back against the tile wall, hard enough to smash the tiles. He grabbed a fistful with that greasy hot-topic dyed hair and slammed Heath's face into the two-way glass, leaving a spider web shattered pattern. The violence was real, and Heath laughed through the whole fucking thing, never crying off, never calling cut, as Bail flipped him onto the metal table, tossed his body around like a rag doll.

The whole time, laughing that laugh, that made Bail want to hit him again, harder. Bale looked over at Heath, sitting in a corner, smoking a cigarette before the next take. Heath was buried in a book, the journal he had with him on set at all times,

with the Joker written on the front, above a picture of a woman in a sun hat feeding an elephant. It was a diary and a scrapbook. Cut-out comic book panels. Photos of Tim Curry as Pennywise, the demonic clown and John Wayne Gacy, the all-too-reel killer clown, who performed at birthday parties in children's hospitals,

but also who killed at least 33 young men and boys. Paintings by Francis Bacon of medieval popes reduced to screaming skeletons, dead birds and rotting slabs of, beef. Old playing cards and a photo of Malcolm McThowell leering grinning in a bowler hat and eyeliner as a clockwork oranges charismatic psychopath, Alex, hyenas, and handwritten dialogue. Bale could go all in on a roll. He tanned himself like leather to play Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. He survived on cigarettes, whiskey, and black coffee to get into the body of a

strung-out insomniac in the machinist, 120 pounds on his six-foot frame. He put on a hundred pounds of muscle before we'd don the bat suit, like CGI, sculpted rubber pecks were for amateurs. Heath, on the other hand, locked himself away for a month in a London hotel room, reading old Batman comics and improvising, leering grins and nails on a chalkboard voices until he got them right. That fucking voice. The month of seclusion fucked with Heath permanently, messed up his circadian rhythms until he was only sleeping two hours a night. Christian Bale put all those lost pounds back on. Every ounce he starved off himself for one roll,

returned his muscle for this one. Heath Ledger didn't go into isolation to lose something. He went to find something, and he came back with that journal, by-bye written ominously on the last page. Aware he was being watched, Heath looked up. He smiled his broad movie star smile, framed by a horror show rictus of makeup and prosthetics.

Heath helped design the look, the scars. He sure his shit didn't want to look like Caesar Romero, who wouldn't even shave his stash before they layered on the grease paint, and he didn't dare look like Jack Nicholson, who was already complaining in the press that no one had even asked him to reprise the role. And the scars were based on an old British mob movie called the Chelsea Grin. He slid a guy's cheek from the corner of his lips to the back of his molars. Shit never heals right.

Ugly for life. Heath licked his lips. He did it constantly to keep the prosthetic scars from coming unglued, the necessity becoming part of the performance. He gave Bale a cheery wave, twiddling his fingers in the air, and went back to his journal and his smoke. And there are rumors Heath Ledger stayed in character while shooting the dark night, that he was the Joker all the time.

Save that noise for Jared Leto. The truth was even scarier, how easily Heath turned it on and off. Once the cameras rolled, he was no longer Heath Ledger. He became the Joker. He spooked Maggie Gyllenhaal who'd known him for years. He spooked Michael Cain, which is no easy feat. This is a guy who lived through the Nazi bombing of London,

who went drink for drink with Peter O'Toole, who co-starred with Lawrence Olivier and Sean Connery, and who defined badass British cruel in the 1960s as Harry Palmer, a spy who made James Bond look like a fucking door-to-door salesman. Michael Cain stammered and botched his lines when he had to stare into Heath Ledger's leering lipstick smeared muck. And the second Nolan called Cut, he was Heath again, sweet, funny, kind. But the thing that he created in that hotel room was still inside him, ready to be let out when they called action. It lived inside him now, and it wouldn't let him sleep.

Heath Ledger wasn't sleeping. It was barely dawn. He decided to go for a chess game in Washington Square Park in the rain. He was thinking about a break from acting. For the first time and forever, Heath felt like he had time to play the long game. If he could just get some fucking sleep, it was 2008. The players in the park respected Heath's game as much as they did as movies. He played speed chess against the early morning regulars.

A stalemate, two losses. He couldn't see the whole board, its future, its possibilities. His brain felt rain slick and jagged. Heath shook hands and went home. But Heath wasn't going back to the storybook apartment in Borum Hill. He and Michelle had split months earlier. In the silence about the reasons for the breakup, the tabloids assumed Heath was back on drugs.

Cocaine tape from the Chateau Marmont hadn't gone public, but its existence was a shared secret among paparazzi. And they never bought Heath's whole Mr. Mom routine to begin with. They knew the real Heath. He was living on Broome Street in Soho. Like with the Aussie Flop House in L.A. years ago, his mates were once again welcome and made regular visits, some longer term than others. Unable to keep Heath away from drugs, they kept drugs away from Heath, chastising people who brought Coke to parties. Put that shit away, Heath can't see that. And they comforted him about the split, about being away from his daughter. and fatherhood was the only thing Heath knew he was good at without an audience to tell him so.

He missed his daughter like a limb. The housekeeper led herself into Heath's Soho pad around noon that day. She knew to always expect guests. Aussie boys passed out on the couch, a supermodel making herself tea in the kitchen, but on this day, Heath's door was closed. Maybe he's getting some rest, she thought. At 2.30 in the afternoon, Heath's massage therapist came by, and neither the therapist nor the housekeeper wanted to wake him.

But Heath needed the massage treatments. Back pain was constant. A good massage many could skip some of the pills. When Heath didn't respond, and they worried. It took both of them to force the door open, and they found him naked on the floor, unresponsive. And the housekeeper told the massage therapist to call an ambulance. But they both knew the things the papers wrote about, Heath.

If there weren't paparazzi outside the apartment already, sirens would draw them like flies to shit. A Heath would wake up as the punchline of a tabloid scandal. To spare him embarrassment, his massage therapist called the first number on a speed dial. She got Mary Kate Olson. In the spotlight since she was nine months old, Mary Kate Olson was one half of America's most notorious set of child star twins. She claimed she and Heath were just friends.

Although anyone who's had to pick nine ride or dies to put on speed dial might suspect it was more significant. She was in L.A. when she got the call from Heath's massage therapist, but rather than say hang up the phone and call a fucking ambulance, she told him she would send her security guy in New York. He'd be there in no time and get everything taken care of, and Mary Kate hung up. The massage therapist called back and stressed that Heath was unconscious.

Mary Kate assured her the guy is on his way. The massage therapist started to think they were beyond damage control. Heath Ledger didn't seem to be. be breathing. Massage therapists looked the naked body on the floor. She wasn't thinking about tabloid headlines. She was thinking what the cops would do if she let Heath Ledger die while she waited for Mary Kate Olson's guy to come over, and she finally called an ambulance, and then called Mary Kate back to let her know. And by the time Mary Kate's guy got there, the paramedics had already called it. Heath Ledger was dead at 28.

300 strangers stood on Broom Street. Phones in the air as the boss. bodyback came out. Stories spun out in real time, a suicide, an overdose. Darren Banks and Eric Mung dug up the video they'd taken at the Chateau Marmont and started shopping it to the highest bidder, and they got a million for it before Banks' ex Jane Doe hit them with a lawsuit. Director Terry Gilliam saw the news on the BBC. He figured it was a deliberate hoax staged by Warner Brothers in order to promote the Joker. The studio had engaged in weird viral marketing for the dark night since before Christmas. Christopher Nolan was still editing the film which earned Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar a year after his death. At a restaurant in London, somebody told Jack Nicholson, I warned him, Jack said.

He refused to elaborate. It took weeks, but the medical examiner labeled Heath Ledger's death, an accidental overdose of prescription medication, classic death by misadventure. A cocktail of anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping pills, and painkillers. Investigators tracked down Heath's doctors and accounted for most of the meds. But the oxycodone that was in that cocktail of anti-anxiety drugs shouldn't have been in the mix. Nobody should have ever prescribed Heath Ledger oxycodone, not with everything else he was taking just to keep his shit together.

And the cops had questions, and so did the DEA. Where did the drugs come from? Given the party traffic in and out of his house, the suspect list would need to include most of Lower Manhattan in Brooklyn. Why they wanted to know, did Mary Kate Olson security guys show up on the scene at the same time as the paramedics? Was he there to help or was he there to clean up a mess? They wanted to talk to the child star turned tabloid regular. Mary Kate's lawyer said she wasn't sitting down for a chat without guaranteed immunity.

That shit might have sounded cute in her adorable full house days, but the DEA wasn't charmed. They issued a subpoena that would force her to testify in front of a grand jury, where they could ask her anything. Had she ever done illegal drugs? Had she ever shared prescription medication with anyone? Mary Kate was in the middle of a legal minefield. Asking for immunity in advance was smart, even if it made her look shady as fuck to folks who wanted someone to blame for Heath's death.

In the end, the U.S. Attorney's Office deemed there was no viable target, which is not the same as saying no one was guilty. A year after his death, Heath's parents and his sister walked onto the stage of the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, too. accept the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor on Heath's behalf. Behind them, an image of Heath as the Joker stared out at the audience. Twenty feet high, the sloppy black paint around his eyes bleeding into the white paint on his face.

His lips, blood red, scraggly swamp green hair, and that smile. The smile he'd created in a hotel room. The smile that lived inside him and never let him sleep again. Truly a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All-Axist member, thank you for supporting the show.

We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad-free. Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at DisgracelandPod. And on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at DisgracelandPod.

Rockerola.