Courtney Stodden became one of Hollywood’s most scandalous
celebrities without ever getting into a drunk-driving accident or
checking into rehab to kick a cocaine habit. Instead, the aspiring
singer/actress shocked the glitterati by… getting
married.
What made Stodden’s nuptials so scandalous is that the
blonde bride is only 16, and her groom, actor Doug Hutchison, is
51. Not since rocker Jerry Lee Lewis wed his 13-year-old cousin
Myra in 1958 has a show-biz marriage caused such a sensation. The
Hutchison-Stodden wedding last month unleashed a torrent of tabloid
headlines on Internet celebrity gossip sites. The couple were
featured on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and covered in newspapers
around the world, from the Sydney Morning Herald to the
London Daily Mail. The irony is that, despite the
35-year-old age difference in what has often been described as a
“May-December” marriage (it’s actually more like “April-October”),
the girl at the center of the scandal is an advocate of traditional
moral values.
Courtney Stodden is a churchgoing Baptist who says she was
a virgin on her wedding night in Las Vegas, where she and Hutchison
tied the knot with the required legal permission of her parents.
And the teen bride’s mother, Krista Stodden, says gossips who have
criticized the newlyweds are a bunch of jealous hypocrites. “She
was a virgin when she got married.… She’s the most honest girl
you’ll ever meet, and the people who are turning around and calling
her all these rotten names are girls that have been sleeping
around, who have disgusting lives,” Mrs. Stodden told me in a phone
interview Wednesday. “I mean, a girl that every man would love to
have, and she’s a woman that every woman would like to be, and
women know this, and they try to discredit her.… And so what is out
there in the media is just their insecurities, just flying all over
the place.”
Mrs. Stodden sought out an interview with me after seeing
a
blog post I’d written in which I called to the
attention of conservative readers what seemed a relevant fact
gleaned from her daughter’s Facebook page: “Courtney describes
herself as a Christian and a Republican. She’s on our
side, whether we like it or not.” Despite Courtney’s
self-identification as a rare Hollywood Republican, no responsible
authority on “our side” was evidently eager to be seen as condoning
this mismatched marriage, and the mother of the bride says she
understands such reluctance. “You know, myself, if I think of a
16-year-old girl and a 51-year-old man together, I think I would
start thinking, like, ‘Oh my God. I can’t even fathom that.’… It’s
very unusual, that’s why it’s so controversial,” said Mrs. Stodden
who, at 51, is the same age as her new son-in-law. She calls
Courtney her “baby,” and notes that neither of her older two
daughters pursued show-biz careers — or middle-aged movie-star
husbands. “My other daughters, they all have husbands their same
ages, and if people would have told me this two years ago, I would
have said, ‘Oh, my God — I can’t even wrap my mind around that.’
But it happened. It’s working for them, and they look great
together.”
Hollywood doesn’t share Mrs. Stodden’s approval of her
daughter’s marriage — one online columnist pronounced it “ick to
the extreme” — and much of the disapproval has centered on
Courtney’s parents, who have been accused by some of “pimping”
their daughter and even smeared as “trailer trash.” Both
accusations are ridiculously misguided, according to Mrs. Stodden,
who laughs as she says, “In fact, I’ve never lived in a trailer.”
She and her husband Alex, who owns a real-estate development
business, have two homes and are respected citizens of Ocean
Shores, their hometown in Washington State. Mrs. Stodden is a
hairdresser who owns a successful salon and drives a Jaguar, and
says that if anything, her daughter — who was privately educated
at a Christian academy — was previously “known as a spoiled little
rich girl that has everything she wants.”
Spoiled or not, Courtney Stodden unquestionably has
something that every girl wants: Stunning good looks. Or as Mrs.
Stodden says of her youngest daughter, “She never looked like she
belonged in Ocean Shores.” By the time she was in sixth grade,
Courtney’s remarkable beauty began to set her apart from her peers
in the seaside resort town of some 4,000 year-round residents. A
precocious affinity for makeup and high-heeled shoes accentuated
her distinctive appearance, and she unabashedly declared her
ambition toward an entertainment career. “Courtney was the only
daughter, from a very young age, that wanted to be in front of the
camera. She loved to perform,” Krista Stodden
explained in our interview Wednesday. “She’d say
to me, ‘I’m going to move to California. I’m going to live in
Hollywood. I just have this feeling. That’s where I
belong.’”
In pursuit of that dream, 14-year-old Courtney recorded
videos of herself — dancing to a Michael
Jackson song and lip-synching to
Christina Aguilera’s retro-pop tune “Candyman” — and uploaded them
to YouTube, where they attracted attention from men who were
apparently unaware of the performer’s jailbait status. Mrs. Stodden
says her daughter received online messages of romantic interest
from men around the world, including at least one police officer
and two major-league baseball players. But while her good looks
made Courtney somewhat of an underground sensation online, and also
helped her win a local contest that qualified her to compete in the
state’s division of Miss Teen USA
pageant, she was increasingly the object of hostility
from her hometown peers. Last December, she produced and posted to
YouTube a video in
which she shared her experiences with cyber-bullies.
“Along with being in the public eye comes a lot of criticism,
hatred and jealousy,” Courtney says in the video, describing how
she was “harassed on a daily basis on the Internet” and reading
online comments from local teens calling her a “bimbo” and a
“slut.” Her mother says such hurtful comments were ironic in that
Courtney, a faithful congregant of Ocean Shores Baptist Church,
carefully avoided the more typical sorts of adolescent rebellion.
“She does not fall under peer pressure, and I think this is what
made a lot of girls really, really angry, that Courtney would not
participate in her small town in the drugs, the dating, going
around with a bunch of boys and drinking,” Mrs. Stodden
said.
Some critics have condemned Krista Stodden as a pushy
“stage mother,” but she insists that it was Courtney’s own idea to
seek Hollywood stardom and says: “I am just guilty of one thing,
and it’s a good thing, being a very supportive mother. If my
daughters tell me they want to do something, then I’m going to help
them do whatever their goals are.” This was how, through a friend
in Hollywood, Mrs. Stodden got in touch with Hutchison, a veteran
actor best known for his roles in the 1999 Oscar-winning film
The Green Mile and more recently the ABC-TV series
Lost. Hutchison teaches acting and Mrs. Stodden sought his
assistance for her daughter’s career. An e-mail correspondence
began and 16-year-old Courtney has said she found herself falling
in love with Hutchison before they had ever met. There was never
any improper behavior between the teen starlet and the middle-aged
actor, and Mrs. Stodden said that, as unusual as it is, the
couple’s marriage is consistent with her own family’s Christian
moral beliefs. “She broke no biblical standards by marrying a
51-year-old man, because she was a virgin, she has good morals,”
she said, describing her daughter’s marriage as a “blessing,” of
which she says Courtney has had many.
“God has given that girl some blessings beyond belief. I
mean, God has been so good to her,” said Mrs. Stodden, comparing
her daughter to another iconic Hollywood beauty. “I look at the
story of John Derek and Bo Derek, and they had a very successful
marriage, and she was actually younger than Courtney when she got
together with John Derek.” Indeed, Bo Derek — who would become
world-famous in the 1979 hit film 10 — was just 16 when
she met her then-47-year-old future husband, a thrice-divorced
actor and director to whom she remained married until his death in
1998. Whether or not Courtney Stodden will herself enjoy such
success either in her marriage or her career, the comparison is apt
in at least one regard:
Bo Derek is a Republican. Perhaps the GOP needs a
new slogan: “Don’t Hate Us Because We’re Young and
Beautiful.”
