LADYSMITH, British Columbia — I’m sitting across from Pamela Anderson, trying to explain that I have an app on my phone that will make me look like Pamela Anderson.
“What?” she says, her blue eyes widening. “What is it? What could she do?”
Anderson, 55, puts on reading glasses, then examines the screen of my phone, which has transformed my face into a 1990s version of her: tousled updo, thin eyebrows, pouty mouth outlined. He lets out a scream: “What madness!” When I tilt the camera towards her, she crouches down. “I’m not going to do it with myself,” she says.
He says it with a laugh, but he means it. She doesn’t want to look like a twenty-something version of herself, nor does she want to relive that period of her life. Or at least she’s not going to let anyone else make her do it.
The world found out about it last year, when it learned of Anderson’s reaction to “Pam & Tommy,” the Hulu series that tells the story of her life and, in particular, her marriage to Tommy Lee, the drummer for Mötley. Crüe and father of her children.
That relationship began with a four-day courtship in Cancun, Mexico, and a wedding, with Anderson in a bikini, and ended primarily with Lee in jail after beating her while holding their newborn. The marriage began to fall apart after a video of the couple having sex was stolen from their home in Malibu, California, and later went viral in the 1990s.
If you grew up in a certain era, you know about that tape. He earned his distributors $77 million in less than 12 months. What you may not have known is that it was stolen, not leaked for publicity, and that Anderson and Lee unsuccessfully sued to try to stop it. It wasn’t originally a sex tape either. It was a 54-minute home video, approximately eight minutes of which featured sexual acts. Those moments were taken and spliced together by sleazy porn distributors, making him a sex god and her a joke.
The intention of “Pam & Tommy” was to make everything clear. But Anderson refused to see her. To her, he felt like another exploitation. Except that this time she came wrapped in the promise of salvation. “It was painful enough the first time,” she says. “It’s like one of those things where you’re like, ‘Really?’ Are people still profiting from it?”
It’s hard to overstate the influence Anderson had on any particular era. She was the straight male fantasy come true—an ordinary girl from a small Canadian town who had been transformed into pure American erotica.
She was already a Playboy model when she helped turn the previously canceled “Baywatch” into the world’s most-watched television show — exporting the image of a platinum-blonde, blue-eyed Californian dream to more than 140 countries. Three decades later, doctors credit him for ushering in an era of plastic surgery that made them wealthy.
She was the forerunner of a fringe culture that advocated objectification as empowerment, as long as you could convince yourself that you were in control. Which made Anderson seem like a perfect candidate for the kind of narrative reframing she was offering “Pam & Tommy”—the kind so many women are offered today when we look at the tragedies of their lives through a more enlightened lens. And yet, isn’t the notion that a TV show should step in and correct the cultural record on its behalf a bit patronizing?
For the past few years, Anderson has been doing something of an introspection. She sold her Malibu home and returned to her small hometown on Vancouver Island, on property she bought from her grandmother 20 years ago. It was here, next door to her parents’ house — she moved them into the compound last year — that she began writing her life story.
He thought he could write it all for his sons, Brandon and Dylan Lee, who are now adults and living in Los Angeles. But eventually, at the urging of his eldest son, Brandon, she decided to publish it as a memoir. “Love, Pamela” was released last month alongside a Netflix documentary co-produced by Brandon. She waits for her to explain her being to a world that she had long assumed she already understood.
Anderson was discovered in her early 20s at a local football game: The Jumbotron screen showed a fresh-faced brunette in a Labatt beer T-shirt, and the company quickly signed her as a spokesmodel. Playboy promptly called. She threw up during the first photo shoot, after a make-up artist touched her breast, but she posed for more covers than anyone in the magazine’s history.
That Pamela Anderson, a hypersexualized creature, was the object of sexual trauma is not accidental. She writes that learning to see herself as sexual was how she regained some control. “It was my choice,” she writes about her decision to pose nude. But she “gave some people the impetus, unfortunately, to treat me with disrespect.”
Anderson used Playboy as a springboard for acting roles, such as Lisa, the “Tool Time” girl on the series “Home Improvement.” But it was her playing C.J. Parker in “Baywatch” that imprinted Anderson in cultural memory. He was featured on trading cards, stickers, and pool floats. “A lot of people have said to me, like, ‘I wish I could bottle you and sell you,’” he tells me. “Dude, I’m not a thing.”
Anderson gained little from all these ramifications. At the time he negotiated his contract with “Baywatch,” he said, he had no agent; he had barely heard terms like “syndication” and “marketing rights,” let alone knew how to negotiate them. “I was a young lady from Canada who would come here and run on the beach,” she said. “Dude, how would you think that would make money?”
There wasn’t much variation in the Pamela Anderson brand from that point on. She had been a hottie with tools, then a hottie on the beach. She would later play a hottie who was a bounty hunter (“Barb Wire”), a hottie in a bookstore (“Stacked”) and a hottie playing herself, the obsession of a Kazakh reporter named Borat.
But he was also in on the prank — stripping down on “Saturday Night Live” to get over his stage fright and branding parts of his body as hunks of meat for PETA, an animal rights activist group.
Of course, he has things that he would like to have done differently. The breasts (implanted, then deflated, then implanted again), marriages (a handful of them, with men who seem to “get progressively worse,” she jokes), bad career decisions (reality TV), worse financial decisions, leading to even worse career decisions (“Dancing with the Stars”). But that’s not the same as having regrets.
“I guess the sex symbol thing is part of what people think of me,” he says. “And it’s not like I’m trying to change it.”
“A lot of people have said to me, like, ‘I wish I could bottle you and sell you.’ Dude, I’m not a thing.”
By: JESSICA BENNETT
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6570747, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-14 20:20:06
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