This Sex Symbol Is Doing Just Fine
LADYSMITH, British Columbia — I am sitting across from Pamela Anderson, trying to explain to her 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 it possibly do?”
Ms. Anderson, 55, puts on reading glasses, then examines my phone screen, which has transformed my face into a 1990s version of her: hair in a tousled top bun, pencil-thin eyebrows, mouth in a lip-lined pout. She shrieks, “That’s insane.” When I angle the camera toward her, she ducks out of the frame. “I am not doing it on myself,” she says.
She is laughing, but she means it. She does not want to look like a 20-something version of herself, nor does she want to relive that period in her life. Or at least she is not going to let someone else force her to.
The world learned that last year, when it got word of Ms. Anderson’s reaction to “Pam & Tommy,” the Hulu series that tells the story of her life and, in particular, her marriage to the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, the father of her children.
That relationship began with a four-day courtship in Cancún, Mexico, and a wedding, with Ms. Anderson in a bikini, and mostly ended with Mr. Lee in jail after striking her while she was holding their newborn. The marriage began to unravel after a video of the couple having sex was stolen from their Malibu, California, home, then went the 1990s version of viral.
If you grew up in a certain era, you know about that tape.
It earned its distributors $77 million in less than 12 months. What you might not have known was that it was stolen, not leaked for publicity, and that Ms. Anderson and Mr. Lee unsuccessfully sued to try to stop it. It also was not originally a sex tape. It was a 54-minute home video, roughly eight minutes of which featured sex acts. Those moments were
spliced together by sleazy porn distributors, turning him into a sex god and her into a joke.
“Pam & Tommy” was meant to set the record straight. But Ms. Anderson refused to watch it. To her, it felt like another exploitation. Except this time it came wrapped in the promise of salvation. “It was already hurtful enough the first time,” she says. “It’s like one of those things where you’re going, ‘Really?’ People are still capitalizing off that thing?”
It is hard to overstate the influence that Ms. Anderson had on a particular era. She was the distillation of straight male fantasy come to life — a small-town Canadian girl next door who had been transformed into pure American erotica.
She was already a Playboy model when she helped make “Baywatch,” which had been previously canceled, the most-watched television show in the world — exporting the image of a platinum blond, blue-eyed California dream to more than 140 countries. Three decades later, doctors credit her with ushering in an era of plastic surgery that made them rich. She was the precursor to a swath of culture that argued for objectification as empowerment, as long as you could convince yourself you were in control.
Which made Ms. Anderson seem like a perfect candidate for the kind of narrative reframing “Pam & Tommy” was offering — the kind offered up to many women these days as we look back on the tragedies of their lives with a more enlightened gaze. And yet isn’t it all a bit patronizing, this notion that a TV show should swoop in and correct the cultural record on her behalf?
For the past few years, Ms. Anderson has been doing something of a re-examination herself. She sold her Malibu house and moved back to her small hometown on Vancouver Island, on a property that she bought from her grandmother two decades ago. It was here, next door to her parents — she moved them onto the compound last year — where she began writing her life story.
She thought she might write it all down for her sons, Brandon and Dylan Lee, who are now grown and living in Los Angeles. But eventually, at the urging of her elder son, Brandon, she decided to publish it in memoir form. “Love, Pamela” was released last month, in tandem with a Netflix documentary co-produced by Brandon. She hopes it will explain her to a world that has long assumed it already understood her.
Ms. Anderson grew up poor, with a violent father she says has softened in old age. She writes that she was molested by a babysitter. Her first sexual experience with a man, at around age 13, was with someone more than a decade her senior and ended in rape. A high school boyfriend once kicked her out of a moving car and another let his friends assault her in a back seat. “I didn’t tell anybody,” she writes. “I just blocked it out.”
Ms. Anderson was discovered in her early 20s at a local football game: the Jumbotron panned to a fresh-faced brunette in a Labatt’s beer T-shirt, and the company promptly hired her as a spokesmodel. Playboy quickly came calling. She threw up during the first shoot, after a makeup artist touched her breast, but she would go on to pose for more covers than anyone else in the magazine’s history.
That Pamela Anderson, hypersexualized creature, was the subject of sexual trauma is not coincidental. She writes that learning to see herself as sexual was how she took back some control. “It was my choice,” she writes of her decision to pose nude. But it “gave some people the impetus, sadly, to treat me without respect.”
Ms. Anderson parlayed Playboy into acting roles, like Lisa the “Tool Time” girl on “Home Improvement.” But it was playing C.J. Parker on “Baywatch” that imprinted Ms. Anderson onto the cultural memory. She appeared on trading cards, stickers and pool floats. “I’ve had so many people tell me, like, ‘I just wish I could bottle you up and sell you,’ ” she tells me. “It’s like, I’m not a thing.”
Ms. Anderson made little on those offshoots. At the time she negotiated her contract with “Baywatch,” she said, she had no agent; she had hardly heard terms like “syndication” and “merchandising rights,” let alone knew how to negotiate for them. “I was a little girl from Canada coming here and running on a beach,” she said. “Like, how would you think that would make any money?”
There was not much variation to the Pamela Anderson brand from that point. She had been a babe with tools, then a babe on a beach. She would go on to play a babe who was a bounty hunter (“Barb Wire”), a babe in a bookstore (“Stacked”), and a babe playing herself, the obsession of a Kazakh reporter named Borat.
But she was also in on the joke — undressing on the TV show “Saturday Night Live” to overcome her stage fright; marking off her body parts like slabs of meat for PETA, an animals rights activists group; embodying the role of an animated cartoon in “Stripperella,” about a superhero who could cut glass with her nipples.
Sure, she has things she wishes she could do over. The breasts (implanted, then deflated, then implanted again), the marriages (a handful of them, to men who seem to “progressively get worse,” she jokes), the bad career choices (reality TV), worse financial decisions, leading to even worse career choices (“Dancing With the Stars”). But that is not the same as having regrets.
“I guess the sex symbol-y thing is part of what people think of me,” she says. “And it’s not like I’m trying to change it.”
“I’ve had so many people tell me, like, ‘I just wish I could bottle you up and sell you.’ It’s like, I’m not a thing.”
PAMELA ANDERSON actress, model, and media personality