Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘Pamela revealed’ – again
But this time former ‘Baywatch’ blonde bombshell will star on ‘Jasmin’ chat website where influencers can command up to R271 per minute
NOTHING can prepare you for FaceTiming Pamela Anderson. One second there is only you – staring, via iPhone at your tired reflection – and the next second there is Pamela Anderson, brightening the screen the way a ray of sun stretching beyond a cloud can seem to bounce off the whole Pacific.
She is striding across the great outdoors, smiling and saying “HehLOOOW!” like she is delighted to talk to you.
“Anytime anyone calls me
Pam, I feel like they’re mad at me. But anything is fine!” She has a
2.4ha pocket of a Canadian island to run. She has shrubs to select based on criteria of prickliness (for privacy) and beauty (for overall visual harmony). She has formal letters to write to the men and women – mostly men – who hold their nations’ nuclear codes, about subjects close to her heart. She has Anaïs Nin to reread, and Russian to study, and a cam site to unveil.
The last of these tasks, on a recent Friday, granted the intrusion into Anderson’s peaceful, insular existence. She was preparing for the refurbished debut of Jasmin, a not necessarily sexually explicit webcam, or “camming” site, which offers live broadcasts and prerecorded content, and has been envisioned as a tamer offshoot of LiveJasmin, one of the most popular, nearly always sexually explicit cam sites on the web.
Jasmin had hired Anderson last year as its spokesperson and creative director, pledging she would appear daily to connect “users with lifestyle, relationship and sex positivity influencers”.
Briskly strolling the grounds of her property on Vancouver
Island, British Columbia, Anderson is an effervescent 52. She cast an impression of a woman who doesn’t take herself too seriously. She waxed lyrical about her rustic life and the “misunderstood market” that is camming.
After describing a fairy-tale existence with various marine mammals frolicking on and around her small wooden dock, she declared optimistically, “I think I have a lot to say that might be interesting to people,” abruptly switching to a low, confessional timbre: “Who knows what I’m doing? I don’t know.
Maybe no one will be interested.”
The property belonged to her paternal grandmother, Marjorie, who used to run a small general store there. Anderson bought it from her decades ago so that the land could stay in the family. It’s on the water, in the same small town in British Columbia where Anderson grew up; she moved back in July, after spending a couple of years in the south of France.
Years ago Anderson and an investment partner filed documents to build condominiums and town houses on the property, but the development plans fizzled. On the
■ phone, Anderson said she had “no plans to make it a business. I just want to live here”.
“When I ever had problems at any time in my life, I would come here and dream really vividly,” Anderson said. “When I go into the middle of my field, with all the trees surrounding me – it’s just like they’ve known me my whole life.”
The weather in British Columbia keeps her calm, she said, although “I don’t really dress for the cold.” In sunny Los Angeles, where Anderson found fame patrolling the beaches on the television series “I think I have more of a nervous kind of energy, or I’m hyper,” she said.
Anderson was famously “discovered” in 1989, when a cameraman at the Canadian football game she was attending (clad in a crop top) broadcast her image on the stadium’s jumbo video screens. Her life as a highly visible public figure started in earnest when she was featured as the centrefold in the February 1990 issue of Playboy. The acting career followed, as did much more Playboy.
“My hair’s all scraggly, all over the place. I’m wearing a sarong and fake Ugg boots. It’s not a pretty look.”
But in her hometown, where there are about 8 500 residents, she said, her presence causes little commotion. Recently, an old man biked up to her in a parking lot and asked how Julian Assange was doing.
Anderson’s years of highly photographed visits to see Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he evaded extradition for seven years, and in the London prison where he is currently held, prompted much speculation about the nature of their relationship.
Thus she successfully drew public attention to what she viewed as a conspiracy to quell press freedoms.
Anderson’s conversation is a bountiful natural resource, seeming well-suited to a webcam venture – consider the shy voyeurs who seek to have engaging interactions with a woman but are perpetually unsure of what to say.
But paths of conversation with Anderson quickly concluded in one of three areas: her activism, her conviction that people must question everything they hear and read, or her general philosophy of
Several other things are also clear. Anderson is an impassioned advocate for animals, for the larger ecosystem of Earth and for those who “question authority”.
“People have to educate themselves and not get into a place where they’ll do anything that they’re told,” she said.
Anyone mistaking Anderson for a good-time gal would do well to peruse her personal website, where, under the label “journaling”, lies an archive of her meticulously formatted open letters written to public figures, on the subject of Assange and other topics.
A letter to “His Excellency President Vladimir Putin” entails
“the designation of marine protected areas in the East Antarctic, the Weddell Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula”.
She has also written to President Donald Trump. On November 8 last year, a week after the UN special rapporteur on torture reported that Assange’s life was at risk in prison, and nearly a year to the day after she referred to Trump on Twitter as a “narcissist perv” and “completely selfish idiotic fool who must work for the devil”, Anderson wrote a letter to the president and first lady in which she appeared to be reaching for things to compliment.
She implored Trump to champion the free press by pardoning Assange. “To save democracy would be your defining moment stamped in the pages of history and will turn your presidency around.”
Despite Anderson’s coaxing, Trump did not issue the pardon.
With Assange in prison, Anderson said, “there’s nothing more I can do. He even said to me, ‘Pamela,
I’d rather you just keep living your life and being you. And that’s how you help me. Don’t put yourself in any awkward positions because of your love for me’.” (Anderson characterises their relationship as a friendship.)
Right now, amid the pandemic, one of Anderson’s primary concerns is the news – specifically, that her parents are watching too many American news programmes. “They just devour CNN and MSNBC. And I said, ‘If you’re watching that, maybe you should watch RT” – the statebacked Russian news network – “as well, because somewhere in the middle is the truth. Or Al Jazeera or BBC.”
Anderson herself was recently the subject of some entertainment news headlines over a “secret marriage” to Jon Peters, a movie producer and her friend of more than 30 years, that ended after 12 days, before the paperwork for a marriage certificate had been filed.
“I wasn’t married,” Anderson said, sounding rather sad. How did she get to that moment?
“I was in India, and I went to this panchakarma cleanse, and I’d been gone for three weeks in this ayurvedic centre, meditating. I came back and within 24 hours, I saw Jon. It was like this little whirlwind thing, and it was over really quick, and it was nothing. Nothing physical. It’s just a friendship.
“I’m a big believer in fate, destiny, all those crazy things. So no hearts were broken…”
The New York Post reported that, after the non-marriage ended, Peters claimed to have paid $200 000 (about R3.5m) worth of bills for Anderson. He subsequently denied making the claim. “I don’t need anyone to pay my bills,” Anderson said.
“I’ve only been married three times. People think I’ve been married five times. I’ve been married to Tommy” (Lee, of the band Mötley Crüe, and the sons’ father); “I’ve been married to Bob” (Ritchie, better known as Kid Rock); “and to Rick” (Salomon). Could she see herself getting married again? “Absolutely! Just one more time, please, God!”
On Jasmin, influencers set a rate – between $1.99 and $14.99 per minute – which users pay to interact with them over text, video chat or direct message. The company said influencers could take home 30% to 60%. The percentages are determined by how frequently an influencer engages with users.
Anderson presented the venture as an opportunity to establish emotional connections and combat loneliness.
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger than a friend or parents,” she said. “We need to communicate. Humans need humans.”
Some people, she knows, will see paying to interact as an imitation of intimacy, instead of fostering the real thing. “I think people tend to always want it to be like it used to be – romanticise the past,” she said. “We need to romanticise the future. And romanticise where we are now.
“Maybe there’s a way to complement our relationships by using some of these platforms.”
“They say, ‘Pamela revealed’,” she said, referring to a label on her Jasmin page, “because I’ve never really shown this side of me.”
Yet the content under that heading would seem to showcase the side of Anderson with which the public is familiar: It consists of two gauzy, black-and-white video shorts in which Anderson, corset clad, plays dress up with pearls and has a photo shoot. It could perhaps be deemed revealing – there certainly is flesh on display – but there’s not much in the way of new specifics.
This is emblematic of the conundrum Anderson, a selfproclaimed “open book”, presents in conversation, which is an impenetrable fog of “romanticism”, a concept she references frequently, but vaguely. It seems roughly intended to denote aspirations and pursuits that are noble, important and free of chemical preservatives.
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