Pamela finally gets her say
FOR MOST OF her life, Pamela Anderson, 55, has been reduced to a caricature: the
Baywatch babe, the ditsy blonde bombshell or, as she puts it in her new documentary,
Pamela, A Love Story, ‘my boobs had a career and I was just tagging along’.
Now, we’re finally able to know the real Pamela, with her memoir, Love, Pamela, published on 31 January, the same day the documentary drops on Netflix. In both, she dismantles the ‘cartoon image’ she felt she had to play along with and tells her story.
Chronicling her journey from naive small-town girl in Canada, to ‘the most famous blonde on the planet’, in the documentary she lays out – with heartbreaking matter-of-factness – the mistreatment she’s endured through her life: a difficult childhood, years of sexual abuse by a babysitter, the rape she experienced aged 12, and violence in a number of her romantic relationships.
Then, of course, there is the 1995 sex tape scandal, which Pamela says ‘changed everything’. Anyone who watched last year’s
Pam & Tommy, starring Sebastian Stan and Lily James, will be familiar with the story of the tape – when private home footage of Pamela and her then-husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, was stolen from their home, mass produced and distributed without their consent.
For Pamela it spelt the end of her dream of a ‘serious’ acting career – ‘I was a punchline’ – and was a humiliating invasion of privacy from which other people made millions. Pam & Tommy spun the whole ordeal into a lolzy comedy-drama. But in the documentary we see Pamela devastated the day the show launches. ‘This feels like when the tape was stolen; I feel sick,’ she says, visibly shaking. ‘Basically, you are just a thing owned by the world.’
It’s the one time we get a glimpse of
Pamela’s anger but, despite everything she has faced – the abuse, the humiliation, the misogyny – she insists she is not a victim.
‘We were, of course, covering some very heavy stuff and she went through some rough patches while we were filming,’ director Ryan White tells Grazia. ‘But Pamela never loses that infectious sense of hope and optimism.’
He adds, ‘I hope the documentary reveals Pamela as human. Her public persona is often larger-than-life, but when you sit down with Pamela she could not be more down-to-earth.’
The Pamela we see – barefaced, wrapped up in a long cardigan on her veranda at her Canadian home, or shopping for $5 hair dye in the supermarket – is vulnerable, funny and endlessly open-hearted. A self-confessed hopeless romantic (she has married and divorced six times), she tells herself her next relationship must be ‘a love affair with myself ’.
Last year, she got her much-longed-for chance to prove herself as an actor, making her Broadway debut as Roxie in Chicago. After initial cynicism at her casting, she wowed critics over the course of her eightweek run, in what she calls ‘the ultimate redemption arc’.
There’s no bitterness that she should have to redeem herself in the first place, or regret over the career she may have had – just a hopeful eye on the future. ‘I’m sure I’m not finished. I have no idea what I’m going to do next,’ she says. ‘But I kind of like this moment right now.’ Finally, Pammy is in control of her own story.