The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Not your average kiss-and-tell
Pamela Anderson’s explosively honest memoir is a wild ride, from Hugh Hefner to that sex tape – but we could do without her self-penned poetry
256pp, Headline, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £10.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Pamela Anderson says her publishers offered her a ghostwriter, but she flatly refused. And she chooses to begin her autobiography with a daunting 14 pages of self-penned poetry which goes like this:
The lines blur between dreams and reality, or where I end and the world begins
Thankfully, she soon switches to prose and lays out the narrative of her extraordinary life.
She was born in 1967 on Vancouver Island, Canada. Her mother (17) was “a knockout”, her father (19) looked like Elvis, but they were always fighting, and she eventually left with Pamela and her brother Gerry. After a year, Dad tracked them down and her mother was thrilled – “He was the only man she could ever love.” They moved back to Vancouver Island and he stopped drinking, though Pamela wondered if sobriety made him boring.
She was keen on reading – Jung and Shakespeare – but not on exams and left school at 16 to work as a waitress. She was raped when she was 12, then gang-raped at 14, but even before that suffered years of sexual abuse from a female babysitter. Her first boyfriend, Boogieman Jack, seemed loving at first but turned violent. “As I matured, I noticed most of my boyfriends were bad – and progressively got worse.”
She left home at 17 “after multiple attempts to rescue my mom from my dad”, and got a job in a tanning salon in Vancouver city. One day a roving TV camera picked her out of the crowd at a football game and a beer company asked her to model for them. Then Playboy flew her out to Los Angeles. She had never been in a plane before and she arrived on Gay Pride Day, and rang her mum to tell her “Not only do gay people exist, they walk around in pink hot pants, handcuffed together!”
The next day a stretch limo took her to the Playboy mansion where she met Hugh Hefner and was charmed. “From that point on, Playboy was my family.” Hef said he wanted her to stay in LA, and be the February centrefold, for $15,000 (£12,000). She rang her mother who said, “Do it sweetheart... live a new life.” She eventually appeared on more Playboy covers than anyone.
The film producer Jon Peters installed her in one of his houses in Bel Air. She had maids, a cook, and “a hip rabbi to teach me Kabbalah”. But she could never fall for Peters and eventually took a cheap apartment instead. (Though she did marry him many years later – but only for 12 days.)
Casting directors kept calling – one from Baywatch was particularly persistent, and in 1992 she made her debut as the lifeguard CJ Parker. By the fourth series, she was the highest-paid actress on the show and had to have her own security team to protect her from the mobs of paparazzi.
She was just leaving for Mexico when she met the rock star Tommy Lee, drummer for Mötley Crüe: he followed her to Cancun and married her on the beach. They spent the flight back in the mile-high club bathroom and the passengers applauded when they came out. “Our lovemaking was tender, delicious, never dark or weird or trying too hard.” When she was filming, he waited naked in her trailer to snatch every minute between takes. After a miscarriage, she had two sons, Brandon and Dylan, and resigned from Baywatch.
She insists: “We never made a ‘sex tape’. We just filmed each other, always, and lived a sexy, passionate life.” But one day they noticed that a safe the size of a fridge was missing from their garage. Then Penthouse’s Bob Guccione rang and said he had a video of them having sex. They sued the distributors but it still went viral on the internet. She says she has never watched it but it damaged her relationship with Tommy.
One day he beat her up and she called the police. Asked if there was a gun in the house, she said yes, a Glock in the bedroom, and the police arrested Tommy, who was already on probation and went to jail. She divorced him – and went on to have four more husbands, including another rock star, Kid Rock – but Tommy was the only man she ever truly loved, and she thanks him in her acknowledgements “for being the catalyst for everything good in my life”.
She remembers some happy years in Malibu, living in a trailer on Paradise Cove and taking the boys surfing. Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler came out to visit, and became good friends. It was Westwood who introduced Pamela to Julian Assange, and she saw him often at the Ecuadorian Embassy, taking him vegan meals, and enjoying “a slightly frisky, fun, alcohol-induced night together”. She was the first person to visit Assange when he was moved to Belmarsh, and she met his mother, Christine, in Australia. Christine advised her to adopt a less sexy image if she wanted to be taken seriously as an animal-rights campaigner. But “I’ve always believed that striving to be a sensual person, or being sexy, should not conflict with intelligence... If the cartoon image was what got me through the door, so be it.”
She lived in France for a year then sold her Malibu house, which set her up for life (“and I am expensive”) and moved back to her childhood home. Last year, she played Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway, which made her boys proud. After six marriages (two of them to poker player Rick Salomon), she is now single and thinks she will stay that way. “Men are my downfall. And I’ve tried all kinds.” This book is so breathtakingly honest you can even forgive her lapses into poetry.