On the primary day of shooting “Home Improvement” in April 1991, Pamela Anderson emerged from her dressing room on the Walt Disney Studios lot and located series star Tim Allen loitering within the hallway in a bathrobe. This seemed normal to the 23-year-old budding actress, but it surely wasn’t. “He opened his robe and flashed me quickly — completely naked underneath,” Anderson writes in her soon-to-be-released memoir, “Love, Pamela.” “He said it was only fair, because he had seen me naked. Now we’re even.”
“I laughed uncomfortably,” she writes.
The incident, which unfolded just 18 months after Anderson left her small-town home on Vancouver Island and quickly became a Playboy goddess (which is how Allen saw her naked), offers a window into the liberties people have taken because they think they know her. The Allen encounter reflects a pattern, the truth is, that continued right up until last 12 months, when a bunch made up of mostly male producers (led by Seth Rogen) felt entitled enough to bring forth a Hulu series about against the law perpetrated against Anderson: the theft and distribution of a videotape that contained footage of her and her then-husband Tommy Lee having sex. It happened through the very early days of the web, and it modified our perceptions about celebrity and privacy. Naturally, nobody asked if Anderson was OK with the series.
So Anderson isn’t any longer laughing, uncomfortably or otherwise. As a substitute, the “Baywatch” star, who’s 55, is taking back her narrative. On Jan. 31, two high-profile projects will launch — the Netflix documentary “Pamela, a Love Story,” directed by Ryan White and produced by her 26-year-old son, Brandon Thomas Lee; and the HarperCollins memoir, featuring haunting vignettes about sexual abuse and jaw-dropping anecdotes just like the Allen encounter. (Allen tells Variety in a press release, “No, it never happened. I might never do such a thing.”)
What’s refreshing about “Love, Pamela” is that, despite very consciously reclaiming her power, Anderson doesn’t tell her reader learn how to think. Within the hands of one other celebrity, the Allen anecdote would have include a swift verdict. But Anderson just states the facts and lets the reader determine. “I’m not a really judgmental person,” she says. Afterward, she sends me a text: “Tim is a comedian, it’s his job to cross the road. I’m sure he had no bad intentions. Times have modified, though. I doubt anyone would try that post #MeToo. It’s a latest world.”
Greg Swales for Variety
For a long time, the industry and the media have mistaken Anderson’s introverted nature for vacuity. When she became a global superstar within the ’90s, playing lifeguard C.J. Parker on “Baywatch,” people associated her character’s Recent Age cheesiness together with her own personality. And although Anderson has published two other Recent York Times bestselling books and might quote at length from Proust and Walt Whitman, the bimbo image has stuck.
“Here’s this icon the world thinks they know,” says Netflix VP of independent and documentary film Lisa Nishimura. “The world has tried to create almost like a caricature of who she is. But there’s a depth to this woman and a definite intelligence that she’s ready to essentially own and to point out the world.”
So on a chilly and rainy January morning in a bungalow on the Beverly Hills Hotel, Anderson slowly dismantles the parable that she is a one-dimensional sex symbol in a red bathing suit who left behind a trail of failed marriages. Today, in a shapeless linen dress, her feet bare, pink reading glasses atop her head, she says bluntly, “My life has been way more meaningful than a fluffy hat or a sex tape.” A random baby in the subsequent bungalow cries, and she or he gets up and slides open the curtains to analyze. She turns back to me and adds, “There’s more to me than that.”
Thirty-three years ago, Anderson arrived in L.A. from Canada, a 22-year-old kid escaping an abusive fiancé. Playboy was footing the hotel bill in addition to her first-class airfare, hoping that the fresh-faced Labatt’s beer girl is likely to be a possible cover model for the February 1990 edition. In actual fact, the Playboy scouts had done well: Over time, Anderson would grow to be the subsequent North American bombshell, like Marilyn Monroe before her, and some of the recognizable women on this planet, because of a record-setting 11 Playboy covers and “Baywatch.” Along the best way, she’d inadvertently usher in the fashionable tabloid era, with the intrusive glare on her marriage to Lee and that pilfered sex tape that “ruined lives,” as she tells it. Nearly three a long time after that debacle upended her marriage, Anderson was forced to relive the indignity with “Pam & Tommy.”
But Anderson isn’t bitter; she’s even prolonged an olive branch to Lily James, who plays her within the series. “I said to Netflix, ‘I’d love to ask Lily to the premiere of the movie,’” Anderson says, balancing a bit of toast topped with peanut butter on her palm. “I feel it’s hard to play any individual once you don’t know the entire picture. I’ve got nothing against Lily James. I feel that she’s a lovely girl and she or he was just doing the job. But the concept of the entire thing happening was just really crushing for me.”
For higher or for worse, “Pam & Tommy” became a popular culture sensation and scored 10 Emmy nominations, putting Anderson firmly back into the general public eye. At the same time as the media clamored for her response to the series, she remained mum, having already moved back to her tiny hometown of Ladysmith on Vancouver Island. “Assholes,” she says when asked to explain the people behind the Hulu series. “Salt on the wound. … You continue to owe me a public apology.” She hasn’t watched a single minute of the show, but she couldn’t escape the billboards promoting James in prosthetics and Sebastian Stan as her heavily tattooed, pierced partner. “It just looked like a Halloween costume to me,” she says.
Greg Swales for Variety
Today, Anderson resides the mirror version of her 22-year-old self. She wakes up at 4 or 5 a.m., around the identical time she used to go home after an evening of partying with Lee. She bought the property in Ladysmith from her grandmother a long time ago. Her parents care for her five dogs — adopted from everywhere in the world — when she’s traveling. She’s alone for the primary time since she will remember. No famous man with whom to share the handheld remote control.
“I’m retracing my childhood steps,” she says. “The trees have known me since birth. My feet touched the bottom first where I’m living now.” It’s where she wrote “Love, Pamela.” “I prefer to call the book my Hail Mary,” she says. “It was essential to return and see what I remember and tell one whole story.”
“Love, Pamela” is “Fabelmans”-esque in its ability to capture the wonders of childhood in a temperate rainforest abutting a beach, at the identical time that it illuminates the pain that Anderson and her younger brother endured while witnessing parental betrayal — on this case her father physically abusing her mother. (The couple, of their 70s, separated when their children were small; they later reconciled and now live together on Anderson’s Ladysmith property.)
Greg Swales for Variety
This early exposure to domestic violence shaped Anderson’s alternative in men and taught her learn how to protect herself. Her first serious boyfriend in highschool kicked her out of a speeding automobile. “He pushed me along with his foot so hard, I had no alternative but to open the door when the automobile was moving and rolled straight right into a ditch,” Anderson writes in “Love, Pamela.” “Mind you, I landed an ideal gymnast dismount — at high speed.” One other time, he tried to run her over as she walked along a sidewalk. “As I matured, I noticed most of my boyfriends were bad — and progressively got worse,” she writes. Within the book, she details three harrowing incidents of sexual abuse in her life, all before the age of 18. A female babysitter repeatedly molested her as a toddler. A 25-year-old man raped her when she was 12. And a highschool boyfriend and a bunch of his friends sexually assaulted her.
“Predators search for any individual to do things to which might be so humiliating you’d be embarrassed to inform any individual,” she says, sitting before a crackling fire, a dog at her feet. “Those sorts of things really color the remaining of your life. You block things out otherwise you’re gonna cope with it later — and I’m coping with it now.”
Though she never again endured sexual abuse, incidents of domestic violence continued. Lee famously served six months in jail for kicking Anderson as she held their 7-week-old son, Dylan (now 24). While it marked the one time Lee physically abused Anderson, she filed for divorce.
“I’m not a victim, and I’m not the damsel in distress,” Anderson says. “I’ve made my decisions in my life. Some obviously were made for me, but I’ve at all times been capable of find myself again. And it’s created a robust person and a robust parent.”
Given every little thing she’s endured, Anderson drew criticism when she said in a 2018 interview that the #MeToo movement “is a bit an excessive amount of for me.” But people process trauma in another way. After we speak, she sends me a memory that she’d blocked out of overt sexual harassment on certainly one of her first jobs as a swimsuit model. She sat next to the photographer on the flight to Hawaii, and he kept putting his hand on her leg. “He was much older and ruddy, drooly, lecherous,” she says. “Then he whispered to me that I’d be the one girl, that he selected me … that it will be intimate, no need for hair or makeup people or photography assistants. Just him and me. I used to be sick to my stomach. I knew it was not good.”
Greg Swales for Variety
As soon as they landed, Anderson flagged a flight attendant, who hid her within the airline’s back office until she could get on a flight to Los Angeles alone. “I hope anyone at risk understands they’ll go to people for help in the event that they are in an unsafe or uncomfortable situation, especially around a whole lot of people,” she says. “You possibly can get to a protected place.”
Anderson has never lost her wicked humorousness, which shines through within the book. She describes one night — wearing acid-washed jeans, a rock ’n’ roll T-shirt, sneakers and people athletic socks with little cotton balls sewn on the back — when she was more of her usual observer than a participant on the Playboy Mansion.
She stumbled upon Jack Nicholson having a threesome in a toilet. “Mr. Nicholson had two beautiful women with him,” she writes. “They were all giggling and kissing up against the wall, sliding throughout one another. I walked by to make use of the mirror, bending over the sink to repair my lip gloss. Trying to not look, but I couldn’t help myself and caught his eye within the reflection. I suppose that got him to the finish line, because he made a funny noise, smiled and said, ‘Thanks, dear.’”
As we revisit that night, she grins on the memory of that lost world. “It was just complete freedom,” she says. “It was stuffed with artists, philanthropists, intellectuals, chivalry, beautiful women. It was really an experience.”
From the minute she set foot on U.S. soil in 1989, Anderson began dating high-profile men, which became a part of the Pamela mystique. She was infatuated with Mario Van Peebles, who she says now was certainly one of her two best boyfriends ever (skilled surfer Kelly Slater was the opposite). At some point after her arrival, she met the mogul Jon Peters on the Playboy Mansion and started living at his Bel Air estate, next to the Reagans’ mansion. Peters showered her with expensive clothes, jewelry and cars. She insists Peters never made a move on her during those early years in Los Angeles, a incontrovertible fact that he confirms for this story.
Greg Swales for Variety
By the point she married Tommy Lee in 1995, at the peak of her “Baywatch” fame, she required security at any time when she traveled. While introducing her film “Barb Wire” on the Cannes Film Festival three months after the marriage, boats nearly collided as cameramen tried to land a shot of the actress. She was nearly crushed by a mob when an appearance in Uruguay became a riot.
In some ways, the “Baywatch” phenomenon — exported to some 150 countries around the globe — rested on her shoulders. There have been so-called Pamela clauses within the licensing deals, with most of the international broadcasters excited about buying only the episodes through which she appeared. And yet she was never properly compensated. A C.J. Parker Barbie became a bestseller based on Anderson’s likeness, but she reaped not a penny. She says she made just $1,500 an episode in the primary season of the show, and while she reportedly earned $300,000 an episode near the tip of her run, co-star David Hasselhoff, who was also a producer, was making more and had an ownership stake that proved to be lucrative once Amazon Prime licensed the remastered series for its library in 2019.
“The producers of ‘Baywatch’ made a fortune,” she says. “I just didn’t have the representation back then. Or the know-how. You don’t realize once you’re doing a TV show that it’s going to be that popular, so that you type of sign your life away.”
Her older son is less forgiving. “She was definitely being taken advantage of. And it still feels weird how there hasn’t been some sort of dialogue with Amazon or the ‘Baywatch’ producers to get her her fair proportion,” says Brandon, who put together the HarperCollins and Netflix deals. “It’s funny how it really works with Dave Chappelle with Netflix; he can by some means return and receives a commission for a show that he didn’t own anything of. And with the Amazon library deal, we didn’t get a penny.”
Adding insult to injury, the “Baywatch” movie producers made a paltry offer for her to cameo within the 2017 film. They called nonstop. “It was becoming really, really awful,” she says. “They said they wanted me to do it as a favor. I said, ‘I do favors for animals, not for Paramount.’ There was just a lot bullying to do it. They wanted me to do it free of charge, as an homage or something. I said, ‘Come on, guys. I mean, really?’”
But she acquiesced and appears in a transient cameo within the film. No dialogue, just walking in slow motion. “I ended up OK,” she says. “No complaints.”
Still, Anderson paid the value for her “Baywatch” fame. After divorcing Lee in 1998, she was living alone in Malibu together with her two young sons when she found a French teenager squatting in a rarely used room of her home, wearing her red “Baywatch” swimsuit. The girl was holding a letter that said, “I’m not a lesbian, but I dream of you.” Because the police arrived, the girl slit her wrists. She survived and was deported.
Anderson was shaken. “The police said, ‘Well, you actually weren’t in that much danger because she was a lady,’” she says. “I used to be like, ‘How does that make it less dangerous? Women can still murder people.’ It’s type of been an interesting, reoccurring theme with me and girls. My babysitter was female, and folks would never assume that she was molesting me. It shouldn’t make a difference. Everyone’s able to horrible things.”
Greg Swales for Variety
The stalker incident proved to be a turning point for Anderson. She began to retreat from the general public eye together with her sons. A self-described romantic, she continued to offer marriage a go — a number of the men being famous (Kid Rock in 2006) and a few mere civilians (Vancouver Island local Dan Hayhurst in 2020). She married skilled poker player Rick Salomon twice — once in 2007 and nonetheless in 2014 — though only certainly one of the marriages was legally binding.
And in a plot twist nobody saw coming, she married Peters in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. It, too, didn’t last. (Also unofficial, the union was over after just 12 days.) “He’s great and has been an enormous influence on my life. I like him to death,” Anderson says now. Peters stays smitten. He tells Variety: “I’ll at all times love Pamela, at all times in my heart. As a matter of fact, I left her $10 million in my will. And she or he doesn’t even know that. No one knows that. I’m just saying it for the primary time with you. I probably shouldn’t be saying it. In order that’s for her, whether she needs it or not.”
That is how Anderson feels about “Pam & Tommy” catapulting her back into the zeitgeist: It distracted the world from her real accomplishments, resembling starring as Roxy Hart in “Chicago” on Broadway right after the finale aired. “It was just shocking,” she says of the series. “Tommy probably thought it was funny. I remember Tommy writing me a note saying, ‘Don’t let this hurt you prefer it did the primary time,’ because he had heard through the youngsters that I used to be type of scuffling with the concept of bringing this all up again. I don’t think he was portrayed kindly. I just know that I refuse to observe it.”
To calm herself down, she repeats a mantra she used to chant within the food market: “Hold your head high. Walk out the door. I do know everybody’s seen me having sex, but I’m just here to get some cereal for my kids. Just carry on going.”
Greg Swales for Variety
One source of comfort has at all times been her relationship with animals. The longtime PETA activist and vegan beams when she notes that she rescued 50 cats and 30 dogs following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Her rescue work has put her within the room with some powerful people, including high-ranking Russian politicians. She lobbied them to ban the import of seal products.
“I’d be on the Kremlin, sitting on the table, and everybody could be there. And I could be rustling my papers with my dolphin pictures and my beluga whales getting hypothermia and pleading across the table to those those who actually did things in real time,” she says. “Putin was only within the room once, but he heard of every little thing. I might get messages from other those who he was pleased that I used to be there — he type of got a kick out of me.”
She stops talking because she’s well aware of the incontrovertible fact that discussing anything Russia-related has grow to be the third rail. “I don’t know what the suitable thing is to say at once,” she says, “since it’s horrible.” And she or he quickly notes that she voted for Biden in 2020. Her politics are easy: “Just keep supporting human beings.”
One other unlikely friendship of Anderson’s is with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Anderson visited him on multiple occasions on the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he sought refuge. He’s now facing extradition to the U.S. on 18 counts referring to WikiLeaks’ release of U.S. military secrets, amongst other alleged transgressions.
“It’s just heartbreaking because he’s in a supermax prison in solitary confinement while he’s awaiting a trial, and all of those other persons are breaking the law in all places and nobody’s in jail,” she says. “It’s an interesting hypocrisy.”
As for the query that many have wondered through the years — was the connection strictly platonic or was there more? She describes one mezcal-filled night on the embassy as “frisky” but is otherwise vague.
Greg Swales for Variety
“It was romantic since it was so inspirational,” she says. “He’s so obsessed with life and about every little thing. There’s just nothing that he says that isn’t fascinating. So there was definitely a connection. We’d just talk through the night and drink mezcal and laugh and tell stories.”
Anderson is devastated that she will now not see Assange. But she says a member of his legal team reads her letters to him behind bars.
Today, Anderson is comfortable not knowing her next step. She’s talking to her friend Werner Herzog about doing a movie called “Vernon God Little,” based on DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning coming-of-age novel. But who knows?
In just a few days, she’ll travel back to Ladysmith. She’s wanting to reunite together with her dogs and take walks on the beach in her Crocs. She will’t get her HBO to work in Canada, so she’s missed the brand new season of “White Lotus,” but she’ll get to it. She likes to binge on docs, like “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen,” about one other Canadian icon. “It’s been a 12 months since I’ve been with anybody, and it’s been the most effective 12 months of my life,” she says. “It’s been day-after-day writing and reading and just occupied with all of the things that make me joyful.”
The hearth is dying down. The breakfast plates sit empty. With that, Anderson shares one last epiphany: “Nobody can ever take me away from me. I’m at all times going to be OK. Irrespective of what happens, I’ve proven that theory. I do know that I can live with nothing. I do know I can live with something. I can live in an apartment. I can live in a trailer. I can live in a mansion. I can live in a castle. I’m just OK right here where I’m at.”
Producer: Alexey Galetskiy; Stylist: Rebecca Ramsey; Set Design: Lucy Holt; Make-Up Artist: Eileen Madrid/Sharleen Collins Cosmetics; Hair Stylist: Sara Tintari/Balmain Hair Couture; Manicurist: Natalie Minerva; Look 1 (Purple Dress): Dress: Saint Laurent; Shoes: Jimmy Choo; Look 2 (Trench Coat): Coat: Chanel/Aralda Vintage; Shoes: Versace; Look 3 (Pink Dress): Dress: Vivienne Westwood/Aralda Vintage; Look 4 (Telephone): Top and skirt: Saint Laurent: Shoes: Jimmy Choo; Look 5: (White Dress): Dress: A.L.C.
