In the ’90s, she was synonymous with fake glamour and sex. But with a new biopic about her, Alim Kheraj says we need to reassess all we think we know about the Baywatch star
For more than 32 years, Pamela Anderson has bewitched, beguiled and befuddled the world. From the moment she ran down a Californian beach in slo-mo wearing a high-cut red bathing suit in Baywatch, she became a pop culture icon. Heralded as one of defining sex symbols of the ’90s, she has been a favourite of the tabloids, who have dissected, plundered and disseminated her life in the name of gossip, scandal and the consumption of celebrity.
Now one of the most infamous aspects of her life has been turned into a high-profile mini-series. Hulu’s Pam & Tommy tells the story of Pamela’s relationship with Mötley Crüe drummer and rock’n’roll bad boy Tommy Lee. The pair met on New Year’s Eve in 1994, with Tommy, legend has it, coming up to Pamela and licking her face. Initially put off by his advances, she ultimately relented, meeting with the rock star in Cancun, where she was visiting for a photo shoot. Just 96 hours later, the pair were married in a ceremony on the beach, the bride famously wearing a white bikini.
The show, however – starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan – will focus on the explicit home video that was later stolen from the garage of the couple’s Malibu mansion in 1995 by disgruntled electrician Rand Gauthier (played by Seth Rogan), who alleged that he was owed $20,000.
The tape, later sold by pornographic film production company Vivid Entertainment as Pam & Tommy Lee: Stolen Honeymoon, was one of the first videos to go viral on what was then the fledgling internet, kick-starting the trend of leaked celebrity sex tapes. Initially, Pamela and Tommy attempted to stop the spread of the video, although the stress of litigation when Palmela was pregnant with the couple’s first child (they had two sons: Brandon, now 25, and Dylan, 24) meant that, ultimately, they gave up. While the tape has since allegedly made $100m, Pamela has never made a dime from it. ‘It’s dirty money,’ she said in 2016.
Pam & Tommy was made without the involvement of Pamela and, according to reports, the 54-year-old star is none too pleased about it. Such a response is understandable. Seeing a traumatic experience re-enacted on screen can’t be pleasant. There’s also the matter of domestic violence. In 1998, Tommy pleaded no contest to charges of felony spousal abuse after Pamela accused him of kicking her while she was holding seven-week-old Dylan; she subsequently filed for divorce. He was sentenced to 180 days in prison, with Pamela saying she was ‘happy that he took responsibility for this’. Whether this incident will appear on screen remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, the show risks once more tying Pamela to her stolen sex tape, as if the subsequent 25 years of her life were an afterthought. (Tommy, of course, gets to continue being a musician because, well, sexism.) But Pamela is a complex and curious individual whose incredible life deserves more than that.
Born in 1967, she grew up in a small town on Vancouver Island, Canada, and was scouted at a football match in 1989 to become the spokesperson for a beer company. Later that year, she was on the cover of Playboy magazine and moved to Los Angeles, where she scored a minor role in the sitcom Home Improvement. In 1992, she was cast as CJ Parker in Baywatch, the role that made her globally famous, and went on to appear in films, including Barb Wire (for which she infamously got a real tattoo rather than have make-up artists paint it on each day), and the camp action series V.I.P., where she played clueless bodyguard Vallery Irons.
But despite her successful career, Pamela has always found herself being reduced and diminished. As a regular model for Playboy (she holds the record for the most covers: 14) she was dismissed as an oversexed bimbo, something that her five-year tenure on Baywatch only solidified.
Yet, if you watch interviews with her during this time, you can tell how self-aware she is. During a 1996 interview with Ruby Wax, Pamela holds her own against Ruby’s playful jabs about her body and sex appeal, quoting Hamlet when her ambitions and abilities as an actor are questioned. In a later interview, the pair discuss the work of Carl Jung in the back of a limousine before the conversation flips and they end up acting out Pamela’s favourite sexual positions.
This sense of duality has always been Pamela’s strength: aware of the power her sex appeal has over people, specifically men, she wields it like a tool in order to achieve her goals. This is most apparent in her activism, which is often overlooked but has been the primary focus of her professional life for over 20 years. She has worked closely with the animal rights organisation PETA and, in 2014, founded the Pamela Anderson Foundation, which supports organisations and individuals who work to protect and preserve human, animal and environmental rights.
It was at the launch of her foundation that Pamela shared that she had been sexually abused between the ages of six and 10 by a female babysitter in her own home. She recalled how later, aged 12, she had been raped by a 25-year-old and how, in her teens, her boyfriend and his friends allegedly gang raped her. ‘This meant I had a hard time trusting humans,’ she said, adding that she found solace in the company of nature and animals. ‘The trees spoke to me. My loyalty was with the animal kingdom and I vowed to protect them and only them. I prayed to the whales with my feet in the ocean, my only real friends until I had children.’
In more recent years, Pamela has tamed her vampy aesthetic – big blonde hair, big boobs, a make-up aesthetic that cared nothing about ‘natural’ – although one still wouldn’t call her demure. She also still uses it to her advantage.
‘Pamela has never been afraid to use her body as a protest tool,’ Dan Matthews, senior vice president of PETA, said during an episode of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories that focused on Pamela. ‘If we have a meeting with the federal government about animal testing, you better believe that she’s going in with the tightest sweater possible.’ Vivienne Westwood echoed these sentiments. ‘She uses her power as this icon to get all the publicity she can.’
Nevertheless, the look she popularised – once derided as ‘plastic’ – is, by today’s standards, fairly innocuous, the hyper-sexualised image now synonymous with the glamour and excess of Hollywood. Many traits of her OTT style are now being played out on TikTok by women who weren’t born when Pamela rose to fame. As Lily James has said of her transformation for the show, ‘I really enjoyed the physicality and sensuality, even down to the long fingernails. There was just so much character to hold on to – it was really thrilling.’
Pamela still sees womanhood and desirability as instruments to be used to her advantage when it comes to men. Unlike today’s more nuanced understanding of gender, she appears to subscribe to binary notions of masculinity and femininity. ‘There are things that women do and things that men do better than each other,’ she said on US chat show The View in 2019, ‘and that’s why we’re stronger in pairs.’
Ironically, in some ways she could today be seen as conservative: most apparent in her negative comments about the #MeToo movement and her disdain for third-wave feminism. ‘I’m a feminist, but I think that this third wave is a bore. It paralyses men,’ she said in 2018, adding that women should use ‘common sense’ in precarious situations.
It’s a controversial stance that strays close to victim-blaming, but Pamela has never been one to hold back. Still, it’s surprising, given her own history of sexual and domestic abuse. There’s also her relationship with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been accused of sexual assault (he denies the allegations) and is facing extradition back to the US. ‘I feel very close to him,’ she said in 2018. She has also had other important relationships since she and Tommy divorced, with marriages to Kid Rock; film producer Rick Salomon (twice, after their first marriage ended in annulment); and, on Christmas Eve 2020, Dan Hayhurst, a builder from her hometown with whom she now lives in Canada.
In 2017, Pamela even went to war with pornography, teaming up with controversial American rabbi Shmuley Boteach to attempt to stem its consumption online, which the pair called ‘a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness’. And while Pamela’s history of nude Playboy shoots might draw accusations of hypocrisy, she sees a distinction. ‘I think [Playboy] was titillating, innocent,’ she said at the time. ‘It was highbrow.’
Whether you agree with her or not, Pamela is clearly a woman who engages with the grey areas of life. She is a conundrum, an imperfect yet forever idealised symbol of sex and the power it holds. In truth, the stolen sex tape is probably the least interesting thing about her.
‘Pam & Tommy’ will be available to stream on Disney+ from 2 February