Pamela Anderson: ’90s Blonde Barbie Has Changed – ‘Baywatch’ Star Is Ready to Tell Her Own Story

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She says she is 12 months “clean” from men, while the documentary “Pamela, a Love Story” will be released on Netflix on January 31

Pamela Anderson He was returning to Canada from Marseille in the south of France, shortly before the coronavirus made its appearance again. Not in any part of Canada, but in Ladysmith, in the white clapboard house where he grew up. “Crime scene,” he calls it.

In France she lived with footballer Adil Rami for a year, but he “broke” her heart. He wasn’t just explosively jealous, she found out, but he was still having an affair with a woman with whom he had children. She wanted to date someone “normal”, as she thought, with the ghosts of former rock star husbands Tommy Lee and Kid Rock “haunting” her.

Renovations had begun on her new old home and Anderson’s eye fell on one of the contractors. Normal. A year later and 25kg heavier from their nightly beer sessions, she was sitting on the sofa wanting her fifth husband to say something interesting. “Ah…” he sighs now. “Normal was the worst.”

So, with another divorce under her belt, Anderson vowed, as the Guardian newspaper writes, to look at her life in a different light, to be precise, to change everything. She went into closets and attics, emptying them of memories, diaries, letters, news and broadcast footage, home videotapes, and tried to map her life.

What happened to that tomboy who was once, with the freckles and the gray-blue eyes? Why did her life seem to take a crazy turn around toxic relationships? Not even she could understand the fortuitous course of her career.

Few will remember that Anderson rose to mainstream fame through Playboy magazine and the TV soap opera Baywatch (1992-97), or that stolen private footage of her and husband Tommy Lee having sex went viral on the fledgling world wide web, making $77 million in 12 months!

Anderson never benefited and never got a cent. Instead, her career plummeted and her marriage crumbled. At times he thought, “Why do they hate me so much? Why do these grown men hate me?’

However, there were also many bad “friends”. “After the tape, it wasn’t like I was attracting men who had the best of intentions,” she says. In 2006, she married and filed for divorce from Kid Rock. In 2007, she married and left poker player Rick Salomon: “He ended up being a big drug addict. We found a crack pipe in the Christmas tree.” (He still denies this, claiming it was someone else’s.) She remarried Salomon in 2014 and divorced again in 2015. She says she would marry her boyfriend, activist Julian Assange, if it would get him out of prison. In early 2020 she married an old suitor, Jon Peters, but later denied that the union was legal. In December of that year she married “regular” Dan Hayhurst, but left him soon after.

She completely abandoned herself, she thinks now. “It’s a form of suicide.” If it weren’t for her sons Brandon and Dylan Lee, she says, she wouldn’t be here. “For the last 20 years I have disappeared. I disappeared even for myself. I was drinking, trying drugs. I mean, it wasn’t me. I just got out of bounds.” But it was also difficult in her work. So, in January 2022, she set herself a goal: “Not to meet any men. Just to concentrate … to be in love with myself.”

Pamela Anderson

Today, she is 12 months… “clean” from men. In addition to appearing on Broadway as Roxie in Chicago last April, she has written her memoir, “Love, Pamela,” and, encouraged by her sons, made a revealing documentary about her life, “Pamela, a Love Story.”

In Vancouver, Anderson worked at a tanning salon and lived with a photographer. She arrived in Los Angeles, her first time on a plane, and the Playboy Mansion, where she was transformed into a blonde Barbie.

About that time in general, he says: “I was quite naive.” Someone offered her $10,000 just to have a hot tub with her. “That sounds more like a hot tub,” she said and declined. Another was paying her thousands of dollars a day to sit next to him in a pool on a remote island. Famous men begged to meet her, no less than Fidel Castro. She missed a phone call from John F. Kennedy Jr., whom she was “too shy” to call back. Actor Sylvester Stallone offered her an apartment and a Porsche to become his No. 1 girl. “And I said, ‘Does that mean there’s a No. 2?'”

Grabowski described Anderson as “the DNA of Playboy.” “Baywatch” asked her to audition 12 times, persisting even when she didn’t show up.

Now she laughs at her first notes from the director: “Pretend it’s real!” But once she got into the red swimsuit and played CJ, there was no turning back… ‘Baywatch’ became the most watched television series in the world, with a weekly viewership of 1.1 billion viewers in 142 countries!

While writing her memoir, Anderson realized the striking similarities to her own parents’ marriage. He knows that she is romantic, that she thinks magically, that she loves chivalry and fairy tales. She also loves music and art, Nick Cave and Frida Kahlo.

Her sons wanted her to do the documentary because they were tired of being bad mouthed, of not understanding who she really was, of having to defend her, ever since they were fighting for her honor on the playground. “They didn’t deserve all that drama,” he admits today. “But despite their genetic material, they are perfect gentlemen. Looking at them today, it gives me a little chill because they are such good people.”

The process of looking back on her life made her think. “Oh my god. How did I get through all this? How did I make these choices? But I also have empathy for myself. I see I just didn’t have the tools,” he says.

From now on, she has to find her own way so she doesn’t make the same mistakes again. She sold her house in Malibu and retired to Canada, all alone. “The ability to be alone is the ability to love. Now with the documentary and the book, people will see the whole character. And then – maybe – I will be able to become human again.”

The documentary “Pamela, a Love Story” will be released on Netflix on January 31st.

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