Boobs! Boyfriends! Baywatch! Pamela Anderson is iconic for her role as the ultimate babe. Now she would like you to know there are brains inside that body, thank you very much. But is this a woman on a quest to find her true self—or has Pam been one step ahead of us all along?
“Omigod!” Pamela Anderson ducks behind the steering wheel of her Aston Martin, eyes widening beneath her Twiggy-blond pixie cut. “I think I just saw my ex-husband.” Slipping on her oversize sunglasses, she rises up until her eyes are level with the windshield, then quickly dives back down, like the heroine of a screwball comedy. “It is! It’s him! Look!” I look. Outside, another white convertible circles the parking lot of Malibu’s Point Dume Plaza. The driver is wearing the obligatory beanie and sunglasses, but the long nose and weak chin are a dead giveaway: Kid Rock. His car is nearly identical to the white Aston Martin we’re in, which—rather poignantly—recalls the matching white T-shirt and bikini ensembles he and Pam wore for their wedding eight years ago. Apparently they also have the same taste in juice bars. And to think it only lasted four months! Though the marriage may have been short, the bad feelings have lingered. “He’s the only person I don’t talk to,” she explains. “We blew it, and the kids suffered.” Anderson has two sons from her infamous marriage to rock star Tommy Lee—Brandon, 17, and Dylan, 16, the most consistent men in her life—and Kid Rock also has a son. “It just kind of turned their lives upside down, and it made us bitter. How do we have the same car?” she says, fingers tapping the dashboard impatiently. “We’ve got to get out of here.” She peers in the rearview mirror at another car blocking the exit. The sunglasses, combined with her customary white ensemble—a camisole and shorts so teeny she might as well not be wearing them at all—topped with a large Aztec-print cardigan (because even Malibu gets cold in January) make her look like a tiny, glamorous ghost. “Let me out, you dumb car,” she growls. “Oh my GODDDDD.” Sweet relief comes and she peels out of the parking place, shivering. “I got that tingly feeling,” she says.
The joke is obvious, and once we’re a safe distance away Anderson is the first to make it. “Pamela Anderson has been married so many times she can’t leave the house without running into an ex-husband,” she says, laughing as we barrel down the Pacific Coast Highway. One of the best things about Anderson is that she is always in on the joke, and this one is especially funny because it’s true: Pamela Anderson can’t escape her ex-husbands. She was saying as much the night before, at Crossroads, a vegan restaurant in West Hollywood. “It’s like, there is more to me than my boobs and my boyfriends,” she told me. To be fair, boobs and boyfriends are what made her famous. Ever since she first put on a Baywatch bathing suit back in ’92, Anderson has reigned supreme as America’s Rock Babe. A whisper-sweet naïf from the Canadian provinces with wild blond hair, a baby voice, and an ever-expanding chest, she out-Kitaened video vixen Tawny Kitaen when it came to keeping company with the bad boys of rock—and not just the bad boys, the worst boys. Over the years, her romances with leather-clad rock stars like Bret Michaels, Kid Rock, and her Great Love, on-again, off-again husband Tommy Lee—the Mötley Crüe drummer with whom she pioneered the celebrity sex tape—somehow became an integral part of her career. Sure, she did other things: She has worked as an actress, a model, a pinup, a magician’s assistant, an activist; she is even a best-selling novelist. But her most frequently recurring role, even according to IMDb, is as Herself. For the past two decades, Anderson’s life has been an ongoing soap opera to which almost everyone from Calgary to Calcutta was unwittingly tuned in. Who was she walking down the red carpet—or the aisle—with now? And what was she wearing? Or not wearing? Even more entertaining, at the end of every romantic episode—and there was always an end— Anderson picked herself up, dusted herself off, and announced in one way or another that she was starting anew.
The joke is obvious, and once we’re a safe distance away Anderson is the first to make it. “Pamela Anderson has been married so many times she can’t leave the house without running into an ex-husband,” she says, laughing as we barrel down the Pacific Coast Highway. One of the best things about Anderson is that she is always in on the joke, and this one is especially funny because it’s true: Pamela Anderson can’t escape her ex-husbands. She was saying as much the night before, at Crossroads, a vegan restaurant in West Hollywood. “It’s like, there is more to me than my boobs and my boyfriends,” she told me. To be fair, boobs and boyfriends are what made her famous. Ever since she first put on a Baywatch bathing suit back in ’92, Anderson has reigned supreme as America’s Rock Babe. A whisper-sweet naïf from the Canadian provinces with wild blond hair, a baby voice, and an ever-expanding chest, she out-Kitaened video vixen Tawny Kitaen when it came to keeping company with the bad boys of rock—and not just the bad boys, the worst boys. Over the years, her romances with leather-clad rock stars like Bret Michaels, Kid Rock, and her Great Love, on-again, off-again husband Tommy Lee—the Mötley Crüe drummer with whom she pioneered the celebrity sex tape—somehow became an integral part of her career. Sure, she did other things: She has worked as an actress, a model, a pinup, a magician’s assistant, an activist; she is even a best-selling novelist. But her most frequently recurring role, even according to IMDb, is as Herself. For the past two decades, Anderson’s life has been an ongoing soap opera to which almost everyone from Calgary to Calcutta was unwittingly tuned in. Who was she walking down the red carpet—or the aisle—with now? And what was she wearing? Or not wearing? Even more entertaining, at the end of every romantic episode—and there was always an end— Anderson picked herself up, dusted herself off, and announced in one way or another that she was starting anew.
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