Pamela Anderson’s Naked Truth
By Steve Garbarino
It is a blustery Monday morning on Malibu Beach, a week after New Year’s Eve, and Pamela Anderson is finally getting a day off from her “boys”—both her bona fide children, Dylan, 9, and Brandon, 10, and the difficult ones, Kid Rock, 36, and Tommy Lee, 44. Dressed in a white terry-cloth mini-jumper, Anderson, makeup-free and glowingly toned—a perfectly proportioned miniature, but for the two infamous orbs—makes her visitor a frothy cup of coffee in her tasteful ocean-fronting kitchen, turns up Van Morrison, singing “Bring It On Home to Me” on the outdoor speakers, and reclines back on a sundeck chair a matter of feet from the breaking waves. To horn-dogs everywhere, the scene is the Maxim magazine version of the “Folgers Lady” ads: Pam Anderson near-naked, making a reporter coffee, in the morning. Cigarette?
As if on cue, to complete the soft-focus postcard picture, two tiny black heads, sea lions, pop up on the water’s surface, rousing Star, Anderson’s 17-year-old golden retriever (“my longest-lasting relationship”), to huff out what the ex-”Baywatch” sex symbol calls “his Bob Seeger bark.” Her neighbor’s black Standard poodles lie in the sand nearby, oblivious. Anderson has just returned from her “safety guard” duties at the nearby public elementary school her children attend.
How was school? “It was great! I go every Monday. I usually wear a little neon vest over my sweats or pajamas—pretty!” says Anderson, later modeling the bulky vest, a wholesome take on the form-fitting life vest she donned through much of the ’90s, saving careless swimmers and hapless drug dealers. “Some parents high five me, telling me I’m just awesome for doing this, and I’m thinking, Why wouldn’t I do it? I’m just there directing, getting them out of the car and into the school safely. Brandon plays the trumpet and we’re always forgetting it and having to go back to the house. He’s really good, actually. He asked me for private lessons because he has to be the best at everything. I’m not worried about Brandon, that’s for sure.”
So, they’re nice kids, Brandon and Dylan? “No, they’re not, they’re monsters. But I still like them.” She’s kidding, as always. How could she not have a laugh in the wake of recent events involving her other life, the one you read about in tabloids?
After a four-month marriage—the bride wore a white bikini—to redneck rocker Kid Rock, resulting in ongoing divorce proceedings (she filed in late November), the “drama” quotient has gone through the roof. Only a few days before this interview, it was reported that Kid Rock came a-looking for Anderson’s longtime on-again-off-again ex-husband, Tommy Lee, to beat him up at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. But he ended up kicking down the wrong door. The startled family in the room was treated to an embarrassing autograph session. Lee was staying on another floor, having yet another laugh at Rock’s expense. That wasn’t all. In late December, the tabloids reported that Anderson had been spending time with yet another controversial suitor, millionaire real estate investor, philanthropist and film producer Stephen Bing (recall the Elizabeth Hurley paternity suit), alleging that the two had gone on a “dinner date from hell.” “Page Six,” the gossip column, ran a retraction shortly after, stating that “the date did not occur.”
“I don’t mean to put my foot in my mouth,” says Anderson, whose feet have won weird honors on their own, “but I don’t like manufactured interviews. How boring is it to sit with a publicist who’s saying, Don’t say this, don’t say that? I think that’s part of my charm. I’m a great mom, I have great friends. I’m blessed.”
God bless her. Days before our first encounter, Anderson emails me that I shouldn’t worry about getting ample time and conversation with her. “Well, I’m PMS-ing, so the real me is bound to come through with flying colors—watch out!” she writes in one of many personal emails to follow.
Of the Hard Rock Hotel incident, she says, “Unfortunately, that actually happened.” It turns out that things have taken even more of a turn for the worse in this rivalry between Rock and Lee. “Heidi Fleiss says to me, ‘Take it as a compliment: two great-looking guys fighting over you.’” The fallen madam-to-the-stars is a close friend.This just in: “Tommy’s getting a restraining order against Bob [Robert Richie, Kid Rock’s real name]. I have a chain of emails between the two I should give you,” she says. “I’m getting emails in the middle of the night from Bob, saying, ‘Don’t stand next to your window.’ I was at [PETA spokesman] Dan Matthews’ birthday party, and Tommy was there for an hour, and he took my phone and he read Bob’s messages to me, which said, ‘Please come back to me. I’ve changed. I’ve gone through the war. I’ve come back.’”
Rock had gone on a concert tour, entertaining the troops in Iraq. “And so Tommy sends something back to him like, ‘What are these pussy emails you’re sending to my ex-wife? She’s with me now. Daddy’s back! Happy New Year, bitch!’ And Bob just freaked out. Bob had some guy hit Tommy in New York, and it just escalated. So now I have these emails between them that seem more like Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller, it’s so funny. It’s like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit, this back and forth of `You’re going down, man!’ All on my phone.
“I don’t have bad feelings toward either of them, but it’s just like, Tommy’s 45 [sic] and Bob’s almost 40 [sic].” Anderson, for the record, is 39.
“My mom’s advice is, ‘If you’re going to be with an asshole, be with you ex-husband—at least you’ve got kids together.’” At this time, she’s leaning toward Lee, being the more mature of the two. Two nights before our beach talk, Anderson met me in the lounge of the Chateau Marmont (on her “girls night out”), along with what she calls her “Velvet Mafia”—including her fancy-dancing hairdresser and friend John Blaine and his boyfriend Sean (“Sean-John,” together), as well as the debonair Matthews. Multiple bottles of Cristal were popped, but Anderson never showed any of the displays of idiocy that today’s current batch of pop tarts are infamous for. She wears a teensy gold jersey dress by James Perse and sky-high Giuseppe Zanotti heels. (“It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”) There, both Lee and Rock were up for jovial roasting. “Turn ’em, they’re done,” Anderson joked.
“I’ve had great husbands.” Big laughter. “I’m still looking.”
Is she actually back with Tommy again?
“No! God, no! Hallelujah!”
Beat.
“I sleep with him a lot, but we aren’t together. How does it go? If you can’t be with the one you love, then fuck the one you’re with.” Is she cynical now about marriage?
“Well, obviously not. I’m willing to try anything. I love weddings, not marriages.” More laughter.
How do her young boys deal with all the familial drama, and her notoriety as a nude pin-up queen for Playboy and the like?
“They know that Dad [Tommy Lee] loves them, they know that they were born out of love. They know that Daddy and Mommy love each other very much. But he’s not really around at all. When he’s around he’s like ‘Fun Dad,’ and he buys them AirSoft guns and knives. It’s not a Weekend Dad—it’s a December 25th Day Dad. I’m actually there to make sure that the boys aren’t committing suicide. I was coming over to Tommy’s house on Christmas, and they were shooting the neighbor’s place in the street, and he’s inside on his BlackBerry. Um, children shooting machine-gun AirSoft pellets, with no eyewear? I said, I’m taking them home. Then, I’m like, OK, I’ll just stay here and have sex with you to make sure the kids are OK. That’s the real version of prostitution. It’s being a Mom. Heidi Fleiss, where are you?”
It got worse. Really. “A funny thing I’m going to tell you,” she says. “The kids and I, on Christmas Eve, we’re sitting in Tommy’s driveway, waiting for him. Forty-five minutes go by, an hour goes by. And he calls me and says, ‘I’m almost there.’ No one else would get this message. He said, ‘I’m so excited. I drove by this [tattoo parlor], and I just had to get my dick pierced.’ I’m like, We’re waiting for you in the fucking driveway! He said, ‘You’re gonna love it!’ I said, I don’t want to see it. What am I supposed to say: Uh, Daddy will be here in a minute, guys. He’s getting…” she trails off, laughing at the tragicomedy of it all. And there is that pesky problem of nude pictures of “Mom” circulating around the children. “At a Lakers game, someone was trying to shove these naked pictures at me to sign. And later, when we were in the car, the boys go, ‘Mom, they were trying to get you to sign naked pictures.’ And I go, No, I was wearing a bikini. And they go, ‘You were not wearing a bikini.’ And I said, It was a flesh-colored bikini.
“Another time, we were at [Hugh Hefner’s] house, and later in the car Brandon says, ‘I was swimming in the grotto with Cooper and Marston [Hefner’s children], and do you know what Hef does for a living?’ I go, What? And he says, ‘He takes pictures of naked girls!’ I go, God, let’s get out of here, and we got out of there. They know him as ‘crazy Uncle Hef.’”
As the evening at the hotel progresses, Stephen Bing, soft-spoken and charming, joins us—she calls him “my friend Stephen” and nothing more. He demurely picks up the escalating bill, before we move on to Teddy’s in the Roosevelt Hotel. When we are sitting alone later, Anderson details further dubious moments spent with immature rock stars, only now she’s on the topic of her most recent paramour, Kid Rock. “One time, when I was leaving him again, I was getting a bag down out of the closet, and his gun fell and it went off! A bullet flew this way, and I almost shot myself! My dad wouldn’t even aim a finger at someone.”
So what brought her together with Rock in the first place, I ask. Loneliness?
“You mean, like, desperation?” she responds, laughing. “Well, I think I was in the right mood, and we were engaged for a couple of years before. There were so many great things about him, and he was a great friend. But it was nothing beyond that. We have absolutely zero in common. Except that I loved music, and he played it. We don’t sit down and read books all night—which I love to do—and worry about the environment and worry about animal rights…and not having a giraffe head on your wall!” Upon entering Rock’s Detroit house, she saw the stuffed giraffe, “sticking out of the wall, a real giraffe head.” That should have been a clue, she says, that things were not meant to be. PETA’s Matthews, who calls Anderson “our weapon of mass distraction,” can only shake his head in disbelief, his animal rights mascot consorting with The Enemy. Ironically, he’s been a target of jealous bouts from her boyfriends.
“I love having him as a date,” says Anderson. “A lot of people don’t realize that Dan is gay. He’s not very flamboyant. So it pisses off my boyfriends. They never believe me, but I know. I absolutely know. I’ve tried everything.
“Tommy, in the beginning, was very jealous, very passionate. He’d say, ‘You’re not really going to Starbucks, are you?’ And I’d be like, No, I’m leaving. I’m pregnant, and I’m cheating on you! God, I’m going to Starbucks. Now, though, Tommy is friends with all of my friends. Bob, he just couldn’t wrap his head around it, guys making out in a corner somewhere.”
Back at the beach rental—she keeps the cozy, shabbily-chic surf shack as a “kid’s house” while her larger compound in a gated Malibu colony is being renovated—Anderson lets out a short sigh of calm. “Finally, I’ve had time to relax. I’m so glad that 2006 is over. This is going to be the year I really take care of myself. Everything in moderation, including moderation,” she jokes. “Last year was high drama. And I can handle drama, but when you have kids, you have to keep a sane home life. I wanted to create for my kids here a little taste of how I grew up. I grew up in a little house by the beach on Vancouver Island. People say to me, ‘This is how you want to live?’ And I’m like, This is my dream! Take your shoes off and walk the beach.”
Anderson’s upbringing does give some indication as to why drama finds her. “We grew up very poor. My mom was a waitress. My father was a chimney-sweeper. We still had a good Christmas, though. My mom worked really hard. They broke up and got back together all the time, but they are so in love now.” Their names are Carol and Barry. Anderson’s brother, Gerry, a filmmaker and screenwriter, often baby-sits for her. Anderson does not have a nanny. “Mom always said, ‘When you love someone, you’re willing to put up with much more. You don’t always like the person you love. But if you don’t love them, get out of there. It’s not worth it.’”
Her mother must really love her father. “My dad was always reckless, always in jail. It was like, Why is Daddy in jail again? It was always for something like stealing a sack of potatoes or punching a cop. But the cop was like one of his friends. We grew up in a small town. He was in a lot of bar fights. My mom was an Elvis fanatic. She goes to Elvis conventions in Reno. She went to Graceland recently, and bought a new pair of shoes that she put on at the entrance as she walked through the house, and then she sent one to her sister and one to her best friend. She split the shoes! Now they have a little bit of Elvis, each of them.”
Perhaps because it gave her a sense of calm in an otherwise tumultuous childhood, Anderson loves holing up by the beach—“I am not a city girl.” But she is not fond of Hollywood, per se. “I think it’s an evil place. Everybody’s so ambitious, like you never really have a real conversation. When I was in Canada, I remember coming here and thinking, you can’t believe what anyone said. And that seems very clichéd too, but everyone’s trying to do something, get something, and that’s why I’m lucky I have my kids and I have my soccer games.” Her boys play soccer, but are also big San Diego Chargers fans: wall-sized memorabilia cram the beach house. “I have my kids, and I have my little life, and I have my little house on the beach. I don’t have a lot of friends in Malibu, but I have a few. There’s a Swedish couple that’s been together for like twenty years and they’re my best friends. My brother lives down the street, and he’s married, and has a four-year-old daughter. They’re my heroes, because they have a happy marriage and a beautiful little girl. But if I look around, I see people my own age who don’t have kids and haven’t been married, and I just kind of feel successful, because I have that.”
But the price of being a celebrity can often intrude—quite literally—upon her blissful family life with her boys. Case in point, the time several years ago when Anderson returned home, walked into her bedroom, and found “a woman laying on my bed with my ‘Baywatch’ bathing suit on. My maid took care of her, gave her some food. She looked crazy, in her late 20s, with bleached blonde hair. She said, ‘I’m not a lesbian. I just want to touch you.’ I called the cops, and they said, ‘At least it’s a girl, and she doesn’t have a weapon!’” Retelling it, Anderson is incredulous. “They go in and arrest her, and she has this piece of beach glass under the table, and she just starts cutting her wrists! There was blood everywhere. And she goes to jail, and some mystery Malibu person bails her out!” She says of the stalker, “They sent her back to France, which is where she turned out to be from. She was from a very wealthy family, and she’s in a mental hospital there now. I got a restraining order.” Pausing, she adds, “she slit her wrists all over my favorite Belgian linens!”
With run-ins like that, it’s no wonder Anderson wants to keep her personal life slightly more calm than the rest of the fast-living Young Hollywood set—Britney, Lindsay, Nicole, and all those troubled young souls—whose nightly shenanigans provide constant fodder for the tabloids. “I mean, I’m always going to have a good time. I’m always up for any adventure, and I always feel like, you know, someone else is in control, not me, so I just kind of go with the flow, and I’m not scared of taking chances,” she says.
“I am my age, and I look back and I think, I’ve had such a great time, and I’ve been so protected. But it’s just a different time, I mean society is what society is, and society is encouraging this. I think that’s just what Young Hollywood is right now, unfortunately it’s not, you know, James Dean and Marlon Brando now. The tabloids and celebrity magazines are a problem too—like “Page Six,” and Us Weekly and People. I have them banned from wherever I go, because there’s never a time I’ve looked at one and felt good.”
She adds, though, that many of the tabloid headline grabbers are feeding the monster. “They do manipulate the press. Some of these stars do have their contacts at these different magazines. I’ve never done that. They have people that are with them that professionally do it, like make up stories, because they want that. Some [celebrities] are almost addicted to it. Like people are addicted to photographers following them around. If they’re not, they feel like something’s wrong. It’s just the way society and Hollywood is right now, I mean the poor girls, they’re very young.”
For now, 2007, for Anderson, means keeping the PETA train rolling—she is one of the most hard-working activists for the animal rights group—and starting a new line of cosmetics. “We’re working on a beauty product line,” she says, “but the packaging has to be entirely biodegradable, like those new water bottles that are out. It has to be environmentally friendly or I won’t do it. And it will be cruelty-free, obviously: no testing on animals. The name we’re thinking about for it is ‘Glama.’ Once you get used to it, it’s ‘Glamalicious.’ I saw this woman, a drag queen, really, and her name was Glama, and I thought, That’s it! That girl’s having way too much fun!”
Her sitcom, “Stacked” had its last run in January of last year—“it was more of a 9-to-5er,” she says of the TV show—and so, as the former “Barb Wire” ushers her boys into their teens, while rethinking her love life, her lawyer has made to her one simple request: “You can’t get married until May 2007.” Several days after our interviews, Anderson emails me this: “I could’ve kept talking. I don’t know what happened. The flood gates opened. This is my break—kids are back in school. Mom’s gone wild!” Young Hollywood, listen up: this is how it is done.
Photography by Markus Klinko & Indrani
Styling by GK Reid
