She went from small-town Canada to becoming the Marilyn Monroe of the 90s – bearing the brunt of that decade’s cruel misogyny in the process. Finally the Baywatch star is ready to tell her own story
Right before Covid hit, Pamela Anderson was returning home to Canada from Marseille in the south of France. Not just any old place in Canada, but Ladysmith on Vancouver Island and the white clapboard house where she grew up. “Scene of the crime” she calls it. In France she’d been living with footballer Adil Rami for a year, but she’d had her heart broken. He wasn’t just explosively jealous, she learned, but still in a relationship with a woman with whom he had children. Just date someone normal, she thought, the spectre of former rock-star husbands Tommy Lee and Kid Rock perhaps kicking doors in the back of her mind. Renovations were beginning on her new-old home and Anderson’s eye alighted on one of the contractors. Normal. A year later and 25lb heavier from their nightly beer sessions, she sat on the sofa willing – desperately willing – her fifth husband to say something interesting. “Oh boy,” she sighs now. “Normal was the worst.”
So, another divorce under her belt, Anderson swore off men and took a long, hard look at her life. She went into cupboards and attics, emptying them of memories – journals, letters, news and talkshow footage, home videotapes (as we know, she’s an inveterate taper) – and tried to map her life. What happened to that tomboy kid she once was, with the freckles and the dove-grey eyes? Why did her life seem to run in crazy chicanes around toxic relationships? Not even she could make sense of her haphazard career trajectory.
