The boob job is back!
(Picture: Getty Images)Pamela Anderson has had her image immortalised in print since the day she was born. She arrived into the world — Canada specifically — on July 1, 1967, a national holiday known as ‘Canada Day’. Her birth year also marked the 100th anniversary of the event, as such she was featured in the paper as a ‘Centennial baby’. This funny little newspaper feature would become the beginning of a life in pictures, from photoshoots to double-page spreads, centrefolds to magazine covers — and not all of them by choice.
Anderson was born to be famous but, at times, it’s proved to be less of a blessing and more of a curse. Even in the 2020s, nearly two decades on from the height of her fame, she became the face of the relentless Y2K revival long before she ever agreed to have her story dredged up and mined for content all over again.
“Nobody knew the truth,” she said of the renewed interest in her past, which can largely be attributed to the popular Hulu series Pam & Tommy, where actors Lily James and Sebastian Stan played out the story of Anderson and ex-husband Tommy Lee’s stolen sex tape. “Even I don’t know 100 per cent of what happened, but I think what is most important is to share my human feelings and how much it hurt and how it undeniably defined me moving forward – in my career and my relationships.”
Because, if there’s a running theme to Anderson’s life beside fame, it’s exploitation. From early childhood abuse to creepy on-set encounters with co-stars, and a traumatic romantic relationship that is now being used as an inspiration for Halloween costumes, Anderson has been dealt some horrible cards over the years, and her pain is often undermined due to her fame and status as a sex symbol.
Today, the star is finally reclaiming her narrative, as Netflix releases an Anderson-approved documentary on her life. Pamela, a love story covers the 55-year-old’s upbringing, her career, the sex-tape fiasco, and her current feelings on having to relive her past over and over again without warning. “Basically, you’re just a thing owned by the world,” Anderson says in her documentary.
So here’s the true story of the Centennial baby turned troubled Canadian teen who went on to become a best-selling author, loving mother, and the most prolific Playboy model of all time.
A traumatic childhood plagued by sexual abuse
Pamela Denise Anderson was born in Ladysmith, British Columbia, to loving but distracted parents. Her mother Carol was a waitress working two jobs and her father Barry was a furnace repairman suffering from alcoholism. It is for these reasons, Pamela reckons, that her parents didn’t pick up on her ongoing sexual abuse, which she suffered at the hands of her female babysitter from the ages of six to 10.
“[They] tried to keep me safe but, to me, the world was not a safe place,” Anderson said during a speech in 2014 where she revealed the sexual abuse. “My mom was always crying,” she added. “I couldn’t break her heart any more than it was breaking. I kept these events to myself.”
Anderson was silenced further when the babysitter died in a car crash shortly after Pamela had “tried to kill her”, leading Anderson to believe she had somehow caused her death.
“I tried to kill her,” Anderson says in her Netflix documentary. “I tried to stab her in the heart with a candy-cane pen and then I told her I wanted her to die, and she died in a car accident the next day.”
Unfortunately, things only got worse. When Anderson was 12, she says she was raped by a 25-year-old man. “I went to a friend’s boyfriend’s house,” she explained in the 2014 speech, “and, when she was busy, the boyfriend’s older brother decided he would teach me backgammon, which led to a back massage, which led to rape. My first heterosexual experience.”
In Pamela, a love story, she shares how she felt the rape had marked her, almost as if it was “tattooed on her forehead”.
Then, when she got her first boyfriend in ninth grade (where students are around 14/15 years old), she claims he gang-raped her with his friends. “My first boyfriend in grade nine decided it would be funny to gang-rape me with six of his friends,” she read in her speech. “Needless to say, I had a hard time trusting humans and I just wanted off this Earth.”
She was discovered by chance — though not entirely
Anderson’s life became more stable in her early adulthood, when she was living in Canada and working as a fitness instructor. Then, in the summer of 1989, when Anderson was 21, she was spotted on the big screen during a BC Lions Canadian football game wearing a beer brand slogan tee and was invited to become the face of the brand. Anyone familiar with Pam & Tommy will know about this “as if by magic” discovery, but it turns out Anderson was much more in control of her fate than the show portrayed.
In reality, Anderson was dating a photographer at the time, who recognised her popularity and photographed her in a Labatt’s T-shirt for a mock-up poster, which he promoted to the beer brand, trying to get her employed. Her appearance on the Jumbotron screen was a stroke of luck (and good looks), yes, but there was a grind behind it, too. Between the promotion and Anderson’s newfound popularity in Vancouver, she became a temporary face of the brand as Labatt’s “Blue Zone Girl”.
This, in turn, caught the attention of Playboy, who offered Anderson a place in the October 1989 issue of the magazine. The timing was fortuitous, because she found out her boyfriend was cheating on her that same day. Thankfully, Playboy was there to help her “take [her] power back”.
“Doing that first photoshoot gave me this little kind of portal on what it felt like to be a sensual woman,” she told The Times earlier this month. “My sexuality was mine. I took my power back.”
Anderson made the cover of Playboy the first time that year, and little did she know she would go on to become the most prolific Playboy cover girl of all time, with a record-breaking 14 covers. But Anderson wanted more than just modelling, she wanted to act.
The big break
After gaining popularity through Playboy, Anderson was cast as the “Tool Time Girl” on ABC’s Home Improvement, alongside The Santa Clause actor Tim Allen. Sadly, male mistreatment has featured in nearly every era of Anderson’s life, and this time period was not exempt.
On her first day of shooting in April 1991, Anderson emerged from her dressing room to find Allen hanging about the hallway, wearing only a bathrobe. “He opened his robe and flashed me quickly — completely naked underneath,” Anderson writes in her new memoir, Love, Pamela. “He said it was only fair, because he had seen me naked. Now we’re even.”
“I laughed uncomfortably,” she writes. Allen denies this saying: “It never happened. I would never do such a thing.”
Her role on Home Improvement got her noticed quickly and she didn’t need to stick around for long. By 1992, she had landed a role on Baywatch as CJ Parker, which she played for five seasons — making her one of the longest-serving cast members.
She also appeared in Barb Wire, Scary Movie 3, and Superhero Movie, but her recurring IMDb credit is most frequently as “herself”. By the mid-2000s, Anderson was such a big name that she would often just pop up as “Pamela Anderson” in a film, do a quick cameo, and then leave. She even turned up in the first 10 minutes of the live-action Scooby-Doo Movie, as herself, for seemingly no reason. The 2000s was the era of unnecessary and unexplained Pameos, and people loved it.
Her first marriage and the tape that rocked the world
If you can’t tell from the title of her memoir and Netflix doc, Pamela Anderson loves love. Anderson is a notorious and prolific serial monogamist, though sadly her relationships don’t always become the fairytale she wants them to be. Her first marriage was to the notorious Tommy Lee, drummer of the brand Mötley Crüe, after the two fell in love on an Ecstasy-laden trip to Cancun in February 1995 and got married on the beach four days in.
“Tommy and I started out having a very intense, fun, crazy relationship because we were two kids,” Anderson told Interview magazine in 2016. “We were madly in love. It wasn’t like drugs or alcohol or anything like that. We were both just really passionate about life.”
Reality hit when the two returned to LA and were relentlessly pursued by paparazzi from the moment they touched down on the tarmac. Within eight months, Anderson was pregnant. Then, a couple of months into her pregnancy, Anderson and Lee discovered that their safe had been stolen out of the garage. The Hulu series picks a culprit for this crime, but truthfully, Anderson still doesn’t know who did it.
“To this day, do not know who stole the tape,” she says in the documentary. “I don’t want to figure it out. There’s no use figuring out anything about it. The damage is done.”
It became the first celebrity sex tape in known history, and affected Anderson deeply.
Her relationship with Lee deteriorated after the two welcomed their second son, Dylan, in 1997. In 1998, Lee was arrested after he physically attacked Anderson while she was holding baby Dylan and the pair separated, breaking her heart.
“The divorce from Tommy was the hardest, lowest, most difficult point of my life," she writes in her memoir. "I was crushed. I still couldn’t believe that the person I loved the most was capable of what had happened that night. We were both devastated, but I had to protect my babies.”
The pair even attempted to reunite in 2008, with Lee telling Rolling Stone at the time: “Pamela and the kids have moved in with me. It’s awesome man. It’s definitely working. You can tell on the kids’ faces - they’re happy when we’re together.”
But the reunion was short-lived and the pair parted ways once again around 2010.
Despite failed reunions and the horrible situation in 1998, the pair have a good relationship today and Pamela looks back on her marriage to Tommy with tenderness. “My relationship with Tommy may have been the only time I was ever truly in love,” she writes, adding: “Tommy is the father of my kids, and I’m forever grateful.”
Her rocky love life and a journey to being comfortable on her own
Hold onto your hats for this rollercoaster, folks. Anderson loves being engaged almost as much as she loves being married, and following her split from Lee she became quickly engaged to Swedish Calvin Klein model Marcus Schenkenberg in 2000, though their relationship lasted less than a year and the two had broken off their engagement by 2001.
By 2002, she was engaged to country rock star Kid Rock, though this was called off by 2003, and Anderson seemed happy about it. “The word that best describes me now is ‘free’,” she told reporters at the time. “That’s all I will say. I’m a mom, and that’s where my life is at.”
Not for long, though, because the two were reunited and wed on a yacht in St Tropez by 2006. “It was like, ‘Let’s just f***ing get married and get it over with,” Rock told Rolling Stone that year. However, in true Anderson fashion, it didn’t last more than a year. “Divorce," the former Baywatch star wrote on her blog in response to the rumours in 2007, “Yes, it’s true. Unfortunately impossible.”
Luckily, she found someone else to marry in 2007: actor and poker player Rick Salomon, whom she wed and divorced that same year (a busy 2007 for Pam). The two rekindled their relationship in 2013 and secretly married again by January 2014.
“We’re very happy. Our families are very happy and that’s all that matters,” Anderson told E! News. But by July 2014, she had filed for divorce and it was finalised in April 2015.
Most recently, Anderson married her bodyguard, Dan Hayhurst, on Christmas Eve 2020. The pair split a year later, with a source telling Rolling Stone that their relationship was ultimately just a “pandemic whirlwind” that didn’t last. Which means, as of present day, Anderson is single, and she’s not mad about it.
“I’ve learned to try and do this without a life preserver,” she told Vanity Fair this month, “without having anyone around me to console me. I have to console myself. That’s been the hardest part of the journey — to go, I’m okay on my own… with my dogs. I need my dogs. I can’t be that alone.
“I had this wild, bumpy life and met a lot of interesting people along the way and had a lot of interesting love affairs,” she explains. “But I feel like my life is more romantic now than ever. I have dinner for one or with my dogs. I’m the same person with or without somebody. Rose petals in the bathtub, making my own rose oils, making my own candles. I’m kind of crafty all of a sudden.”
So it looks like Pam is finally happy being a party of one, which is perhaps why she’s suddenly able to look back on the whirlwind from outside the eye of the storm. Between Pamela, a love story and Love, Pamela, we’re about to find out the true, unfiltered story of Pamela Anderson — and how she learned to love herself in the process.
