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he was born
surrounded by water--on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, the first child to a father
who fixed furnaces and drank too much, and a petite, curvy, indomitable mother who worked
so many waitress jobs that, her daughter would recall, "she went through her whole
life in a pair of black work pants and a white shirt.''
A laughing Carol Anderson, in a voice that sounds like a honey-dipped Brillo pad, still remembers her short-haired, tomboyish daughter scrambling up the back of a toilet tank in the middle of the night to reach the baby aspirin she loved to chew like candy. "I was one of those 3 o'clock-in-the-morning nightmare children,'' admits Anderson Lee. "It was constant, constant badness.''
She was not close
to her father. "He just drank a bit too much,'' Anderson Lee says. "I really
didn't have respect for him. It was kind of like a stubborn contest between the two of us.
When I was a child and my dad said, 'You've got to be home by 11 or else!,' I started
going, What is 'or else'? What's the worst thing that can happen? He's not gonna kill me.
So I would test it. I'd come home at 11:30 and he'd go, 'You're grounded!' Big deal! I'll
just lock you out of my room and sneak out the window.''
A young Pam disingenuously scrawled i'm going to be a virgin until i'm nineteen throughout her teenage diary to fool anyone who might try to sneak a peek, but she's since blocked out the unpleasant memories of her well-before-nineteen gropings. "My first few experiences weren't that great,'' says Anderson Lee. Pressed to describe her first time, she hits another mental roadblock. "The first time I was willing . . . ?'' Her voice trails off. "I can't remember the first time. But I remember boyfriends threatening me: 'I'll break up with you if you don't have sex with me,' that whole thing. I'm sure I caved in, but I don't really have too much memory of all that.''
While attending a B.C. Lions football game in Vancouver with friends, Anderson Lee was picked out of the crowd by a cameraman and projected onto the stadium's jumbo screen. The crowd went nuts. So did a representative from Labatt's beer, whose blue signature T-shirt Anderson Lee was wearing at the game. Labatt's managed to track Anderson Lee down and signed her on as a model for its "Enter the Blue Zone'' print campaign; the photographer on that shoot, Dan Ilicic, became her boyfriend.
"He was so controlling,'' recalls Melanie Arthur, who was to have been Anderson Lee's maid of honor at their wedding. "I went over there for a weekend and he didn't even want us to go to the mall together.''
After several months of covert phone calls from rival photographer Ken Honey, Anderson Lee agreed to pose for composite shots that Honey submitted to Playboy.
"I took one look at her [composite] and said, 'She's gorgeous and she'd be perfect for a cover,' '' recalls Playboy's Marilyn Grabowski. "When I saw Dorothy Stratten I felt the same way. I brought Pam down from Canada, which is rare, because we're in a town full of beautiful girls. In the 30-odd years I've been with Playboy, that's the only time I've ever done that.''
It was during her initial trip to L.A. that Anderson Lee met producer
Jon Peters, at the Playboy Mansion. He urged her not to pose for the magazine, but with no
other career ambitions in mind, Anderson Lee shot her first cover, broke things off with
Ilicic, and moved in with Peters, who soon sponsored her acting, voice, and dance lessons,
and even offered to help her publish a children's book she had conceived.
Anderson Lee's subsequent exposure in Playboy--she agreed to pose nude after a dinner at Spago with Grabowski--landed her bit parts on short-lived TV series and in B movies, which led to an audition for a recurring role on a start-up sitcom called Home Improvement. "When Pam comes in, she lights up a room,'' says Deborah Barylski, the Home Improvement casting director who originally auditioned Anderson Lee. "There is just something very charming and accessible about her.'' The producers, however, offered the role to another up-and-coming young actress, Ashley Judd. But once again, Anderson Lee felt the hand of fate on her back: Judd declined the role to pursue a feature-film career, and Anderson Lee landed the part.
Attention from Home Improvement's high ratings helped earn her a starring spot on the Baywatch squad, but after a year of shooting both shows simultaneously, Anderson Lee left the sitcom for her more, um, substantial Baywatch role when Home Improvement's producers declined to cough up the dough required to make her a series regular.
As for the obvious enhancements Anderson Lee has made to her breasts, she claims to have done so not under pressure from Playboy or any other Hollywood force, but because Grabowski and Kimberly Hefner told her, while working out together one day shortly after Anderson Lee's arrival in L.A., that another female acquaintance of Anderson Lee's had gotten implants. "I was, like, If everybody else had them, then maybe I should go [to a plastic surgeon],'' she says. "I remember waking up in the recovery room and grabbing my chest, going, 'When am I going in?' And they went, 'You're done.' I was, like, What? I was expecting to be like Dolly Parton or something.''
But Anderson Lee routinely refused Grabowski's offers to introduce her around town to managers, agents, and producers--a favor the photo editor grants her more promising Playmates, such as Anna Nicole Smith. "Pamela was always more interested in creating a life for herself with a man [than in a career],'' Grabowski says. "She'd stay in a relationship no matter how bad it got.''
Not all of her relationships were detrimental. "I actually thought for a while that Jon Peters was a very good boyfriend, the best one she's ever had,'' Grabowski continues. "He had a lot of good advice for her, and he wasn't out to destroy her to prove himself.'' After splitting up with Peters, she was engaged to sitcom icon Scott Baio, a relationship of which no one acquainted with the couple--including Anderson Lee--has positive memories. "Scott was hardly the person that was going to make her a star,'' says Grabowski. "He didn't want her to work, he didn't want her to wear makeup. He wanted her to stay home and cook.''
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Does Anderson Lee feel she's ever given up too much control to a man? "To a certain point, yeah,'' she says. "I always found people who tried to change me. It's weird how men do this: They meet you and they fall in love with you for who you are, and they strip all those good things away from you that they fell in love with until you're not appealing to anybody--including them. When I feel myself slipping away, that's when I leave.'' A rationalization masquerading as an adventure, Anderson Lee's secret marriage to Tommy Lee in Cancun was the ultimate act of rebellion for a woman who used to phone her mother collect from breakfast, lunch, and dinner meetings when she first arrived in L.A. No surprise that Anderson Lee's friends and family did not take the news well. Carol Anderson stayed in bed for a week and refused to speak to her daughter for five days. Melanie Arthur cried. "I got home around 11:30 on a Sunday night and there was a message from her that said, 'I'm marrying Tommy Lee tonight,' '' recalls Arthur. "I went into work the next day and called her mom, and she started crying and I went, Oh my God, it's true. I completely lost it. It was almost like someone had died instead of someone had gotten married.'' Anderson Lee's friends and family struggled to put the marriage in perspective. "I always trusted her judgment in her boyfriends because she only puts up with so much," Carol Anderson says. "That's what's helped me with her marriage to Tommy. There has to be something in him that she's seen.'' |
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The film began production in May, following Anderson Lee's whirlwind, paparazzi-filled trip to the Cannes Film Festival. Further buoyed by the enthusiastic response from foreign investors, PolyGram offered to boost the Barb Wire budget to $18 million, provided director Adam Rifkin--the Dark Backward auteur whose dailies were deemed unsatisfactory--was fired. Eight days into production, Moyer replaced Rifkin with video director David Hogan, a feature-film first-timer who had shot second-unit action sequences for Batman Forever. As part of her $500,000 deal for the film, PolyGram had insisted that Anderson Lee have no approval over the script or the director. Nonetheless, Hogan sought to allay Anderson Lee's potential concerns. "She has really good visual ideas,'' he says, "if you just listen to her.'' When Anderson Lee recounted to Hogan a dream she'd had the night before--about being sprayed with champagne and two fire hoses while doing a "nasty dance'' in a rubber dress --Hogan threw out Barb Wire's original opening scene and incorporated Anderson Lee's concept into the film's title sequence. "It was weird,'' she says with a laugh, "because I'm not used to having people care so much about what I think, you know?" --K.O. |
Tommy Lee strides into the restaurant wearing jeans, black lace-up boots, and a white ribbed T-shirt with a blue rebellious bastards insignia, his dark hair pulled into a ponytail with a neon pink hair scrunchy and buried under a baseball cap. He pulls up a chair and plunks down next to his wife, promptly spilling a glass of iced tea. Anderson Lee gently strokes his leg and coos at her husband, who doesn't seem in the mood to answer the questions tossed his way. "I'm not working today,'' Lee says, eyeing the tape recorder suspiciously.
For now, Anderson Lee seems content to follow the path she currently treads with Lee by her side. "They seem very happy,'' observes Carol Anderson. "That's what every mother wishes for their child. 'As long as you're happy . . .' ''
Some are less optimistic about the future of Anderson Lee's marriage. "All I've got to do is look at Dorothy Stratten,'' says Grabowski. "I was having lunch with her the day before they found her dead . . .'' Late afternoon sunlight sweeps across her desk and glints off her eyes. She seems to be blinking back tears. "I said, 'Please don't see your husband alone,' because I knew he was out of control. I'm not using that as a comparison [between Stratten's husband and Tommy Lee], because Paul Snider was certifiable as far as I was concerned. [Pam's marriage] is not to that place. But I don't see the positive thing for her coming out of this. That's what worries me. The child might be the bonding force that brings them together, and onward and upward. We'll see.''
With a smile and a thank-you, Pamela Anderson Lee strolls out of the restaurant, hand in hand with Tommy Lee.
Kristen O'Neill is a writer at large for Premiere.
Copyright © 1996 - Y2K+7 Pamwatch All Rights Reserved.
n March of 1995, Barb
Wire producers Todd Moyer and Michael Richardson were sitting in a limousine as it
wound its way to the Malibu home of Anderson Lee and her husband. They were to take the
couple to the Hollywood Hills home of Michael Kuhn, CEO of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment,
who was hosting a party for a select group of investors in international film sales. They
had yet to arrive in Malibu when Moyer's cel phone began to ring. On the other end of the
line was Ray Manzella, Anderson Lee's personal manager. He had some advice for Moyer: Stop
off at a liquor store for Cristal champagne and peach schnapps. 
The tip paid
off. As the couple downed their Cristal- schnapps concoctions, Moyer spent the lengthy
trip pumping his star up for the task at hand: impressing the checkbooks out of the
biggest buyers in the foreign-sales business. It didn't take long to get a reading.
"We knew that we were doing really incredible because Pamela showed up in a silver
latex dress to the floor," Moyer says excitedly, "and this Japanese guy was just
about the perfect height, okay? Both the German guy and the Japanese guy were, like, dying
for her. The Japanese guy just sat there with his jaw open, staring at her, and we knew we
were going to do really well in foreign sales.''