Pamela Anderson’s life story contains several showbiz-beauty clichés: an abusive childhood, accidental fame and many marriages. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth, she didn’t grow up with the Hollywood studio system, so there were no brilliant writers and directors laid on to make her acting career memorable. But the absence of this structure – in which women were deemed past it at 35 – also meant that she could do much as she pleased at an age when those earlier sex symbols were distraught, depressed or dead. Ten years ago she was branded ‘delinquent’ for running up $493,000 in unpaid taxes and moving to a trailer park in Malibu. Last year she bounced on to Broadway with a triumphant run in Chicago, and this year she has a smash hit Netflix documentary and a likely bestseller in this book.
Anderson was 22 when, at a sports event, her face was captured by one of those weird giant roving cameras. It might serve as a metaphor for her life: pretty woman minds her own business as the perving eyes of the mob fasten on her. Of course she could simply have said no when Hugh Hefner came calling, but she went on to appear on more Playboy covers than anyone else. Girls from straitlaced backgrounds might struggle when they first disrobe for pay, but our humble heroine had no such fetters. It can be embarrassing when people describe themselves as ‘free spirits’ (I always assume this means they won’t be using proper punctuation), but when Anderson portrays herself as one it’s a fact.
She was born in 1967 to teenage parents, a chimney sweep and a waitress (‘hot trouble – the local Bonnie and Clyde’), in a fishing village on Vancouver Island. (She scolds us about politics from the get-go: ‘You can’t “discover” a land where people already live – history is often rewritten to make heroes out of monsters’.)
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