Pamela Anderson wore a structured Tory Burch gown to the Met Gala this year, its bell-shaped skirt, rounded neckline, and long sleeves hiding every part of her except her hands and her face, which was mostly free of makeup, her preference for the past few years; her blond hair was newly cut into a bob. It was the fashion of subtraction, only her face identifying her as the famous star.
If she had wanted something like invisibility, however, she missed the mark. If clothes can convey messages, hers screamed, Alert the incels! These unfortunates have a number of obsessions, one of which is locating famously beautiful and unattainable women who would once have scorned them but are now, the men imagine, stripped of their power because they aren’t young anymore. The incels spoke as one that night, posting photographs of Anderson in her youth next to the ones of her at the Met. Their comments were predictable.
Not typing his feelings about Pamela Anderson’s dress was the actor Liam Neeson, who finished shooting a remake of Naked Gun with her last year and then confessed that he’d fallen “madly in love” with Pamela Anderson. She picked up the ball and said that the relationship had been “professionally romantic,” and that he’d been a “perfect gentleman.”
That exchange says more about Anderson and her appeal than anything mewled by the misbegotten. She is 58. She can keep going until she’s 102 and she’ll still have plenty of male attention. Because she’s been famous for so long, and because that fame is the result of her youthful work in Playboy and on Baywatch, she can seem dispensable, one more Populuxe American Blonde from an era when Hollywood was full of them. In fact, she’s a much more interesting person than that, serious and funny, an eager student of a range of arcane topics.
The person she is most like is Marilyn Monroe, not for the simple fact of her great beauty, or for its type, but because as with Monroe there is something sacrificial about her. Long before the internet became the central force in people’s lives, Anderson was the victim of something that has been made almost common because of it: a celebrity sex tape. Today, women have adopted a range of strategies to manage such a violation, chief among them the assertion that they have nothing to be ashamed of, that the person who released the video and those who seek it out are the ones who should be ashamed.
At the time, however, Anderson had no role models, only her own humiliation, gleefully celebrated by millions of men who finally had what they wanted from her, which is what men always want from women: everything. Many people never would have recovered from what was done to her; Monroe was dead at 36, a casualty of barbiturates and Hollywood.
Monroe lived her life dependent on the kindness of sadists; Anderson has lived hers on the strength of what once would have been called her own “hopes and dreams.” Her current cultural relevancy—she was cast in her first serious film role last year, and she’s at the center of conversations about beauty and youth—might seem like the result of a series of power moves, but she doesn’t operate on that economy. Her vulnerability is as much a part of her constitution as her strength is. It’s the old, dangerous combination, but she has triumphed by it.
The Pamela Anderson origin story is legendary. After a troubled childhood spent in a small town on an island in British Columbia, she had an idea that many young people from obscure places have: She should move to a city and maybe, just by being in a larger and more exciting place, something would happen to change her life.
It was the right impulse. She moved to Vancouver, and almost before she had unpacked she was on a rocket ship that didn’t touch down for more than a decade. Friends who worked in publicity for the Labatt’s beer company gave her an extra ticket to a football game and a Labatt’s T-shirt to wear. She was not long in the stands before the Jumbotron caught sight of her. A planet-shaking male cheer erupted.
Stand up, one of her friends told her. She did, and she shimmied a little bit. She was 22, her brown hair aggressively highlighted with Sun In, and I’m certain that a hopeful thousand or more men made a plan to go find her during halftime, but she wasn’t in her seat at halftime. She was down on the field, picking the winning number in a lottery.
Labatt’s asked her to be its “Blue Zone Girl,” and she appeared in a commercial and on a poster, but the campaign was short-lived because soon the phone rang. It was Playboy, asking if she wanted to come to Los Angeles and be on the cover of the October 1989 issue.
It was the kind of call that we are taught to distrust, but Anderson was—and to some extent still is—a trusting person. The animating idea of Playboy magazine, which was launched in 1953, was that it was different from the publications of the “smut” industry. It would not feature desperate-looking women engaged in various forms of depredation, but rather women who may have been naked but could still plausibly be presented as having hobbies and interests outside of sex, and who were “clean”—not just of sexually transmitted diseases, but of backgrounds tarnished by experience.
Soon enough she had landed at LAX and was being driven by limousine to the Playboy mansion. She was lonely in the back seat of the cavernous car and asked the driver if she could sit up front with him. She could. She had her hair colored an “acceptable shade of honey blond,” had only a moment of embarrassment at the very beginning of the first shoot, and from there on out loved her work for the magazine, for which she would eventually shoot 14 covers. The closest she came to waffling over the implications of nude modeling was calling her mother soon after her first shoot to see if it would be all right if she became a Playmate. “Do it, sweetheart,” her mother said.
She loved posing for Playboy. From a young age, she said, she’d had “so much shame” about her body. That changed in front of the camera. It was “the first time I felt like I’d broken free of something.” Anderson’s feelings about sex and her naked body were less in line with the hyper-materialist 1980s and ’90s than with the attitudes of the ’60s—she just wanted to be free.
A new Playboy model didn’t usually create a sensation in Hollywood, but Pamela Anderson did. Through her connection to the magazine, she met a wide range of people. The legendary movie producer Jon Peters waged a full-on campaign to romance her, drenching her in expensive gifts, allowing her to live in one of his Bel Air houses, and installing her as the hostess of his dinner parties, where she mixed with writers, artists, and intellectuals. Anderson had already read Jung, and now entered analysis. She read Nightwood, The Drama of the Gifted Child, The Golden Notebook, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Peters wasn’t used to getting friend-zoned, but he put up with it, because what else could he do? (“There are beautiful girls everywhere,” Peters told The Hollywood Reporter in 2020; “I could have my pick, but—for 35 years—I’ve only wanted Pamela.”)
Then something happened that made Anderson not just famous, but one of the most famous people in the world. Permanently famous, globally famous. She was cast in the third season of Baywatch, and quickly became the most popular character on what may be the most-watched television show in history. At its peak, more than 1 billion people watched it every week.
Baywatch was made when the idea of the American dream burned strongly around the world and found its highest expression in the California dream, which, reduced to its purest elements, meant gorgeous young people, endless summer, and the beach. The show was first broadcast on NBC, which canceled it after its first season; in another bit of entertainment legend, one of its stars, David Hasselhoff, helped revive it under new ownership. It had all the elements of a global hit, including plots so simple that even a viewer who didn’t speak one of the 48 languages into which the show was translated could understand what was happening—and what was happening, seemingly three or four times an episode, was that the lifeguards were running across the sand in red bathing suits and extreme slow motion, perhaps to save someone from drowning, perhaps to see if the rest of the gang wanted to play beach volleyball.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire episode of Baywatch, but the show was so much a part of the wallpaper of the time that actually watching it seemed redundant. Like a lot of American television at the time, Baywatch was conservative: It was on the side of law and order; the lifeguards often fell into bed with each other, but rarely outside an established relationship, and never in any overtly sexual way. The most you would see was a couple giggling under the sheets while one of them (usually the man) fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp.
Anderson had broken a well-policed barrier between the kind of woman who could be a Playboy model and the kind of woman who could be a television star. The two roles amplified each other. Playboy wanted to be as much in the mainstream as it could be: Whenever Anderson was on a new cover, entertainment shows reported on it. The television series—sexy without being sexual—seemed racier because of its association with the magazine.
In 1995 she married Tommy Lee, the drummer from the band Mötley Crüe, on a beach in Cancun. They wore bathing suits, the day was brilliant, the photographs were everywhere, and on the flight home to California, she asked him what their last name was, thinking it might be Jones, like the actor Tommy Lee Jones.
In the early ’90s, personal video cameras became popular, in part because of parents’ eagerness to film their children. A different use soon became apparent to other users (let us call them “men”): They could record intimate sexual acts. Persuading women to participate in that kind of video usually required some effort, but so did composing The Federalist Papers. Anderson and Lee spent a lot of time in luxurious hotels while one or the other of them was on tour, but for their honeymoon they kept it real: a houseboat on Lake Mead, in Arizona. They brought the video camera on that trip and a few others, recording a total of about eight minutes of sexual activity.
The couple returned to their Malibu house, and Lee hid the tapes inside a large home safe he kept behind a carpeted wall in the garage.
Why would someone as reckless and Mötley Crüe–ish as Tommy Lee go to the trouble of hiding videocassettes so carefully? Because this was 1995, but when it comes to sexual norms, it might as well have been 1955. The internet has caused as dramatic and irreversible a change in people’s sexual behavior as the birth-control pill did more than half a century ago. The pill made the true liberation of women a possibility, and the internet made their near enslavement to male sexual desires so commonplace that we don’t even acknowledge it. The concepts of the empowered sex worker, the financially savvy OnlyFans account creator, the winning-at-life porn star are the product of women trying to create a personal ethic that encompasses the fearsome power of the internet. But back in the ’90s, that was a long way off; the world could still lose its mind over a private film of a woman having sex with her own husband.
Anderson and Lee realized that the safe—and with it the tapes—had been stolen in January 1996. Soon after, they got a letter from Bob Guccione, the pornographer and creator of Penthouse magazine: He wanted to buy the rights to distribute the footage.
The realization that the tapes were in the hands of strangers was horrifying to Anderson; her choice to model for Playboy had been an act of her own liberation. This was entirely different—a violation, a precursor to a kind of public shaming few women had then experienced. Even in the midst of her shock, she realized that whatever happened next would be good for her husband’s career and ruinous to her own—and it just about was. News of the recordings—which were eventually retailed by an associate of the thief—was received by millions of men with savage glee. Night after night after night, Jay Leno made cruel jokes about it. It was as though Anderson was experiencing her due punishment for giving men just a peek at her naked body, not access to the whole of it. Pornography runs in one direction: A woman can go further and further into the form, but reversing course is all but impossible. Once men have seen everything, they’re rarely in the mood to see it covered back up; the spell is broken.
The couple filed a civil suit, but Anderson couldn’t make it through the depositions—lawyers plastered the office where it took place with giant reproductions of her Playboy pictures and assaulted her with irrelevant questions about her sexual preferences and experiences. She was pregnant, after suffering an earlier miscarriage, and so upset by the experience that she feared she would lose this baby, too.
For a long time, I thought the cruelty of the episode could never be repeated. But in 2022, Hulu broadcast a limited series in which the event was played for laughs—including a re-creation of the making of the tapes themselves. In a documentary released the next year, Anderson explains how painful this was to her: She had blocked it out “in order to survive,” and “now that it’s all coming up again, I feel sick.” The show’s star, Lily James, eventually sent her a letter of apology, but Anderson said she never opened it.
Anderson has always been devoted to her sons. When one of them was a little boy, he came home from school, rattled by another day of facing relentless comments about his mother, and said, “Mom, why did you do that tape?”
It seems a hell of a thing to make a comedy about, but pornography has driven us mad.
Anderson divorced Lee and remarried several times. She had the sense—shared by many—that she was foundering. The low point was when she took a job as a magician’s assistant in Las Vegas. But through it all, she has remained a beloved figure. The painter Ed Ruscha had become a friend, and introduced her to Werner Herzog, who called her regularly about a movie project; her sexy friendship with Julian Assange was based on genuine feeling for him and his plight.
One of her long-standing goals has been to end the Canadian seal hunt, a brutal event that kills seals for their meat, pelt, and oil. In 2010, she wrote to Vladimir Putin—Russia was by then the world’s biggest importer of Canadian seal fur. Sure enough, those imports were banned the next year. Later, she went several times to the Kremlin to lobby for other animal-rights issues. “Have you ever talked directly to him?” Piers Morgan asked her during an interview. She kept a long, smiling silence. “Putin was only in the room once, but he heard of everything,” she reported. “I would get messages from other people that he was pleased that I was there—he kind of got a kick out of me.”
Two years ago, she went to Paris for Fashion Week. She didn’t want to spend three hours in a chair getting her hair and makeup done; she’d rather go to the Louvre. So she did. Many older women have decided at a certain point to stop wearing cosmetics, but none has made as big of a splash as Anderson.
“I’m not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room,” she told Vogue France. “If we all chase youth,” she added, “we’re only going to be disappointed and maybe a little bit sad.”
This past fall she appeared on the Today show to promote her new plant-based cookbook. She was wearing black pants and a bright-white shirt, and she looked like she was having a great time. The hosts had been discussing Mariah Carey’s long-term battle with unflattering overhead lighting. “Let the makeup go, let the lighting go!” she said as the hosts laughed and agreed with her. She said she’d had no idea what a big impact her decision to toss the cosmetics would have; women have come up to her with their young daughters to thank her for what she’s doing. She does look different without makeup, but she is still a very pretty woman, and clearly she has been renewed in some deep way.
Anderson starred in a movie released this year that could have been written for her, although it wasn’t. The Last Showgirl is a beautiful, small movie about a dancer in one of the last big Las Vegas revues. As the movie opens, the dancer discovers that this show, too, is about to close. She’s a Tennessee Williams character, facing a delicate situation—she’s too old to appear in the newer, more explicit shows—with a mixture of fatalism, daydreams, and terror. Reviewers took Anderson’s performance seriously, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe.
She’s always handled herself with grace, always been bigger than the situations thrust upon her. And probably more than she realizes, we’ve always been on her side. She spent the most tumultuous years of her life protecting her sons as best she could from the cruelty that followed the stolen tape. They’re men now, fiercely protective of her—her older son, Brandon, urged her to read The Last Showgirl script after her agent had passed on it.
In 2015, Pamela posed for her last Playboy cover, but before doing so, she asked her sons how they would feel about it. They told her they weren’t embarrassed anymore. As Brandon said, “You know, we think you’re great.”
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