Bittersweet Infamy - #150 - Running in Slow Motion

Episode Date: October 18, 2026

150th episode spectacular! Josie tells Taylor about Canadian actor and '90s sex symbol Pamela Anderson: her unlikely path to Playboy and Baywatch fame, her rocky relationships with famous bad boys like Tommy Lee and Kid Rock, the celebrity sex tape that spawned a genre, and how she's stayed true to herself through it all. Plus: what are dead white man's clothes? Find out in our brand new segment! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Bitter Sweet and food. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and in me. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet.

150. Welcome to a hundred and fifth. Sparkle, sparkle. Bitterswintennial. Welcome to a hundred quintennial. That's good. Bitter swentennial is really good. I'm impressed.

150 episodes. Did you ever think when we were back in the COVID days? And we decided to do a little podcast, and you can kind of go back, and I don't recommend anyone does this, but you can go back to our very first episodes, and you can hear how much we've improved. Yeah. I was really sweating it out on Barbara Streisand's Cloned Dogs. Really?

You can't tell. You can't tell. Okay. Okay. No, I think I got my sweatiest with hexing the moon. Witch talk, which talk. That one was hard. I remember I kept confounding you with questions, like, but what's the story of this?

But what happened? Who, who hex the moon? How do you know? And you're like, man, it's crazy. Which it was. And it still is. But also, I'll say this, that episode is like a sweet little like 36-minuteer. Oh, that thing blows by.

That might be our shortest episode. Yeah. We didn't have them infamous yet. Nor did I have concept of story quite yet. But that's good. Doing fucking what is effectively, I mean, I know it's not exactly half of 150 because there's episodes that were non-standard formats and whatever, but doing half of 150 episodes over a course of five or so years now,

five or six years now, it has been an enormous help to my writing, as much of a help as like going to an MFA was more maybe, because it's just like get in there, you have to communicate it to an audience who like may not give a shit about Formula One racing, but you're telling them about, trust me guys, this is really interesting about Formula One racing. Yeah. And you've got to have strong narrative arcs and you've got to have beginnings, middle, ends, conclusions, protagonists, all the things that Witch Talk loves. What's your favorite? Of the episodes you have done, because you're bagging on yourself for being sweating. Of the episodes you have done, which is your own favorite and why?

I have a little waterlogged spot in my heart for Dolphin House. I just... Dolphin House. And that one was still pretty early. It was. It was episode 17. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty early. There was just a nice confluence of, like, living in this watery house with a dolphin and teaching

it English, it was just, like, hidden. I laughed. I laughed so hard. The only other time I remember laughing that hard during a session, it was my own fucking joke, and it's a terrible joke. It didn't even make it to the fucking podcast. It got cut. What was that joke? You were telling the episode 51, the cloud seeding story about Hatfield in the San Diego Flood. Yeah.

And I had to, off the dome, I had to come up with what is some slop headline that a garbage sidebar would push you for a non-reliable news source. And all I could come up with off the top of my head was Adele's. dead. And I lost my shit laughing at that, I remember, because I surprised myself with that, and I loved to be surprised. It is nice to be surprised. Surprises are fun. Surprises are fun. What's your favorite episode that you have ever done? I know you say what I'm not. In the race, certainly for my favorite episode that we've ever done, is, let me get this, because I made a chart, by the way, I made a spreadsheet if you want access to it. A tattoo? I made the podcast spreadsheet tattoo.

That's for episode 200. We're getting bittersweet spreadsheet tattoos. Josie's going to lead and I'm going to follow. I'm right behind you. Right. Keep the chair warm for me. In episode 130, bury me on Rattlesnake Island. An episode is so...

It's so off the wall. The kiss, I still think of it. That like creeps into the back of my head all the time. The Central Kiss. This is a story about a man who tried to, like, basically set up a Middle Eastern themed theme park off the coast of Peachtland in BC, and the whole thing like spirals until, like, the embassy is being held up in Beirut, Lebanon kind of thing with machine guns. Like, it just goes for a fucking, goes for like 90 turns this one.

And it's also, we were in person, we were at the 604 studios with Alex and the front half of the episode rather than having them infamous, we have our road trip. First little part, first little part of our road trip, the big Skookum-Bisi road trip, which you, me, Rui and Lucia did together and didn't we have a lot of fun. So yeah, I would say episode 130, if you haven't listened to it and you want to hear like, you know, the BC stuff always has a little bit of extra heart in it. Give it a listen. 130. You reminded me of my episode with the Militant Mothers of Raymer. I really loved doing that one. Very good. The right side of the tracks number 77. I remember this. It was a group of women who lived in essentially like subsidized housing.

Like you might call it a project. I don't know if we have that term in Canada even. Well, yeah, or maybe just the connotations in the U.S. are different. But in order for the kids to get to school, they had to cross a train track and it was really, really dangerous. And so these mothers who society had kind of cast aside and said, well, you're not really up to snuff. You're not good, You're not good people. We're not going to listen to you. They didn't back down. They didn't let that stop them.

And they fought for their kids to be safe. And now there's an overpass walkway over the railway there. And then the circumstances under which you told it were very sweet because we were like out in Jordan River on Vancouver Island by a kind of twinklelight campfire sharing these things. It was a lot of fun. The in-person ones really stick out to me. They're special and they're also heavily gimmicked a lot of the time. We love a gimmick. Or a very intoxicated.

That happens too. If I had to pick one of my least favorite episodes, it's that one, and it's because I get really Joe. You know what? Fuck it. We've referred back to it a bunch of times. Episode 42, Josie does an excellent piece about the Moonies that I absolutely ruined. You and Mitchell were gone, so.

We were climbing the way, teacher, da-da-da-da-you were just, I'd be like, kids, settle down. I've got a story to get through. No, the only reason I wasn't fucking climbing the wall. Because you had a story to get through. I had a story. I had to be at least aware enough to read off the screen. Yeah. Well, it's interesting.

It's interesting. That episode is historically, those set of episodes, it's 41 The Runaway Bride, 42, Moonstruck. Yeah. Those sets of episodes are historically important in the bittersweet infamy canon because not only were those are first kind of in-person ones, but they were the first appearance of the fact or fiction infamous. Yeah. So if you want to do that whole series, you've got to go back there and pardon my breath. Josephine, when you were talking about the militant mothers of Raymer just then, genuinely, I was like, this is the type of role that a Dolly Parton would kick the shit out of because it's that same like

fighting from underneath, scrappy, folksy, street smarts, all the hallmarks of like the Dolly Parton character in the movie, right? Yeah. And that ties in beautifully to our advertisement for our coffee account. That's true for our Bittersweet Film Club. Boom. We're watching what? We're watching Straight Talk.

We've watched Straight Talk. We've got to talk straight talk. We've got to talk the straight talk. While these dolly nails are still going. That's beautiful. We've got to sip a cup of chat and get down with our favorite radio therapist, Dr. Shirley Canyon, or is it, Kendall? Who's to say? Does it matter?

What are doctors? Yeah. Is Dr. Oz a doctor? You know? We are watching that one just as an RIP to Dolly, but of course you can choose what we watch. If that's not to your taste, you monster, you can come in there and be like, watch Zodiac. And we'll... Kind of.

You know? Yeah. Now we've got to watch, because we made such a big deal out of it. We have to watch Zodiac. No, we've made such a big deal. We can't. It's the one we can't. It's like rule number six.

Maybe we'll end film club. It'll be the film club finale. And, again, Because like A to Z, right? It's Z, sorry. Oh. Oh, I know. I'm a turncoat.

I'm a traitor. Can you keep your passport if you do that? Damn. No, fuck no. You can go to coffee.com, K-O-hyphen, fI.com slash bittersweet infamy. Sign up $3 a month. You get your name read in the end credits. So if vanity is your thing, you can, you'll get your name read in the end credits of the main show.

And we take your suggestions. And we watch them. And we have a good time doing it, God damn it. I know. We really do. Movies. Who knew? Intertaining.

We fly by the seat of our pants, and our pants look great. Yeah, and you can see them because it's video. Yes. Well, we're sitting, so we actually don't really see much of our pants. But you see their pets a lot. You see their very cute pets are very rambunctious during the tapings of these things. Yeah, it's true. They're crawling up all over.

There was one where we were talking about last. in attacks in the movie Roar and P.K. was crawling all up and down, and I was like, oh, this is like the birds. They've infiltrated, you see. Okay, so I brought a new little segment to throw us to break, because I've been noticing, since we got rid of them infamous, we end up going to break on film club, and it doesn't quite feel quite right, because you want to go to break with like a little zinger or something. You know what I mean? Something to give the audience, well, ha, ha, ha, ha. Now I can go urinate, and then come back and listen to these again. I've brought.

a segment that captures the spirit of them infamous, but adds a little bit of a gameplay component to it. Josie, I know you love surprise game shows. This is not that, but it's adjacent. Okay. It's just not a surprise and not really a game show. So I need your help, though, because I haven't come up with a name for this segment. So perhaps over the course of this, you know, 150th episode or maybe immediately, we can come up with a good name for it. But the gist is this. I'm going to ask you a question, simple question, A, B, C, or D, you think about it? We throw it a break. They think about it at home. Go urinate. Come back. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my. Okay.

And then when we come back from the break, well, that's when the answer comes out. And I'll give a little bit of extra context about whatever I'm talking about. Yeah, I love this. For right now, this segment is called Untitled by Taylor Basso and Josie Mitchell. I love it. Oh, I love Untitled Works. Josie. Taylor. What are dead white man's clothes?

Are they? A, a name for second-hand clothes in Ghana. B. Garments that wash ashore in the Caribbean. C. A capsule fashion collection from China. Or D. The clothes of the late New Zealand politician H. Dead Whiteman. Oh my God, I love this.

There you go. See, does the segment get to stay? Oh, the segment gets to stay. Yay! 150! 150! So Josie, I'm going to invite you to think about that, and we will get your answer and the answer after the break.

Josie, what are dead white man's clothes? Are they? A, a name for second-hand clothes in Ghana. B, garments that wash ashore in the Caribbean. C, a capsule fashion collection from China, or D, the clothes of the late New Zealand. politician H. Dead Whiteman. Okay. All of these

are like real fucking winners. I'm really pleased with myself. I would put in the full offer on all of those. Okay. So I just have to go with the one that I think sounds the coolest, maybe. It's not even that I think it's the coolest. I guess it's just like the imagery is really like doing it for me. And it's the, any clothes that wash up on the shore in the Caribbean.

B, garments that wash ashore in the Caribbean. B, garments that wash ashore in the Caribbean. Josie, you are incorrect. Okay. Okay, good, good, because now that means it's one of those other choices. It's one of those other choices. Okay. If you at home guessed that dead white man's clothes are A, a name for secondhand clothes in Ghana,

give yourself a pat on the back, you are correct. I mean, I don't know why I'm patting myself in the back. Yeah, what are you, this is stolen valor. Don't pat yourself. A proxy, proxy, okay? Practicing for when I'm winning. Yes. The Akhan phrase, Obroni Weewu, or dead white man's clothes, is the name given to the surfeit of secondhand clothing that floods into the West African nation of Ghana from other

countries, like the United States, Canada, China, Korea, and Australia. Okay. Fifteen million pieces of clothing arrive every week in large compressed bales wrapped in plastic, They are then freed to be sold or customized into new looks and then sold by the vendors at Cantamanto Market, a market in Accra where thousands of vendors sell 5 million pounds of used clothing a week. Wait, 5 million pounds a week? That's not yearly. That's not an annual total.

And that's just what sold. That's just what sold. Oh, Maga Gord. Okay, and I am surprised that I didn't choose this because I remember visiting my mom when she was in Tanzania, and we went to a market, and they had stalls with clothes. that were clearly Western clothes. And my mom's like, yeah, this is like what Salvation Army doesn't sell. They compress it and send it over here and sell it.

And I, like, they had some great. I still wear a shirt that I got in there. It's like this little floral with a little lace shiboo. I love it. You're a dead white man. I'm wearing dead white men's clothes. That's me. You didn't even know you were making a fashion statement when you did that.

Exactly. I'm glad that you mentioned that it was when you were visiting your mom in Tanzania because much of what I'm saying is focused on Ghana, but I know this phenomenon exists in other countries. But maybe the level at which it does is unsurpassed, perhaps, because that's numbers. My God. In 2021, I think, Ghana was the world's largest importer of secondhand clothes. Okay.

According to the vendors, the young people of Ghana love the styles that they see in Western media, such as the American TV show Glee. I put that in there. That was my choice. I just thought it was fun. That is fun. They didn't name Glee. I named Glee. Okay, good.

This makes Cantamanto Market a prime destination for Ghanaian hipsters and influencers and shoppers and tourists of all kinds. Not all handshakes and hammy downs, though. The excess of fast fashion has created dire impacts in the environment, about 40% of the average bail of second-hand clothing that arrives at the market is waste. When you math that out, a hundred tons of garments leave Cantamanto Market each day and only about a third are properly disposed of. The rest end up as textile waste in bodies of water like Accra's polluted Coral Lagoon

or in communities like Old Fadama near Ghana, a once vibrant town of 80,000 that's now stacked high with junkos and camsals. In 2023, Akra Director of Waste Management, Solomon Noy, attended the Change Now conference in Paris, where he implored the Global North to help with waste management, infrastructure, and logistics, as well as for clothing companies to disclose and decrease the amount of garments they create. One group that's been really active in this space is the nonprofit Orr Foundation. If you'd like to find out more about them and about dead white man's clothes in general,

visit their website at dead white man's clothes.org. So you know Josie's going to be a fan because it's dot org family. I'm already there. I'm boopo boop. I auto-complete. I set my Google default to autocomplete.org.

So there you go. That's dead white man's clothes. That is so rad. I get it. I really get it. The term dead white man's clothes and even the term like used clothing, I noticed,

or Foundation specifically said they avoid the term used clothing because some of this is just like, hand because like you say, huge bundles of the polos that H&M didn't sell or whatever the Salvation Army couldn't get rid of. And I'm not naming these organizations specifically that I know they do. These things, I'm giving examples of hypothetically this is the type of organization that might do it.

But then you also get a lot of like, I'm sure, the shirts that we send over that are like, congratulations, Stanley Cup winners, Vancouver Canucks. But the Canucks never win because they're a bunch of bums. So we send those out to Ghana. Yeah. Where the perception, I guess, is that they're African, they're poor. they'll take anything we give them when really it's like, nope. Yeah.

Doesn't look. It's not my color. I'm a summer, bitch. Yeah. This is for fall. Dead white men. Like all the fucking MAGA hats that have been produced that aren't going to, you know? Yeah.

Send them over. Dang. Ganean teenagers walk around rep and MAGA. They don't even know who Madison Cawthorn is. And that number goes down every day and I'm grateful for it. I don't know who that is. Hey, thank you. You've made, and on that note, you have a story to tell me.

I do, I do. So, Taylor, for this, our bitter, smantennial. So good. This is your biggest hit since Minfamous. Wow. I'll give you this. Yeah. Okay. Finally, a follow-up sophomore album to Minfamous, the people have been waiting.

They've been waiting a while. They have been waiting a while. So we have our sesquicentennial with our 150th. episode. I mean, it's 150th anniversary, so we are not 150 years old. No, we are. Oh, I don't agree. Yeah, we are. Remember Houdini? He was a strange guy. Great tipper. I have to thank our subject of today's episode because I was coming across Centennial a lot and then thinking, wait, what are we, this Cisquist Centennial, which is a little bit of a suffering succotash centennial vibe. You're going to want to wear the Spit Shield. Yeah, oh, a big time, a big time.

And as are bitter spontaneous, I wanted to bring a story that you would love, Taylor, of course. You know, that's, that was the very original prompt was like, bring a story you think the other person would want to hear. Yeah. Yeah. And then I brought you Pokemon. I don't. I loved that. I love that.

Oh, okay. So we work. Unconventional win. I love to learn new things. Okay. Yes. We do. It's been great.

Great podcast for that. Honestly. Great podcast. It's true. Very true. If I do you say so myself. And I wanted to bring a storyteller that you do so incredibly well. And I'm a little intimidated to bring it.

But I'm also like plying for sympathy right now. So it's good too. Sympathy doesn't be fit you. You're good. Okay. So today I'm bringing a biography story, the story of someone's life. Yes. Which again, you do so well.

I just did a Lauren Hill one of these a couple episodes ago that, you know, go give it a listen. Lauren Hill, we've got Chenate O'Connor, we've got Vanessa Williams. Portrait of a person, as I described it in the Lorraine Hill episode. But yeah, a biopic, basically a biography. Whenever you do these stories, especially we'll maybe focus on the celebrity ones in particular. Sure. But it's so clear that this person who you do the portrait of a person, they are known and loved as this celebrity, as this persona. And sometimes they're not loved.

Sometimes they are hated and vilified for this persona. And it's in large part how the media treats it and how the media kind of spins and spits it out. And here on Bitter's Reefamy, when we apply any type of empathy, but also when we just, like, I think when anybody like spends the time and attention and brings a non-househole lens, you start to realize. The person becomes more of a person. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Especially true for famous women, I think. celebrity women, that these personas that we so confidently fall back on as their personality or understand to be their personality, they're rarely true, rarely true. Yeah, no, rarely true or like, they are true, but so are nine other things.

Or they are true and here's why she's like that. Yeah. Or whatever it is. Yeah. And you just, yeah, you just need to scratch the surface and there's a whole different picture beneath that. So to bring this particular story to Live, Taylor, I want to introduce you to a public figure whose fame spans the U.S. Canadian border.

Mm-hmm. I guess in particular, this figure occupies and has inhabited the West Coast. Okay. Of our two great nations. And I want to see if you can guess... Pam Anderson. Okay, yeah. Is that it?

Uh, yeah. Nice one. You didn't even need the multiple choice. The most famous centennial baby of the Canadian population, I would argue. In Canada, it's kind of like a matter of local pride when someone from, it applies to across Canada, but especially in your neck of the woods gets big, right? Like, I'm never going to be as in for like Justin Bieber and Shania, these kind of Ontario exports, as I'm going to be for Pam Anderson, Jennifer Tilly.

You'll be like, oh, she's from Vancouver, you know, as you watch the thing and it makes you happy. Yeah, yeah. That's very much a thing. And so Pam Anderson is like, I guess, like, one of our greatest exports, I wager. Yeah. Like we were saying, she's very popular in the U.S. She's very popular in Canada. She's popular worldwide. So there was a time when Baywatch was like the most massive fucking show in the world. Exactly. Translated into like 150 languages. It was insane. I was thinking about centennial law and sesquicentennial and bittersweetenial because Pam Anderson was born July 1st, 1967. Which...

What a Canadian, which is Canada Day. Yeah, it's Canada Day. And it's Canada Day of our 150. I know. Just. Just break out the Canadian tuxedo. This is remarkable. Yes.

Do you do Jamitri at all? Can you read my numerology? Because you seem to have a knack. Send me your birth time, okay? And I will make the astrological chart. Please. That's remarkable. What a perfect fit that ended up being.

Pamela Denise Anderson. This is our girl today, man. This is our girl. So you obviously, you know, hometown girl made big. Yeah. What's your Pam Anderson connection? Have you seen you're on the sky train? No, to my great chagrin. To my great chagrin. I'm going to go through these in kind of order. Okay. Number one, every good West Coast Canadian, every good British Columbian knows the story of how Pam Anderson was discovered, which I won't ruin. The first thing I think of when I think of her, honestly. Okay. That's the hometown girl vibe. Yeah. I liked her on Home Improvement. Yes, Lisa. I never really watched much of Baywatch. I didn't clock it at the time, but sort of retroactively. She was such an influence on 90s style for women. Yeah. Like that kind of like really thin eyebrows, blonde hair, with all the love in the world, big fake knockers. Yeah. It was in. The red swimsuits were in. Yeah. She nailed it. There was a sex tape with Tommy Lee at some point. That was really, really big.

There was a marriage to kid rock in there. Whose real name is Bob, by the way. Bob Rock? Just Bob. She married Bob Rock, and I know lately that she was in the last showgirl. She looks like a million bucks, and I believe she's dating Liam Neeson. We'll get to that, yeah. Also, VIP is in there, too.

I remember VIP. That was never on my radar. Is Barb wire Pam Anderson? Amen, my brother. Okay, okay, so yes, I've got a deep bench on Pammy. Yeah. Bench on Pammy. We guys go way back.

BC. Until I was having this conversation, I've never really sat down and thought, are you a fan of Pam Anderson? But, like, looking at it now, I suppose I am. I like her. Yeah. Well, I mean, and we'll talk about this. I think usually when you're asked the question, are you a Pam,

are you a Pam of Sam Anderson? Yeah, yeah. It's usually like, are you a hetero guy who's related to- Do you spank it to Pam Anderson? Yeah, yeah. That's essentially the, like, persona that is built around her. She also had, I think, a bar. barbed wire tattoo in the 90s, which was, again, very, everyone in their fucking mother went out and got a barbed wire tattoo.

Yeah, yeah. She got it for the film. She was in makeup all the time getting it done. She's like, fuck it. I'll just get it done for real. Baller. She has since had it removed. So when we lose a barbed wire around the bicep tat, an angel loses its wings. Yeah, it happens. It does happen. Well, her story is pretty well known. Even before I jumped into this, I knew the basic shape of that as well. could name a couple of TV shows you'd seen her in or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. And like certainly an image of her comes to mind right away.

I've been part of the Bittersweet Ambush. I know that she's from Lady Smith, so there's that, you know. Kim Katrall, not from Lady Smith. No. Courtney. Yeah. Courtney. Think about that, Monsha.

Think about that. Uh-huh. Consider it. Another big part of her story that maybe is just a little bit before our time or maybe we're just not Playboy fans is she was a playmate. Oh, dude. How did I forget to? mention this. Of course, she was, she was

the Playboy, Playmate. It might be because you're gay. I don't know. Yeah, no, dude, it might be because I'm gay, but in my, in my, not defense, Taylor, don't, this is, but, I watched pro wrestling, which had a lot of overlap with Playboy, because, like, a lot of the wrestling chicks would go do Playboy.

Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. And so I'm surprised that I didn't remember it in that context, because of course she was, yeah, she was very playboy. We're going to, like, good old classic portrait of a person, We're going to start the beginning. We're going to end at the end. Well, end now.

Well, end now. Yes. Unless you know something I don't. No, no. Please, Josie, I can't take it. I can't keep having these. Yeah. I'll do whatever you say.

Release her alive, Josie. Please. Liam Mason is coming to get her, man. You got to be careful. I know. Fuck. That's so true. So we're going to hear the ins and outs of her story.

Of course, it is not the entire story. Because how can you condense someone's entire rich full life into a story. I've never met the woman. I've read her memoir. I have watched her documentary. All right. I will bring the tone down a little bit with a trigger warning because this story does include mention of sexual assaults and rape of a minor as well. I think that you need to take care of yourself as you can. We will address it towards the beginning of her story, but because it is foundational, like any childhood drama, it does reappear

in the discussion. So nothing graphic, nothing intense. A harrowing subject. A harrowing subject, yes. And I will say that I followed her memoir and the documentary that she was a part of making pretty closely on that. So I'm not really adding

any other information that she hasn't already put out there. Got it. All right. There are two things that I want to bring to this story to kind of thematically help us move through it because I think there's a lot that happens to Pamela Anderson in her life and it happens quickly. You know, the highest point of her fame, it moves extremely quickly. Oh, I can only imagine. And I think these two things that anchor her story and reflect in different

ways is this idea of image. And within image, what that looks like in terms of beauty and what we determined to be pretty, what we determined to be sexy, what we determined to be kind of naughty or bad, womanly? Good and bad. Yeah, Madonna and the whore, like these types of image that happens, especially when we see women in popular media. Women in swimsuits. Yes, exactly.

Or not in swimsuits, too, to be fair. So that's image. And then the second pillar, honesty. And I say honesty because I don't like the word authenticity. We've talked about this before. or what is it for you about this word? I have encountered it a lot in discussions of like First Nations or Native American identity politics. And this idea of like, you're authentic when you are like blood quantum or when you're like this or when you're exactly like that.

And I think sometimes authenticity has this backwards effect of you are authentic when we say you're authentic or when we feel that you're authentic. Sure. And I think honesty is actually a better encapsulation. of that, especially maybe in Pamela Anderson's story because so many times she is faced with this juggernaut of the media and she brings a very honest reaction that sometimes gets her in trouble. But we love that. But we love that. But we love that.

My honest reactions sometimes get me in trouble too. Exactly. Is he crass? Yes. But is he wrong? Yes. But is he incorrect? Yes.

We talked with as many times. Yes, exactly. And I think, too, as her story has evolved in probably like the last decade, we see this honesty becoming a really big part of her story in general. And then I think if you look back even further, you see the ways that it's blended in and the way that it guides her and gets her in trouble too. So we have these two ideas of image and honesty and the way that they like work against each other sometimes and sometimes work with each other.

There is, I mentioned her memoir. Her memoir is called Love Pamela. It has all its Houston Public Library stickers on it, so it can't really see it. It's a close-up of her kind of iconic, heavy, eyeliner, smoky, sexy. Skinny eyebrows, blonde. Yeah. Lip liner. I mean, it's a black and white image.

Yeah. She was all about a lip liner was Pam Anderson. Yes. Yeah. And her memoir came out in 2023. It is written by her. There is no ghost writer. Good for her.

She fought for that. Good for her. They told her that, no, we don't really. think that's a great idea, Pamela. We got someone to introduce you to. They'll make your jokes land. There was also kind of a push against her writing it because she was like, well, I want to write it in poetry. I want to write. Instead of prose, I want to bring poetry. And there's a lot of back and forth about, we're not, it's going to be harder to market, like with a book that

we want to sign on for is going, it needs to be pros. They weren't watching Baywatch for her poetry, kind of thought. There was a little bit of that, but I also think like poetry, books are just really hard to sell. And, you know, maybe, maybe a poetry book by Pam Anderson. Maybe that's her next chapter. That'd be cool. I'd read that. Pun intended, I'm sure. But there's a good little middle ground that happens through the memoir where some of it is her poetry and some of it is her prose. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Honestly, I like that better than the idea of it being fully poetry, unless she was just about to, like, really kick the shit out of it. Yeah. Because that has to be, like, a poetry memoir has to be like 10 out of 10 good in

or for me to not be like, can I get a fucking predicate? What's going on? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. She was selling a biography, not a book of poetry, maybe. I'm going to read from the very beginning. It starts with a long poem. And I think this is a really interesting way that she sees herself and reflects on her own image. And again, image and honesty.

I was and still am an exceptionally easy target. And I'm proud of that. My defenses are weak. I'm not bitter. I don't have the craving to be hard, heard, or even taken seriously. I prefer to be fluid and free without boundaries, leaving life to chance and destiny. She's a good writer. Yeah, she's a really good writer.

She's a good writer. Very introspective. I guess it makes sense. It's your fucking autobiography. But. Crummy as it is, people do-do memoirs where they don't introspect and it sucks. You said do-do. I know I heard myself say it

and say oh damn it I'm saying it That part of the poem And the book in general Actually really stuck out to me As I was reading Because this idea that like She again wants to be honest

She doesn't And she's honest about the fact That she's not hard And she doesn't want to be Hardened She doesn't want to be bitter She doesn't want to be taken seriously Or her

She just wants to be sweet She just wants to be, yeah She doesn't want to be better She wants to be sweet Exactly She's not listening to this show No We don't have anything to offer her

Well, maybe this episode. So, Lady Smith, let's head over to the island. Vancouver Island. Oh, I miss when we went to the island. That was a really fun time. I know, that was really fun. So good. And Lady Smith is on the opposite side of Vancouver Island from where we were.

So it's on the side that's like faces mainland. Southeast. Southeast, yeah. It's an old lumber town, pretty small, you know, small town Canada is where she's from. Her grandparents owned a motor park in Lady Smith, so like a kind of a hotel where you would drive to. Wooden picnic tables outside and a campsite nearby. Right on the water, though. And so you're just imagining like beautiful tall trees.

There is maybe no place in the world more beautiful than Vancouver Island. It's so pretty. It's insane. How gorgeous. And I also think the western shore, like Sunshine Coast, is... Oh, God, yeah, absolutely. That part of the, I just like insane, just so insane. And so she grows up right on the water. She is in and out, picking up starfish, making sand castles, making friends with all the little squirrels.

Like, she is a tomboy through and through. Does not care what she's looking like, climbing up trees, scratched knees. None of this like pretty beautifulness. No lip liner. There's no lip liner. No lip liner yet. Yes, exactly. She was very devoted to animals. She was very into the natural world. She did pita stuff, didn't she? Exactly. Yes. Yeah, she's done a lot of pita stuff. All this late Pam knowledge bubbling up. I know, I know. How exciting. She really lived in her own little world. She had all of this energy, so she was always kind of

running around. When she got a little bit older and in high school, she did gymnastics. She's double-jointed and very flexible. So she was kind of natural. a gymnast, but you can imagine just like a gymnast between like the gorgeous pines and the water and the dock and like, ah. She's just this kind of wild, feral island kid. Her parents, Carol and Barry Anderson, they were 17 and 19 when they had her. She was the first of their two kids. Sure. It was a babies, raise and babies kind of situation. That's tough. And it shows that, You know, they were living in her grandparents' motor park and cabin six right on the water. But Carol worked as a waitress off and on again and a few other jobs.

And Barry was a chimney sweep when he was in his 20s or so. All right, Mrs. Poppins? Yeah. I haven't watched Mary Poppins. This is where it fails me. Okay. He had a dumb little top hat and everything. Like, you know.

Oh, he comes out of the chimney and he's all suited up, just like in the movies? Yeah, just like in the movies. Exactly. Understood. A few years after Pamela is born, her younger brother comes on the scene, Jerry. Jerry with a G, you should know. Okay. This is important.

Write it down. Yes. There might be a surprise game show about Pam Anderson. It's happened before. Oh, Papa. Lady Smith. Courtney? Who knows?

Who knows? It's Lady Smith. Her mom, again, very young and very devoted to looking good. She always had a little bouffant hairstyle going on. I remember being 19. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And apparently Carol would save money on groceries and only eat soup because then she could use the soup cans as like hair curlers. Necessity breeds innovation. She was very devoted to always looking together. Even if she didn't have a lot of money, she wanted to look good. Her dad was kind of the neighborhood ne'er-do-well. Like everybody in Lady Smith had a story about Barry Anderson doing something.

Ah, Barry. Exactly. And he loved cars, so he always had a different car, and he was always driving too fast. In fact, he and Carol got into a really bad accident when Carol was pregnant with Pamela. Carol went through the window shield and still has a scar that crosses her entire... You hate to hear that. Forehead, yeah. Thank God both mother and baby survived, though.

That's good. I know. You can imagine Pamela's just kind of feral out there. Her grandfather, who she was very close with, he was a Finnish logger, who, worked timber. I prefer a pilsner. Right, yeah. That was cute. That was good.

150 episodes of this shit. You're welcome. It keeps coming. It keeps coming. It won't stop. It will not stop. No. And apparently her grandfather was pretty rough and tumble with her dad, but in a way that grandparents can be, they're very soft and sweet and loving. With the grandkids. With the grandkids. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the adult child certainly doesn't feel really. resentment toward their own child for this. No, never, never. It just doesn't happen like that. No. This grandfather, he taught Pamela some finish. He told her these fairy tales about fairies who lived in the woods and da-da-da-da. And this really like feeds her imagination. Lady Smith, a great place for this. Yes, exactly. Yeah, little fairy rings and all of it. Yeah, exactly. And back to her parents, they were absolutely and madly in love. You could tell. just how much they really...

Very rare on this show. Well, slow your role, because there's a sweep, but there's also a bitter too, right? They were so madly in love, but there's a kind of an emphasis on the mad there. Her dad was an alcoholic. As much as he loved his wife, he was physically abusive. There was a story that Pamela tells in her memoir and in the documentary where her mom was vacuuming during hockey night in Canada. Don't be doing that.

That's a big no-no in Canadian circles. Yeah. Barry saw that through because he threw the vacuum over her head out the window onto the beach. No vacuuming in hockey night. That's not right. That must be really scary for like a young person. But like, I guess the non-lived in broad strokes of that story of someone like freaking out and lofting a vacuum onto the beach because it was going during hockey night in Canada. Kind of funny. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that one's good. That one's good. It's not. It's not good. It's horrible. There's a silver lining of humor in that one that is not in the story where he gets mad with Pamela because she brought these baby kittens into the house. And so he puts them in a sack, walks them out into the water and in front of her drowns them.

Again, they're young. They like don't really know what they're doing. Again, I remember being 19. I didn't do that. That's true. That's optional. You don't have to drown a sack of kittens in the river in front of your chival. child? This is true. And there were quite a few times when Carol, Pamela's mother, was like, kids,

we're getting the car and we're leaving. We're not, we can't do this. We're not doing this anymore. And, you know, they wouldn't go far. They would come back later that day and the next day. Until Pamela and Jerry were like early high school, they got in the car and they drove to Camp Loops. Are you sure? No, it might be Colonna. No, I think it was Camloops, yeah. Okay. So Camloops, if you haven't gotten the gist, is like, I think it's sort of dwarfed by Colonna a little bit. Everyone thinks it's Kelona.

It's fine. We stayed at a Ramada there. It's a K. It's a K interior, B.C. You know? I had a midfish taco there, and we went to the Ramon. And that waitress was like, oh, you tie-died to your jacket yourself. It doesn't look like an amateur did it.

So, to be fair, the thought behind it is, like, really well-intentioned and sweet. but the execution it needs refining. Yes, yes, yeah. So the reason they're in Camloops is because Carol's sister lives in Camloops. So it's Pamela's aunt. And they're like, we're going to live next to them. Carol got a job cleaning the morgue at the local hospital. Fun times, I'm sure.

They were living off of welfare and Pamela remembers like the taste of the powdered milk, like the chalkiness of it, even to this day. You don't forget that. Dude, you don't forget things like that. No, uh-uh. It gets baked in. You carry that with you. What is it?

The body keeps the score. Yes. Yeah. The taste buds, remember. The taste buds keep the score, man. Yeah, oh, big time. So they had been in Camloops for about a year, and Pamela answers the phone, and it's her dad. And he's like, where are you guys?

And Pamela misses him. She misses the ocean. They don't got the ocean in Camloops. They do not. They have some dusty map. They have desert. They got some wineries if you're into that. So she's.

She sees a piece of mail next to the phone and she's like, this is our address. And he comes and he gets him. Carol Anderson, Pamela's mom. Pamela describes it as seeing her mom kind of washed with relief, seeing her dad. And it speaks to this like really strong love that they have for each other, this romantic love that is almost destructive in some ways. But they still love each other a lot. And so they reconcile. They get back together, Pamela and Jerry get in the car, they head out west.

But Carol says, I don't want to go back to Lady Smith. There are too many bad memories there. We need a fresh start. The tide keeps washing that vacuum back up. We got to move. So they moved to Comox, which is... Sure, yeah. Just big ferry terminal up there.

Up north Vancouver Island. Because Kamloops is on the mainland. That's maybe something we should say. Camloops is part of the big mass of BC and everything else that we've discussed has been on the large island, Vancouver Island next to it. So Pamela enrolls in high school and Comox. That's where she becomes a gymnast. That's where she joins the jazz band and learns some saxophone.

Some jazz hands. She even learns a little bit of scatting, a little bit of doop-de-be-be-doo. Zappa-a-ba. Like Kim Katrow. Like Kim Katrow. She also skats. You scat in a Canadian tuxedo of all denim. In high school, Pam is a really good student.

She has a really deep devotion to journaling. Even since she was a kid, she kept a journal and wrote every kind of little detail. And that's where the name of her memoir kind of comes from, Love Pamela. She would always sign off her journal entries with like Love or Exo Pamela. She was, if not a straight A student than like an A and B student. She was good. She was really good. She loved reading.

She loved to write. She was pretty shy in high school. And this is what we'll talk a little bit about her experience with sexual assault. Okay. As a young kid, so even younger than this, she had a babysitter who her parents really liked because she would bring Pamela all these toys. In reality, this babysitter who was a woman was asking Pam to do things that Pam did not want to do and telling her not to tell anybody.

Fuck that bitch. And she would cover it up with all these toys and like, let's play with pretty dolls and Barbies and stuff. And Pamela was never a Barbie girl. She wanted to, like, you know, dig a hole to China instead in the dirt. Which is sort of ironic because in like the, I guess, the uneducated eye, Pam Anderson would adopt a similar role to Barbie in terms of like their aesthetics and being like a... Exactly. You know. Yeah.

Blonde bombshell kind of vibe. Exactly. Yeah. But this babysitter who, interesting right in the larger aesthetic is kind of forcing this Barbie aesthetic on to her. It's also attached to this abuse. Pamela got so upset with her that she like just like raged out and was just like, I want her to die. Like she like was out in the forest and just like yelled it and wished it, you know, put it in her journal kind of thing. And then the next day, this babysitter died in a car crash.

So Pamela was like this young kid being like, oh my God, I killed my babysitter with my magical mind. Oh, no. First of all, oh no. Second of all, good job. Yeah. Third of all. Well done. Good use of your magical mind. That's a great deal to have to process. My heart goes out to her for that.

That's despicable. That's despicable. She marks that as a time when she started to turn a little more inward. No doubt. But when she was 12, something even more egregious happened to her that made her turn even further inward. And she was with a friend who had an older boy. boyfriend and the friend was like, let's pretend we're going to the movies and my boyfriend will pick us up. And so they got into a car and drove to this older guy like 18, 19, and they're like 12 and 13.

The guy is a roommate. And when her friend, when Pamela's friend goes off with her quote unquote boyfriend, Pamela is stuck with this roommate who they start playing backgammon and then he's like, well, do you want to back rub? And she was 12 when she was raped and lost her virginity. Oh, God. Yeah. And she did not, you know, it was like, it was a secret that her friend was doing, nobody knew.

She didn't, she was like too young to feel like she could tell anybody, especially because she knew that it was really bad. She, like, did not know how to process it. But she also felt like everybody could read it on her. She felt like it was like written across her head. Oh, baby. I know. And her mom had given her this little necklace with a pee on it, like with little like rhinestones. For Pamela.

For Pamela. And it had like gotten ripped off in this experience. Oh, that makes me so mad. This is awful. She lost it. I know. For Pamela, she says that made it so that the rest of her adolescence, she really did not feel comfortable with herself in herself. She felt really shy. Like she described it as being painfully shy.

And she did not really have a lot of friends. They were not a wealthy family. And it's not that there was a lot of wealth in Lady Smith, but like she's kind of stuck out in that way. She stuck out in the way of having experienced this abuse and not been able to process it. She was also pretty petite. She was a very small, small slip of a lasse. Slip of alas. One thing that she, it's interesting, it's mentioned in the memoir, but it's not in the documentary, is that she does not minstreet until she's about 18 years old. Oh, bam. And for some people, like, it just happens like that. Yeah, that does just happen. And, you know, for her, she thought maybe it was like all the gymnastics she was doing and she was so active. That's a thing. But it also may have been the trauma.

that she had experienced. This girl has PTSD. Poor of that. Yeah. And it makes me even sadder when I remember that the things that are to come are like her becoming a huge sex symbol, her having a sex tape, like these sorts of things. I'm like preemptively really worried for her soul. I don't know.

Exactly. Not like a moral judgment way, but in a like I want to like hold you softly kind of way. Give you a hug. Yeah. It's going to be okay. I know. Here's a cup of tea pan. I'm so sorry.

I know. I know. So her high school years were relatively unremarkable. You know, like the yearbook pictures, like, Pam Anderson is not the Pam Anderson we know. You look at the gymnastics team and you're like, I don't know. She left the red swimsuit at home. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, it's like, I don't know which one is Pam.

I mean, not getting her period until so much later, she grew like five inches when she got her period. You know what I mean? Oh, interesting. Yeah, she like was just looked a very different person than who she came to be at age 18. And when she did turn 18, college was not really. on the radar. It just wasn't really something that anybody that she knew really well was doing. Sure. So it's not that she didn't have the grades maybe, but maybe the finances weren't quite there to support it. And we model the futures that are offered to us in front of our own eyes. Yes. But something

that her grandfather instilled in her early, her grandfather who knew all the fairy stories, he told her you are not the small town that you are from. You have a light that is all your own. So she had that background. She had that support. And she was still living at home when the abuse between her mom and dad got bad enough that she was like, I got to get out of here. In fact, she walked in on her dad holding her mom's face close to the stove's element while it was on. Oh my God. Like not good, very scared. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's awful. And Pamela was scared and mad enough that she hauled off and punched her dad in the jaw. Get him. I have so much respect for Pam Anderson, dude. Yes. Good for her. And she acknowledges. She's like, I know that my brother wanted to do that so badly.

Like being a guy and like, blah, blah, but he knew the backlash from his dad would be just so much greater. And so I think that also kind of unleashed something in her where she's just like, okay, here we go. I'm Barb wire now, bitch. Yeah, and her dad, like, left the kitchen. Like, he didn't know what, like, he, he didn't. Because he's a fucking bully. Yeah, yeah. And she stood up to him.

Exactly. But it was at that point where she was like, I can't change this. Like, they have this relationship that has been going on my whole life, and there's no way that. And even if she could, it's not her responsibility. Exactly. So she decides it's time to leave. And she goes ahead and doesn't quite. get to Vancouver because her mom being the island girls that they are, she's like, no, you can't move

to the mainland. That's too far. We'll have to take the ferry. Yeah. Disgusting. If you show up a fucking second too late. Yeah, yes. They shoot you in the head. BC fairies are intense. Yes. There was also this way that Pamela described it where like her mom would be like, there was a shooting in Texas this week. So I don't think you should go to Vancouver. And Pamela was like, But that is so far. That's my mother. That is so far. But her mom would be like, but there's nothing in between Vancouver and Texas. So we don't know. We don't know.

That's an Anna Maria as well. Oh, yeah. She, I remember one time she told me not to go to a particular sky train station in Surrey because five people had been shot there. Uh-huh. And I said, a revolver only has six chambers, so I like my odds. And she didn't find that as funny as you did. No, no, I understand why, but also, I mean, you know that she was like, she opened the fridge door and, like, laughed into the fridge. She had to us. She didn't want to give you that. My family is well used to ignoring my shit by now. She probably didn't even notice. So instead of moving to Vancouver, Pamela heeds her mom's advice and she moves in with family in Victoria. She moves in with her anti-vi. Our province's capital, home of the parliament.

Beautiful. Home of the government. High tea. She's in Victoria with her Auntie Vi. And her Auntie Vi is a recent widow. And Auntie Vi is, like, amazing. She's feather-boad, like, negligee. Like, honey, take care of your son.

Honey, stay. Honey. Oh, uh. I'm going to the Legion with Ed. Exactly. This guy's going to be. Yes. Big time.

Big time. And Pamela just loves her. It's a really good time for Pamela because she can see. It's the same beauty that her mom had. but it's a little different, right? And that's what is so beautiful about, like, having aunties and uncles is, like, same, same, but different going on. And she kind of appreciates this over-the-top beauty, this, like, really, like, saucy and strong.

Dolly Parton. Yes, yeah. I'm not immune to the charms of, like, a peroxide blonde with a great fake rack. Yeah. Who among us? Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

So her time in Victoria is not too long because Auntie Vi has her life to live. live. Pamela remembers she, like, walked in the door and her aunt comes up to her, and she's like, feather boa negligee wearing. She's like, could you give me like an hour? I have a friend over. Oh, no. An hour. Good for her, though. Yeah, right. And Pamela was like, you need your space. I need my space. I'm going to go to Vancouver. Let's figure this out. I'm going to go to Vancouver. We're going to Vancouver. So she gets a job working. in a gym. They have free tans. So she's like, sweet, I'm going to, like, tan the shit out of myself. This is a great, like, makeover into Pam Anderson kind of sequence that we're going here.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. She, like, douses in the sun in, in the summers. Yeah, good for her. She meets a man at the gym, like, through the gym. He kind of works there off and on, but he's also a photographer. And he's mad about her and loves her. And she's like, okay, let's get engaged. Yeah, let's do it. as one does in the throes of a passionate, whatever. Their relationship is not great. He's quite jealous, but he's also very sneaky. She has this story of coming home one day,

and he was washing his penis in the sink. She's like, I don't know what is going on, but... We use that sink for food. Okay, so, Taylor, you need to take it away. This is the moment where Pam's friend really wants to go to the BC Lions game, and their mutual friend who has the tickets, he works for Labat's beer. And so he gives them these shirts and says, let's go. We free tickets, but you got to wear the shirts.

And then what happens? Then what happens? Pam Anderson probably has the How I Became a Star Story of All Time, certainly locally. She was shown on the Tron at the BC Lions game where all the fucking stars start out is on the fucking JumboTron at the fucking Canadian foot. football game, the BC Lions are trotting out. So amazing. Wonderful stuff.

Yeah. Pam Anderson could never lose Canada. We would claim Pam forever. As you should. Wayne Gretzky lost Canada. That's crazy. Pam Anderson could never lose Canada. No.

You know, she's wearing this, like, it's kind of a bit of a crop top, and she has jeans, like high-wasted, synched jeans, and she's tan. She's really tan. And on the shirt, right over her boot. it says in the blue zone, which is a Labat's saying. And she's up on the Jumbotron. And she remembers seeing herself on the Jumbotron. And she's like, oh, my God.

Oh, I don't, oh, I don't. I look horrible. I look horrible. No, no. Yeah. And then somebody comes to her and says, hey, we want you to do the draw on the 50-yard line. And she's like, what? And so off she goes and she's taken down to the field to do the, like, a 50-50 draw.

Love it. Do y'all have 50, you all have 50-50 draws, right? You know, it's something that I personally have only encountered in Canada. Okay, so the 50-50 draw then is you pay 10 bucks for an arm's length of tickets until everybody's bought into basically a big pot. And let's say it's a theater hosting a 50-50 draw. It's intermission or something. If your ticket gets drawn, you get 50% of the pot and then the other 50% goes to the

house and it's a way to fundraise a lot of the time. Pam is on the 50-yard lining. She's looking up at this huge stadium filled with people and she describes all their little heads is like little eraser heads. I love it. And she's just like, what? Holy cow. You know, this is like the most exciting thing that's ever happened to her.

Small town girl, making it big, right? Yeah. The Tron at the BC Lions game, baby. Right, yeah. Little does she know how much bigger it's going to get. Mm-hmm. So Labats contacts her and says, we want to do a photo shoot with you. We want you to do a poster.

And she's like, uh, can my fiancé, he's a photographer, can you take the photos? And they're like, No, no, get him out of here. Okay, fine, whatever. Fine. Yeah. And so she does it. And if you find these, if you look, they're easy to find there on the internet. She's very young, right? She's in her early 20s. And there's a very, like, girl next door vibe about her. She's not wearing a lot of makeup. Her hair's kind of 80s, tossled, but it's not, like, teased and scoop. Not teased or anything. Yeah. It's kind of more like mermaid bee. hair than it is like 80s teased. An effortless beauty parentheses very tan. Yes. Yes, exactly. Got it. And that gets around. It's an advertisement for granted, like a more local beer,

like north of the border kind of beer, but it makes enough of a sensation. You know, she's again seen wearing the shirt like in the blue zone. That would have been posted all over every liquor store when you went in to get your scratches validated and fucking buy a, a Mickey of, what do you buy a fireball? Mickey a Fireball. How about that? Buy your Mickey a Fireball. You see. You see Pam up there. She doesn't even know how this image got to the Playboy Mansion. The writers will write in a transition later. Yes. Yeah, exactly. She gets a call from a representative of the Playboy Mansion, a woman who goes by the name Marilyn and says, we're really interested in having you come down and... Get them out. Pretty much. Come down, get the rack out, and let's see what happens. Yeah. We think. it would be a great thing for us. And if you think it would be great, we could, we could think about

making this happen. And Pamela's fiancee is in the room at the time when she has taken this phone call. And he's like, who is it? What is it? What's going on? What's going on? And Pamela's like, you're saying this as if it might be a thing. Is this a real thing? Are you for real? She's essentially like, are you for real? Because I'm for real. Are you for real? And the woman's like, this is real. This is real. Yes. Yes. We're not, it's not hypothetical. We want to invite you to L.A. to the playboy mansion. We want you to pose. Yes. And she's like, I'm coming. I'm coming. And she like hangs up the phone and runs out of there. She gets rid of that guy. She stays with a friend for a few days. Fuck that guy. Exactly. Bad supporting characters. Bad supporting characters in this one. In this story, they all do tend to be men. I will say that. Interesting chick, string of shitty men. Isn't that the story? Yeah. So she goes to the airport. She goes to YVR. She's like, she's so excited. She's at passport control. Nicest airport in the world. You come down those fucking little two escalators next to the water feature that's full of tunis. You know that customs is going to be a goddamn breeze and it is.

It really is. It's so nice. That's every time I come down those stairs, that's when I like text everybody like, I'm here. And then I take a picture. Yeah, I love those stairs. Because that's to me, that's like, okay. Like the end is tangibly here. Usually I just was on like an eight-hour plane or something. Exactly. So she's at passport control and they're like, what's your purpose for entering the U.S.? And she's like, I am going to pose for a playboy. And she has her little letter and she's like, ah. And the border patrol is like, you're going to, I'm sorry, you're working in the United States.

No. You need a work permit to do that. Oh, Tammy. So we're not going to allow you entry. She's like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay. Bump in the road. She goes back out.

She calls Marilyn again, and she's like, they're not going to let me come because I'm working. So what do we do? And Marilyn's like, okay, I'm going to book you another flight on another airline. So Pamela goes into the bathroom, changes her clothes, puts on a hat. She goes to the other airline, and she's like, hi, I have a flight to Los Angeles. And apparently it's the same woman who is at the other counter. Oh, this is amazing. Who's there?

And she's like... Does she spot her? Absolutely not, honey. I was hoping she would get away with it. So she calls Marilyn again. She's like, I've been foiled yet again. So Marilyn's like, okay, okay. You know what?

How do you feel about just hopping on a bus? We'll get you to Seattle and we'll see how that works. There's passport control, but it's not as heavy, not as intense. They're sloppy in Seattle. A little bit. Because she gets on the bus and passport control goes to the person behind her, looks at their passport, asks them a few questions. skips her and goes to the person in front of her.

Love that. No big whoop-ed-dup. That was the story of me leaving Peru, man. Oh, yes, yes. Every fucking 10 seconds, someone looking at my idea and that's, and the Josie, the adrenaline, I swear to God, if you could bottle that feeling. I even in the moment noticed I was like, this is like, I'm so, I'm so upset, but like also like, it's never been this high stakes for me, ooh, you know?

What could happen? My life could totally change now now. Yeah. Maybe I'm Peruvian now. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I just live here now. So she crosses the border. She spends the night in a shitty Seattle hotel. But then she wakes up and she gets on a first class flight to Los Angeles. Beautiful. City of Stars. City of Angels. It's gay pride parade when she lands. And so her limo that is taking her to the Belage Hotel in Bel Air. Jesus. This is amazing stuff. She's like driving in the back of the liver. and there's like pink hot pants and rainbow flags and she like calls her mom when she gets to

the hotel and she's like mom you'll never guess like everybody in L.A. is gorgeous and they're gay and they wear pink hot pants. It's wonderful. That's funny. And her mom is like, you've really made it now. Yeah. Dude, honest to God, Vancouver Island types are pretty loosey. What do you mean by that? Can you say more? Say more. Oh, you know, vote. green, smoke weed. Yeah. Don't be super politically judgey in my experience, although I don't, you know, all the, all the people that I know from the island are very politically judgy.

Put it to you that way. There's trees and waves and sand and sea to worry about, yeah. What's there to be mad about, dude? Yeah. What's there to be mad about? It's so pretty there. Exactly. But she's gone.

She's left. She's in the sunny hills of California now. And her first stop is to the Playboy Mansion. She is 22 years old. She is wearing her Metallica t-shirt. Her hair is doused in Sunnan, and she is very tan. She has this odd fascination with these socks that have little like pom-pom poof balls on the ankle. Right.

So she's wearing those to the Playboy Mansion. Some different just because she likes it. Yeah, some great. And she meets all these people who are very excited to see her. They've heard this like small town girl from Canada's coming down. and Labots and, you know, whatever. And she finally gets to meet Hugh Hefner. That old lizard.

She doesn't describe him as an old lizard. Those are my words, not Pamelaus. We will say, we will say that. We will say that. One of the paintings that's on the wall is a Dali painting. And apparently one of the first interactions she has with Heph is they talk about Dali and surrealism and how, like, she loves the artwork and how. What an interesting woman.

So interesting. And she's so young. and she's so, like, fresh-faced, right? And, like, Dali, that's great. She's, like, not drinking, you know, it's a party. Like, there's a lot of people. There's a lot of beautiful women around. She feels totally inferior to all of them.

She's like, well, just you wait, honey. But she is gobsmacked and a little overwhelmed, but she also isn't turned off. We'll say that. Okay. This is just a slightly awkward feeling party, but I know that it's because it's the first one and I don't know anyone. Exactly.

And these men are kind of hitting on me, But, you know, one thing about the Playboy mention is that it is very strategically designed so that women outnumber men, which makes it a... A matriarchy. A matriarchy in some ways. Yes. With Hugh Hefner as the big mother. Right.

Yes. Okay. Now it falls apart. The lizard at the top doesn't make sense. Yeah. It wasn't that well thought out. I apologize. No, but there is something.

Like, the invitation list is constructed that way so that men get to have like three women. Yeah, three women on their arm. Yeah. It has that vote. vibe. But the other side of that is that there is like kind of a sisterhood. There is a vibe where safety and numbers. Safety in numbers. Exactly. Safety and numbers. And Pamela Anderson still describes the playboy as being like a home base for her. It was a really important landing pad for her. A positive one, it seems. Interesting. Interesting. She describes Hugh Hefner and the whole vibe as being like one of the last bastions of

Hollywood chivalry. Back when the mobsters ran Las Vegas and days are good. Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that kind of vibe. A little bit of that. Yeah. There's naked women and there's like corsets and boobies out and all of it, but she sees it in this way of self-expression and a ticket out and like just what a wild left turn for her life she feels like. And she's committed to just kind of living. She's like, well, I'm going to try it. Yeah, fuck it. Go for it. She asks her mom, like, mom, do you think I should really pose in Playboy? Like, is that a good idea? And her mom's response is like, the only reason I didn't pose in Playboys is because nobody asked me. I say, do it. Go for it. Let's see what happens. Do you want to finish this joint? Yeah. Exactly. Look, Dolphins. Yeah. Vancouver Island parenting. I'm telling you. So the next day, Pamela Anderson mistakenly sleeps in.

In there was just there this week. Awful feeling. It's horrible. But she says, actually, everybody was really chill. She showed up to the photo shoot. And they're like, no problem. No problem. We're just, we're going to fix your hair. That's what we're going to do first. So they re-d dye her hair so that it actually has some blonde-lookingness to it. Makeover sequence, yeah. Yeah. And it's a very quick photo shoot. She is topless in it, you know, in these in these first images that they take. and she describes it as, you know, she was so painfully shy in high school and so inward, and there's so much shame attached to what she had experienced.

And now this was a whole new chapter, a whole new thing that she could do. And, you know, so many people say like, oh, well, you must have felt so beautiful, like, so pretty. And she was like, I didn't feel beautiful. I didn't feel pretty. All these other playmates were way more good looking than, I thought they were more good looking than I would ever be. I didn't feel pretty. I felt brave. And I wanted to be brave.

No, for sure. That's very brave. It's all very brave. Yeah. Isn't it telling that even Pam Anderson enters a room and thinks everyone here is prettier than me? Yeah. That's sad. People, man.

People. Yeah. We're our own worst critics, for sure. We're horrible to ourselves. We're horrible to ourselves. We're really horrible, yeah. So I'll read another little poem section from the memoir, specifically about Playboy and her decision to go ahead and do it. Playboy was an honor and a privilege. I never thought of it as immoral or salacious, but the unforeseen

downside was that it may have set me up. It was my choice. I accepted my fate. It gave some people the impetus, sadly, to treat me without respect. But I was more used to that. I wasn't going to be taken down. I had already survived to this point. Nothing could hurt me more than how I'd already been hurt. Playboy was empowering. It helped me in ways I could never articulate. Dang. Yeah. Interesting. Very interesting. Very. But what a woman. Jesus. Yeah. And I mean, she does have like, even as a kid, like this kind of crazy experience with sexual abuse and this very like freeing and wild childhood that gets squashed. There's a chance for it to open again here. And, you know, Hugh Hefner and this representative of the mansion, Marilyn, kept repeating, like, this is not how it happens.

Women line up around the block to have their polarites taken so that Hugh will see them like six months down the road. Real, real. For sure. 100%. You do not get invited to the Playboy Mansion. Hugh doesn't even watch Canadian football. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So one, there's that. But then to like have a, you know, like a quick little photo shoot and then that becomes the cover of the October 89 issue of Playboy. Like, wow. Girl, this is not, like, Marilyn kept trying to emphasize that. This is, like, you are the unicorn here.

This is it. Yes. Yeah. There's dues that you were supposed to have paid. Right. And you haven't. So, enjoy it. Free ride, dude.

Good for her. And part of her free ride is there is a Playboy closet that she has access to. Oh, I would love to take a look in the Playboy closet. thigh high, plastic boots, a lot of corsets. Fluffy, white, gauzy, I'm imagining a little bit. Yeah, yeah, some little, like, little floaty negligee. For when your sugar and then black leather from when you're spice. Exactly, yes.

Got it. Yeah. There's also a Playboy gym where all the bunnies work out. And she remembers being there and looking around and being like, God, everybody has such gorgeous boobs. And the playmate next to her is like, you know, they're all fake, right? Oh, baby. And Pam is like, what?

Really? They do that? They do that? And that's where the idea came from. I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of other ideas. But I think being a playmate and like having this kind of family and, you know, she does this cover. But then she goes on and she travels the world with Playboy to take these photo shoots. You know, Huff calls her the DNA of Playboy.

And she was going to be the playmate of the year. but it was during Operation Desert Storm, so they decided they had to go with an American girl, not a Canadian. No, my God. Oh, my God. I know. The integrity of the playmate of the year title will be selling if we give it to some maple syrup guzzlin curler. What the fuck?

What did we do? We've been on your... This is... See, this is typical Americans now. Oh, gosh. So funny. That's funny. So she feels like the Playboy Mansion is like this home space, this family space.

So I'm sure when she's in that gym and these women that she loves and knows and respects are like, girl, get a boob job. Fuck it. You'll make more money. Like, it's an investment. It's like being at the gym. Let me tell you a little something about the 90s, gal. Yeah, yeah.

These are coming in. You know, her body in particular and her boob job becomes like fair game for all the dumbass. Mean impressions. Yeah. Late night hosts who are all dudes. It's fair game. And we'll get into that as she moves forward in her career. But I will say that Pam Anderson, it might be a little different now.

But at least during that time in her early 20s was probably one of the least ambitious people who wound up this famous. I love hearing the stories of how sometimes it just goes to people who don't really care. It's white swan and black swan. It's white swan and black swan. Pam Anderson is black swan. Sorry, Natalie Portman. Yeah. She can't help that it comes effortlessly.

Exactly. And I don't mean to say that she doesn't work hard and that she like isn't, you know, she's showing up. She's doing it. But she's just kind of seeing where this takes her. She doesn't have a particular path in mind. She's floating. She is figuring it out as she goes. And that doesn't mean that she's like sitting there being like, I need to do this.

I want to do this. I need to meet this person and then do this and like network and da-da-da. She is like, I really like this modeling thing. Maybe I'll like acting. Maybe I should give that a shot. I'm going to do the best job I can and be the best actress I can be. Multi-toel player, not just a pretty face. So she is wildly popular as a Playboy Bunny. She appears topless. She appears nude. It's it's Playboy. So it's not like a leg spread situation. Maybe we could say that. We'll leave that to Hustler. Yes, exactly. Penthouse, Christ, we'll leave it to Penn House. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

If we could only all get to this milestone in our careers, she has a cameo on married with children. Oh, love and marriage, love and marriage. I hate fat women, Peg. That's the show. Ew! I'm horny! This was the show I was not allowed to watch.

Our house was pretty lenient. You missed nothing. Yes. You missed nothing. Oh, no. I watched. it because I was told not to watch it, so I definitely watched it. Yeah, see what happens, Alice? You see what happens when you tell him no?

So she was at the soundstage on set, leaving married with children, and this woman comes rushing up to her, and she says, you're going to miss Hammer Time, you're going to miss Hammer Time. You follow me. And Pamela is like, okay. Good for her. Lady Smith, dude, I'm telling you, the Vancouver Island, they're built different. out there. They're built different out there. Yeah, sure. That sounds fun.

Well, how not. Put tamertime. So she winds up in this waiting room that's filled with all these other, you know, cute, beautiful women. And she's like, what? And then they, like, ask her some questions. And then she's put into another room. And then she's on a set.

And then she's like, oh, my gosh. Hammer. Oh, this is home improvement. Hammer time. I'm on the set of tool time. So how the fuck, how the fuck, what the fuck? Wait. She invariably and did not know that she was auditioning for the part of Lisa at... Oh, and they just gave it to her and like, oh, get over here. It's on right now.

It didn't quite happen that way, but it wasn't until they were filming the pilot that she realized, oh, they hired me. And so if you don't know Home Improvement, it was a very popular show during this time. Millennial Reminiscences. Yeah, in the 90s. It stars Tim Allen and he hosts a show on. all about tools on TV, but he, that character, whose name is Tim. Tim the Toolman, Taylor, absolutely. I hate women. Power tools.

Yeah. I got, I got them all. You're all trapped in here. You're all trapped in here. Bying to get out. You see their little fists pounding at my forehead. There's his home life with his three sons and his wife, and then there's the show that he hosts. And Lisa, the character that Pamela Anderson,

place is the eye candy for the show within the show. She comes out and she like holds a big tool and she's wearing like overalls and a bikini top under that. And look at and looking fab. Looking looking really good. Yeah. And her line, the first few seasons was here you go Tim. You go Tim. Yep. I remember. Her part gets expanded and her line includes, uh, have a nice day as well. Go. We're moving on up. That is a pay-bub. Yep. Yes. They'll give you a sag card for that. Yeah. So, Home Improvement was a really, really popular show, which is funny because we never really talk about it. Extremely popular, extremely popular. Like, top the charts. Yeah. And Tim Allen is all types of problematic. In her memoir, she recounts, like, one of her first days there. Tim, they encounter each other in the hallway in front of the dressing rooms and he's wearing a robe. And he pulls it open and he's totally nude. And he says, ha ha, now we're even. I've seen you naked. Now, you've seen me naked.

Tim. Apparently Tim Allen does not corroborate that story. He denies it. He strenuously denies? Well, why wouldn't you deny it? It's a gross thing to do. Of course, you would deny it. You would deny it. And she has more credibility with me than him. I'm sorry. It's like a toss-off line in the memoir.

She's not making a big deal of it. And, like, do you know how many dong she probably saw in that same way? Ugh. But yeah. She is on this primetime TV show. And it's a family TV show. We should be clear. She's a Playboy Bunny, and she's appeared, you know, in a nudie magazine. And she really wasn't, again, not super ambitious.

She doesn't have a publicist. She doesn't have a stylist. She's just kind of out there floating, going with it. And she is falling in love, left, right, and center. She has boyfriend after boyfriend after boyfriend after boyfriend. She's like Mario Van Peebles. Kelly Slater. Like, anybody and everybody, handsome, beautiful man.

Lorenzo Law Miss type. Exactly. Yeah. She is either dating them or on dates with them or whatever. Right. She is definitely looking for love. She might not be very career-minded, but she is... She loves love.

She loves love. She's just like you, Taylor, Basta. She loves love. Because that's how they breed them up here. Yeah. We love. We feel passionately and we smoke a lot of weed and we love love. It's so true.

That's so true. The tabloids are kind of getting into it because it's like a playboy bunny and like, of course, she has a lot of boyfriends. But if you read it from her perspective and if you just look a little closely, it's like, girl just like what's a partner. She wants to like go to the movie. She wants to like. I don't even think it needs to be pure. I think that she has someone who's like, we all float on. I think that's a great thing to float on on. I like this little date. I like that little date. Oh no, I've fallen in love a million times. Great for a person like this. Exactly. Who cares?

Yeah. As long as it's not a matter of her, like, constantly getting her heart broken over and over and over, because then at that point, it's like, well, for your own sake, you might try a different approach. But if it's just like she's playing the field and having little affairs of the heart and the body, yeah, fuck it. Yeah. That sounds nice. And, you know, she's probably mid-20s at this point. Like, this is the time. This is the era.

This is what she wants to do. And so she's going to do it. She's dating a guy, one of these, you know, handsome young men who's also an actor. and he has an audition for Baywatch. She decides, okay, well, I'll come with you. I'll just, you know, I'll be around. And somebody from the staff, from the casting, sees her and they're like, are you Pam Anderson, are you Pam Anderson who never shows up, the one who never shows up?

She's like, well, what do you mean? They're like, well, for a few years now, we've been trying to get you to audition. We've been calling the Playboy Mansion and seeing if you would come auditioned, for Baywalks. She's like, oh, yeah, I guess that is me. I just, I don't know, I've been busy, like. Bitch me too. Yeah, bitch me too. Like, I don't listen to my voicemails, guys. We don't even have those. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, don't page me. Uh-uh. Am I answering machine? The tape is full. Yeah, I was busy. And immediately they're like, oh my God, I can't believe you're here. Like, come sit down. We have this whole character sketched out

for you. We think you'll really, really like her. And like... This is just how people receive this woman, huh? It's just like, oh my God, give me a hug, let me give you everything. Yeah, oh my God. Yeah, do you want the keys to my fucking house? Yeah. What are we doing? Of course, the boyfriend is furious. He does get apart. He gets on the show, but he's like, fuck this. Like, no, we're not dating anymore. And so that's gone. Good friends. And the producers of Baywax are like, okay, we want to sit down and we want to, like, build this character. We have this idea. Her name is C.J. Parker. Mm-hmm. C. CJ Parker, yes. Casey Jean. We want to base her off of you. We love your look. Your look is perfect for this. You're going to be a bathing suit. But we want to build this character with you. And so she sits down and she's like, well, I love love.

And I love animals. And I love crystals. And I just kind of go with the flow. And they're like, uh-huh. Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. CJ Parker falls in and out of love, gets her heartbroken all the time. She's very whimsical. Like, her first appearance on the series is season three, and she is playing a saxophone, which we know, fuck yeah. She played in high school. Yes. Continuity.

It's all continuity. It's all continuity. And so they wanted her so badly that they built this character around her. Or they built it as close to her as possible so she wouldn't have to app because they were playing it safe. Yes, I think that is definitely true. And that's, you know, that's a telltale way to, or like a... Oh, no, that's just probably misogyny.

Like, I'm not shocked. But to your point, she was the centerpiece of the marketing of this show. The iconic image of Pamela Anderson in the red swimsuit from Baywatch must have made hundreds of millions of dollars all in between the show and the, it was, oh my God, huge. As you pointed out, Baywatch is one of those shows that, like, it was big in the U.S. Like, people know it, partly because of her, like you're saying, but people around the world knew it. What you don't understand, America, is that everyone used to want to be you. And now?

And now, well, we'll talk about that later. This is very, like, classic, like, this is a very American kind of feeling show. Although we do have David Hasselhoff, of course, rep in Germany. But it's a very, like, again, the sunbleached blonde, who ironically is not American, she's Canadian, right? She's not even a blonde, yeah. When you see her in this image, she seems to be, like, this Americana show where there's, like, you know, bad guys come in and there's explosions and these lifeguards are fixing it somehow, you know? Yeah. on dolphins.

Yes. Little Jimmy stuck under the rock and the cavern is filling with water. You have to get him, David Hasselhoff. And here's the thing. And I've experienced this as a Californian abroad. It's not selling America. It's selling California. Okay.

People like California worldwide more than they like America. It's a much easier sell. It's beautiful. Yeah. If you don't like American politics, then California has enough of the opposite that you can be fine with it, you know? Just don't move to. Irvine, you'll be okay.

If you'll, yeah, keep out of there. Yeah, yeah. And any Reagan, you know, Orange County vibe. If you hear the phrase like planned community. Yeah. You're just going to want to... Move to the side. Look around.

The houses, are they different or are they the same? Exactly. I'll read this from her book to give you a sense of like how insane this era was. The Baywatch years were a blur. By the fourth season, I was the highest paid actress on the show. Many of the international broadcasters would buy. only the episodes I appeared in. So there were Pamela clauses in the international deals.

Baywatch was shown in 150 countries. At the time, I didn't even know there were 150 countries. Yeah, Baywatch was worldwide. Yes. Baywatch was worldwide and huge worldwide. So huge. When she got the part, she was still trying to do tool time. She was still trying to do home improvement.

And she had this choice. Can I be in this fucking beach show where I'm the centerpiece? Right. And I have special clauses in my contract and so on. Or do I want to say, here's your tool, Tim. Have a nice day or whatever the fuck my new line is. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, at the time when she was going to leave home improvement for Baywatch, home improvement paid more. It was going to be a step down. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. She called it right.

She called it right. It's funny because her rationale wasn't money, one. And two, it wasn't like, oh, it'll be centered around me. She was like, I get to go to the beach all the time. I get to swim. I like swimming. Like, this will be, I guess she's got to be, like, on the beach all day. When you think about the amount of time that Pam Anderson has probably spent on the beach in her life, she must have been loving it.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm sure it wasn't always fucking sunshine and roses, as you'll tell me, but broadly, a very nice place to work. They filmed it on location on a beach in Los Angeles. Things were getting so popular that that made it hard. People would swarm the set. In particular, they would swarm the lifeguard tower that was CJ's tower. That's so scary. That's like a mob of zombies, you know?

She did have a few incidences, especially traveling abroad where like, uh-oh, you know, like we're getting crushed and, oh, we got to go to the van. Now the van is tipping, like that kind of. The crowd is a thing of its own. Oh, yeah. It's like a miasma that can like encroach and, it's horrible shit. Especially when they're like, oh, so beautiful. Yeah.

You're sexy. I want you. Let me touch you. Let me touch you. Let me touch you. I already have a whole idea about who you are. Yeah. Yeah.

You're the girl next door and you'll save me from drowning and, you know. And you're a playboy, playmate. Yeah. And I expect you to be on in all three of those categories when we meet. Yes. It's, oh, big time celebrity. Yeah. Again, image.

It's that image that I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she's responding with this honesty, this like, let's see where life takes me. I don't know. Like, dolphins, let's go. You know. Sure. Sure. Sure. On the set, a baywalk, she meets Kelly Slater, a famous surfer. And they kind of have an off and on again relationship. She really likes them. I mean, she's, there's a lot of people that she's seeing and dating. And Kelly Slater's kind of the same way. He's like, sure, I'm in town, but oh, wait, my other girlfriend. You know, like, oh, they don't all have to be the one. Though, this is when Pamela Anderson finds her one.

It is New Year's Eve. She wants to start a new chapter. She goes out to the bar called sanctuary that she's part owner of. I know, right? Never ends. Never ends. Remember I say, like, she's not ambitious, but gosh, that girl shows up to work. Like, she really just like goes for it.

She grinds it out. She seems like she's putting it. Paces. Yeah. And she's celebrating, happy, who she sends shots of Goldschlager. Again, so 90s. Yes, Goldslager. The VIP room where the drummer of Motley crew, Tommy Lee, is hanging out. And Tommy Lee thinks that she sit only him. A shot. Oh, funny. So he comes over and says, hello, licks the side of her face, and wow, she is stars in her eyes. She's just like, he's... Licks the side of her face, you say?

Yes. Just flex of gold on her cheek, what imagines. And so her friend is like, oh, no, girl, we're going home. No, no, no, no, no. No, you don't want to mess with Tommy Lee. Like, let's not, you're getting hurt. Let's go. Let's go home.

And so Pamela's like, okay, you're right, you're right, you're right. and somehow Tommy gets her number. A phone book back in the day. Probably, yeah, yeah. Aver Anderson is right there. Okay, Malibu, and yes. Put on Butterfield 8, please. Yeah, exactly.

And she doesn't answer, she doesn't call back, she's busy. She is filming Baywalk. She's still posing for Playboy and traveling internationally. She's a playmate, right? So it's not just posing, it's going and doing events and other. She got jobs, this woman. And jobs and jobs. Yes, exactly.

She doesn't have time for Tommy Lee. Until he calls one day. She's running out the door, on her way to the airport. She answers and says, hello, and it's Tommy Lee. And then a tongue comes out of the receiver and licks her face. Yeah. Got it. She's like, listen, I can't.

I'm on my way to Cancun. I'm going to Cancun. I'm doing a shoot. I'm doing a playboy shoot. I can't talk. Talk to you when I see you. Whatever. This pesky Cancun photo shoots.

And he's like, Cancun? We're in Cancun. She's like, I don't even know. I'm just going to Canada. It's in Mexico. She's like, I just learned that. And she's like, I got to go. I got to go.

Bye. She gets to Cancun and she's like, oh, fuck, this is not a big place. I was thinking, you know, I was mistaken. And I told Tommy Lee, who has the resources and time and intention to get here and find me. So she tells the hotel staff, she's like, if anybody comes around with like a lot of tattoos, I'm not here. Like, please don't let him in the hotel. She does her shoot.

Everything's going well. It's the last night. And there's a big club that she can see from her, like, high rise, her Cancun high rise. It's called La Boom. Beautiful. And she's like, it's just her last night. What's a night?

Yolo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know her vibe. I'm familiar enough with how she makes her choices like this way. Yeah. Yeah. Asher. Tommy Lee is there.

He's so excited to see her. He's like, let's do ecstasy, obviously. And she does. She's never done it. And she's like, what? First time with Tommy Lee? Yes, on ecstasy. In Cancun? In Cancun. When you're like engaged in professional activities? Yes. Yes. No, no, no.

And the party goes on. It is not her last night in Cancun because she extends her trip. Oh. They are just like, don't leave each other's side. Smitten. Smitten. Smitten little kittens. And it's pretty clear that it's both. It's what she has been wanting is like to be smitten and to be smet at. To be smet at. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. She doesn't want to like be together with the rich guy who just like wants her as a thing in the window. You know, she doesn't. A Hugh Hefner. Yeah. She's not interested in and that. She's not interested in the guy who's more focused on his career than her. She wants to be somebody's world. You know, she's just like so hungry for that all encompassing love. Oh, needy. I'll give it to you.

Pam Anderson, I would love you every day if you came to live with me. You sweet angel. I know, right? Yes. I don't have a lot of space. I'll have to sleep on the coach. Pam can have the bed. That's the gentlemanly thing to do, really. Yes, I think so.

I think so. And it is four days until Tommy Lee is like, you know what? Let's just get married. And he takes off his friend, not even his own, his friend's skull ring and gives it to Pamela, puts it on our finger. Tommy. After four days of knowing each other, they get married on the beach. She's in a white bikini. Pam.

He is in board shorts. Yeah. It is just like a fucking wild, wild ride. They have the little like disposable cameras at the wedding and stuff like that. Which apparently Pam says, oh, that was a mistake because then those photos got out. So now... Shame on you, Robin Williams at the fucking pharmacist. There we go.

And, you know, your response there at the beginning being like, ah, Pam, why? That's exactly her family's response. They are like, ah, why? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do not change your will, Pam. Yes, yeah, yeah. That kind of has that vibes.

And they get back to California. They get back to Malibu, and she's like, wait, what's our last name? And he's like, it's leave. I'm Tommy Lee. And she's like, but don't you have another last name? Is it like Tommy Lee Jones or something? Tommy Lee Jones is obviously where we go. And he's like, no, that's not my name.

I'm not. Wait, wait, do you think I'm Tommy Lee Jones? Because I'm not Tommy Lee Jones. She didn't think that. But it's like, illustrative of like, what a world when this. No, she didn't know his name. Yeah. She didn't even know his name.

Yeah. And not like a strategic name, the last name that she would. take. I remember. I'm old enough to remember the brief period where she was working as both Pamela Lee and Pamela Anderson Lee, I think. And then she switched back after the, after the breakup. Exactly.

And we'll get to that. But before we get to their breakup. Sorry, did I step on the plot twist? I apologize. I don't think anybody's surprised. No offense, Pamela, but. In a good way, their relationship was not just confined to those four days of smink. kitten whimsy. It was their whole time together. And they were together for about three years.

Tommy Lee would show up at their house. They moved in together. And he would like come and get her in full shining armor riding a white horse. He was like night and shining armor. Josie, how would you react to that, I guess, gesture of affection if Mitchell say were to do it? I'd be like, what the fuck? Like, how much is this? This horse? This poor. horse? Like what is happening? Yeah. I didn't ask you to be my white night. What the fuck is this? Exactly. Yeah. You don't think I can take care of myself? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's like Tommy Lee

is just willing to me her energy. The dream. The dream. It's the dream. You know, if we think back to Pamela's parents, they also were madly in love with each other. Emphasis on the madly too. Yes. There's a difference between like, even like deeply, passionately caring about someone or being smitten about them. But like, I would say that like the kind of abuse we're talking about is like hard to like reconcile and love. You know what I mean? Yeah. He shows kind of early signs that she can pass off as like, well, I think that's cute.

He would get pretty possessive of her and show up on set at Baywatch. And it was to the point where the showrunners gave her a beeper on the back of her red swimsuit so that she would know when he was there. They would not do certain scenes that they had planned if they knew Tommy was going to be there. Like if she had to kiss a co-star or whatever like that. No mouth to mouth. That was not going to happen when he was around. Interesting.

Yeah. In fact, there was one scene that she was like, I'm just not going to tell him. I have to kiss so and so, but I'm not going to tell him. And he saw it and he blew up at her. He was so pissed. Yeah, fuck that. She's lying and, you know. You can't, like, she's a character in a TV show.

CJ Parker is not a real person. She's great. She's a lot like Pam. Yeah. But she's not Pam. This is an actor who's doing a professional job that she was hired to do it. Exactly. Which is to simulate a kiss on the lips,

with David Hasselham. Exactly. Yes. So at this time, too, she got cast in her first feature-length film, which you had already mentioned Barb Wire. Have you seen Barb Wire? I have not seen Barb Wire. I think it had, like, my recollection is that critically it's supposed to be a little bit

stinky, but like critics hate women, so I don't know. I think it's kind of like a cult classic vibe. I have not seen it. I'll say that. And the documentary that Pamela does, she's like, I don't even know. what Barbwire is about. They kept switching the script. Like, if she got more and more famous, they're like, oh, we're going to pump more money into this and like, do this and blow this up. And now the script is this and that. She's like, I don't even know what's going on anymore, guys.

But I show up on time and I read my lines and I look good doing it. Yeah, yeah. And they did this big rollout for Barb wire at the Cannes Film Festival. Oh, good. How long was the applause? 10, 20, 30 minutes Oh my God, yeah, that's not what I'm saying. No, this wasn't even the film. It was just the promotion. They hadn't shot anything. It was just the promotion. We're pitching Barb wire.

Yeah. And so Pamela shows up on the dock. She hops out of like a yacht. And she's wearing what becomes a very iconic image. She's wearing like this boostier black leather, like almost plasticy thing with like skin tight pants and her hair is really teased. And she has started doing this like really. really heavy eye makeup, like a dark smoky look. Yeah.

And the lip liner is on. Like, she's wearing this in Baywatch too. Originally, CJ was supposed to be kind of hippie-dippy, but she's like, I want to be the bombshell. And I think she was, like, you pointed out the misogyny of like. She wanted to fucking just play a character. She wanted to play more of a character. And so she's like, I want to have lashes on while I'm underwater, you motherfuckers.

Let's get it done. And it was the right call. And it was the right call, dude. In the same way, this outfit that she wore to the barbed wire promotional stuff was all her own doing. They hadn't filmed anything. There was no costume for this character. She was just like, well, it seems like this is the vibe. So she gets her fucking workout pants.

Those are those skin tight pants that she's wearing. And she had this boostier and these boots from a photo shoot that she had done earlier. You are looking at the image. Yes. Yes. She, yeah, describe what you see. Pretend you're... She looks like a million goddamn bucks.

Yeah. She is in the... Yeah, I think you honestly described it pretty well. Skin tight, latex-looking corset. Uh-huh. Really surprised those are workout pants, but it doesn't really matter because your eyes, they're black and your eye is so drawn to like the striking hourglass figure that's cut. Yeah.

I love shape language in fashion, in style, and she's all curves. All curves. All curves. And the folks driving the yachts around also were noticing those curves. Like, apparently they were running into each other. This looks like a fucking Dior campaign. This is like amazing. Yes, and that was totally whipped together.

She put that together. And, you know, this is the height of her stardom. Like, she's so popular. And again, no stylist. She's putting together these looks. She doesn't have a publicist, which we will see very clearly soon. Again, it's like image and honesty. She's interested in playing these characters and playing with image and like, okay, well, what if I wear a whole bunch of makeup at the beach?

What is that? What's that character? What if I, you know, do this or do that? So around this time, she's married to Tommy Lee. Tommy Lee is showing up on the set of Baywatch causing havoc, showing up on the set of barbed wire causing havoc. He is very possessive of her time. He's like, no, she's my newly wed wife. I need, I need this.

Barbwire is kind of a end of the world, apocalypse, action, sex scenes, kind of vibe that's happening. Sounds fun. Yeah, I know. Film Club all the way. She has a very physical role. She's doing like roundhouse kicks and, you know, like,

bu, blah, bye. She's into it. She likes it. But she's getting really worn down. She's working a shit. ton, Baywaxe, barbed wire. And those are physical roles, very physical roles. Very physical roles. Yeah.

She has a very physical marriage with Tommy Lee. Like, they are like bonin. They're bonin. Okay. It's happening. And she's also trying to please everybody a little bit. She wants to make Tommy happy. She loves Tommy. She loves him so much.

But like she also wants to work and she wants to do this and that. And she's just kind of like exhausted. and at her wits end, and she ends up in the hospital. She faints on set. While in hospital, the doctors say, you've had a miscarriage. Oh, how awful. She didn't know she was pregnant, but she found out she lost the baby. Oh, that's a shame.

How awful. Let's add to this mix, insane 90s paparazzi. Insane 2000. Princess Diana era. Yes. Fucking craziness. The paparazzi are fucking loving Tommy Lee and Pamela because they are getting married, after four days and known each other.

They're both super hot in a kind of trashy, parenthesis, affectionate way. Exactly, yes. And so there's fucking, like, paparazzi in the tree outside their house. You know what I mean? Like, constantly. And if we know Tommy at all, we know that he really doesn't have a lot of patience for that. He's going to be mad-dogging these guys. He's going to be beating some heads in.

He's going to be pushing, ripping cameras. They're sued left, right and center all the time. Thank God for Baywatching, right? Right. Yeah, exactly. it's so messy and it's no fun and she decides, you know what, I need to slow down. I'm going to slow down a little bit. In that slowdown, she gets pregnant and she has the baby. Her and Tommy Lee are so excited. And I should say at this point, too, that since day one of them

being together in Cancun, these little Sminketkins have a little camcorder, a little 90s camcorder that is constantly playing. So this is what we call foreshadowing in the biz kids. You're going to want to pay attention to that camera because Josie's gone out of her way to mention it. It might come back later. Yes. And you should also know that like it is constantly going. It's like, oh, you made pancakes, babe. Let's look at like zoom in on the blueberry. You know what I mean? Like they're home videos. That's essentially what it is. It's home videos of, you know, Pamela pregnant. And it's home videos of like, you know, the blueberry. on the pancake. It's home videos of like Tommy Lee whipping his dick out so that he can like steer the

boat that they're on with his penis. Kind of hot. Kind of hot. Yeah. It's goofy. It's very, you know, and these are two people who feel very comfortable being naked. They are in the privacy of their own home or they're, you know, the privacy of a hotel room that they're in or the boat that they're on, you know, all these things. They are never meant for public consumption. But let's hold off there because her first son comes into the world. She really wants to do a water birth, but she's outside of the tub when he comes, and she's bummed. But she's stoked to do a home birth. And everything's safe. Mommy and baby are safe. Brandon Thomas Lee is their first child. Brandon and Dylan. Yes, Brandon and Dylan. How do you know? They're the names of the two male leads on

Beverly Hills 902.0. This is the type of error where you might hear a name on TV and be like, Brandon, you know what I mean? So it could be that. But yes, Brandon and Dylan, I remember this. They're a happy, beautiful little family, the three of them. Pamela is so incredibly stoked. She's just like over the moon. If she was looking for love, this was the like above and beyond of what she could

ever have hoped for. And Tommy Lee is happy as well. The paparazzi are always at the door, but you know, fuck them. And like her mom and her dad who are still together. She moves them down to Malibu. She's moved in with Tommy Lee, so she puts them in her Malibu condo. And they're there to, like, help babysit. She obviously doesn't trust any other babysitters.

Oh, God, yeah, of course. There's one day where they're in their home and they're, you know, they have a young baby. They're kind of homebodies at this point. And Tommy Lee is like, okay, who's playing the joke? And everyone there, like, you know, there's an assistant and there's Pamela. And they're like, what are you talking about? Like, what joke? They're like, who moved the safe?

Like, this refrigerator-sized safe? Like, who moved it? That's hilarious, guys. And they're like, ha-ha, ha-ha. Oh, no. Nobody's moved to the safe. Where's the safe? No one put their hand up, huh?

Oh. This huge, again, refrigerator-sized safe is not there. And they're like, oh, my God, how long has it not been there? In the previous six months to this point, they've been doing renovation. on their house. So they've had construction folks in and out. White sheets on things. Yes. Yeah. Things are covered. It was a safe that was kind of hidden. It was like hidden behind a, you know, a hidden wall almost kind of thing. I don't know. It's a Malibu house. They're rich. But it's like, wait, when was it missing? There's so many people who could have had access to it. Also, who steals that big of a safe? That's insane. We're looking for our most well-built linebacker. Yes. Yeah. And they're like, God damn, what was in the safe? And you know that they don't have, like, item by item inventory.

But Pamela's like... Oh, no, not these two. Wait, wait. There's my white bathing suit from our wedding. There is some guns, some of Tommy Lee's guns. There's some jewelry and there's some videotapes. And they're gone. So what the fuck?

So they call the police. They put in a report for a robbery. But there's, again, not much they can do because so many people had access. They can't tell them, like, oh, it was last night or whatever. So they're just like, ugh. Okay. Well, we hope the guns. are okay and like sucks about the white bathing suit but we'll figure something out until a few months

after that somebody with penthouse called said I have some videos and I think you should pay me five million dollars and they're like well what's on the video and they're like well we'll send you a copy so they get a copy Tommy Lee takes it upstairs he watches it Pamela does not watch it And he comes back down, he says, it's not great. It is different times that we have had sex on camera. And you look good. You look great. Everything's good.

Was it ever in doubt? But this is going to be a lot harder on you than it is me. And I know that. That's the truth. That's the truth. They had taken all these home videos together. Anything, everything. Like, oh, the seagull.

You know, like all of it. And whoever stole these tapes went through all of them and spliced out any time that they were having sex, anytime they were naked. And then they edited all of those together to make... To make a tape. What is known as the Tommy and Pamela sex tape. Not to claim any expertise in this genre. And I should say, I haven't actually seen this sex tape. I haven't either.

I didn't want to. I didn't think you would. Because it's illicitly obtained, right? It's creepy. Yeah, yeah. Pam and Tommy and then Kim Kardashian and Ray J. And that's kind of the upper league, honestly. We'll talk about that too.

Initially, they're like, no, somebody stole this from our home. And we don't want it to be in the public. Somebody committed a crime and you can't release this. We're not going to pay you money to commit a crime. Absolutely not. Mind you, this is right at the start of the internet. So Pamela and Tommy are thinking about, how porn and sex tapes are limited to physical media, that is not the case anymore.

No. The first videos are released on VHS. They're released in physical media. And things get copied and things go like that, you know? It's released by an associate entertainment industry. So technically not us. Yeah, technically not us. Like a little shell game there.

Yeah. Right, right. Got it, got it. So it's released by like an adult entertainment producer. Sure. It hits the internet and it explodes. It is everywhere. But Pamela and Tommy are resolute.

They're like, we're going to sue. We're going to sue this company. We might not be able to get rid of that, but this is a privacy issue. You can't walk into somebody's house and take something that they made and then sell it as your own. Regardless if it's a sex tape, regardless of it's intimate and personal. This is a public and private property situation here. Interesting. Ed Masry.

Do you recognize that name? lawyer that worked with Aaron Brockovich. Yeah. Dude, talk about film club. Aaron fucking Brockovich sometime. Yes, I know. I know. That is a film with a capital F.

That is a work of art. Ed Mazurie approaches them. He's like, I'll be your lawyer. I agree with you. This is wrong. And I will represent you. And so they start to put together the case. Things are working through.

And then it gets time for the deposition. Now, depositions within the lawsuit timeline, They happen before you get to the case, and they are essentially like fact-finding missions. Welcome to, you know, bittersweet law school right now. Each side is in a private room allowed to interview any witnesses and kind of ask whatever they want. You don't have to answer everything, but you can ask. And they are brutal. No matter what, you know, like in this case, it's brutal, but I've heard of other folks in

depositions where it's like you're really going to ask me that because that's not related, but it's like, well, it might be. This is a fact-finding situation. So we need to know if it's related. So you need to answer or you need to not answer and then we'll take that as information. Are you obligated to tell the truth? Like, are you under oath? Yes, you are. Fuck me. Okay. The idea too is they, especially in civil cases, they are kind of meant to break you down a little bit. If you get a little snappy, if you, if you say something you don't mean to, if you get kind of emotional, then they might be able to get something out of you that they wouldn't have otherwise. So they're, they're just, they're not, it's not fun. It's not a fun day at the playground.

Pamela was pregnant with their second kid when she was going into her deposition. And her deposition was multi days. She walked in to, you know, a boardroom and there were these big blown up pictures of her playboy images in the room. See, that's the type of like mind fuck they try and do. Fuckers. It's not just like in a folder and be like, well, we do. We do. We do. It's not just like in a folder and be like, well, we do, you know, you are, blah, blah, blah. It's like blown up and in your face. And essentially what they were hammering home in her deposition is like, you have no right to privacy of your body or the privacy of your sexuality because you do this.

Because you're naked. Because you have been, yes. Because you've given it up. So you have no privacy. This won't stand, you know, a jury won't care. Right, right. She is so upset by this. She even remembers, I'll read this little short part about it.

Sure. One lawyer was literally foaming at the mouth. These are grown men in the room, right? He's foaming at the mouth. White stuff collected in the corners. You could smell his sick and unrelenting nervous breath from across the room. So also just imagine like that type of attention on you and you're pregnant and you have already suffered a miscarriage before this.

Yeah. Yeah. And she goes to Tommy. She's like, I can't do this. I know that this is an important case, and I know that this will, like, help us. It'll help clear our name. But fuck, I can't. I don't think this is good for the baby.

I just don't think we can, I can physically do this. And so they dropped the lawsuit. Wow. She just can't. She couldn't do it. Fairfax. As the BC Lottery Commission says, know your limit. Play within it if we're celebrating BC.

It's a good priority setting, I think. Yes. I get why someone would stick with it. But you got to listen. to your body and yourself. Especially, like, in her case, having suffered the miscarriage before, she's just like, my babies mean more than anything to me, more than this tape. I'm not going to harm my baby to clear my name.

Clear her name of what? Are they accused of selling the tape under their own, they were in on it? That becomes a tabloid story. I see. Okay. Is that to promote their careers, they released this tape and they're pretending that it was stolen. Which, like, stranger things have happened, but again, not. the compassionate tabloid media of the 90s, you know?

So you mentioned the sex tape and, like, later, sex tapes are almost used to promote. Like, it feels like once Pamela and Tommy Lee, like, broke the seal on the sex tape thing, then it's like, oh, actually, that's a really great. Yeah, let's release a little sex tape. Okay, if that's your prerogative, go for it, I guess. But it's definitely... If you're empowered to do it. And if it's your choice, and that's, I think, definitely clear here.

that it was stolen, it was not their choice, and they did not make a fucking dime off of that. And they were blackmailed about it. Yes. And I think it's one thing to have this thing tarnish your name and be the thing that you're known for in the public eye. It's another for it to be something that you really didn't want to happen. Like if you were empowered to release it yourself, great. But then it's like another insult to not make any money off of it. You made somebody else a millionaire, but you didn't see any of that. Yeah, that's fucked. It's so brutal. And it takes a really, a really bad toll on Pamela and Tommy Lee. There's one evening, she is busy with these two babies. She's trying to, like, mother and Tommy is,

like, on the floor being a baby himself. He's like, where's my wife gone? I want my wife back. Like, they need love, but I need love too. And she has never talked to him like this before. She just kind of snapped. She's like, I need an adult here. Yeah. You can't do this. Weh, yeah, shut up.

Listen, I'm steering the car, so shut the fuck up. You're a father and you need to step it up right now. Because this is... Get a hobby. Take up rowing. Well, I wish you'd taken up rowing because instead he flew off the handle and he while Pamela was holding their seven-week-old son in her arms, he pushes her up against a wall and kicks her in the back.

Ugly. At a certain point, her fingernail gets ripped, and there's blood, and she's holding the seven-week-old, but there's little Brandon who's seeing this all, and she's just... Horrible. Not a home for two children, no. She calls the police, and they come. At that point, she doesn't press charges, but the police do domestic abuse. Tommy Lee goes to jail for six months.

You know, fuck around, find out. Not that I'm like pro-carceral system, but I see it applied okay. Yeah. And Pamela is really heartbroken about it because this beautiful little home, their weirdness is all matching and their energy is just like rah all the time. And things are hard with the tape and the paparazzi and they have. have two kids, but you know what, it's still a beautiful life. And then Tommy just kind of shreds it to pieces.

And she's so heartbroken about it. Man. That girl stays so strong. She does not listen to anyone who's like, well, maybe just, you know, maybe it was a bad night. Maybe he just... Wow, one and done, huh? She certainly doesn't listen to Tommy Lee, who was like, please take me back.

I'm so sorry. I'll never do it again. Because she watched her fucking father do this exact same thing to her mother. I must learn a lesson from this. She learns it really well. There's restraining order and they're not supposed to see each other. There are trists that happen. They're boning, you know, in the back of a car or whatever.

Like there's that intensity and that passion. They have two children together. They have, I get it. Yeah, yeah. And like, love of my life, that kind of vibe. But the divorce goes through. She never marries him again. I will say kind of looking forward, you know, it's the father of her children.

She loves him. She still has a relationship with him as the father. of her children, and she feels bad that she couldn't provide the stability that she wanted so badly in a family. Yeah. She tries to find some other people. She marries Kid Rock, whose name is Bob. Bob Rock, as you say. Robert Rock, if you're, you know, the government. The story of their wedding is so hilarious, because at this point, she's made really good friends with David La Chappelle, the photographer. Ooh, yeah, and like, stylists par excellence, very, like, artsy kind of gay divas in dramatic shit super saturated like a lot of colors really tanned out like

Pamela Anderson is kind of that aesthetic is like what he's cooking up in his photography a lot of times for her staget like they just like go all out in Vegas and it's wild and she's like late to the wedding and David Luschapel walks her down the aisle and the officiant is a little confused he's like am I married who am I marrying am I marrying Pamela and David or who Bob, your Bob? Kid Rock. Who's Kid Rock? Who's Pamela? Like, he's like... Robert? Robert? Yes. Which pisses off Kid Rock to no end. Yeah.

More shit happens, of course. It's not a good match. And at one point he gets really mad. She's in Borat. That's what it is. She is in Borat. Yes. And he's pissed about it. He's so mad. Of course he is. What a fucking man. So he ditches her at the premiere and he goes home and she's, she's, she's, She's like, gets a ride home. She's like, what the fuck?

Come on. It's Borat. Like, who fuck cares? It's fucking Borat. Or what are you, Giuliani? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he's like in their living room and he's taken this picture down off the wall and just ripping it, like, destroying it.

She's like, what are you doing? And he's like, I can't stand looking at this picture of you and David LaShapelle anymore. I just see it every fucking day. And she's like, that is not a picture of me and David. That's a picture of Marilyn Monroe. And this other photographer of the era. Oh my goodness, buddy. Yeah.

Dude, men. Fucking men. Fucking men. Imagine two dudes in a row fumbling Pam Anderson the same way. The same, yeah. Fucking idiots. And she's like, no, thank you. That was a year that I'll never get back.

And a photo I didn't really care about. So she tries again. She marries a friend and Rick Solomon. That doesn't work out. She did marry Rick Solomon. Yeah, she married him twice. Isn't that? Is that not Shannon Doherty's old man?

Hold on. Oh, maybe it is. Maybe it is. Shannon Doherty. He had high-profile marriages with EG. Daily Shannon Doherty and Pamela Anderson. He, what a man. Yeah.

God damn. He's best known for his 2004 sex tape with Paris Hilton. There we go. Okay. Oh, Paris Hilton had him. I forgot she had a sex tape. Oh, my gosh. So she marries him for a year in 2007 to 2008.

It doesn't work out. She marries him again, 2014, 2015. She loves love. She really loves love. Who among us? One man can't do it all. That's what she says. One man can't do it all.

In fact, some of these men can't do anything. So there's that. One thing that is very constant through this time of her life is her two sons. She is devoted to them. She is a totally hands-on mom. She's getting them up early in the morning and taking them surfing before school. She is like feeding all the neighborhood kids who come through. She is really invested in what they want to do and how she can help them do it.

She's also very invested in them becoming their own men. She is aware that as a single mom, there's a masculine influence that is kind of floating on the edges here. Andrew Tate, Andrew Tate. And it's not a very good influence, so I want to make sure that they are strong and good. They end up going to elite private school on Vancouver Island, actually, called Seanigan Lake. Jeez, I know Seanigan Lake. You do? I played Seanigan.

Did I play Seanigan Lake? I think maybe I was in the one time I did a debate. I think I might have been against Seanigan Lake, or it was at a speech thing or an ethical. athletics thing. But at some point, I was conscious Seanigan Lake. I remember. Volleyball. So hard. But fuck them. Yeah. Yeah. Premier all boys, like, elite thing.

But she was like, you know what? I think they need some Canadian manners. I think they need some, some of that good, good smell and tree air, some of that salt water. Yes. Yes. It was hard for them. They loved Malibu. They loved growing up in California. but in the end they did appreciate that she was able to send them there.

If you had to get shipped off to the boonies, those are the boonies you want to get shipped off to. And by that point, their grandparents, so Pamela's parents had moved back to Vancouver Island. So they were like within an hour of their grandparents. Beauty. But the way that she built her life around these boys to support them, but also as a way to provide her own sense of structure for her life. You know, if we think about the whirlwind of her early 20s, it just like exponentially grows, right? With fame and with paparazzi and Tommy Lee and the sex date, all this kind of stuff.

And the one thing that she like knows to be true and honest is, I'm going to raise these boys. I'm going to be the best mom ever. When she was writing in her journal, she's like, maybe I'll try acting. I want to be the best actress I can. When it came to her sons, though, she was writing in her journals. I am going to be the best mom. I'm going to give my everything to being a mother and supporting them. She was not ambitious nor calculating in her career,

but God damn it when it came to parenting. She didn't have to be. Right, yeah, just kind of red carpeted. People fell all over. We're filming the pilot right now. Come this one. Yes, yeah, yeah. So this era when her boys are growing up,

she's still working. She's bringing the bacon home. She has a gorgeous house in Malibu that she is constantly redoing. Every year they had like a garage sale. With the proceeds, they donated them to all her various fundraisers, including, as you mentioned, she, and this is like starting in her Baywatch days, is a huge proponent of PETA. People for the ethical treatment of animals. She has always loved animals.

She is vegan. And she rolled out these huge kids. campaigns for them. You know, she was, like, wearing lettuce leaves in one, nothing but lettuce leaves. And she was like, you know what? The world thinks of me as this sex icon. I am not really that image. That's a character.

But that's what they see. And I'll use it for good. Fine, then. Yeah, sure. And she does some really high-profile things. She works with Putin to stop whale-killing. I know. Just like, okay, let's go.

Reaching across the aisle. Reach across the ocean. Oceans, continents, the whole thing. She does a lot of work for conservation, especially like Vancouver Island area, Pacific Coast area. Thank you. Yes, she's doing it. She's doing it.

And she raises a shit ton of money because she works hard. She fucking shows up. She's got like nips out and people are like, I'll give you some money for that. Yeah, sure. And she's like, thank you. And here's for the polar bears. You know what I mean?

She's going. She's a huge supporter of Julian Assange. Of WikiLeaks? She's like, that guy tells the truth. I like him. And apparently they may have had some romance. In her memoir, there are inklings of romance. Wow.

She showed up at, what, the Peruvian embassy? Is that where he was? That's where I was. That's where I was. The Ecuadorian embassy in London. In London. Okay, yeah. And she's just like,

that guy tells it true, and I'm all about honesty. Let's go. She, Pamela Anderson has just like a wild life. Meanwhile, this whole time, she is a voracious reader. She's reading constantly. She seems like she reads. Yes. The home videos of her with Tommy Lee. It's all just her reading books. Yeah. It's like Brothers Caramaza offer. It's like, what the fuck? It's like, okay. All right, go get it, girl. I haven't read that. No, oh, have fun. That looks great. Infinite jest. Yeah, I love Infinite Just. You go for it, Pam. So let's skip a little. Her boys come of age. They are strong and independent guys.

They are public figures pretty much themselves now. I mean, you kind of have to be if you're Tommy Lee and Paymel Anderson's kids. But it is 2020 and she decides, I'm going to leave L.A. I'm going to sell my house that she's put kind of her heart and soul into. That she's always renovating and renovating. Exactly. But the mandala gets blown into the wind, right? We make the beautiful thing and like all things, the beautiful thing ends.

And then we hope to find the next beautiful thing or create it ourselves. And hopefully the beautiful thing that you sell gives you a shit ton of money. That's the most beautiful thing about it. That is what happens with her Malibu home. She is able to make some bank off of that house. So she takes that and she's like, where do I want to? to be. I want to be where the trees have known me since birth. Absolutely right. Direct web. Come home, darling. We're good enough for Harry and Megan Markle. Come home.

Yeah. And she's like, you know what? Not only that, I'm not only going back to the island. I'm going back to that motherfucking motor park that my grandparents used to own. She buys that property. Wow. Renovates it. Builds a home for herself. Builds a home for her parents. builds a badass garden that she spends all of her COVID time in. Amazing. There's a brief little time in there where she marries another guy. He's a Canadian guy. He does construction and she's like, well, maybe this is what I need. Just like, I'm back to my roots, homegrown.

Oh, a normie? Dan Hayhurst. Sure, sure. He's not a celebrity. She met him at the Legion. Yeah. I see. He was her bodyguard.

Oh, that's romantic. Yeah. was, you know, salt of the earth, Canadian guy. She's like, maybe this is what I need. Turns out, no, that's not what she needs. They didn't have a lot of common. The men are kind of fucked up there, too. Well, men, you know.

So she is fresh off a divorce. She is home at this place that she's been able to make new, but it still holds a lot of trauma. It's really hard to be there sometimes. And then on the Netflix horizon appears a mini-series, exactly. Always. Called Pam and Tommy. As you might be able to guess, it is about the sex tape.

Is it a fictionalized retelling? It is based on true events telling. Who's the cast? The cast features. Lily James, Sebastian Stan, of course. Yeah. Seth Rogen doing local work up there. You should know that Seth Rogen is not only in it playing the guy who steals the tape,

this disgruntled employee. He is the head producer. This was re-traumatizing her. She was not given a heads up. She was not asked. She was not consulted. I didn't watch it because she was so, like, anti-it. I felt like I was perpetuating something if I watched it.

There's nothing I won't watch for this show. I don't think the limit exists for that. The sex tape? I might. Yeah. I might. In principle, in life, no, I don't even take photos in graveyards. Like, fuck, no, that's eerie.

in the purposes of research, yeah, maybe. Yeah. I guess I read enough about this that I felt like I kind of got what I needed. Yeah, yeah. And of course you have like now established a deep empathy with one of the participants in it. Exactly. Yeah. Was not good for her, right?

So. Because the reviews say it does portray Pamela and Tommy as like victims of this situation. They were stolen from. They did not release it. They did not take it with the idea of releasing it. They did not make money on it. Like that all is portrayed. and the trauma is portrayed.

But even according to the economists and their review, the television show about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex tape participates in the problem it is trying to depict. And it's kind of like a semi-comedy too. Like it's Seth Rogen, so he's trying to like throw in some dark comedy vibes in there. And for Pamela, at least in her personal recounting through her memoir and the documentary, it retramatizes her.

She's like, okay. For a while there, people would be like, well, she's doing Pita. Or like, okay, yeah, she's not around. But now I'm, she just felt like she was back on the scene for the sex tape. And not being asked in any way, shape, or form. Like, you know, she's just across, you know, she's just across the water. She's not far, sad. She's shaving over the rose bush.

Yeah. And, of course, with the Netflix show comes a brand new set of eyes on the original sex tape. Exactly. The TV series comes out in 2022. Not only does it shake Pamela, but it shakes her two sons. They know that this is very sensitive. It's sensitive for them. It's their parents.

Of course. You know? Like, ugh. It's their extremely hot parents going at it when they were their extremely hottest, but it is stolen footage. Yeah, exactly. And they're very close to their mom. And they know that she's like this whimsical weirdo that is very honest and soft and not

hard. And just like, oh, they hate to see that. So they're like, you know what? Let's make a documentary. Ah, that's a really good thing to do with that impulse. It was her oldest son, Brandon. He really did a lot of the production work for it. But Dylan was involved as well. And they were like, Mom, you were so very different from the image of you.

Yes, absolutely. This is such a wild difference. And we want to, Brandon, he said in an interview, we want to give you back. that freedom that you gave us as kids, that freedom to be ourselves, and you protected us so much, I'm paraphrasing, but we want to give that back to you. Good young men, good young man. Well raised. Yeah, it's actually a nice little back loop of like, that's really sweet because you were so well raised.

Oh, I love that. And the documentary, it's called Love Pamela. It's great. The very first scene you see is Pamela Anderson and her house and ladiesmith, you know, a cute little, like coastal grandma design, and she is putting a home video into a VCR. What plays is, you know, cute little home videos of them as kids and stuff. And it's like, y'all know what you're fucking doing right here. This is good. Take the expectation, subvert it filmmaking. Boom. Profits. Done. Hear that, Seth Rogen? She volunteers her journals, but she doesn't want to read them.

She's like, you can have them, but I don't want to do the voiceover. She, like, hasn't even seen the entire documentary. She's like, it's too much. I can't. I just don't. I don't, I can't do it. It's awkward. It's awkward to be like the center of attention in this way. You know, she's so sweet. There's that. But also, she's so fucking smart. And I don't think that she's calculating. She's never been calculating. There is no robot Pamela Anderson. It's the opposite, if anything. Yeah. She's almost like worryingly uncalculated at points. Mostly happens to work out in the end. Yes. Yeah. Parentheses, men. And I think it works out when she's, like trusts herself and she follows that sweetness and that honesty. And the documentary just shows it

so well. And we get to see her cool house. And we also see the Playboy. You know, we see the home videos. We see the whole thing. And she's willing and open to talk about so much of her life. Even if she's like, she's always kind of, you know, over her shoulder in the interviews. She's not, she's never like, face on. It's hard to be really vulnerable to begin with for a person like this, I think, who's like, I don't want to watch this back. I think that that's part of it is like the vulnerable, I don't want to read my journals. Why? Because like, oh, I cringe at older versions of myself or I cringe at the current version of myself or I'll pick myself apart or whatever it is. Even Pam Anderson. Yeah, yeah. And you could say like, well, even Pam Anderson, she's gorgeous.

Or even Pam Anderson, like, she's been naked in front of the whole world. But like vulnerability, true, honest vulnerability of like really knowing yourself and being true to the good and the bad in you. Like that is, I'll take my top off any day instead of having to like deal with that, you know, on the public stage, right? The documentary ends. It kind of has this nice climax of her being asked to portray Roxy Hart on Broadway. From Chicago. Nice. The Reniz-Ey-Lu-Wiguro.

It's a great story and the music's great and she, Pamela Anderson, sings and she dances in it. I mean, I only saw little clips that made their way into the documentary, but wonderful. Again, like a very, like, true voice. It's not the big Broadway, like, blah, blah, but it's in character. And that becomes the crescendo of the documentary, but Girl has been in the new naked gun alongside Liam Neeson. She did have like a brief love affair with Liam Neeson. They're not together anymore. She chose herself. She chose herself. She chose herself. She's like, I fall in love with all my leading romantic partners. Like, that's the fun of being on a set. I completely agree. I love love. Oh my God. I love

love. No, completely. I always say that like the best worst feeling in the world is having like a really big crush on someone. Oh. That you're just sitting on and sitting on and sitting on and sitting on. It's like, Like a high like no other. It's crushing you so deeply. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pam Anderson is like, this year she is 59 and you know that she has a crush on somebody. We don't know who.

But she did that. 2023. She was a little bit more on the scene. She went to Paris Fashion Week. And she was like, you know what? I want to go to a museum instead of sitting in the makeup chair for three hours. So I'm just not going to wear makeup to the show. Good for her.

Amazing. Hate that that's like a notable thing that we're having to. You know what I mean? That's frustrating. Semi-colon. She's fucking Pam Anderson. Of course, she looks amazing with no makeup. I know.

Yeah, we knew. We knew, Pam. Yeah. Apparently her mom, because this has been since 2023, so almost three years now. And apparently her mom, like, hates this for her. She's like, could she just please, like, just a little mask here. Could you just put a little bit on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. She's a little, something more form fitting, sweetie. And she's like, in the 90s, I used more makeup on my face than most women will in their entire lifetime. I'm due. I'm due a break. Skin refresh, skin reset.

And she looks amazing. Like her skin looks amazing. And again, girl will be working. She has a skincare company. Ah, good. Good for it. And again, perfect. Perfect.

The chick who goes around with no makeup looking amazing because her skin is nice. And all the advertisements take place in her beautiful lady Smith garden that has like, you know, hydrangeas and blueberries. Yeah. Take me back. Yes, yes.

Through that documentary, one of the Coppola daughters, Giacopola saw her and was like, would you be the star of my film The Last Showgirl, about a showgirl in Vegas who is 59 and gets fired from the last showgirl show on the strip? Oh, that's a good concept. It's a good movie. It's a killer concept. And Pam Anderson's a killer piece of casting for that. It's amazing. It's so good.

Through the documentary, she got that role. She's also in a movie called Pruning the Rosebush. She has another movie coming out. She works. She's been working. She's always been working. She's always been working. At no point in this story, she's not working.

It's true. Even when she's raising her boys, she did a stint on the strip in Vegas working as like a magician's assistant. She was like the headliner kind of thing. I love that. That's amazing. And again, perfect. Yeah. Perfect.

Yeah. Her agent told her not to do that one. And she was like, fuck it. I'm going to do it. Gilo. She would, like, fly back home to do school drop-off and volunteer at school drop-off for her kids. Oh, my God. She'd be, like, covered in glitter.

This is just one of the chapters. Like, I am so thankful that this story does not end here. And you know that it'll be more and more. And part of it is she is talking about her traumas in the past, the sex tape, and her childhood abuse, all of these things. Good for her. Very difficult and enormously brave to talk about that shit. Very difficult. She's just constantly embracing that bravery.

Good for her. She's using the honesty that's so intrinsic to her to do all of this. And she's also using her image so smartly. She's still so beautiful, right? But she also has this image of all these other characters that she played in her life, on screen or off in every day. The barb wire. The barb wire.

Exactly. whom Beyonce wore that as a Halloween costume, that like get up in 2004. I am so excited to see where Pamela Anderson goes. I am like, I'm such a fan now. Like when I saw her in Naked Gunn, I was like, huh, I didn't, okay. There's more going on here than I had thought. I'm intrigued. I'm really intrigued.

And like, anytime you take some public persona and just scratch the tiniest little bit of Arnish from it, it is a whole. It is a whole kaleidoscope different than you thought. And again, like you say, someone who I wouldn't have thought even to ever think about in this context, but the second you said that was your subject, it was like, of course, that makes perfect sense. She's actually like a bittersweet, beautiful vibe. And I just like, I love her so much.

And I'm happy, a fan. I had to be, I had to remember that I was a Pam Anderson fan. I had to look at it. Never forget. Never forget. Yeah, yeah. And I am just. so stoked that, like, you know, I said at the top, like, this woman, her, her life kind of spans

these places that we both know very well, too, like, West Coast, you know, Vancouver and Southern California. Yes. I love that about this story. Yes. She picked up and ran off to Camloops. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's local work. Yeah. But one of the things that I probably admired most about Pamela Anderson and all of this is she is so. devoted and concentrated on the present. She's just like, I can't live in the past. I can understand it. I can look back at it, but I can't live there. And I'm not going to live in the future because I don't know where this dolphin ride is going to take me. Someone's going to come and take me by the hand and be like,

Princess, you are needed in the embassy. And I'll say, okay. Yeah, all right. I started the episode off all cocky about like, I know shit about Pam Anderson. And to be fair, I did know that her son's your name Brandon and Jones. That's a deep cut. You're a deep cat. I'm not a new. You're British Colombian. Exactly. And it's, it's one of those things where a lot of what I know about her is like local type of stuff. Yeah. But then also I thought that I knew her as like a celebrity as well in the bigger context. But I realized I just kind of knew her roles. You know what I mean? Right. I knew barbed wire. I knew VIP. I knew Baywatch, obviously, C.J. Parker. And I knew of like the sex tape that I didn't know anything about. And I'm sure that I was half convinced that

they leaked it themselves because that's how the misinformation thing works. And it's was like a really interesting look at like of course there's like behind this like sort of like very iconic 90s bombshell there's like a fucking human and she's like chill and nice and is from lady smith yeah it seems to feel like a good mother and uh loves love yeah sure me too dogs and whales and love and accepts the offer yes and yes yes and biches yes thanks for listening if you want more infamy we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweet infamy dot com you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account. At K-O-Hifin-F-I.com forward slash Bittersweet Infamy. But no pressure. Bitter Sweet Infamy is free,

baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at Bitter Sweet Infamy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet. My sources for the as-yet-unnamed trivia game were Ghana's Contamanteau Market at the center of O'Broni Waywayway in Cool Hunting by Katie Olson, August 3, 2022. Stop dumping your cast-offs on us, Ganean Closed Traders Tell EU by Isabel Chote for the Guardian May 31st, 2023.

It's like a death pit, how Ghana became fast-fashioned's dumping ground by Sarah Johnson for the Guardian June 5th, 2023. And lastly, but critically, I visited at dead white man's clothes.org. The sources that I used for this episode of Bitter Sweet Infamy, the Bitterstantennial, include a podcast interview between Pamela Anderson and Elizabeth Day on the YouTube channel How to Fail with Elizabeth Day. The episode is called Pamela Anderson, redefining beauty, fame, and finding self-worth. It was posted to YouTube July 6, 2025. I read an article in variety published December 18th, 24, Pamela Anderson's son, Brandon Thomas Lee, made it his personal mission to shatter Hollywood's

view of his mom, written by Jazz 10K. I read an article in W. After the Bombshell, Pamela Anderson's next act, written by Sandra Ballantine, published May 9th, 2016. And I can highly recommend Pamela Anderson's 2023 memoir, Love Pamela, written by Pamela. herself, as well as a documentary about her life. Pamela, a love story, came out in 23, directed by Ryan White, and her sons were producers on that documentary. I also watched Season 3, Episode 1 of Baywatch, where C.J. Parker makes her entrance into the series. I watched the 2024 film The Last Showgirl, directed by Gia Coppola, with Pamela Anderson as the lead and I had seen

2025 film The Naked Gun starring Pamela Anderson. If you would like to support the Bittersweet Infamy podcast, then please head over to our coffee page. That's K0-Fi.com slash Bittersweet Infamy.

And if you throw us a few bucks, you can become a monthly subscriber and join the glorious and vaulted ranks of the Bittersweet hearts. That includes Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Erica Joe, Sof, Dylan, and Satchel the Cat. It only takes three bucks and you get your name called out. It's great. It's a good time. Not only that, you get to watch The Bitter Sweet Film Club. Every month, he tells to watch a movie and Taylor, I,

and Perpectual Special Guest Mitchell Collins, chat it out. Any movie you want, maybe one day, even Zodiac. Bittersweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 podcast. Network. This episode was edited by Taylor Basso and me, Josie Mitchell. The interstitial music you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins, and the song you are listening to now is T Street by Brian Steele. Thanks for being around 150 episodes, y'all. Stay sweet for 150 more.