The surreal second act of Pamela Anderson, America's newest reality star

This article is from the July/August issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here.

Click here for a photogallery featuring two decades of Pamela Anderson's magazine covers.

The following exchange between Pamela Anderson and me takes place in the back of a moving vehicle about 30 miles north of San Diego. Since our conversation thus far has had its tense moments, I come up with a suggestion: a long, quiet "time out." Then, a few days hence, when tempers have cooled, we can get on the phone for a follow-up.

Pam: [Shocked at the very suggestion.] No! I'm not doing any more. This is the longest interview I've ever had. No! No! No! No! But I like that it's a little rough. I like it rough. It's not a smooth hippy-dippy interview. It's got challenge. You know?
Me: [Brightly.] It was going pretty well about three miles ago!
Pam: I know. I can relax when we're all talking about something interesting. [Beat.] I really can't wait to do the pictures. That's what I'm excited about. Terry Richardson is someone I've always wanted to work with. He's wanted to work with me, too. [Eyeing me.] And nobody can be at the shoot.
Me: [Spiraling back into hurt.] I'm not coming.
Pam: Okay, good. I thought you were going to come.
Me: [Broadly, masking the wounds.] You'll never see me again.
Pam: [Conciliatory.] No, I don't want that. It's just that at photo shoots, I can only do one thing at a time.
Me: [Desperately, irrationally.] Do you want some candy? I have some candy in my bag.

Click here for a photogallery featuring two decades of Pamela Anderson's magazine covers.

It's a two-hour drive down to Camp Pendleton—plenty of time to discuss: Tommy, Kid Rock, hepatitis C. And maybe, time permitting, some gossip about a few of the skanks on her ex-boyfriend Bret Michaels' VH1 show. In and out. EasyHow did we get to this place, she and I, feeling like a pair of house cats tossed into a Hefty bag together? Granted, it was never going to be a long lunch at the Polo Club followed by a leisurely outing along Mulholland, capped off with side-by-side green-tea facials at the Beverly Wilshire spa. No, it was just going to be a drive with Pamela Anderson from her house in Malibu to a USO appearance. The backseat of a limo wouldn't be the best environment for a heart-to-heart, but at least there'd be plenty of time to get acquainted; if the 405's clear (which it never is), it's a two-hour drive down to Camp Pendleton—plenty of time to discuss: Tommy. Kid Rock. Her two sons. Hef. The health of her liver after her lengthy bout with hepatitis C. Those years during which her breast implants made a seemingly regular commute into and out of her body. Turning the big four-oh. Her tireless work as a PETA Honorary Committee member, and how KFC is the Abu Ghraib of deep-fried poultry. And maybe, time permitting, some gossip about a few of the skanks on her ex-boyfriend Bret Michaels' VH1 show. In and out. Easy.

Alas, the limo that should be parked in front of her place in the gated Malibu Colony is actually a big passenger van. And we aren't the only passengers. Up front, directly behind Mickey the driver, sits Karen Stephens, Pam's makeup artist and hairstylist whom she befriended backstage last year during her six-month Vegas gig as assistant to Hans Klok, the flamboyant Dutch illusionist. Pam-watchers will recall that it was during the run of that show that she married Rick Salomon (between sets), director and costar of a low-budget indie film called 1 Night in Paris. After two months, they sought an annulment.

Behind and to the right of Stephens is Peter Asher, Pamela's next-door neighbor in Malibu and her manager of just four weeks. It's all a little hazy just exactly how Asher, a posh, sprightly Brit, ended up in this van in his elegantly snug bespoke spring suit and alligator loafers. In 1964, his group, Peter & Gordon, had turned "A World Without Love," written by his sister's then-beau Paul McCartney, into a number-one hit. (Back then, he had both the glasses and teeth of Austin Powers, and some think Mike Myers based the character's look on him.) Asher went on to produce and manage James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, earning a couple Grammys and landing on the cover of Rolling Stone as 1977's producer of the year. Now, here he is, managing Pamela Anderson, who doesn't sing, dance, or, by her own reckoning, have any real gift for acting or desire to do it ever again.

What Anderson does have, however, is a reality show—sorry, an "observational documentary series"—which explains the other passenger in this van, turned backward in the middle seat, aiming a video camera at my face. Nigel Dick, a soft-spoken British transplant to L.A., is perhaps the most prolific music video director of all time, credited with Britney Spears' first five videos, Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle," and about 300 others. Dick is the show's co-executive producer.

Details of Pam's show, which is tentatively titled Pam—Girl on the Loose and is scheduled for an eight-episode run this summer on E!, remain scarce, but there may be a few clues scattered amid the seemingly arbitrary gossip items about Anderson that have been popping up all spring. Like the one about her holding a charity yard sale in Malibu (and personally manning the lemonade stand), or the blurb that had her writhing on the back of a Harley Davidson onstage at a nude cabaret in Paris, or the report of her doffing her clothes to deliver a slice of birthday cake to Hef in Vegas on his 80th birthday.

What makes Anderson different, her manager observes, is that "she's in on the joke. She knows exactly what the Pamela Anderson deal is. She 100 percent gets it"Which brings us, finally, to the star of the show herself, seated right next to me. In my experience, what passes for sexy in Hollywood tends to disappoint in person. Not so with Pamela Anderson. She's extraordinary—so precision-engineered she seems more like a product of a body shop than the Body Shop. Her breasts—my, they are large—heave from underneath her little khaki dress. Tight as a sausage casing, the outfit gives the impression that if it were hit at just the right angle by a spitball, the whole ensemble would explode. "It's the bigness of it all," says Randy Barbato, cofounder of World of Wonder Productions, the company behind the show, explaining what it is about Pam's aesthetic that so appeals to gay men. "She's like a 50-foot woman with breasts the size of Manhattan." Of course, this explains the obsession straight men have with her as well.

It's tempting to be reductive about exactly why Pam Anderson's famous; just watch her 2005 Comedy Central roast, which begins with Jimmy Kimmel announcing they're honoring someone "who showed us just how far a woman can go when she believes in herself and gets a pair of volleyball-size breast implants." That said, Gena Lee Nolin got implants, was on Baywatch, and even had a sex tape, but if she swiped your wallet, could you pick her out of a lineup? What makes Anderson different, Asher observes, is that "she's in on the joke. She knows exactly what the Pamela Anderson deal is. She 100 percent gets it."

I don't know if she chugged a barrel of Mountain Dew before the road trip began, but the second she hops into the van, she starts chattering like a dot-matrix printer laboring to spit out the OED in under a minute. As executive producer of the show, which she refers to variously as an "art project" and a "self-portrait," Anderson is involved in directing as well as editing, in which capacity she wants Nigel to know that it might be a good idea to go out and spend a day shooting her younger brother, Gerry, who has started a small T-shirt concern that could use a publicity boost. "So Gerry's thrilled about doing this T-shirt company," she says. "Gerry's going to be bleaching his T-shirts out in the sun. You guys can film him on Saturday. He'll have them hanging from the trees. You should get him in his trailer, too. He lives in a trailer. I bought it for him, but you should get him there. He lives in Point Dume. It would be cute to have a clothesline with all his T-shirts over it, like he's actually working on it, 'cause then they'll show up in the show. I love clotheslines. I want a clothesline. My interior designer's like, you want a clothesline? I'm like, 'I love clotheslines.' I'll do your laundry, too. I'm obsessed with laundry. I'm obsessed with laundry. No one believes me. Nigel, you believe me."

Asher tries to sneak into the conversation. "Some people love laundry," he opines. "They love doing it. They find it therapeutic. James Taylor used to like doing laundry." He begins to elaborate but is quickly hushed by Pam. In true unscripted-show fashion, she's making a speakerphone call on her BlackBerry, excitedly talking to somebody named Tony about a trip to San Francisco to have her portrait painted by Pop artist Mel Ramos, who specializes in images of nude women straddling oversize products like Toblerone bars. The whole van hushes for the big call; perhaps Pam hasn't noticed Nigel's camera isn't running but is resting on the seat next to him.

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when things begin to go south between Pam and me. But I think it happens early in the ride, when I make a comment she seems to take as evidence that either I dislike black people or think they don't belong at USO events. (For the record, I dig patriots of all colors.) She's just mentioned her son Brandon, one of her two children with Tommy Lee, a 12-year-old who's obsessed with World War II. She talks about her sons incessantly, and nothing about her high regard for them seems even remotely contrived.

Pam: You know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a book called Brothers in Arms. He's a historian and he's written textbooks for schools. And he's a friend of mine. So Brandon's reading the book and is going to interview Kareem, and I'm going to film it and make a little movie, and that will be his report for school.
Me: Does Kareem Abdul-Jabbar live here in Malibu?
Pam: No, he doesn't. He comes to Malibu. And he loves the kids, especially Brandon, who's interested in the war. He really wanted to come to Camp Pendleton, but because of all of the press, I didn't want to take him along.
Me: You wanted to bring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?
Pam: No, I'm talking about my son.
Me: Oh! I guess it would be pretty weird if you brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. That wouldn't really make any sense.
Pam: [Huffily.] Why wouldn't it? Snoop Dogg's going to be there. And Janet Jackson.

It gets worse.

Me: You don't seem relaxed now.
Pam: It's because I'm wearing a really small dress.
Me: Really?
Pam: And because you're asking me some stupid questions.

Tommy has me Google Alerted. And I'm like, "Honey! Stop Google Alerting me!" He loves me. I love him. But I don't Google Alert himTo be fair, the poor thing probably did feel trapped, and some of the questions were perhaps stupid. (Am I the only person in America who doesn't know that a Ghillie suit is what a soldier wears when wanting to resemble a bush?) But it wasn't all bad. Rather than reliving every moment when the fantasy of jumping out the van's doors at 70 mph crept into my mind—and in all likelihood, hers—here's a quick rundown of what I learned during the better moments.

1. Although the first sex scene in her 2004 semiautobiographical novel, Star, involves the heroine getting diddled by a girlfriend, Pam says she's never swung that way. "It's really weird because I've never been with a girl," she says. "Writing about it was as far as it got."

2. This is an enormous disappointment to her mom. "Lately my mother's said, 'I wish you were gay, considering your choice of men.'"

3. Her mother was thrilled, however, when Anderson took the magician's assistant job with Amsterdam's own Hans Klok. "My mom's Dutch, so she thought that was fabulous, even though she just found out we're Russian and not Dutch. But at that point, she still thought we were Dutch." Wait. What? "Long story," Anderson says. "But at that point, she was still collecting wooden shoes and windmills."

4. On her television show, her children are strictly off-limits, though, as Asher puts it, we may glimpse "occasional backs of heads and stuff."

5. She has a good relationship with Tommy Lee, and thinks it likely they'll grow old together. "I can't get rid of him," she says. But their love has taken a new form. "For some reason, Tommy has me Google Alerted," she says. "He'll always be like, 'What's this?' 'What's this?' He gets every single thing. And I'm like, 'Honey! Stop Google Alerting me!' He loves me. I love him. But I don't Google Alert him."

6. Unless she's totally kidding about this, before Playboy flew her in from her dinky hometown, Vancouver Island, Canada, in 1989, to shoot her first of 11 pictorials, she was really naive about Hollywood. "I thought when I came to L.A. people would have parrots on their shoulders," she says. "I still don't understand where that concept came from. And I thought for sure photographers would have pointy shoulders and big hats." Like pirate photographers? "Yes, pointy shoulder pads and parrots. And hats."

7. Anyone who wishes to hire her for commercial work should understand that she might bring along one of her best friends, photographer David LaChapelle. "I did a commercial once for Sirius, and I said the only way I would do it was if David directed it," she says. "But they didn't want David to direct it, because he's not considered mainstream, and they had this other director who was supposedly more fabulous. I said the only way I would do it was if I had David with me. So he was hired as my companion, and he would walk to and from the set with me. We also brought three skateboarders, an entire circus, transvestites, and midgets. Actually, not midgets. Not that time."

We arrive at Camp Pendleton, where the rest of Nigel's film crew is waiting outside Pam's cinder-block seaside dressing room. They're hanging out with a handful of sunburned marines who already seem pretty Hollywood-savvy, having worked on a video shoot the day before in which Janet Jackson and her dancers were filmed storming the beach from an amphibious assault vehicle. As Pam makes her way out of the van, a brave 25-year-old staff sergeant from Oklahoma named David Williams calls out, "Pamela Anderson," in a manner familiar enough to suggest that they had once tongue-kissed in the bathroom of a bar. She comes over, poses for a few pictures, and hustles into the dressing room. Nigel and the camera crew descend upon Williams to tape a postmortem on his brush with greatness.

Williams: When I was younger, me and my little brother used to watch Baywatch, and we'd actually call it Babe Watch. You'd watch all the babes running down the beach and whatnot. And that's actually what really attracted me to Pamela.
Nigel: What was your favorite thing Pam did during a Baywatch episode?
Williams: Gosh. I don't know if I should even say. Running? That would probably be the best way to put it.
Nigel: I used to love watching Pamela run whenever she ran on Baywatch.

(A split second passes wherein Williams seems to think Nigel's confessing to an uncannily similar memory, but then realizes he's trying to goad him into answering in a complete sentence for the camera.)

Williams: Oh, really? I don't know if I should say that, though. It's kind of perverted. You know, the whole marine thing. ... You gotta watch what you say.
Nigel: So, what message would the Marine Corps like to deliver to Pamela Anderson?
Williams: Keep doing what she's doing.
Nigel: The message I have from the Marine Corps is ... you know.
Williams: The message I have from the Marine Corps is, "Pamela, keep doing what she's doing."

Time out here for a special thank you to Sarah Jandrain, a lovely producer from World of Wonder, who's nice enough to notice what a hollow-eyed wreck I am post-ride and scrounge up a banana and a Coke for me from the crew's truck. It makes me feel all the more guilty about what happened when she asked me to sign a release form, by which I would (quoting here) "agree that you may create and include in the Program such actual or fictional incidents, scenes, situations, dialogue, events, characters, names, biographical information, and other material as you may, in your sole discretion, consider proper or necessary, and you are free to edit, change, and dub any recording of me with any other material (for any purpose, including without limitation, for humorous or satirical effect), as you determine in your sole discretion." When she wasn't looking, I crumpled the form into my pocket. Sorry, Sarah!

Pam starts signing autographs, and the marines crowd in, and the flashes are snapping, and now she's signing belliesLater, with the banana for sustenance, I stand by the dressing room door and try to see what they're filming inside. Here's who gets in:

1. Comedienne Kathy Griffin, the dressing room's other occupant (Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, Bravo; Celebrity Mole: Hawaii, ABC; Celebrity Poker Showdown, Bravo).

Afterward, Griffin tells me what happened inside. "Not unlike Big Brother, she got there first, so she took the one bathroom. But she was very sweet." What, I wonder, is the difference between what Pam is making and a reality show? "A reality show is more humiliating," Griffin says. "A docu-series is for people who don't want to admit they have a reality show. J. Lo's is also a docu-series. I'm not famous enough to have a docu-series."

2. Choreographer and Pussycat Dolls creator Robin Antin (The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll, The CW; Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious, The CW; What Perez Sez, VH1; Keeping Up With the Kardashians, E!; Blow Out (starring hairstylist brother Jonathan Antin), Bravo; Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica, MTV).

3. Three young members of the singing group Girlicious, known for the song "Stupid Shit" (Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious, The CW).

Just before showtime, Pam, Griffin, and Asher emerge from the dressing room and hop onto a golf cart for the trip to the backstage area. Janet Jackson's there, too, marching around in camo. Pam greets the three blondes—Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson—who cycle in and out of Hef's bedroom on E!'s The Girls Next Door and are no doubt wondering if they'll ever achieve anything close to what Anderson has.

From start to finish, the opening remarks and introductions of Toby Keith and Snoop Dogg that she spent four hours traveling and prepping for put her in front of the audience for three minutes, tops. It's dark by the time she hops back on that golf cart, which is penned in by a sea of gray-camouflaged marines. So Pam alights. And she starts signing autographs. And she hoists a little kid who has a pair of glow sticks in his hands. And the marines crowd closer, and the flashes are snapping, and now she's signing bellies, and now come the photos for all the guys, each bearing a name on his chest—Feeley and Spear and Dickens and Ruth and Pittman and Mosely. Pam gives each his due, vamping for the camera so whoever sees the photo will know that this was a special moment for them both.

Soon there are so many guys around that the show organizers are starting to wig out. "You guys gotta move this over! You're blocking access for the rest of the talent." It's Pam's cue to blow the guys a kiss and be on her way. But she's in no hurry. She just moves the whole circus over a few feet and keeps going.

Back in the dressing room, she and Karen are starved, ravenously attacking the provisions—a bag of Tostitos and salsa—the marines have graciously set out for them. "I hope those Tostitos aren't tested on animals," Pam says, scarfing the stuff down, and I start to ask, how bad would it really be if some monkey was fed a chip? But I'm too tired to be a dick.

"If you're not starving like we are, it's good to think about something before you shove it in your mouth," Pam adds. "You can control what goes in your mouth, they say. However, we've all made bad choices." She and Karen dissolve into laughter. Pam slides the salsa across the table toward me. "You've got to eat it," she says. "How else are you going to write about it? You gotta live what you write."

Seems like a peace offering. I dip and eat.

Click here for a photogallery featuring two decades of Pamela Anderson's magazine covers.

This article is from the July/August issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here.