Sunday March 29, 2009
Revelation time
By ANDREW SIA
Take a peek at the private life of Pammie in Girl on the Loose.
PAMELA Anderson – the big-breasted actress, model and sex symbol famous for her silicone implants – is back! This time, it’s in a reality TV show called Pam: Girl on the Loose that has just started showing on E! over Astro.
As the press release from E! Entertainment Television states, the blonde bombshell is set to provide her viewers with the prospect of getting “to know the real woman behind the famous breasts” through the new series.
Pamela Anderson parading a creation for Vivienne Westwood’s fallwinter 2009-10 collection on March 6 in Paris. The star never ceases to shock and awe. – AP Yes, the star fondly known as Pammie is no stranger to sex-sationalism. She first became famous by being Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month in February 1990 and then starring in Baywatch, that 1990s TV series loaded with bikini-clad Californian hot bods.
Her acting career, however, has not been getting as much attention as her silicone-injected assets, her provocative behaviour, colourful love life and even the causes she champions. She’s appeared in movies like Naked Souls and Showgirls (both 1995), Barb Wire (1996), Scary Movie 3 (2003), Blonde and Blonder (2008) as well as the TV action series V.I.P. (1998-2002).
Pam: Girl on the Loose aims to show that there is a lot more substance to the Canadian than her saccharine screen persona (up to now) may have suggested. The press release from E! also notes that Anderson “is well read, articulate and intelligent, but also surprisingly famous for being naked from time to time”!
In one episode, viewers will see how she finally makes it to Washington DC after a rough camping trip on the beach planning her trip. There, she does a quadruple bill of attending the White House Correspondents Dinner, holding a Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) press conference, appearing on Larry King Live and even squeezing in a tour of DC.
In another episode, Anderson travels with family and friends to Abu Dhabi, UAE, where some news reports suggest that she is building her very own eco-friendly hotel. But in the TV programme, Anderson will be up to something more serious – auctioning herself off to the highest bidder to raise money for a children’s charity. How will she adjust to life in the Middle East?
The series also promises to “take fans beyond her fame to present a true glimpse into her private life, exposing the woman behind the myth” and the opening credits caution that she is “the kind of man every man wants but should not have”.
Indeed, her relationships have made headlines in gossip magazines for years. Anderson married Tommy Lee, drummer of Motley Crue, in 1995 after knowing him for only 96 hours. After a brouhaha over a stolen honeymoon sex video which appeared on the Internet, she filed for divorce from (and reconciled with) Lee twice before finally calling the union off.
After getting engaged (and then breaking up with) the model Marcus Schenkenberg, she married the singer Kid Rock in July 2006 on a yacht off the French coast but divorced him by November.
Being honoured in Roast of Pamela Anderson by the Comedy Central channel in Los Angeles in 2005. – Reuters Anderson told US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres in September 2007 that she was crazy about a new mystery man: “I paid off a poker debt with sexual favours, and I fell in love.”
The guy turned out to be film producer and online gambling website owner Rick Salomon, who also has his own leaked sex video – with Paris Hilton.
The pair tied the knot in October 2007 at the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas, during the 90-minute break between her two magic shows. After the nuptials, it was right back to work for Anderson, who announced to her audience: “Hello, I just got married ... I did ... I’m distracted. It’s a big day.”
However, within four months, she asked the courts to annul her marriage, citing reasons of fraud.
So how much of a gritty or brazen look will Girl on the Loose be into Anderson’s private life?
From the roughly edited preview copies, the episodes seem to be an amalgam of slices of her life. In the first episode, The Uncensored Confessions of a Trailer-Camp Tramp (which premiered last Sunday), Anderson takes the audience through what seems like a warehouse full of her worldly possessions (including her old Baywatch swimsuit – “Oh my God, it still fits!”) which she plans to offload in a huge Peta-benefit garage sale. It’s also heart-warming to see her two sons helping out by setting up a lemonade stand.
The programme is all shot in an informal jump-cut sort of way and punctuated with Anderson’s personal thoughts (either told to the audience or inscribed in fluorescent pink marker across the screen).
There are interviews with her brother (he found it “difficult” when his colleagues couldn’t put down the copy of Playboy featuring his sister) and her mother (who complains that Anderson has always been “doing” her face and hair) plus a visit to Hugh Hefner, the grand old man of the Playboy empire, where she quips: “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
There are segments about her current passion for overseeing the design of her new eco-friendly home (hence the need to get rid of that warehouse of old stuff!) and how she supposedly employs no help at home, choosing to cook for, clean and watch after her children herself. But hey, what’s that bit about her having her own special vegetarian cook?
With ex-husband Tommy Lee – the father of her two kids – at the premiere of Scary Movie 3 in Los Angeles on Oct 20, 2003. – Reuters In the episode entitled For the Boys, she visits an army camp and one soldier confesses on camera that he’s so inspired that he “can go overseas and fight a war” after meeting her. Ah ... nothing like a blonde bombshell as a morale booster for the War on Terror.
Boost from boobs
It’s undeniable that the daughter of a waitress and a furnace repairman has managed to grab global attention. For one, there have been judicious self-proclamations about her globular assets – first, she told the world that she would remove her breast implants in 1999 only to reveal that she had gotten even larger ones in 2000, and again in 2005. Appropriately, after the latter (strategically-timed?) announcement, she appeared in a Fox channel sitcom called, well, Stacked.
Leveraging on her assets in the same year, the Comedy Central channel created the Roast of Pamela Anderson to honour the sex symbol of the decade, during which she referred to her two bosom buddies as “Pancho and Lefty”.
This is one woman who knows how to age gracefully. Besides baring her whoppers for the cover of Playboy a whopping 12 times over 18 years, for Valentine’s Day 2008, she performed a striptease on a Harley Davidson in one of France’s most famous nude revues, the Crazy Horse of Paris. Not bad for a woman who turns 42 this July.
Her ability to shock and awe has not diminished one bit. In April last year, Anderson gave Hefner the ultimate surprise by giving him a cake – in the buff – during his 82nd birthday party at a Las Vegas hotel.
Then in December, at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, she appeared in nothing more than a grey T-shirt with orange and black panties. Just in case people were in doubt about what the highlights were, she posed for photographs bending over paintings with her butt in the air.
And just this month, while attending British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood’s Paris show, one of her boobs “accidentally” popped out of her dress. As for her collaboration with Westwood, Anderson said: “Yesterday I was considered soft porn, but today I am art.”
But of course, there are her detractors such as the British feminist Carmen Callil, who has called Anderson “an absurd Barbie doll”, the very embodiment of fake manufactured beauty and a sign of the hollowness of Western civilisation.
Or as the Canadian news magazine MacLean once described her: “Looking sexy – and only that – is the main reason she is famous. Through sheer exposure (double entendre intended), her bombshell-next-door image has become an element of popular culture ... she is famous for being famous, a kind of pure celebrity, unsullied by accomplishment.”
Street-smart
Yet Anderson is devoted to her two sons (with Lee), 12-year-old Brandon and 10-year-old Dylan, and insists she would rather spend time with her family than on her work.
“I concentrate on my boys first ... and everything else is just a bonus,” she said last year.
To her credit, she has also used her fame for a good cause – animal rights. Anderson became a vegetarian in her early teens when she saw her father slaughtering an animal he had hunted. Nowadays, apart from showing off skin, she is best known for being an active member of Peta.
In 2001, she supported Peta’s movement against Kentucky Fried Chicken, stating that “what KFC does to 750 million chickens each year is not civilised or acceptable”. She later made a video about KFC’s treatment of chickens.
Another of her landmark campaigns has been against the use of fur (which often originates from the brutal trapping of animals) in clothes. In 2003, Anderson stripped down for Peta’s I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur advertising campaign.
But there are feminists who object to her methods. While Cathleen and Colleen McGuire respect the campaign’s objectives, they feel that Anderson’s “soft core pornography” is a capitulation “to the fashion industry’s traditionally sexist mores in which women’s bodies are continually represented as impossibly perfect objects”, a “sophisticated form of propaganda ‘educating’ women how to look” with false computer-enhanced makeovers.
Anderson herself once said: “I don’t know why people consider me stupid, I’m actually really smart.”
She has a point there. Her sultry poses may not be politically correct but their provocative nature has promoted her animal rights’ campaigns. Besides, publicity is publicity; always good at raising the ratings.
In some ways, she is almost like a reincarnation of Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett or Bo Derek, for every decade has its personification of desire, the pinup girl that hormone-charged teenage boys sweat over.
What’s the secret of her success?
As her manager says: “Men lust after her while women don’t hate her ... she’s the blonde with the ultimate *bleep* but she’s not just a bimbo ... she has brains too.”
The eight-episode ‘Pam: Girl on the Loose’ started airing on E! (Astro Channel 712) last week. It airs on Sundays at 9.30pm.
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