Lust Action Hero - Premiere May 1996
Lust Action Hero
BY KRISTEN O'NEILL
* PHOTOGRAPHED BY LANCE STAEDLER *
wo of Pamela Anderson Lee's best assets--the right one and the left one--are resting on a corner table at Shutters, a bright beachfront eatery in Santa Monica. They are smaller than you'd expect, and surprisingly delicate, like the rest of her five-foot-seven, five-months-pregnant frame. She leans forward, allowing her lunch guest to touch them.
They are her hands. Long, manicured nails polished a pearly white flow flawlessly into slender fingers devoid of accessory, save for a single word--tommy's--elegantly inked around her ring finger. "Big Mike did that,'' she says, drawing attention as well to the artfully shaded ring of barbed wire that wraps around her left biceps, the tattoo she got to kick off production on Barb Wire, her feature-film starring-role debut, which opens around the country this month--right around the time she is due to give birth to her first child, by her husband, Motley Cr�e drummer Tommy Lee.
"I think women are more beautiful when they're pregnant--you definitely have a higher sex drive,'' she says, laughing. "It's a much more sensual thing if you're creating a life together; it's really, really wild.''
She is considering some below-the-beltline piercing, "but not until after the baby. You've gotta be careful. Tommy was having his nipple pierced, and I asked the guy, 'If you pierce my nipple, will it spray out three different ways?' 'Well, it already sticks out like a shower head--who cares?' And I'm, like, 'It does?' " She pauses in the middle of her chopped salad ni�oise to retrieve a page from her husband. She smiles as she shows the beeper display: 007. "It means he loves me, but I don't have to call him back,'' she says.
Without question these are heady, hormone-rich times for Pamela Anderson Lee, the 28-year-old fantasy-object phenomenon launched from the pages of Playboy whose blond hair bleached the color of a klieg light, breathtakingly enhanced breasts, and Bardot-with-a-bullwhip persona have come to embody the '90s bimbo. In addition to gracing an unprecedented six Playboy covers, not to mention a slew of top-selling posters and calendars, she has scored a hat trick of small-screen number ones: Home Improvement, a top-rated show in the U.S.; the syndicated smash Baywatch, said to be the world's most popular television program; and Playboy's The Best of Pamela Anderson home video, which bumped Forrest Gump from the video-sales chart's top slot. Her seat-of-the-bikini Cancun marriage to Tommy Lee, after the couple had known each other just four days ("In the morning we woke up and he goes, 'Do you drink coffee? Do you like eggs?' "), shot her public profile into the stratosphere, and capped an impressive--and still unabated--tabloid run, which has included the publication of some honeymoon Polaroids in which Anderson Lee is shown committing an act of considerable friendliness on her presumably grateful husband.
The attention is all the more striking considering it's based on little more than how Anderson Lee looks in (and out of) a bathing suit. "I think what has happened to Pam has happened by default,'' says Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy's West Coast photo editor and a longtime associate of Anderson Lee's. "All Pam had to do was go stand on that street corner. As many beautiful girls as there are, there are very few Pamelas."
Her status figures to grow further this month with the release of Barb Wire--a slickly shot B movie from Gramercy Pictures that hopes to fashion Anderson Lee into the female action star Hollywood has always yearned to create, ready to both kick ass and bare it at a moment's notice. But in its less-than-infinite wisdom, Hollywood made a strikingly ironic choice for the role of a self-sufficient, don't-!&$@-with-me heroine in Anderson Lee--who throughout her stay in Hollywood has been a sweetly pliant prefeminist, come to conquer not the town but a man whom she could wed and to whom she could bear children. It is that goal--not fame or money or stardom--that she has pursued most avidly, propelling her through a series of failed relationships with a host of high-profile men.
That goal, at least, she says she has attained, via her whirlwind marriage to Lee, whom friends and associates agree exerts adamantine control over his wife. Her never-a-dull-moment behavior on the Barb Wire set--from Lee-led fights with producers to fainting spells, womanly problems, trips to the hospital, uncharacteristic surliness, and trailer-rocking lunchtime trysts--has prompted friends and colleagues to invoke the names of such fallen icons as Dorothy Stratten and Marilyn Monroe when speaking of the sweet, naive Canadian girl.
And yet . . . in person, Anderson Lee is hardly the plastic figurine splashed across magazine covers and tabloids. Her freshly washed hair drapes over her freshly scrubbed face, revealing high cheekbones sprinkled with light freckles, and a tiny zit over her right eyebrow. She wears square-heeled black pumps and a sleeveless, mauve knit dress that softly falls just far enough below her bottom. Five months and one week pregnant on this day (the baby is due in May), Anderson Lee sports a belly swollen to the approximate size of the slight nagging bulge that millions of women sweat through aerobics and sets of abdominal crunches every day to obliterate.
To meet her is to like her, immediately. An animated storyteller with "madness in her head,'' she waves her hands emphatically and discusses her love of flaming-hot Chee-tos, Pringles light BBQ-flavor potato chips, and Shirley MacLaine--her favorite actress--with the same enthusiasm that she exudes when recounting a recent naked water-skiing escapade.
It's safe to say that Anderson Lee never envisioned that her meager show business credits would place her at the forefront of mainstream pop culture worldwide; in typically self-deprecating style, she finds the Pamela Phenomenon, coming soon to a theater near you, as mystifyingly funny as anyone would. "It's this high-profile thing--for nothing, really,'' says Anderson Lee. "I don't understand it. It's just bizarre. I go to Europe and there's all this madness, it's crazy. I'm, like, What's this based on? I haven't done anything.''
here have been many action stars and many action films, but Pamela Anderson Lee might be the first person ever to have begun an action movie and stopped taking her birth-control pills, in hopes of getting pregnant, at the same time. At first she wrote off the cramps she started experiencing during some of Barb Wire's fight scenes to morning sickness. "I have a very high tolerance for pain,'' says Anderson Lee. "I'm not a whiner. I didn't want to disappoint them. This is my first movie and I don't want to be known as a problem, because I'm always on time and I always work really hard.''
The camera was rolling on day four of one sequence when Anderson Lee nearly fainted. "She was literally at the point where she says, 'Don't call me babe,' '' says director David Hogan, referring to the cine-moment when Barb Wire levels her gun at the bad guys and delivers her signature tag line. "Her hands were shaking. She almost passed out before we got that take done. Then we did one more shot and she almost went down again.''
A trip to the hospital revealed that Anderson Lee had a cyst the size of a grapefruit on one of her ovaries. Production shut down for four days while she underwent surgery. "The day I could move my legs,'' Anderson Lee says, "I came back to work.''
In June, Anderson Lee took a pregnancy test in her trailer with her best friend and assistant on the film, Melanie Arthur. The results came up positive, and Anderson Lee saved the test to show Lee when he arrived on location. Her elation was short-lived: Weeks later, she miscarried. (Her current pregnancy was confirmed by doctors in October.) Production shut down for another two days.
It was at this point that friends and colleagues began to notice what they saw as a dramatic change in Anderson Lee. "She just became increasingly exhausted,'' says Arthur. "[The miscarriage] took a lot out of her, and it just added to the stress of having a new marriage and not knowing your husband before you're married. I'm sure it was really hard for her to concentrate on the movie.''
Now the actress--who used to fall asleep in her truck outside of her makeup artist's house if she arrived early for her 5 a.m. Baywatch preparation session--was habitually late to the set and regularly asked to leave work early. She stomped around her trailer throwing hissy fits when a wardrobe dresser would attempt to make costume changes. On one occasion, Anderson Lee even threw an Evian bottle at a crew member. Those at the shoot were quick to fault the influence of Tommy Lee, a constant presence hovering on the set and drinking with his buddies in her trailer.
"Tommy never disrupted a day of shooting,'' counters Hogan. "If he did, I wasn't aware of it.'' All the same, crew members regularly grouped around her trailer at lunchtime, gawking as it literally rocked and rolled while she and Lee had sex inside. Perhaps as a result, postlunch makeup, hair, and costume touch-up sessions that had formerly taken an hour to complete stretched to three hours. "There were times when I said, 'It's time for [Pamela] to come out of her trailer,' and she took a little longer than she should,'' says Hogan. "But I've never worked with a woman that didn't happen to.''
"I was overwhelmed,'' Anderson Lee admits. "My first movie, starring in a film, a lot of pressure. I'm glad Tommy was there. Tommy actually helped me out a lot.''
Lee's influence over Anderson Lee was palpable to crew members. More than one observer recalls Lee's telling her--barely one month pregnant, hardly showing--that she had better say she was three months pregnant in order to explain her burgeoning belly. "I believe she was having a lot of emotional problems, and she was having problems with Tommy,'' producer Todd Moyer says. Was she using drugs--speed, cocaine? "Absolutely not. I do not know that she did any drugs during that time. I believe she partied hard, but I never saw it. Nobody really knows except for Pamela and maybe her doctor.''
"That's why I was asleep in my trailer every five minutes,'' Anderson Lee says when asked if she did drugs at any point during the Barb Wireshoot. "I can't even imagine myself on that stuff. I'm so hyper as it is, if I were to have anything like that, I'd probably go through the roof. There's no way my body could even take it."
The turmoil reached its peak one afternoon in the last month of production, when Anderson Lee asked Moyer if she could leave the set early. Moyer refused to release her. "I started crying: 'You can't talk to me that way,' '' Anderson Lee says of their conversation. " 'I've had no time to emotionally heal from this miscarriage. I came back four days after having had endometriosis surgery.' He said, 'I didn't know you had goddamn surgery. I thought you were just having a miscarriage.' I was, like, 'Just a miscarriage?' Tommy went out to him and said, 'If you ever talk to my wife that way, I'm going to kick your ass. I don't give a fuck who you are.' ''
"She never brought up her illnesses [during our conversation],'' Moyer counters. He claims Anderson Lee wanted to leave early to attend a meeting with Lee and his lawyer. "Pam said to me, 'If I don't go to this meeting, I'm gonna get a divorce from Tommy.' I said, 'Then you have a problem with your relationship. You can't leave in the middle of a $200,000 shooting day.' ''
Anderson Lee insisted that Moyer keep his distance from the set for the remainder of production. "It was shortly thereafter that Todd kind of disappeared,'' Arthur reports, "and we didn't see him much after that at all.''
Anderson Lee also fired managers Ray Manzella and Dennis Brody midway through production. "They misrepresented me,'' she says. "They were constantly demanding things on my behalf. Finally I said, 'I don't need a manager. I don't need a baby-sitter. I definitely don't need a date.' ''
Despite the tempestuous nature of her fifteen-month relationship with Lee--one blowout in Anderson Lee's trailer on the Baywatch set resulted in Lee punching his fist through a cupboard door--Anderson Lee approaches the business of marriage with a doggedly traditional attitude. Against the counsel of her advisers, she has merged not only her life but her finances with those of her husband.
"It's just more comfortable to have everything under the same roof,'' Anderson Lee says. "Tommy and I are determined. Everything is in both our names. It's so bizarre when your business people are going, 'It's really important to keep everything separated.' What are you preparing us for? I go, 'Listen, rule number one, you are wanting to protect me from my husband. We're not going to get a divorce. Screw you people.' ''
And to those who dare suggest that Anderson Lee has undergone a personality change since her marriage to Lee: "I'm really happy with my husband,'' she says. "I'm really happy with my life. Everything is changing for the better. So anyone who says that I've changed for the worse are people that probably aren't in my life anymore.''
BY KRISTEN O'NEILL
* PHOTOGRAPHED BY LANCE STAEDLER *
wo of Pamela Anderson Lee's best assets--the right one and the left one--are resting on a corner table at Shutters, a bright beachfront eatery in Santa Monica. They are smaller than you'd expect, and surprisingly delicate, like the rest of her five-foot-seven, five-months-pregnant frame. She leans forward, allowing her lunch guest to touch them.
They are her hands. Long, manicured nails polished a pearly white flow flawlessly into slender fingers devoid of accessory, save for a single word--tommy's--elegantly inked around her ring finger. "Big Mike did that,'' she says, drawing attention as well to the artfully shaded ring of barbed wire that wraps around her left biceps, the tattoo she got to kick off production on Barb Wire, her feature-film starring-role debut, which opens around the country this month--right around the time she is due to give birth to her first child, by her husband, Motley Cr�e drummer Tommy Lee.
"I think women are more beautiful when they're pregnant--you definitely have a higher sex drive,'' she says, laughing. "It's a much more sensual thing if you're creating a life together; it's really, really wild.''
She is considering some below-the-beltline piercing, "but not until after the baby. You've gotta be careful. Tommy was having his nipple pierced, and I asked the guy, 'If you pierce my nipple, will it spray out three different ways?' 'Well, it already sticks out like a shower head--who cares?' And I'm, like, 'It does?' " She pauses in the middle of her chopped salad ni�oise to retrieve a page from her husband. She smiles as she shows the beeper display: 007. "It means he loves me, but I don't have to call him back,'' she says.
Without question these are heady, hormone-rich times for Pamela Anderson Lee, the 28-year-old fantasy-object phenomenon launched from the pages of Playboy whose blond hair bleached the color of a klieg light, breathtakingly enhanced breasts, and Bardot-with-a-bullwhip persona have come to embody the '90s bimbo. In addition to gracing an unprecedented six Playboy covers, not to mention a slew of top-selling posters and calendars, she has scored a hat trick of small-screen number ones: Home Improvement, a top-rated show in the U.S.; the syndicated smash Baywatch, said to be the world's most popular television program; and Playboy's The Best of Pamela Anderson home video, which bumped Forrest Gump from the video-sales chart's top slot. Her seat-of-the-bikini Cancun marriage to Tommy Lee, after the couple had known each other just four days ("In the morning we woke up and he goes, 'Do you drink coffee? Do you like eggs?' "), shot her public profile into the stratosphere, and capped an impressive--and still unabated--tabloid run, which has included the publication of some honeymoon Polaroids in which Anderson Lee is shown committing an act of considerable friendliness on her presumably grateful husband.
The attention is all the more striking considering it's based on little more than how Anderson Lee looks in (and out of) a bathing suit. "I think what has happened to Pam has happened by default,'' says Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy's West Coast photo editor and a longtime associate of Anderson Lee's. "All Pam had to do was go stand on that street corner. As many beautiful girls as there are, there are very few Pamelas."
Her status figures to grow further this month with the release of Barb Wire--a slickly shot B movie from Gramercy Pictures that hopes to fashion Anderson Lee into the female action star Hollywood has always yearned to create, ready to both kick ass and bare it at a moment's notice. But in its less-than-infinite wisdom, Hollywood made a strikingly ironic choice for the role of a self-sufficient, don't-!&$@-with-me heroine in Anderson Lee--who throughout her stay in Hollywood has been a sweetly pliant prefeminist, come to conquer not the town but a man whom she could wed and to whom she could bear children. It is that goal--not fame or money or stardom--that she has pursued most avidly, propelling her through a series of failed relationships with a host of high-profile men.
That goal, at least, she says she has attained, via her whirlwind marriage to Lee, whom friends and associates agree exerts adamantine control over his wife. Her never-a-dull-moment behavior on the Barb Wire set--from Lee-led fights with producers to fainting spells, womanly problems, trips to the hospital, uncharacteristic surliness, and trailer-rocking lunchtime trysts--has prompted friends and colleagues to invoke the names of such fallen icons as Dorothy Stratten and Marilyn Monroe when speaking of the sweet, naive Canadian girl.
And yet . . . in person, Anderson Lee is hardly the plastic figurine splashed across magazine covers and tabloids. Her freshly washed hair drapes over her freshly scrubbed face, revealing high cheekbones sprinkled with light freckles, and a tiny zit over her right eyebrow. She wears square-heeled black pumps and a sleeveless, mauve knit dress that softly falls just far enough below her bottom. Five months and one week pregnant on this day (the baby is due in May), Anderson Lee sports a belly swollen to the approximate size of the slight nagging bulge that millions of women sweat through aerobics and sets of abdominal crunches every day to obliterate.
To meet her is to like her, immediately. An animated storyteller with "madness in her head,'' she waves her hands emphatically and discusses her love of flaming-hot Chee-tos, Pringles light BBQ-flavor potato chips, and Shirley MacLaine--her favorite actress--with the same enthusiasm that she exudes when recounting a recent naked water-skiing escapade.
It's safe to say that Anderson Lee never envisioned that her meager show business credits would place her at the forefront of mainstream pop culture worldwide; in typically self-deprecating style, she finds the Pamela Phenomenon, coming soon to a theater near you, as mystifyingly funny as anyone would. "It's this high-profile thing--for nothing, really,'' says Anderson Lee. "I don't understand it. It's just bizarre. I go to Europe and there's all this madness, it's crazy. I'm, like, What's this based on? I haven't done anything.''
here have been many action stars and many action films, but Pamela Anderson Lee might be the first person ever to have begun an action movie and stopped taking her birth-control pills, in hopes of getting pregnant, at the same time. At first she wrote off the cramps she started experiencing during some of Barb Wire's fight scenes to morning sickness. "I have a very high tolerance for pain,'' says Anderson Lee. "I'm not a whiner. I didn't want to disappoint them. This is my first movie and I don't want to be known as a problem, because I'm always on time and I always work really hard.''
The camera was rolling on day four of one sequence when Anderson Lee nearly fainted. "She was literally at the point where she says, 'Don't call me babe,' '' says director David Hogan, referring to the cine-moment when Barb Wire levels her gun at the bad guys and delivers her signature tag line. "Her hands were shaking. She almost passed out before we got that take done. Then we did one more shot and she almost went down again.''
A trip to the hospital revealed that Anderson Lee had a cyst the size of a grapefruit on one of her ovaries. Production shut down for four days while she underwent surgery. "The day I could move my legs,'' Anderson Lee says, "I came back to work.''
In June, Anderson Lee took a pregnancy test in her trailer with her best friend and assistant on the film, Melanie Arthur. The results came up positive, and Anderson Lee saved the test to show Lee when he arrived on location. Her elation was short-lived: Weeks later, she miscarried. (Her current pregnancy was confirmed by doctors in October.) Production shut down for another two days.
It was at this point that friends and colleagues began to notice what they saw as a dramatic change in Anderson Lee. "She just became increasingly exhausted,'' says Arthur. "[The miscarriage] took a lot out of her, and it just added to the stress of having a new marriage and not knowing your husband before you're married. I'm sure it was really hard for her to concentrate on the movie.''
Now the actress--who used to fall asleep in her truck outside of her makeup artist's house if she arrived early for her 5 a.m. Baywatch preparation session--was habitually late to the set and regularly asked to leave work early. She stomped around her trailer throwing hissy fits when a wardrobe dresser would attempt to make costume changes. On one occasion, Anderson Lee even threw an Evian bottle at a crew member. Those at the shoot were quick to fault the influence of Tommy Lee, a constant presence hovering on the set and drinking with his buddies in her trailer.
"Tommy never disrupted a day of shooting,'' counters Hogan. "If he did, I wasn't aware of it.'' All the same, crew members regularly grouped around her trailer at lunchtime, gawking as it literally rocked and rolled while she and Lee had sex inside. Perhaps as a result, postlunch makeup, hair, and costume touch-up sessions that had formerly taken an hour to complete stretched to three hours. "There were times when I said, 'It's time for [Pamela] to come out of her trailer,' and she took a little longer than she should,'' says Hogan. "But I've never worked with a woman that didn't happen to.''
"I was overwhelmed,'' Anderson Lee admits. "My first movie, starring in a film, a lot of pressure. I'm glad Tommy was there. Tommy actually helped me out a lot.''
Lee's influence over Anderson Lee was palpable to crew members. More than one observer recalls Lee's telling her--barely one month pregnant, hardly showing--that she had better say she was three months pregnant in order to explain her burgeoning belly. "I believe she was having a lot of emotional problems, and she was having problems with Tommy,'' producer Todd Moyer says. Was she using drugs--speed, cocaine? "Absolutely not. I do not know that she did any drugs during that time. I believe she partied hard, but I never saw it. Nobody really knows except for Pamela and maybe her doctor.''
"That's why I was asleep in my trailer every five minutes,'' Anderson Lee says when asked if she did drugs at any point during the Barb Wireshoot. "I can't even imagine myself on that stuff. I'm so hyper as it is, if I were to have anything like that, I'd probably go through the roof. There's no way my body could even take it."
The turmoil reached its peak one afternoon in the last month of production, when Anderson Lee asked Moyer if she could leave the set early. Moyer refused to release her. "I started crying: 'You can't talk to me that way,' '' Anderson Lee says of their conversation. " 'I've had no time to emotionally heal from this miscarriage. I came back four days after having had endometriosis surgery.' He said, 'I didn't know you had goddamn surgery. I thought you were just having a miscarriage.' I was, like, 'Just a miscarriage?' Tommy went out to him and said, 'If you ever talk to my wife that way, I'm going to kick your ass. I don't give a fuck who you are.' ''
"She never brought up her illnesses [during our conversation],'' Moyer counters. He claims Anderson Lee wanted to leave early to attend a meeting with Lee and his lawyer. "Pam said to me, 'If I don't go to this meeting, I'm gonna get a divorce from Tommy.' I said, 'Then you have a problem with your relationship. You can't leave in the middle of a $200,000 shooting day.' ''
Anderson Lee insisted that Moyer keep his distance from the set for the remainder of production. "It was shortly thereafter that Todd kind of disappeared,'' Arthur reports, "and we didn't see him much after that at all.''
Anderson Lee also fired managers Ray Manzella and Dennis Brody midway through production. "They misrepresented me,'' she says. "They were constantly demanding things on my behalf. Finally I said, 'I don't need a manager. I don't need a baby-sitter. I definitely don't need a date.' ''
Despite the tempestuous nature of her fifteen-month relationship with Lee--one blowout in Anderson Lee's trailer on the Baywatch set resulted in Lee punching his fist through a cupboard door--Anderson Lee approaches the business of marriage with a doggedly traditional attitude. Against the counsel of her advisers, she has merged not only her life but her finances with those of her husband.
"It's just more comfortable to have everything under the same roof,'' Anderson Lee says. "Tommy and I are determined. Everything is in both our names. It's so bizarre when your business people are going, 'It's really important to keep everything separated.' What are you preparing us for? I go, 'Listen, rule number one, you are wanting to protect me from my husband. We're not going to get a divorce. Screw you people.' ''
And to those who dare suggest that Anderson Lee has undergone a personality change since her marriage to Lee: "I'm really happy with my husband,'' she says. "I'm really happy with my life. Everything is changing for the better. So anyone who says that I've changed for the worse are people that probably aren't in my life anymore.''
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