Pamela Anderson has spent the last month revealing bombshells from her life—from Tim Allen flashing her to Jack Nicholson’s wild threesome—but the actress saved some of the biggest reveals for her new memoir.
Love, Pamela, which releases today, offers an intimate look into the many controversies of Anderson’s life. She doesn’t hold back while talking about being sexually assaulted in high school, or about her days as a Playmate with Hugh Hefner, or the leak of her sex tape with Tommy Lee.
The celebrity memoir takes on a new form in Love, Pamela which blends personal anecdotes and the model's original poetry. If there’s anyone in the world yearning to read a sonnet about posing for a Playboy cover—a long shot—they’ll be pleased to read Anderson’s original verses, which are all quite cheesy. These poems take up about half of the book, sandwiched in between Anderson’s juicier revelations.
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“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,” Anderson writes.
One thing that does feel slightly askew in Anderson’s book is her commitment to Hefner and the Playboy mansion. After opening up about her own dealings with sexual assault and domestic violence, to completely ignore the accusations of rape and other abusive tactics in the mansion feels like an oversight on her part. Instead, Anderson champions Hefner and her ties to the group, which discredits the many women who have spoken out against Playboy in a book that aims to empower women.
The celeb also goes long about her care for the natural world, detailing her work with PETA—though she does begin the memoir by saying she once accidentally ripped a tail off a rat and that, as a child, she used to spread butter on cats. There’s a fascinating obsession with animals in her stories and poetry, leading up to the disclosure that as recently as last year she took a job as a dog walker.
While the poetry may not be great and Anderson’s memoir is completely unrelatable, the tidbits of celebrity gossip make it more notable. From violent run-ins with Tommy Lee to crushing on JFK Jr., here are the biggest reveals from Anderson’s memoir:
She got sick after a makeup artist touched her breast at her very first Playboy photoshoot.
Anderson admitted to feeling a sense of “shyness” at her first Playboy shoot, which led to some struggles on set. A makeup artist named Tracey was assisting at the shoot, opening Anderson’s jacket to show off her chest a bit more. “Tracey touched my boob to enhance my bony cleavage,” Anderson writes. “They asked me to soften my stomach, saying my ribs were too sharp. I started to feel nauseous, faint, I had to stop. I ran to the bathroom and got sick.” Anderson goes on to say she “couldn’t believe a woman had touched me there, I just couldn’t.”
She confesses that she now regrets getting a breast augmentation.
Anderson jokes that her “breasts had a career of their own” and she “was just tagging along,” but there’s a darker side to this. She says that at the Playboy Mansion, she had “agreed to amplify my chest like everyone else.” But Anderson wasn’t ready for all the attention she would face as a result. She faced more complications and surgeries. “I understand that sometimes it might be worth it, or necessary,” Anderson writes. “In my case, it really wasn’t. It was an impetuous, shallow decision.”
Her “most embarrassing moment” was meeting John F. Kennedy Jr. at her famous American flag shoot.
John F. Kennedy Jr. wanted Anderson to pose for the first cover of George magazine, but it didn’t work out. Still, he persisted, eventually getting her to pose naked behind an American flag. In her “most embarrassing moment,” Anderson made a “squeal” on the phone call with Kennedy as they chatted about the shoot. “He tried again to reach me after the shoot, but I was too shy to call him back,” she writes. “He was way out of my league.”
Tommy Lee was banned from the Barb Wire set for violent outbursts.
The newlyweds were together on the set of Anderson’s film “every minute.” This led to some conflict, because Lee wanted his “wife time” but the producers wanted to finish the film. In one event, Lee punched a producer in the face after being told he’d have to go home. He was then banned from the set, but that didn’t stop him—Lee would hop the fence to meet Anderson in her trailer instead.
She went through “days of harassment” from lawyers after the sex tape leak.
Lee and Anderson attempted to block the company that had distributed their sex tape, and the company’s lawyers forced the couple to interview separately. She was seven months pregnant at the time. One of the lawyers was “literally foaming at the mouth” as they displayed big naked photos to “prove [she] didn’t care about being nude publicly.” They told Anderson she had “no right to privacy” after appearing in Playboy. The lawyers went so far as to suggest that Anderson “probably liked the attention” of having the sex tape leak.
She blames steroids on Tommy’s infamous 1998 attack.
Just a few years after the sex tape leak, Lee was booked after “physically assaulting” Anderson as she held their son. Anderson recounts that night in her memoir, but the biggest reveal is that she blames his use of steroids for his actions that night.
Tommy threatened to kill Kid Rock when he started dating her.
Anderson met Kid Rock in 2001, and not long after, the singer was ready to propose. She writes that Kid Rock still called Lee to “tell him that he loved me and wanted to marry me,” but this obviously didn’t go over so well. “Tommy told him to fuck off—and that he’d kill him.” That didn’t stop them from getting married just a year later.
She was a part-time dog walker in NYC last year.
While Anderson starred as Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway in 2022, she picked up a side job: walking dogs. Well, one dog in particular. The actress had a dog of her own, but she missed him so much that she’d visit Central Park to cheer herself up. “I even found a dog to walk while I was there,” she recalls, “a beautiful red Irish setter named Dash that I’d pick up each day on the walk to the park, to his busy parents’ delight.”
