Pamela Anderson doesn’t hold back in her memoir “Love, Pamela,” writing honestly about her sometimes violent childhood and her tempestuous marriage to Mötley Crüe rocker and sex-tape partner Tommy Lee.
The Canadian-born actress, 55, also reveals that things got so bad that she once downed vodka and a bottle of pills and let herself into a bathtub full of water — an act that could have cost Anderson her life.
In 1995, Anderson was pulling double-duty, filming “Baywatch” and the movie “Barb Wire.” She was also newly married to Lee, who she wed after knowing for only four days. The ceremony took place on a beach in Cancun, Mexico, with Anderson clad in a white bikini.
“It was a challenging time,” she writes. “I hardly slept, I was working constantly between the movie and Baywatch, and I was freshly married. It felt like I needed to be ‘on’ 24/7, and yet I could barely stay awake.”
Then a friend introduced her to diet pills named ephedrine.
“I liked how the pills kept me awake, and I could get a lot more done,” Anderson reveals in the book. “But the side effects meant I was losing weight fast. I looked like a bowlegged skeleton in a bathing suit, 105 pounds at five foot seven. In some of the ‘Baywatch’ episodes filmed during that time, even the tiniest waves would knock me over.”
Anderson remembers that people around her were concerned but writes that she dealt with it by withdrawing. She also admits to being frightened of upsetting her new husband, who alleegedly “got so angry and jealous when I had scenes with other men, especially if I was kissing someone else. That was out of the question.”
It got so bad that the “Baywatch” producers began to tinker with dialogue and scenes if they saw the heavily-tattooed rock star approaching.
Once, Lee allegedly acted out on the “Baywatch” set by ramming his car into the makeup trailer and punching cabinets in the makeup room. He then, she writes, proceeded to toss Anderson “into his car, driving off the set, tires spinning. He dropped me off at the condo, and went who knows where.”
The next day, Anderson uncharacteristically didn’t show up on set. Her driver came to her condo and found the actress unconscious on the floor.
“I had been at the end of my rope,” she writes. “I was confused, sad, tired, not in my right mind. I had gotten into the bathtub the night before and tried to swallow a bottle of Advil with vodka, sinking slowly under the water. But luckily, I couldn’t stand the taste
of hard alcohol and the nausea forced me out of the tub. I threw up everything, all over the stone floor, and then fell asleep in a pool of Advil-red vomit. It must have looked scary.”
She confesses to feeling a “depth of despair I’d never felt —and I’d been through a lot.”
Anderson’s younger brother Gerry, who was an extra on “Baywatch,” heard what had happened and raced to the hospital with Lee.
“Tommy was apologetic, in tears, afraid he’d almost lost me,” Anderson writes. “Still, he and my brother started fighting, rolling around, wrestling, throwing punches. The staff tried to stop them, and next thing, security was trying to escort both of them out. When the doctor came in, my brother was furious and screaming at Tommy, saying he was killing me, and most definitely killing any chance I had at a career.”
Finally, tempers cooled. And the doctor announced that Anderson was pregnant.
“All was forgiven, and we fell into each other’s arms in happy tears,” she writes.
The elation was sadly short-lived when, a few weeks later, she miscarried.
It wasn’t Anderson’s only health scare that year.
During the making of “Barb Wire,” she had an ovarian cyst burst while attempting a back roundhouse kick in stilettos and a corset. Lee, who was on set, scooped her up and drove to the hospital.
“I had to stay in the hospital overnight. Tommy and I made love in the narrow, stretcher-like hospital bed while I was connected to an IV. We fell asleep in each other’s arms,” she writes. “There was no way they were going to be able to get him to leave — they didn’t even try.”
Eventually, they went on to have two sons, Brandon, now 26, and Dylan, 25.
Anderson says that the paparazzi were a constant source of frustration for the couple, who followed and antagonized them.
“The lawsuits kept stacking up,” she writes. “We were leaving a hotel, and Tommy dropped his cigarettes. I bent down to pick them up, and a photographer whistled. Tommy walked up and had a few words, then backhanded him, breaking his jaw. Another $25,000 to settle that one.”
A court-appointed therapist named Dr. Weiner tried to teach the couple to view the paparazzi as “invisible,” to little avail.
One night, soon after they had welcomed Dylan, Lee was on the floor rocking himself back and forth, holding his head and mumbling, “What about me? I want my wife back.”
Anderson offered to call her parents to come help but Lee rebuffed her.
“‘Then f–king help me!” Anderson remembers screaming. “You have to grow up, Tommy. It’s not just about you anymore.'”
She had never spoken to Lee like that before. Anderson writes that he reacted by grabbing the phone, twisting her arm as she was holding Dylan and tearing off one of her nails. He allegedly threw her against a wall and took off with the Brandon.
Anderson called 911. When the police arrived, they asked if there was a gun in the house.
“I naively told them yes, there was a Glock handgun in our bedpost,” Anderson writes. “Tommy was on probation and was immediately arrested. He went to jail. Our hell began.”
(Lee was arrested for felony spousal abuse and would later plead guilty to charges.)
The actress refused to see or speak to Lee while he was in jail but that changed when he was released.
“We’d have secret meetings, breaking the restraining order. He’d tap on my window and we’d make love in the car outside my house. I was under the strict orders of lawyers and therapists to avoid him, but we couldn’t help ourselves,” she writes, noting that, ultimately, they couldn’t forgive each other.
“We just weren’t equipped to get through it all,” she admits. “I loved to see him with his boys, but the four of us together forever was only a dream.”
Anderson calls her 1998 divorce “the hardest, lowest, most difficult point of my life. I still couldn’t believe that the person I loved the most was capable of what had happened that night. We were both devastated, but I had to protect my babies.”
She write that, years later, she found out that Lee had been taking steroids during that time which may account for why he snapped so suddenly and violently.
Despite going on to have several more relationships and marriages, including one to Kid Rock, Anderson says that her relationship with Lee “may have been the only time I was ever truly in love.
“I blamed myself and I blamed Tommy for the fact that we could not keep the most important relationship of our lives together for the boys,” Anderson writes. “We let them down.”
