Where Pamela Anderson walks today, the beach is made of stones and gravel.

"This isn't California.

I can't run in slow motion here," she laughs, telling the camera that follows her.

She'll be laughing a lot in the next two hours of her documentary Pamela: A Love Story, especially at the jokes she makes about herself.

A coping laugh that creates distance to what happened to her.

Caroline O Jebens

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

  • Follow I follow

Anderson is now 55 years old and no longer lives in Malibu, California, but back in Ladysmith, Canada, where she grew up, not far from her parents.

She returned there because of the pandemic, but that's not the only reason.

She has used the last few years to write, first just for herself, then for her two sons, Brandon and Dylan.

Brandon, the elder, had advised her to make a book out of it, Love, Pamela, which came out last year and which she wrote entirely without ghostwriting.

Anderson has always written: diaries, notebooks, poems.

Her yellow notepads are the actual “Yellow Pages”, she jokes – she has recorded everything she has experienced in them since her early youth.

For the documentary, an actress reads from it with a soft voice, even softer than Anderson's voice is already.

Her life is recounted in a good manner: her childhood, her youth;

how her career started and how she started a family.

What went wrong along the way and what maybe didn't.

Time travel through VHS cassettes

That's a thankful starting point for a documentary that Anderson knows how to improve on when she returns from the stony beach to the house, where everything is white and the boxes full of videocassettes have been unpacked.

She's sent her home over the years.

In the nineties, she says, everything was filmed with small digicams.

So she puts in some of the VHS tapes (which in itself feels like time travel) and watching her creates very emotional scenes, simply because it's always emotional when you indulge in nostalgia.

But that is also how to experience it again, she says: "painful".

Her father drank and beat her, her babysitter abused her, her boyfriend followed her, an acquaintance raped her.

Then the slim girl with the brown hair left the island.

What comes next is the short, fast-paced tale of a discovery the likes of which can only happen in the United States: she's caught on stadium cameras at a 1989 football game, the brewery whose shirt she's wearing hires her as a model, and the "Playboy" calls her, she cancels, he calls, she cancels, and it goes like this until he says yes.

Arrived at the sandy beach, everything seems to be easy.

She only has to do two steps, she is told in the “Mansion”: bleach her hair and enlarge her breasts.

She does it because she wants it too.

The first shoot was like an awakening for her, she says: "I regained the power that was taken from me." And Anderson won: no one was on the "Playboy" cover more often than she (fourteen times);

she also had the last nude cover of the magazine, 2015.