Love, Pamela, by Pamela Anderson

The former Baywatch star and Playboy pin-up tells her story.

Pamela Anderson has always been perceived as a two-dimensional figure – a pin up girl and Baywatch star, more famous for her red swimsuit than any acting ability. She married drummer Tommy Lee in a bikini on the beach and found her life dragged through the gutter when some private videos were stolen from her house and edited into a sordid “sex tape”. In later years a different side to Anderson emerged. There was her animal welfare work for PETA and advocacy for Julian Assange.

Now middle-aged and with two adult sons, Pamela Anderson has decided to write her own story. An avid reader (everyone from Anais Nin to Noam Chomsky is referenced) and diary keeper since childhood, Love, Pamela seamlessly blends poetry and prose and has a brisk, almost chatty tone. She discusses growing up in Canada, her parents' turbulent relationship and childhood traumas such as when she was molested by a female babysitter. There are entertaining chapters on working for Playboy Magazine, her passionate and often extravagant lifestyle with Tommy Lee and the more settled years of activism and farming on her Canadian property, where she lives with her parents.

Love, Pamela could be best described as a book of forgiveness and healing. Anderson is candid about the many mistakes she has made in life, but seems to shrug them off as all par for the course. No one's perfect and nor should they expect to be. Where others have done her wrong, she holds no grudges or bitterness. Indeed, this is a sweet and hopeful book that strives to see the best in people.

An inspiring memoir, written in Pamela Anderson's unique authorial voice. The blonde pin-up now speaks, her words wise and compassionate.    

Love, Pamela, by Pamela Anderson. Published by Headline. $34.99

FEB23

Get Happy, by Gerald Clarke

The wildest ride at Disneyland couldn’t equal the life of Judy Garland, a woman who seemed to live life as one big mess. Husbands stole from her and she knew it, but would confess to friends ‘I know, but I love the guy’. Strangest of all, three generations of women in her family married gay men. Her mother and her daughter both had gay husbands. How weird is that?

I’m not much up with the Judy Garland story, but this biography by Gerald Clarke, who wrote the brilliant Capote biography, didn’t impress me as much. It seemed on the tabloidy side, discussing Judy’s sex life in way too much detail. It would have been nicer if the book had concentrated a bit more on her career.

This is a readable and enjoyable enough biography, but I came away with a bit of an empty feeling.

Tallulah!, by Joel Lobenthal

Joel Lobenthal’s biography of Tallulah Bankhead has no time for Miss Bankhead’s legendary cult status as gay icon. At various stages in the book the author describes Bankhead’s legions of gay fans as misogynists and saboteurs. It’s as if Susan Sontag’s famous Notes on Camp had never been written, in which Sontag lists Tallulah Bankhead as one of ‘The great stylists of temperament and mannerism.’ Sorry, but Sontag’s description of camp seems like praise to me. By doggedly refusing to discuss Tallulah’s camp appeal, this book loses any possible zest it may have possessed.

It’s a pretty big book, over 500 pages. As far as I can tell, the book’s aim is to make a ‘serious’ appraisal of Tallulah’s career and definitively slot her somewhere into the history of film and stage. Lobenthal wants to give Tallulah the dignity that he feels her icon status denies her. The result is a sluggish book. It has some moments, but they are the sections where Tallulah thankfully does most of the talking.

The most boring parts are all the theatre descriptions and names, names, names of people I’ve never heard of before. The plots of dull, second rate plays are also summarised in unnecessary detail. Who cares? You’d have to be a theatre aficionado of the time to really enjoy all the talk about these forgotten directors, writers and actors.

I noticed one glaring error in the text. On page 154 Lobenthal describes actor Harry Kendal being glimpsed in the Hitchcock film Young and Strange. No such film exists. He’s obviously mixed up either Hitchock’s Rich and Strange (a line out of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets) or Young and Innocent. I don’t know which. Such muddle headed scholarship is a bit of a worry. Who knows what other errors there are in the text?

I only finished this book because of Tallulah. In the early fifties she wrote her own autobiography – or rather dictated it to a ghost writer. No doubt she could have written it herself. She was a huge reader. (She found Proust ‘a bit excessive’, finishing his long novel out of a sense of intellectual duty). I sense her autobiography would be full of pithy, sharp as a tack observations, like Lucille Ball’s wonderful memoirs.

Let’s leave the last words to Tallulah Bankead herself, from the above mentioned autobiography:

‘If I have my history right, it is the heretics, the nonconformists, the iconoclasts who have enriched our lives, added both to our knowledge, our progress, and our happiness.’

Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg

This book came to me as a Christmas present from my mother. I can't say that I've ever really been a fan of Katharine Hepburn. To be honest, I get sick of hearing people raving about how wonderful she was. It seems if you're a movie star and half way intelligent or decent as a human being they laud you to the skies. Surely there are millions of Katharine Hepburns the world over, it's just they're not famous.

This was a really enjoyable book. The author, A. Scott Berg, has written extensively about Hollywood and knows his subject. In 1983 he met and became friends with Miss Hepburn, frequently staying at her house. The biography is a mixture of memoir and a chronology of her work as an actress.

There was heaps I didn't know about Katharine Hepburn, and must admit to now being more intrigued to find out some of her films. What I admired most about her was she persistently flung herself at difficult and challenging acting jobs throughout her career, even repeatedly taking on Shakespeare as a stage actress. What other actresses of her generation did such a thing. She even played Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Can you imagine any one more perfect to play that cross dressing, male willed heroine?

Katharine Hepburn had a hard core of common sense. She kept her own house and independent lifestyle all her life. She didn't get in a flap because she couldn't marry Spencer Tracy, but rather kept a cool head.

She had a sharp intelligence and articulate mind, no doubt the result of her life long devotion to reading. Check out this remarkable response, given in her eighties, to the question of whether she believed in Jesus Christ:

'I believed he lived,' she said without hesitation. 'And I believe he was an exemplary human being who walked the earth�.and if more people practiced what he preached, this world would be a better place. And I'd say a lot of people have done terrible things in his name. But was he the son of God? Well, I don't think I could honestly say�..'

It was painful to read of the last years of her life, lingering on and on and on well into her nineties, without any apparent joy in life. Also, it was shocking to read about Warren Beatty trying to coax her (successfully, after much trying) for a bit part in one of his stupid movies. (He got her to say this numb line, 'fuck a duck'. Really.) Couldn't he leave the poor woman alone and allow her some dignity? What a creep.

Michael Jackson fans should turn to page 214 for an eye popping 12 page description of a visit by the star. MJ was 25 at the time, at the height of his Thriller fame. It's the weirdest thing I've ever read. Michael seems like an evil child - oh so sweet, but entirely manipulative. He barely says anything throughout the dinner, doesn't know much about Hepburn's films, despite professing to be a fan. Near the end of the dinner he asks to speak privately to Miss Hepburn, and suddenly the other guests hear her saying, 'Absolutely not! Out of the question'. Michael wanted a photo of him with Katharine. (He had a professional photographer waiting out in his car.) When this failed he asked if she knew Greta Garbo, and if she could organise a meeting, to which Miss Hepburn gave another definite no.

A really enjoyable book. Check it out!

Ball of Fire, by Stefan Kanfer

This is one of those 'dark side' biographies. It's so depressing I'm inclined to think it's pretty accurate. Lucille Ball should really have the type of legendary reputation that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had as uber-bitches. Indeed, even La Crawford, after working with Miss Ball, said that even she could 'outbitch' her. The only thing that seems to have saved Lucille from such a fate is the I Love Lucy show itself. So sacred is the image of Lucille Ball to popular culture, no one would believe that Lucy, the lovable goofball, could possibly be the seasoned, tough as nails Hollywood broad.

Unwittingly proving this very point herself, Lucy bemoaned the hostile reaction she got from the American public when the inevitable and long, long over due divorce from Desi finally came. It was like she'd murdered something. She noted the irony that when she was exposed as being a one time member of the communist party, it had not been as bad as the public's reaction to her break up.

Lucy's daughter, Lucie, perhaps encapsulated everything best. She noted that both her parents wanted to be the Ricardos, and were peeved that this could never be so.

Lucille Ball had it all. Money, fame, the children she always wanted (and ignored once she had them). Despite all this she could still moan, 'Why can't I be happy?'

Fun in a Chinese Laundry, by Josef Von Sternberg

Josef Von Sternberg is one helluva fop. His memoirs, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, can't really be called that. They're more a meditation on life and art. The assiduous reader who looks for juicy detail on his biggest creation, Marlene Dietrich, is bound to be disappointed. Her name barely turns up half a dozen times. Instead we get pages and pages of tantalising fragments, but never anything concrete. For example, he gives us these longs lists of outrageous things he's done, but never tells us exactly how and in what circumstances these things happened to him.

As such, I don't know how far we can trust the veracity of the great film director's recollections. Indeed, in a footnote on page 264, he tells us about an essay titled, the Fetish of Authenticity. Von Sternberg adds, 'I consider this a noteworthy concentration of a theme in a title.' Indeed!

For example, I was shocked to read Joseph Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy) lauded to the skies as charming and brilliant. Everyone knows he was a grubby little crook!!

All that aside, I found the 340 pages a very seductive read. It is written in a leisurely, lapidary prose and I found myself turning page after page eagerly. Not as outrageous as Salvador Dali's memoirs, not a classic like Proust or Jean Genet (the book's style is much in that line) I'd call it a most interesting curio. Essential reading for any devotee of twentieth century art, a little known side street in literature.