Star by Pamela Anderson

The appeal of Pamela Anderson is a thing of balance. This balance refers not only to skeletal matters, but to her market appeal. Yes, she made her first waves as a model for Playboy- but Playboy was always considered a tasteful publication with the likes of Larry Flynt around. She became an international star playing a flotation-device fitted lifeguard in a costume that didn’t so much leave something to the imagination as it grabbed it by the collar and screamed “Can you guess what’s under here!?”, that’s true. But “Baywatch” was a show with good wholesome family values. Risque, but never offensive. Her wedding night video may have clocked up downloads in the millions, but hey- it was her wedding night, and they stole the tape, right?

Therefore when Pamela and her ghost writer Eric Shaw Quinn took it upon themselves to write an account of Pamela’s rise to stardom, sex, drugs and pajama-clad magazine publishers included, a couple of easy punches have been pulled. For the sake of balance.

For starters, names have been changed. Pamela Anderson becomes Star Wood Leigh, a late bloomer and a doe eyed charmer who inadvertently finds herself on the cover of “Mann” magazine when she agrees to help a friend with her makeup on a shoot. The pipe smoking head of Mann magazine, Marsten Mann, bears a suprising resemblance to a Hugh Hefner, and the names don’t stop there. David Hasselhoff becomes “Foster Streithope” and drummer ex-husband Tommy Lee becomes “Jimi Deed”. As for the shows that brought Pam to our screens,“Home Improvement” becomes “Hammer Time” and “Lifeguards Inc” is substituted for “Baywatch”.

That Baywatch balance of smut and good old American values has also formed the basis for “Star”. From the cheesy opening sequence in Miami which has Star singing Journey’s “Don’t stop Believin’” from her beat up Impala to her continued wide eyed innocence as she descends into Hollywood, that girl next door grip is maintained. Tellingly her relationship with Tommy Lee has been all but left out of the book: But perhaps that’s because there’s just not much about the subject the world doesn’t already know.

The net result teeters between a raunchy account of Pamela’s life and loves and pure fiction. Was Tony Danza really “faster than a speeding bullet”? Did Brett Michaels really entertain Bacchanalian orgies in his hotel room? To Pamela’s credit, she has clearly realized that thanks to the fictionalisation of her life through tabloids she can get away with just about anything.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about “Star” is that despite Anderson’s character sleeping with virtually every male character in the book, including many of the producers that had no small hand in bringing about her success, Anderson still manages to come across unaffected, uncalculating and just so god darn shocked at how crazy everything turned out. Is “Star” a literal lesson in PR perhaps?