COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Lordy, lordy, Pamela turns 40
Pamela Anderson did something remarkable recently. And no, I don’t mean her new “reality show,” “Pam: Girl on the Loose,” which premiered Sunday on the E Network.
She celebrated her 40th birthday July 1.
Can you BE Pamela Anderson and 40 at the same time? Just as 60 is the bottom step of old age, 40 is, unmistakably, the bottom rung of middle age’s ladder. The whole point of Pamela Anderson, up to now, has been to be a walking youthful sunburst — of blonde hair, expensively implanted flesh and giggly naughtiness. Yes, she comes from the beaches of Canada, but she’s the Beach Boys’ “California Girl” personified — forever 18, until, that is, the moment when she celebrates her 40th birthday.
And talks about it on Letterman, where close-ups of her lovely face indicated that, yeah, gorgeous as she is (and is likely to be in perpetuity), she isn’t exactly a contemporary of Miley Cyrus. (She’s the same age as Celine Dion, Halle Berry and Will Smith, in fact.)
But then think of her husbands, after all — Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, rocker Kid Rock and Paris Hilton’s sex tape co-star Rick Salomon. They’re the kind of men someone might marry if they weren’t yet old enough to know the difference between a one-night stand and a husband.
She’s an archetype made flesh. Long before she ever actually bared her body for Playboy, there was a cartoonist for the magazine named Eldon Dedini whose women all looked like Pam Anderson before she was even born.
I submit we are at the beginning of a great experiment in celebrity — how a person might remain Pam Anderson even though you’re a 40-year-old mother of two young boys.
Madonna, at 50, has shown that you can still find a way to be publicly disreputable against all likelihood. Whatever she’s actually doing with A-Rod (not to mention her husband, Guy Ritchie, who seems remarkably composed), the emergence of a 50-year old Madonna as well-toned homewrecker certainly takes the place of the bucolic British matron, showbiz pro and student of Kabbalah that she’d settled into.
Anderson’s reality show gave us glimpses of her being late to her nude photo shoot for David LaChapelle, then being late for an Elton John Vegas opening. We also saw her Mom frying up pierogies for her and an awful lot of Pam’s things arrayed in a yard sale to benefit PETA, her favorite cause.
According to Pam, what we won’t see, except for perhaps their feet or the backs of their heads, is her kids. As the co-star of perhaps the most famous home sex tape in the Western World, Pamela Anderson fully knows the difference between exploiting yourself ruthlessly and selling your soul. (There IS a difference. It’s in there somewhere, though not many of us are ever pushed so far out there we need to find it.)
“This isn’t a reality show,” she scrawls on the TV picture in pink lipstick. “This is MY show.” And if you think that isn’t an enormously canny distinction — and compelling bit of metaphysical candor — you may still be caught in the trap of dismissing Anderson as a dim-bulb phantom of fanboy fantasy a la Paris Hilton and Denise Richards.
I do have a suggestion, though, for all those at Pamela Anderson Inc. to consider, now that she’s 40. Instead of a bad peep show on the E Network, why not a Pamela Anderson video game like, say, Guitar Hero? In Pam The Video Game, fanboys with joysticks can fight off paparazzi, jealous competing bimbos, stalkers, seducers, dishonest showbiz types, randy rockers and slimy tabloid reporters. In the PG-13 version of the game, the highest level is to run alongside Pam on the beach in some eternal “Baywatch.”
In the NC-17 version you get to be Tommy Lee on the boat.
