44 The Times Magazinehe chauffeur-driven limousine was
wending its way from Heathrow
Airport to Park Lane, but, it
appeared, not nearly fast enough
for its A-list cargo. Playboy cover
girl turned Baywatch icon Pamela
Anderson and her rock star
husband of ten months, Tommy
Lee, had just touched down in
London from Los Angeles, and,
having fought their way through a phalanx
of photographers, were eager for “a lie-down”.
Anderson, 29 years old and one of the most
famous women on the planet, thanks to the
Baywatch global audience of one billion, was
in the early stages of pregnancy, but had not yet
announced it publicly. And, evidently, it had
not dampened the couple’s notorious ardour.
They discussed their sex life regularly in
TV interviews. “I just want to make love to my
wife all day long. What’s wrong with that?” Lee,
the 33-year-old drummer with Mötley Crüe,
would ask, bragging proudly about his latest
tattoo: his wife’s name inked on his genitals.
They had, Anderson breezily revealed to
the journalists beside them in the limousine
that morning, already demonstrated their
commitment to the Mile High Club – several
times – on the flight over, but the priapic Lee
suffered from a crippling condition, he claimed:
DSB, or “dreaded semen build-up”. When
the car pulled up to the Lanesborough hotel,
45 minutes later, Lee hurried his wife straight
to their luxury suite. Where they remained for
much of their week in the capital.
It was December 1995, the final weeks of a
year in which Anderson and Lee had dominated
the headlines, having married in February
after a four-day, drug-fuelled whirlwind
romance on the beach in Cancún, Mexico.
They were catnip to the world’s tabloids, and
The Sun had flown them to London, putting
them up at the Lanesborough for a week of
pre-Christmas photo opportunities. “We’d
had an itinerary drawn up, but that went out
of the window as they wouldn’t come out of
their room,” recalls Antonella Lazzeri, a former
feature writer at the newspaper, who was
tasked with “minding” the pair for the week.
“It was a smouldering sex show; they were at
it morning, noon and night.” And loudly.
It was, she says, challenging to keep the
couple focused on the task in hand. Picture
sessions were often interrupted by Lee
grabbing Anderson, “throwing her on the
bed and ordering us out while they ‘took
a break’”. So infrequently did the couple
leave their suite, let alone the hotel, that
the burly bodyguard hired to protect them
from paparazzi was left sitting idle.
One rare outing, to the Queen’s lingerie
supplier, Rigby & Peller, ended with Lee
becoming so excited by Anderson parading
around in lacy bras and knickers that he hadto be hauled out of the dressing room seconds
before they got frisky. On another, to see the
musical Cats in the West End, they reportedly
squeezed in a quickie during the interval.
Perhaps, given their legendary libidos, it
was only poetic that the couple inadvertently
created a new cultural phenomenon: the
celebrity sex tape.
Shortly before their departure from LA to
London, the Anderson-Lees had discovered
that not only was the world hearing about
their intimate athletics, but a sizeable number
of people had now seen them too. In an
end-of-year review by the Mail on Sunday,
which detailed the couple’s romantic hijinks
of the past ten months, it was mentioned that
a video of the pair having sex on a yacht was
on sale in Los Angeles.
Anderson was devastated, while Lee was
livid. The tape – 54 minutes of private, personal
home video, 8 of which were highly explicit- had seemingly been stolen by a disgruntled
tradesman who had been working on their
home renovation and who, advertising on a
new and increasingly popular platform called
the internet, was now selling VHS copies
of Pamela’s Hardcore Sex Video for $59.99 - around £40 – and shipping them worldwide.
The colourful couple, their wild romance,
the stolen sex tape and its fallout, are the
subject of a new miniseries next month,
starring Lily James as the Baywatch bombshell
and Sebastian Stan as her heavily tattooed
bad-boy husband. Forget the Blair and Brown
documentary or the forthcoming Frasier reboot,
Pam & Tommy is a shot of mid-Nineties
nostalgia as potent as the Goldschläger
Anderson sent Lee in an LA nightclub – the
gesture that initiated their entire union.
Best known for playing radiant English
roses – Mrs de Winter in Rebecca, Linda in
The Pursuit of Love and actual Lady Rose
in Downton Abbey – the willowy James was
transformed into a pneumatic Baywatch Barbie
via four hours of daily make-up, beginning
at 3.30am, and involving the application of a
wig, a chest plate and a mahogany Californian
tan. “I’ve never done anything where I look
very different from myself before. And... there
was something very freeing and liberating in
it,” she said earlier this month. “There was a
bravery that came from that. A courage that
came from... disappearing.”
And disappear she does, wholly and
convincingly, into a breathy, wide-eyed sex
kitten, in tiny rubber dresses, whose aims to
emulate Jane Fonda (“A sexy feminist, who
didn’t give a f*** what anyone thought of
her”) and her film career never quite come
to fruition, much to her frustration.
Frequently, it’s easy to forget that it is
Disney’s former live action Cinderella there,
going at it, on every conceivable flat surface
and ledge, at every available opportunity.
Quite aside from all the sex – and there’s a
lot – and the cartoonish surgical enhancement
(nobody’s seen double Ds like these since
the WAGs took over Baden-Baden), Pam &
Tommy captures a moment in time, the pivotal
confluence of technology and celebrity, or, as
Rolling Stone magazine put it, “the fulcrum of
two eras, before and after the internet came to
dominate commerce and communication”.
Before Paris Hilton’s 1 Night in Paris, and
long before Kim Kardashian rocketed to
fame with the release of her sex tape with
her boyfriend at the time Ray J, Anderson
and Lee’s hardcore home video was the
first celebrity sex tape to go viral. Moreover,
many believe, it set a precedent that the rich
and famous are, by virtue of their profiting
from said fame, less entitled to privacy
than us proles. “It provoked an internet
and celebrity culture that I believe is just
way out of hand,” said Lily James. “There
is no such thing as privacy now.”T
BEFORE PARIS HILTON,
BEFORE KIM KARDASHIAN,
THEIRS WAS THE FIRST
SEX TAPE TO GO VIRAL
Their 1995 wedding in
Mexico and, below, in
Las Vegas the same yearPREVIOUS SPREAD: JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES, DISNEY+. THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES, ERICA PARISE/HULU