The Times Magazine 45rock’n’roll excess, making no secret of their
fondness for cocaine, heroin and groupies.
Lee did not hold back in relationships
either. By the mid-Nineties, he’d been married
twice, first to model Elaine Starchuk, then to
Dynasty and Melrose Place actress Heather
Locklear, a union that ended, after seven
years, in accusations of infidelity on Lee’s
part, allegedly with a porn star.
He was engaged again, to model Bobbie
Brown, when, on New Year’s Eve 1994, at LA’s
Sanctuary Club, Anderson sent him over the
Goldschläger. Already well refreshed with
Cristal champagne and Ecstasy, Lee thanked
her in the time-honoured way: by licking her
face from jawline to scalp. Understandably,
Anderson gave him her number, with which
he then pursued her relentlessly for six weeks,
eventually, in a grand romantic/stalking
gesture, tracking her down to Cancún,
where he wooed her in a heady haze of
drugs, booze and orgasms.
Four days later – Lee having proposed at
a nightclub string bikini contest – the couple
were man and wife, married barefoot on the
beach, Lee in board shorts, Anderson in a
skimpy white bikini. Following the vows, made
in front of eight guests, the groom threw his
bride into the Caribbean. Instead of wedding
bands, Anderson had “Tommy” tattooed around
her ring finger (as previously mentioned,
Lee also had her name prominently tattooed).
“I don’t like jewellery,” said Anderson at the
time. “The size of the stone is really about
the man’s ego over his little thing. I think
diamonds have a direct relationship to your
man’s penis size.” Her family learnt of her
nuptials by reading about them in the press.
“People were a bit surprised when they got
together,” says Stuart White, former American
editor for The News of the World, who was
based in LA in the Nineties. “She looked sexy,
but she also had this image of being a good
girl, a clean-cut Canadian girl with a bit of
naivety about her.” The Baywatch crew, from
whom White would sometimes get tip-offs
for stories, spoke of her professionalism,
her politeness, her sweetness. Pam & Tommy
presents the actress as knowing yet vulnerable;
highly sexual, but also traditional and desperate
to start a family. Lee, on the other hand, was
wild and unpredictable, with a reputation for
hard living and chaos. “It’s the old story, the
good girl and the bad boy, the vicar’s daughter
and the street corner hooligan,” says White.
Nevertheless, contemporaneous observers
concur that as well as their overwhelming,
all-consuming lust – a somewhat impractical
lust that often led to them “having sex in the
most unusual places because they literally
couldn’t wait until they got home”, according
to Lazzeri – they were also deeply in love.
“He worshipped her,” she adds. “I don’t
think he could quite believe she had agreedto marry him. He was very solicitous of her,
always worrying if she was OK.”
While rollicking and deliciously rompy,
Pam & Tommy does also portray the pair as
devoted to one another – and devastated when
Anderson miscarries, after months of trying to
get pregnant.
On their return to LA, Anderson moved into
Lee’s Malibu mansion, which was undergoing
renovations. It would, eventually, be turned
into a “fantasy land” with a leather sex swing
in the bedroom, a shark tank in the kitchen
and “Club Mayhem”, a disco in the basement.
Anderson, it appeared, had no problem
applying herself to the rock wife lifestyle; that
October, she threw Lee a circus-themed party
for his 33rd birthday, featuring carnival rides,
tigers, sword-swallowers, a Swedish death-metal
band and a reported $5,000 worth of drugs.
In the course of the renovations, however,
Lee had fired an electrician, Rand Gauthier,
whom he accused of doing a shoddy job, but
to whom he still owed a reported $20,000.
Gauthier (played in the series by a rumpled,
resentful Seth Rogan) wasn’t the first
tradesperson Lee had burnt through – the
ever changing, and obscenely costly, “vision”
for his hedonistic home included a pillow
room, a koi pond, a 20ft mural of heaven
and hell in the elevator shaft, and a 30ft swing
in the living room, hanging above a white
baby grand piano – but he was the first to
seek retaliation against what he saw as the
unreasonable demands of the rock star.
Gauthier, he has since claimed, spent
months planning his Halloween heist,
documenting the comings and goings of
vehicles to the three-level Spanish-style
mansion, and the hours that Lee and
Anderson slept, before audaciously, at 3am
one night, climbing over their fence – clad in
yak fur to disguise himself as a very large dog- disabling the security cameras, stealing the
safe which was kept behind a carpeted wall in
Lee’s recording studio, and, with the help of
a borrowed demolition saw, prising it open.
According to a police report, the contents
included an AK47 assault rifle, a .45 calibre
rifle and a Mossberg shotgun, along with a
Rolex, a gold and diamond Cartier watch, gold
and emerald cufflinks, a ruby and diamond
cross, the white bikini that Anderson wore to
their beach wedding, and a selection of family
photographs. So far, so gaudily prosaic. What
Gauthier had not been prepared for was the
discovery of a Hi8 cassette tape, of the sort
used in handheld video cameras, featuring two
front-page tabloid favourites enjoying eight
minutes of orgiastic delight.
Since this is a Hollywood tale, this electrician - naturally – had previously been married to a
porn star, and had appeared in a few adult films
himself, so had connections in the business.
(“Oh my God, it’s so... private,” comments a
Anderson was not the most likely Playboy
cover girl. The daughter of a waitress and
a furnace repairman, she was raised in a
conservative family in a small town on
Vancouver Island, Canada. She, too, was working
as a waitress when a cameraman focused on
her at a football match and projected her image
onto the Jumbotron, to roars of approval
from the lascivious crowd. Labatts, the beer
company whose T-shirt she was sporting,
signed her up as a model, then a photographer
boyfriend submitted pictures to Playboy, who
featured her on the cover in October 1989.
At 22, she arrived in Hollywood, posed some
more for Playboy and amped up her cleavage
with implants. At 24, she was cast as CJ Parker
in a mediocre, soapy beach drama about
lifeguards; five years later – thanks largely
to Anderson’s enormous appeal – Baywatch
was a phenomenon, with more than one
billion viewers in 150 countries.
Lee was born in Athens, Greece, to a US
army sergeant father and a mother who had
been a contestant in the Miss Greece pageant
- The family returned to the United States,
settling in California, when Lee was two.
A keen drummer since childhood, he
dropped out of high school to form bands and
join the heavy metal scene centred around LA’s
Sunset Strip. In the Eighties, the flamboyant
Mötley Crüe amassed a serious fanbase, a
string of hit albums and a reputation for
Lily James as
Pamela Anderson