BOBBIE, MEET PAMELA
“Hey, Bobbie, check out Star magazine; you’re in it!” said Tracey Mikolas, head model booker at Flame.
Later that day at the supermarket, I grabbed a copy of Star and looked through the pages. What was Tracey talking about? Ah. There she was, my doppelgänger. A model by the name of Pamela Anderson, photographed with Scott Baio.
Who is she? And why is she hanging with Baio? I wondered.
Pamela was five foot seven, I was five foot eight, and we were both blond bombshells with surfer girl appeal. She was two years older than me but had arrived in Hollywood the same year I did, 1989, after being spotted in the crowd at a BC Lions game in Vancouver, wearing a tight Labatt’s shirt. Hugh Hefner had made her his October 1989 Playboy cover girl, so she moved to L.A., got a boob job, and was trying to make it big as a model. In 1990, just after I shot the “Cherry Pie” video, she and I were cast alongside each other. I was excited to meet my lookalike.
I met her on the set of Married . . . with Children, where we were playing Al Bundy’s fantasy blondes.
“Hey, I’m Bobbie,” I said.
“Hey,” said Pamela, flashing a quick smile and looking over my shoulder. She seemed disinterested. About as friendly as a cornered rat, I thought. Oh well. Maybe she’s just shy.
In Al Bundy’s fantasy, Pamela and I were among four women lavishing him with attention on the couch, Pamela by one knee and me at his other. Pamela would not stop stroking his leg up and down.
Pamela and I were blond girls with dreams, except I was perhaps more naïve than she. There were so many lessons I had yet to learn. How desirability will gain you admirers, but rarely will it gain you true love. How beauty opens many doors, but you should beware of where they lead. Pamela was more switched on to the realities of the game we were playing, as confident and self-assured as I seemed. I didn’t realize Hollywood could chew you up and spit you out just as quickly as it could fool you into believing you’re the hottest girl in town. I thought I was too special to get hurt, too down-to-earth to get suckered in.
HAWAII
“So did you sleep with Jani, Bobbie? Is that how you got the job?” Matthew’s eyes flashed. I had never seen him so angry. Things with him and me had hit rock bottom. I couldn’t believe that the tender lover who used to stroke my hair until I fell asleep at night was turning on me in this way.
We were four days into a vacation in Hawaii, and despite the rainbows, sunsets, and turquoise waters, things were ugly as can be. Matthew was still bitter about Jani’s gallant marriage proposal on The Howard Stern Show, even though I had argued that it was just for publicity, to bring attention to the video and the song. And Jani had sparked other, completely unfounded suspicions in Matthew’s mind.
“Bobbie, I need to know what happened between you and Richard Grieco. Were you intimate with him, too? Gunnar told me he has photos.”
Gunnar had concocted some cock-and-bull story involving me and the actor Richard Grieco, which, like everything else that came out of Gunnar’s mouth, was a crock. Yes, I had met Richard at the Roxbury. And yes, he had asked for my number. So had Johnny Depp; so had Paul Stanley from Kiss (he was so effeminate, I assumed he was gay); so had a lot of guys in town. But I had hoped that by now, Matthew would have understood that I didn’t play around. It wasn’t fair that Gunnar was doing this to me, and to Matthew.
“Matthew, I have to tell you something. I wouldn’t believe everything Gunnar tells you. The truth is, he has been coming on to me.”
There, I said it.
Matthew was horrified. I knew he didn’t believe me. And even if he had, ultimately it wouldn’t have mattered. Blood is thicker than water, and in the heat of the moment, I had forgotten that nothing, not even love, was going to get in the way of Matthew and Gunnar Nelson’s careers.
“You should go home, Bobbie,” said Matthew, his voice cracking. “I can’t do this anymore.”
He helped me pack some clothes; then he drove me to the airport. “Are you okay?” he asked me. I couldn’t even speak. I got on the first plane back to L.A., and cried the entire five-hour flight. Matthew had asked me to have my belongings out of the house by the time they got back from Hawaii, so as to avoid any further confrontation. Which gave me about three days to get my shit out. Tracey, my booker at Flame, came over and helped me pack up.
“Tracey, I’m so fucking hurt,” I said, shoving clothes into a duffel bag.
“Don’t get mad, Bobbie. Get even.”
An interesting proposition. What would really get under Matt’s skin, I wondered?
In a coat pocket, I found Kathy Conan’s number. She was the sweet girlfriend of Warrant’s guitarist.
“Hey, Kathy, so Matthew and I broke up. Just wanted to let you know.”
Exactly five minutes after Kathy and I hung up, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Bobbie, it’s Jani Lane.”
Chapter Six
SHE’S MY CHERRY PIE
“This song is for Miss Bobbie Brown!”
Jani Lane dedicated “Heaven,” Warrant’s huge lighters-in-the-air ballad to me on our first date. As the stage lights exploded in Shreveport, Louisiana, I surveyed the screaming fans and privately noted that Matthew Nelson had never, not once, publicly dedicated a song to me.
“Jani’s so intense!” said my friend Tammy, who had come with me to the show. “He looks like he really means it, you know?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, imagining Matthew’s face when he found out the Cherry Pie guy had dedicated a song to the Cherry Pie girl onstage. For a second, I wondered if maybe Jani was pursuing me as a publicity stunt—but no, Jani didn’t seem desperate enough for that. Manufacturing a love affair to boost record sales just didn’t seem his style.
Jani had bought me a ticket from Los Angeles to New Orleans. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone, combine my date with Jani with a visit back home. I hadn’t been back since leaving two years ago, and Baton Rouge seemed so dull. My mom and Mr. Earl were just the same. The house was just the same. Everything was the same, except that I couldn’t step out the door without people recognizing me from Star Search or the “Cherry Pie” video. Wow, am I famous? I thought. Maybe.
Tammy and I made the swampy four-hour drive north from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, past small church towns and old plantations. By the time we arrived, my skin was sticky and hot. “I forgot about this damn Southern heat,” I said, splashing my face at a water fountain in the parking lot.
Warrant had just taken the stage in front of the packed venue. For all the rocker posturing, there was more to Jani Lane than the façade. He was truly charismatic. It was something to do with the way he moved, the way he commanded the stage. When he smiled, the room smiled with him. After the show, Tammy and I met up with Jani and the Warrant guys at a local bar. We drank Coors and shot pool. No velvet ropes, no VIP rooms. When the bar closed, the band called a taxi to take them to their hotel—they had to leave early the next morning to get to their next show.
“I want to come home with you, Bobbie,” said Jani.
“What about your show tomorrow?” I said.
“I’ll catch a plane, don’t worry about it. I want to fall asleep next to you.”
Tammy, Jani, and I went back to our motel room in Shreveport. Tammy passed out immediately in one of the two beds, and Jani and I lay together in the other. He was running his hand up and down my side, kissing my neck, tugging softly on my jeans. I unbuttoned them, and he pulled them down, then my panties. All thoughts of Matthew drifted away as Jani unbuckled his pants and slowly, quietly, did what we’d both been thinking about all night.
In the morning, I acted like it was nothing. In the early ’90s, sexual mores were still just as freewheeling as they had been in the ’80s. You could sleep with someone on the first date and own it. As Jani waited for his taxi to take him to the airport, he said he wanted to see me again.
“Let me fly you out next time I play a show?” he s
aid, taking my hands and kissing me.
“Maybe.”
On our way back from Shreveport, I made Tammy pull over at a small occult shop I had visited a few times in the past. Inside was a guy who looked like your average Joe, but he was a voodoo doctor, the real deal. My grandpa John had told me witch doctors would go into the swamps to dig up roots and wild plants for their medicines and potions. He told me about women who made magical dolls, and about the power of New Orleans gris-gris. I had grown up with my head swimming with tales of hoodoo, rootwork, and Southern conjure. I believed in magic, and I still do.
“I want you to cast a spell on Matthew Nelson that takes away his money, love, and success,” I told the voodoo doctor. “You have to be careful with revenge spells—sometimes they come back around,” he said. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” He gave me a black fabric voodoo doll, a black candle, and some black-arts oil. Then he wrote down some instructions.
When I got back to L.A., I spent nine days in my newly rented apartment performing magic. “First, anoint the black candle with the oil,” read the instructions. I had to burn the candle for seventeen minutes each day, for nine days. While it burned, I held the candle in my left hand and cursed Matthew Nelson, dripping the wax all over the doll’s body. It stared back at me with its helpless button eyes.
“May Nelson’s career suck forever!”
“May Matthew Nelson never love anyone more than me!”
After the ninth day of incantations, I put what was left of the candle in a small box along with the doll, a small bottle of rum, and nine cents. I wrapped it in black cloth and tied it with twine. I was supposed to take it to a cemetery and bury it, but that was too creepy. So I shoved it behind some boxes and asked the black-magic gods to get to work ASAP.
AN ITEM
“So, Bobbie, we hear you’ve been seeing someone.”
I was being interviewed live on KROQ, L.A.’s biggest rock music radio station. Sometimes the DJs would call me and ask me questions about what was happening on the Strip.
Had someone photographed me with Jani in Shreveport maybe? Oh well, the cat’s out of the bag, I thought.
“Yes, we heard you were at the Cathouse last night, making out with Taime Downe.”
What the fuck?
Taime Downe was the lead singer of a hair band called Faster Pussycat and he looked like a Nazi tranny. The Cathouse was his club with Riki Rachtman, host of MTV’s Headbangers Ball, pure sleaze, full of fast sex and hairspray. It was the dirtiest, most punk rock of the Hollywood clubs. Lita Ford had puked in the bathroom. Christina Applegate worked coat check. Slash fell down the stairs. Axl wore a Cathouse T-shirt in the “Paradise City” video. Every seedy hair metal cliché you can think of had happened at the Cathouse. But never, not once, did I swap spit with Taime Downe.
“Dude, Taime had something in his eye and I was trying to see what it was!” I protested. Fucking journalists. Later that day, the phone rang again. This time it was Jani. “So what’s this about you and Taime? Did you guys seriously hook up?” Jani was on the road, somewhere in Oregon. One of his buddies had heard me on the radio and called him. News travels fast. “Um, no. I don’t kiss drag queens,” I said.
Taime wore way too much lipstick for my taste. And he was just an acquaintance. Jani promised he believed me, and we hung up. Wait, why is Jani acting all boyfriendy? I thought. We hadn’t had an official conversation about our relationship—apart from him asking me to marry him live on national radio, that is.
A few days later, Jani called me again from the road. He had found a phone booth and called me long-distance. “The show was awesome, and our video is number one on MTV,” he said, excited. “Oh, and Bobbie, I love you.”
“Wait, what?” Then he hung up the phone.
On my twenty-first birthday, October 7, Jani presented me with a platinum and diamond bracelet he had bought in Beverly Hills with the help of my model booker, Tracey. It was the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever seen.
“Bobbie, I think you should move in with me,” he said.
Whoa.
It felt like things were happening really fast. Jani was always talking about “when we’re married” this and “when we’re married” that. “Just say the word, Bobbie. I’m your guy.” But I had not given marriage any serious thought since T-Boy broke my heart in high school. I felt too young to be locked down.
A few days later, I went out of town on a modeling job. When I got home, my apartment was empty. Couch, tables, bed—gone. There was a note on the carpet.
Your new palace awaits.
There was an address on the back . . . Jani had gone ahead and moved me into his place while I was away! I got in my car and headed over to his house in Sherman Oaks. I was less furious than you might imagine. Actually, I was flattered—having been dumped by Matthew Nelson because he was too weak to stand up against his brother, it was refreshing to meet a guy who so clearly knew what he wanted. Me. I was used to getting attention from men, but Jani was more devoted, more chivalrous than any other guy I had met. His fervent belief that I was “the one” was alluring. I had already been let down by a string of men, and his adoration made me feel safe. Plus I admired his chutzpah.
I knocked on the door, and Jani opened it, smiling.
“See? Your stuff looks awesome here,” he said.
“I didn’t know breaking and entering was a hobby of yours.”
“It wasn’t, until I met you.”
I wished I could have called Matthew there and then. “Hey, asshole, guess what: I’m with someone who is more famous than you, who worships me and adores me and isn’t afraid to tell the whole world.” Jani had no qualms about standing up onstage and telling everyone that Bobbie Brown was the most beautiful girl in the room. Thanks to this kind of gallantry I was becoming putty in Jani’s hands. He knew how to push all the right buttons. It wasn’t so much a physical attraction for me, with Jani, as it was an emotional attraction. Whether or not for the right reasons, I was definitely falling in love.
I looked around Jani’s house. It was a sweet place, a family home, with a yard. “Well, I guess I’m here now.” I sat on the couch—my couch. Actually, it wasn’t so bad in here. He’d decorated it pretty nice. It was bright and warm. “Hey, so I found this weird thing at your place,” said Jani. “I wasn’t sure what to do with it.” He pointed at the display cabinet where, alongside his high school track-and-field trophies, my voodoo doll sat, staring back at me.
Yikes!
As soon as Jani left the room, I grabbed it and tossed it in the trash. I wasn’t going to let myself think about Matthew Nelson anymore. That chapter was closed.
LOVE SHACK
Living with Jani was fun. Well, it was fun at first. Fashion had always been my thing, and he loved to be styled. When I met him on the “Cherry Pie” set, he had his jeans tucked into his cowboy boots, complete with moose-knuckle. Oh, no, no, no, I thought. Within a few weeks of living together, I was helping him update his look. I got him in some hip-hugger leather pants made that laced at the side and didn’t go up to his boobs. He stopped wearing bicycle shorts, tank tops, and groovy white George Michael jackets. We trimmed his hair so it was less straggly (he would come to me for haircuts for the rest of his life), and we threw out the fanny packs and the goofy hats. He looked one thousand times cooler, and he told me he loved his new look. It was fun playing dress-up with Jani.
“What are your fantasies?” Jani asked me one night. We were in bed, snuggling.
“What if we had a ménage à trois?” I suggested. With Jani, I felt safe enough to try it again, if that was what he wanted. At this point, I kind of assumed that was what all rock stars wanted.
Jani nearly fell out of the bed. “No way, Bobbie! Really?”
“Well, what’s your fantasy?” I was defensive now.
“I don’t know, you wearing high heels naked, standing in a shopwindow?”
“Oh.”
Even though he was a
rock star, Jani was kind of a sex newbie, a down-home boy. I already had a fair amount of experimenting under my belt. He had had one threesome before and hated it. Thankfully, he wasn’t a talker, nor did he expect me to talk. He was a very quiet lover, and sometimes the only way I could tell he was having an orgasm was by listening to his breathing. Also, I couldn’t go anywhere near his ass. That especially freaked him out. He wasn’t into foreplay, and never, ever went down on me. (After he and I separated, apparently that was all he was about, I heard through the grapevine via his subsequent wives.) When we were in bed, I was either blowing him or fucking him, and with no other stimulation on the table, I started to get frustrated.
While I was getting pissed off about what was happening in our bedroom, Jani was increasingly annoyed by the guys lurking outside it. I don’t think I have ever had a boyfriend who hasn’t been bummed out by the army of guy friends that I keep within a five-mile radius. I keep my guy buddies close, probably too close for comfort. But I wasn’t a cheater, and I assumed that Jani knew that too. So I couldn’t understand why he would get so upset about all my platonic boyfriends, like Slash from Guns N’ Roses.
I had met Slash at a party and went up to him and moved his hair away from his face, like it was a curtain. He was kind of shy and seemed to be using his hair as a mask.
“Wow, you’re actually really cute, Slash!”
Slash and I started talking on the phone during the day, like grandmas. We would watch cooking shows together, and soaps. He was useless at sewing, so I would sew the buttons on his jeans. Harmless shit. But Jani hated it. “If you like Slash so much, why don’t you have his babies,” he grouched, and I just rolled my eyes. I had yet to have a boyfriend who didn’t act like he wanted to own me.
Jani was equally pissed about my friendship with Jay Gordon. Jay was this punky glam kid from San Francisco who played bass guitar and, like everyone else in town, dreamed about being a rock star. He was my age but seemed younger, and was tapped into a new, alternative metal sound. He was good friends with a guy called Jonathan Davis, who would become famous for his band Korn and would sign Jay and his band Orgy to his record label, turning Jay into an industrial-metal pinup. But that was a whole decade away, and when I met Jay, he was just a gangly cute kid who liked to dance.
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