Dirty Rocker Boys

by Brown, Bobbie; Ryder, Caroline

  “Tommy, so good to meet you finally!” said Pamela, a half smile playing on her freshly glossed lips. Pamela started talking about herself, how she ate organic and cared about the environment and only used a little bit of electricity compared to her neighbors. “Also, I can play the drums,” she added, playing air drums and shaking her hair, and Tommy nodded, impressed. Sharise turned to me, mouthing, “What the fuck?”

  “So I’m dating David Charvet, this guy on my show Baywatch,” Pamela continued, eyes fixed on Tommy’s. “Talk about a pencil dick. I’m so over it!” (They dated for about two years and then Charvet went on to marry Brooke Burke, cohost of Dancing with the Stars, which Pamela became a contestant on.) “That sucks,” said Tommy, looking amused. “Where I come from, they throw the small ones back.” We all laughed, and Tommy squeezed my hand reassuringly. But something didn’t feel right.

  What is up with Pamela tonight? I wondered. She was trying a little too hard. I knew she was a big fan of rock music, so maybe she was just nervous. She hung on Tommy’s every word. It was obvious she had no interest in what anyone else had to say—her conversation was directed solely toward him. She had a reputation for being a guy’s girl, one whose identity revolved around men’s attention. She had few female friends in Hollywood, and it was pretty obvious what her goal was in town—to make it. My professional ambition, on the other hand, had been stymied by love, motherhood, and the pursuit of fun.

  We sat with them for about forty-five minutes; then, when Tommy said he wanted to go to the Viper Room, Pamela invited herself along with us. At the Viper Room, Sharise and I got onstage and started dancing, and Pamela joined us, gyrating and shaking her tits all over the place. It was amazingly awkward for Sharise and me, because not only were we unused to having a third wheel, we also knew she wasn’t really trying to be our friend—it felt like she was trying to show off in front of Tommy. That much was obvious. Carmen Electra was at one of the tables next to the stage, and when she yelled up at us saying she wanted to dance too, I was relieved—as soon as Carmen jumped up, Sharise and I jumped down off the stage, leaving them to it.

  “Hey, my brother just texted saying the doorman won’t let him in,” said Sharise. I told Tommy, who said, “No problem, let me go and talk to the bouncer.” He grabbed Sharise’s hand and the two of them marched outside to make sure her brother could get in. Pamela, who had been watching, sidled up to me. “What’s up with homegirl holding your boyfriend’s hand? I wouldn’t stand for that shit.” I was stunned. Why was Pamela planting thoughts like that in my head? “Hey, it’s no big deal—Sharise is my best friend, and they are like brother and sister.” When Sharise came back, I told her what Pamela had said. “Fuck her!” said Sharise. “What a weirdo!”

  It wasn’t the first time I had seen a woman try to sabotage my relationship with Tommy. But I told myself not to worry about it. Tommy and I had a love that was unbreakable, immune to the advances of all women—even Pamela Anderson.

  TOMMY’S GIRL

  I had, against my better judgment, moved in with Tommy by this point. He had rented actress Sela Ward’s three-bedroom love nest on the beach in Malibu Colony, and Taylar and our nanny, Gretchen (Taylar called her “Scratchin’ ”), Tommy, and I were living there in glorious beachfront decadence.

  One afternoon, Tommy and I were shopping for furniture and my eyes rested on a beautiful ornate bed. It looked like the carriage in Cinderella.

  “Is that the one you want?” said Tommy.

  “It’s a total fairy-tale bed,” I gushed.

  “It’s ours,” he said, and wrote a check for fifteen thousand dollars on the spot.

  I had never seen anyone drop $15K on a whim like that. Jani and I had owned a nice home, and I made good money modeling, but we weren’t crazy rich like Mötley Crüe. Mötley Crüe had a plane, for God’s sake. Our rent in Malibu was eight thousand dollars a month. We had four cars. Tommy bought Ferraris and motorcycles when he felt like it. Once, he bought me ten-thousand-dollar leather pants. Now I look back on that, and I think it was dumb. But it was 1994. The recession of the early ’90s was over, and America was feeling prosperous. Beavis and Butthead was the most intelligent thing on TV. The Wonderbra was a feminist statement—it was a fun, foolish time to be American.

  Tommy didn’t want me to work. His ex-wife Heather Locklear had been all about her career, and he’d hated not being the center of her attention. He never said anything bad about Heather, just that their problems arose from her being more invested in her acting than in the relationship. He said he wanted a woman who was about him, who wasn’t trying to be in the limelight. “I am so not into paparazzi and being in the public eye anymore—it’s so cheesy,” he would say. He insisted that I quit modeling for a while and promised to take care of me in return. I didn’t need to make money—I was Tommy’s girl.

  Taylar, now two years old, called him “Dad Tommy.” He loved to have fun with her, although I would stop short of calling him paternal. Tommy is a big kid, which is why children always love being around him, but he also behaved like a big kid when he wanted attention. And he had no qualms about competing for that attention, even with a small child. Sometimes, for instance, I would hear my daughter cry and start to get up to see what was wrong, and Tommy would pull me back.

  “Don’t get up. Stay here with me.”

  “Of course I’m getting up,” I would say, pulling away.

  I had become friends with Athena, Tommy’s younger sister. Athena was in a punk group called Butt Trumpet and had a daughter, Tobi, who was a little older than Taylar, and a two-year-old boy called Miles. She was a monster on the drums, having taught herself to play in the soundproof garage Tommy’s dad had built, honing her skills on Tommy’s Theatre of Pain kit. When Tommy was on the road, Athena and I would hang out at the house in Malibu, giggling at the many faxes Tommy loved to send me from the road, saying how much he missed me. Yeah, love faxes—that’s how ’90s we were. When Tommy would roll home, whoever was at the house would take a hike. Because with Tommy and me, it was zero to naked in sixty seconds. I have never experienced such insane sexual chemistry as I had with Tommy Lee.

  ENJOY THE FEELING AS THE BALLS PASS THROUGH

  “What if I do it slowly and maybe work it in?” said Tommy, trying to coax me into anal. The only other time I had had anal sex was with Jani, when he tied me up. That experience had freaked me out, so I was wary of letting anyone back there again. Tommy promised to be gentle, but it really didn’t work out the way he had hoped. “Wait . . . stop . . . fuck that, your dick’s too big, Tommy! Ouch! Get it away from my ass!”

  He bought me a vibrator that had a rabbit on the end and a little tongue. It was loud as a lawn mower. You could hear it on the other side of the house. Waaaaaaah. And it had two settings—intense, and fucking intense. “Dude, that thing was ripping me apart!” I told Tommy, handing it back to him in the box. “Did you keep the receipt?” For a rock star’s girlfriend, I was pretty vanilla I guess, but that’s just me. I wasn’t ashamed of it.

  “How about we try these instead?” he said, going into the bathroom and coming out with a box. Inside was a string of little purple balls of increasing size. “What is this, a jump rope?” I read the side of the packaging. “ ‘Insert through the anus into the rectum, and at the point of climax, pull out and enjoy the feeling as the balls pass through your sphincter.’ ” Ah.

  “I guess they were all out of the starter kits, huh, Tommy?” There were six beads, listed as “medium to large size.” I wished he could have at least gotten them in “small.”

  “How about we shove these up your ass first, and then if you like it, I’ll give them a go afterward,” I said. Tommy turned up his nose. “Oh, forget it.”

  The way I saw it, we didn’t need anal beads or girl-on-girl porn or dildos or anything beyond each other’s bodies, really. Sex with Tommy was always great, because I was so in love. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had a big dick—although all that really means is
that the guy doesn’t have to work very hard. When you’re really into somebody, sex is special, regardless of his length, girth, or the number of sex toys next to the bed.

  I WANNA WIFE YOU

  In the summer of 1994, around six months into our relationship, I flew out to meet Tommy on tour in the Midwest. He had a limo pick me up from the airport and suggested we drive straight back to the Four Seasons, where he was staying, so we could have dinner in the fancy French restaurant there. He could have taken me to Chuck E. Cheese’s for all I cared. I just wanted to see him.

  Tommy waved at the waiter. “Can you bring over that dessert we were talking about?” When the waiter returned, he was holding a ring case, which he handed to Tommy. Tommy pushed it across the table to me—inside was a four-carat diamond ring set in platinum, with diamonds on the side.

  “I wanna wife you, Bobbie,” he said.

  “Oh my God!” I gasped, tears welling in my eyes.

  I was twenty-five years old, with one rock star divorce under my belt. He was thirty-two, with two ex-wives under his. The first was a Canadian dancer/stripper named Elaine Bergen, in 1984. She was a dancer at the Body Shop, a titty bar on the Sunset Strip, and her stripper name was Candice Starrek. A sultry brunette, she did a spread in Penthouse, which is where she caught Tommy’s eye (Playboy and Penthouse were basically like the Match.com for models and rock stars back then). That marriage lasted a whole month, until she supposedly tried to stab him with a butter knife and he punched her in the mouth, knocking a cap off her tooth.

  Then he pulled a 180 and got with fresh-faced blond actress Heather Locklear, who was famous for playing the bitchy Sammy Jo on popular nighttime soap Dynasty and Amanda on Melrose Place. Tommy had spotted her backstage at an REO Speedwagon concert at L.A.’s Forum. Then he stalked her through her dentist. Three months after they started dating, she proposed to him in a Texas hotel room. Tommy walked up the aisle chewing gum, wearing a white leather tux. They were married from 1986 to 1993, and had divorced shortly before we got together. Tommy, I would later realize, is a compulsive proposer. He’s been engaged many, many times. Tommy Lee just does not like to be single.

  Shortly after we became engaged, Tommy tattooed my name in cursive script along his neck. Years later, he told me that having that tattoo removed was more painful than any ink work he had ever received. All that was yet to come.

  MALIBU MAYHEM

  One thing about Tommy, he hated clothes. Clothes on me, specifically. I wasn’t allowed to sleep in pajamas, ever. If Bobbie wasn’t naked, Tommy wasn’t happy. I would be cleaning up or doing dishes, and he’d yell at me, “Come sit next to me, fuck the dishes.”

  “But I want to do the dishes, Tommy.”

  “Take your clothes off and come sit next to me!” He was like a spoiled little boy.

  “I don’t want to be naked watching TV, Tommy, I want to do the fucking dishes!”

  Sometimes I felt like a big doll. He wanted to take out my tampons; he wanted to shave my legs. If he could have crawled inside me, he would have. It was strange to me that someone with so much success in his life would be so needy and codependent. “Where were you, what were you doing?” Tommy would ask me if I left him alone for more than a few minutes.

  “Um, I went to go take a shit.” It was annoying. He was like a neurotic five-year-old.

  Boom!

  A huge explosion came from the beach. It must have woken up the whole of Malibu. And this time, it wasn’t an earthquake.

  Tommy came running into the house, half his eyebrow and half of his shirt smoldering. “Okay, I guess that wasn’t a cherry bomb,” he said, laughing maniacally. “Close the storm windows, let’s hide!” When Tommy wasn’t playing with my boobs, he was blowing shit up. Like I say, it was like living with a big out-of-control kid.

  Those first few months in Malibu were all fun and games. Our friends would come over to party all night and hang out on the beach. I was, by now, fully off the wagon, although my partying wasn’t worrying me. It felt recreational, I told myself. And my daughter was never exposed to any of it. There were always people coming and going through the house, new friends, old friends, and sycophants by the truckload. Elijah Blue, Cher’s son. Whitfield Crane of Ugly Kid Joe. Matt Sorum from Guns N’ Roses. Bobby Hewitt, the drummer of Orgy. Athena and her new guy James Kottak from the Scorpions. Because Malibu is waaay up the coast from Hollywood, far from everybody and everything, people would come and stay at our place for days on end. Each day blended into the next as life became one long Malibu beach party.

  Anybody who looked up to Tommy would become his new best friend, because he, like so many musicians, thrives on adoration. Elijah Blue, for example, lived down the street at Cher’s place and thought Tommy was the coolest thing in the world, which Tommy liked. Elijah had been making music, and Tommy invited him to play some for us. “That’s the shit; that’s awesome!” said Tommy. Hm, I’m not so sure, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. Tommy hated it when I contradicted him in front of people. In fact, Tommy hated a lot of things, but it was easy to ignore his bratty side, because when he was in a good mood, he was awesome. Tommy was wild, he was funny, he was the only man whose mouth could keep up with mine. He put me so high on a pedestal that I could barely see the ground anymore. Then, before I knew it, he was yanking me down by my hair. It was the blow I should have seen coming, but refused to.

  One night, Mötley was playing in L.A. and I was chatting with Nikki Sixx’s gorgeous wife Brandi Brandt, side-stage. Brandi was even-keeled and soft spoken. I glanced at the stage mid-conversation and saw that Tommy was looking at me with these crazy eyes as he drummed.

  “Uh-oh, I think I’m in trouble,” I said to Brandi.

  “Why are you in trouble?” said Brandi softly.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Sure enough, after the show, Tommy tore me a new asshole. “What the fuck, Bobbie, this isn’t social hour. You are here to see me. What, you don’t fucking love me anymore?” Tommy was becoming more and more of a brat by the day. I couldn’t go anywhere without him. I couldn’t hang out alone with my friends or Tommy would get jealous. He had to be a part of everything I did unless he was on tour, in which case I had to go see him whenever possible. If I hung out with friends, it had to be at our home. He was uncomfortable with how close I was getting to Athena. He didn’t even like my talking to my mom too much, so he got a phone service to field all calls to the house. He started criticizing my appearance. If I didn’t have makeup on, he would get mad, saying, “What, you’re not trying to get with me?” And if I was dolled up, he would be like, “Who are you trying to fuck?”

  I had gained a little weight from playing the wife role, cooking and hanging out and basically being Tommy’s girl for a living. I would prepare him three solid meals a day—lasagna, homemade potpies, the works. His favorite thing was Cajun sausage and scrambled eggs for breakfast. Although he loved my food, he didn’t love my new fuller figure. I called a friend in the modeling business. “I need something to help me get thin again,” I said. Less than twenty-four hours later, I was holding a small bag of crystal meth in my hand.

  I sat in our bedroom, with a dish on my lap, and cut the powder with one of Tommy’s credit cards. I had heard you didn’t need that much speed to feel the effects, so I made a very small line. The first hit was a surprise. Unlike cocaine, it burned, sending lightning bolts through my eyeballs. I learned to look past the pain, because this was a high like no other. It felt . . . natural. My ADD mind felt oddly at peace. One of the chief things meth does is to release serotonin in the brain, so suddenly I was the optimistic, positive, confident Bobbie again. Plus, I could cook dinner for Tommy without the tiniest urge to taste what was in the pan. From day one, I was hooked.

  The weekend I started using speed (behind Tommy’s back, for the record), Tommy took us out on his boat to Lake Mead near Las Vegas for a mini vacation (you might recognize the location from the sex tape he and Pamela Anderson would make, in the not to
o distant future). I didn’t eat anything the whole weekend, because the speed I had taken had, to my glee, completely destroyed my appetite. “Why aren’t you eating?” Tommy asked me, and I told him I just didn’t feel hungry, no biggie. Tommy wanted me to water-ski, which I had never tried before, but when I tried to get up, my legs buckled beneath me. I was too weak for water sports. My body was starving. I could practically feel the weight dropping off as my metabolism sped up . . . I liked it.

  From day one, I started using a little speed every day, and was impressed at how quickly I was losing weight. Very soon it got to the point where I was too thin. Grotesquely thin. There is a photo I did for Cosmopolitan (one of the rare modeling gigs I did during that period) in which I weighed ninety pounds. Now, instead of making fun of my curves, Tommy was calling me Skeletor. I couldn’t win. But I had given up everything, handed Tommy complete power and control over me. The more I gave up, the less he respected me. The less he respected me, the more I used. The more I used, the less I respected myself. The cycle of addiction had begun. I was starting to fuck up big-time, throwing away opportunities that could have made me a major star, because my life’s focus had now narrowed to just two things—Tommy and drugs.

  Robert De Niro called the house, trying to convince Tommy to let me read for the part of Ginger, his wife in the movie Casino, with Martin Scorsese set to direct. The mighty Robert De Niro was calling me. Most boyfriends would have been delighted. But Tommy wasn’t having any of it and told my agent that I would not be available to audition. Who knows, maybe I would have got the part, maybe I would have got a different part. Point is, I’ll never know. The role went to Sharon Stone, who won a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for her performance. As I watched my career disintegrate before my eyes, it became harder for me to bury my resentment. I stopped being the fun, sassy Bobbie Brown who Tommy had fallen in love with. I became a bitchy, anorexic tweaker, obsessed with cleaning, who certainly didn’t feel like lying around naked with Tommy anymore.