Nancy Drew Grows Up

She was heroine and role model for millions of pubescent girls seated setside on Sunday night, watching her portray the TV version of Nancy Drew, teenaged adventuress and mystery solver reincarnated from the innocent novels their mothers--even grandmothers--once read. But late last year, after completing 14 "Drew" episodes, Pamela Sue Martin chose to walk away from the vacuous series and move on to more significant matters. She had made a career of playing pink-cheeked girls in (text continued on page 92) films, commercials and modeling assignments. Now, at the age of 25, she was ready to unveil a radically different persona. For starters, she played a Las Vegas showgirl, mistress to a Mobster, in the made-for-TV movie "It Could Happen to You," to be shown on NBC-TV this fall. She also posed for Playboy and we dispatched Richard Warren Lewis to talk with her about these departures.

[Q] Playboy: Considering your strait-laced television image, why have you chosen to pose for Playboy?

[A] Martin: Simply to present another side of myself. Given the opportunity, I can surely project beyond adolescence, even though I still get asked for my I.D. a lot and door-to-door salesmen ask if my parents are home. I consider these photographs to be an exploration of my personality. A lot of people will take them as evidence of an image change. But Nancy Drew is not my image any more than Playboy is. What's really significant is that this layout is the first time I've sat down to do any serious still photography in seven years, since I was a teenaged model.

[Q] Playboy: Why the long absence?

[A] Martin: I had a lot of bad feelings about photography left over from when I was 17. After several months of doing magazine advertisements and fashion features for Seventeen, I realized I could not participate in a daily exercise of vanity. It was just a meat market; I wasn't using anything except my body. After all those years, the Playboy picture taking meant a chance to do something more than look a certain way to sell a product. It was a special experience.

[Q] Playboy: How do you imagine the Nancy Drew audience will react?

[A] Martin: It's unlikely that most of them read Playboy. They're very young. And with the end of Nancy Drew, I no longer feel that I have a responsibility to that audience. I'm now doing what I want to do. I learned some things from the show; I got a lot of technical background. But I don't consider the series a particular achievement. Obviously, it had certain limitations. Nancy Drew never cried or experienced an inordinate amount of pain. There was never any tragedy or extreme emotion. Never a kissing scene or any sign that she would indulge with the opposite sex. A big moment for her was coming across an old skeleton in a dungeon and screaming. Or being attacked by a bat in Transylvania. I couldn't get off on that at all. Some of it was so bad, I found myself cringing. Oh, God, I thought. This is bullshit.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you left the show?

[A] Martin: Partly. Another problem was that the network decided to combine Nancy Drew with another show, the Hardy Boys. With three co-stars, it wouldn't have been demanding enough. Also, it became hard to do different things with one character. I felt compromised. They offered me twice my salary--$20,000 an episode. I turned that down. It wasn't a hard decision to make.

[Q] Playboy: Since acting is such an insecure profession, wasn't it pretty daring of you to give up a financial sinecure?

[A] Martin: Maybe it's unrealistic, but I just don't think about money very much. People have a hard time understanding that. I don't feel the need to accumulate a lot of money. What's the worst that could happen if I went broke? I'd sell my house and go stay with friends or rent a room somewhere. It might be different if I had the responsibility of a family or if I'd ever really gone without. But I'm a privileged person. I grew up in a beautiful town--Westport, Connecticut. My family was always very comfortable. Maybe that's why I tend to be idealistic. I'd rather devote my attention to more important things than money. Last March, I turned down a TV movie because it conflicted with something I wanted to do more--join an expedition to Canada with people from the Greenpeace Foundation to protest the slaughter of baby seals. For me to be asked to go on that expedition was an honor.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get involved with Greenpeace?

[A] Martin: Out of my long-term feeling about protecting the environment. It's something I really believe in. And what Greenpeace does makes a difference. It has called attention to the senseless killing of whales in the Pacific and the seal slaughter in the Atlantic. Both are endangered species. They could become extinct very soon. In the Pacific, members of Greenpeace confronted the Russian fishing fleet in their tiny Zodiac boats, placing themselves between the harpoons and the whales. The Russians were forced to stop hunting, at least while Greenpeace was there. The Canada trip was designed to disrupt this year's harp-seal hunt and protest people who come in on ships and slaughter baby seals for their rare white pelts, which are eventually sold to the European fashion industry. We flew with a camera crew by helicopter to an ice floe near St. Anthony, Newfoundland, and came face to face with the slaughterers, standing between them and the seals. We hope that people around the world got the message.

[Q] Playboy: Did you think there would be some danger in that confrontation?

[A] Martin: Sure. Maybe that's one of the reasons I went to Canada. Fear and anxiety can be emotional cripplers. I try to kill my fears as often as I can by forcing myself to do things that frighten me.

[Q] Playboy: Skeptics will insist that many actors support popular causes merely to enhance their own image.

[A] Martin: I realize that I put myself in a position for criticism. But I'm not just giving lip service to a cause, just trying to get attention. I'm trying to use the fame I've attained in the past few years to draw attention to something worth while.

[Q] Playboy: How did the Greenpeace workers react to your participation?

[A] Martin: At first, not terribly well. Before I went to Newfoundland, I wanted to meet some of the crew on the Zodiac boats, just to get acquainted. When I got on one of the boats in San Francisco, these otherwise laid-back, neat kind of guys looked at me like I was some kind of freak. They had a preconceived idea of me, which wasn't fair. Maybe they'd seen the show or read some of the crap that appeared about me in fan magazines.

[Q] Playboy: What had the fan magazines been saying?

[A] Martin: Totally fictitious stuff written to appeal to six-year-olds. I've never talked to reporters from a fan magazine, yet they print these imbecilic interviews with me. At first, this bothered me. But what's the point? They're just so laughable. My father called after one of the more absurd stories and said, "I just read that you're having an affair with your hairdresser and that you're marrying him." All I could say was, "Oh, Dad, please! Don't read it and don't believe it." The funny thing, though, is that I can't help reading that garbage myself, because it is about me. Like: "The truth is that Pamela has always found it hard to make good friends. She has always been a shy girl and she has found it hard to let people know the real her. In relationships, she's been hurt many times. In fact, too many times for a girl of her age. In the past months, she's been out with many men. But somehow, the relationships never develop. They just fizzle out and the little girl is left alone again in the big bad world of Hollywood." Can you believe that shit?

[Q] Playboy: It sounds like the prose you might find in a Nancy Drew novel.

[A] Martin: I give the author credit for being better than that.

[Q] Playboy: How do you relate to men?

[A] Martin: I have a very strong feeling there's a place in my life for a man. But I have a lot of reservations about the idea of marriage, mainly because I'm going through a lot of changes. It would be hard for somebody else to follow me around. I want to be free to go through all the different things I want to (concluded on page 184)Nancy Drew(continued from page 92) experience, whether it's visiting an ice floe in Newfoundland, exploring ancient ruins in Mexico or--for a total diversion--blowing it out in Las Vegas. I tend to go around in my own world. I don't want to worry about having to take someone with me. When I have time alone, I'd rather read or go to films; I haven't watched TV in two years, except for my own show. And I probably wouldn't have watched that if I hadn't been in it. I really want to work in films again, because the whole approach to acting is different. In TV, we shot an hour's show in eight days. For an hour-and-a-half feature film, it takes three months. There's so much more time to work on concepts and ideas and feelings, and to take them to a much deeper level. I hope to become involved in the types of films I like to see, generally European films, like those of Bergman, Truffaut and Lelouch. They seem to deal with people on a more intimate level. That's what film acting is all about: a very close look.

[Q] Playboy: What was memorable about your previous film experiences?

[A] Martin: When I left high school to make my first film, To Find a Man, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was only 17. It was the story of a pregnant 15-year-old who wanted to get an abortion but didn't want her parents to find out about it. So she employed the boy next door, who had an enormous crush on her, to help her out. On the basis of that movie, I was asked to come to California to make one of the first disaster films, The Poseidon Adventure. The fact that it was one of the first is the only good thing I have to say about it. I was one of two children who escaped. The one film that was really a total experience for me was Our Time. It was about two girls in boarding school in the Fifties and, again, an illegal abortion. I seem to have a propensity for that. In Buster and Billie, I played the pretty high school girl, the class bitch. I'm bored by that, because I've played it so many times before. The kind of thing I could do best is something that I haven't had the chance to do yet. I keep asking myself when it will happen. I could wait my whole life for Bergman and never find him. I have a lot of unanswered questions about this life. I often wonder what we're here for. Every once in a while, I get into a negative frame of mind: Nothing seems to make any sense. I just can't figure out the point. I keep asking myself why. You can only get yourself crazy with that question. I got myself crazy for a while. I went into therapy--not because I expected to get any answers but because my questions were burning me up and inhibiting my ability to function. If you're with the right person, it can be a great learning experience. And it was.

[Q] Playboy: Any lingering doubts?

[A] Martin: Only this feeling I have about becoming a commercial entity. At this point in Hollywood, one's popularity often has to do with how big one's publicity agent is. That's repellent to me. I want to be successful. But I'd rather go a medium route than go all out for publicity--like the Charlie's Angels group--and feel like I'm selling out. I'd rather be a semisuccessful person and get to do a few projects I could feel proud of, maybe one or two nice films a year. I don't particularly want to be famous.

"Every once in a while, I get into a negative frame of mind: Nothing seems to make any sense."