Going Native

She's actually rather low class and economically deprived, and she's not very intellectually realized or thought out or satisfied. She's the kind of person I don't really know and never really will."

That's actress Pamela Bellwood talking about her video alter ego, Claudia Blaisdel, perhaps the only certifiably demented character in the hugely successful ABC-TV serial drama Dynasty. If you know Claudia, then you haven't an inkling of what Pamela is like.

For instance, Claudia is now in an insane asylum, put there by a merciful team of writers. But her consignment to a padded pantry put Pamela on the bricks--for a while, anyway.

Strangely, there were no tears for Claudia in the Bellwood household, because while Claudia gets her head straight, Pamela is free to roam the world, a passion in which she unashamedly overindulges.

"I don't know why I love to travel so much," Pamela says, "but I really do. To me, it's very heady to just pack your bags and get on a flight and wind up someplace you've never been. I love that. And the rougher it is, the better I like it. I love trekking through the jungle and coming upon a village that no one's been to and having pigs moved out (text concluded on page 92) of a mud-floored hut so I can sleep there. And eating with people whom I can't even communicate with verbally. There's a link that exists among people that's nonverbal. It's a behavioral link. And I've found that in so many places, and that's fascinating"

We caught Pamela on a refueling stop at her home in Los Angeles. In her particular neighborhood, a mud-floored hut is the result of a hot tub's overflowing. The house, though spacious, is not luxurious. It's almost Spartan by Hollywood standards. The one fairly rich-looking piece we commented on, an ornately carved bed from Thailand, was offered to us for sale. It is clearly the home of people who aren't home much.

Pamela lives there--when she's there--with Nik Wheeler, a British-born photojournalist Along with Nik, and in her capacity as a writer for a French press syndicate, Pamela has covered the wild-mustang roundups in Nevada, East African wildebeest migrations, Filipino gun patrols, rhinoceros poaching in Kenya, river rafting in Thailand, swamp-buggy racing in Florida, World Cup soccer in Argentina, the Cannes Film Festival and the Holmes-Cooney fight, among other things.

We talked with her just after her trip to Africa and just before her junket to Japan.

In the manner of a true travel junkie, Pamela tells time by her shots: "It was about four days before we left for New Guinea, because I remember taking my malaria pills" or "It was the day before we were leaving for Japan and I had gotten my yellow-fever shots."

She calls herself an observer and makes no apologies for an insatiable curiosity. But there is more than observing going on in her. There is a lot of participating. And curiosity is a modest euphemism for her drive to learn. Her latest African jaunt was Playboy's idea: a 36-hour flight to the Masai Mara, a game preserve in Kenya, and another hour and a half by Land-Rover to a remote Masai village--to shoot the wild Bellwood in her preferred habitat.

The Masai, while dignified, are also fun-loving. But they are far enough off the beaten track never to have heard of Playboy; i.e., truly remote. The cultural differences were immediately apparent.

"We found an old T-shirt," Pamela recounts, "and a baggy pair of green shorts that we were going to use for the shoot. We decided to cut the shorts to make them shorter and sexier. The Masai men were standing around watching. Then one of them, as we were cutting the shorts--and we were cutting them real high--came over and said, 'I think that is enough. I think that is more than enough.' It was sweet.

"They have a sense of etiquette. Only the unmarried women are allowed to show their breasts. Once you're married, you can't bare your chest at all. Most of the shooting we did was with married women, who didn't mind the fact that I was bare-breasted. But then I put on this kind of loincloth, and all the women walked away and sat under a tree. They wouldn't come back as long as I was wearing that. Because, even though it's all right to show the upper part of your body, they never show their legs at all. The men show their legs, but the women wear skirts. Showing bare legs was very unnerving to them."

The Masai also tend to be very discriminating in what they pick up from Western civilization or, at least, from the little to which they're exposed. "For instance," Pamela continues, "the Masai cut their ear lobes and stretch them into large loops. Sometimes, in the tribes that are close to the tented camps, you'll see them walking around with film cans in their ears. On the other hand, when they saw my hair [corn-rowed with beads at the time], one of them came up to me and looked at my beads and just said, 'Plastic.' The ones who spoke English were very funny.

"The Masai are such a beautiful people. When you look at the faces of some we shot, they are so magnificent. And they're such a gentle people. Sensuous and colorful. If this pictorial makes them more accessible to people who will never get to see them, then it will be a good thing. I hope it shows their beauty, a beauty I couldn't hope to match."

If Pamela is smitten by the Masai, she is just as enamored of the land and the animals of Kenya.

"The earth is a magnificent color," she rhapsodizes. "It's ocher, bright orange-red clay. And the flowers are extraordinary. Bright yellows and oranges and pinks all in combination with the really fresh green, plus magnificent vistas, beautiful rivers and lakes. And amid all that, wildlife that you don't have anywhere else in the world. It's as close to Eden as you can imagine."

But Pamela saw trouble in paradise, too. "I saw all these impalas that were just dying. A lot of animals were dying because of the drought. Females were dying in childbirth because they didn't have the strength to deliver their calves. So you would see babies kind of half out of their mothers and both of them dead. Or hyenas just waiting for a mother to deliver. They're such thieves! They'll just snatch the baby from her.

"There are barbed-wire fences around the game preserve. I saw impalas jump through the barbed wire because the drought was so severe. They get caught and just push themselves through. It's very upsetting to see an animal disoriented like that. And yet, the first time I went to Africa, it was like going home. I don't know why, but I remember seeing a mountain in the northern part of Kenya that I felt I'd seen before--that I'd been there before. I remember getting up at dawn and having breakfast on that mountain and feeling that I could spend the rest of my life there. I've never had that feeling any other place. So Africa is a very, very, very special place for me."

Pamela Bellwood is a native of New York. She attended a fashionable Eastern college that she refuses to name. She describes her family as "a middle-class family from the East Coast, business-oriented. My father is very involved in the stock market. An establishment family."

She began her acting career on the stage in Boston, London and New York successively. Her movie credits include Two-Minute Warning, Airport '77, Serial, The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Hangar 18. You've seen her on the tube in Mannix, Police Story, Baretta, The Hallmark Hall of Fame and in the Faye Dunaway role in TV's version of Network, which was called WEB. (Pamela actually took the role of Claudia Blaisdel to avoid being typecast as the "hard-bitten female-executive type" she had played in WEB.)

Still, nothing in her background would explain her predilection for mud floors. The fact is, she lives two completely separate lives. The acting finances the travel and the travel broadens the acting talent. We wondered if it were the contrasting danger that attracted her to the wanderer's life. Pamela wondered where the real danger was.

"I'd much rather sleep in a tented camp knowing there are hippos or lions outside that can be very dangerous if you have to go to the outhouse at three in the morning--I'd rather deal with that kind of danger than with the element of danger coming from sophisticated hypocrisy and back-stabbing. We feel out of the bush and into the jungle when we come back to Los Angeles. One time, I was in a little village in northern Thailand at an elephant roundup. I had to fly back here to have lunch with this Beverly Hills lawyer in a Beverly Hills restaurant. And he told me that the stereo set that he put in his office cost him $40,000, but it gave great music and it was the same kind that Barbra Streisand had. I was thinking that the entire gross income of the village I had just left 24 hours earlier was probably smaller than the cost of his stereo system. So if you ask me why I travel, why I like to go places, it's just to gain a larger perspective than you get here.

"I mean, I like my pretty house and I like nice cars and creature comforts. It's nice to be able to have them. But I think what is not nice is not to be able to live without them. I don't think that would be a problem for me, though I'm not yet ready to give them up. But I don't think you have to give up one thing for the other. I'm trying to achieve a balance in my life. So far, it's satisfying."