Welcome to St.-Tropez, where the days can be hot but the nights are cooled by Mediterranean breezes that help make this French town one of the most romantic spots on earth. It just got hotter, cooler and even more romantic, thanks to a visit from Pamela Anderson, a friend of ours who steamed up the lenses of photographer Stephen Wayda more than the weather ever could. Pamela, Playboy's Miss February 1990, told us then that "this is the start of something big." All she has done since is appear as Lisa the Tool Time Girl on Home Improvement, America's number one TV show, and co-star as C.J. Parker on Baywatch, the TV show with more than a billion viewers worldwide each week. There's also a Mike Hammer movie-of-the-week on CBS (Pamela plays Hammer's sexy assistant). Not bad for the daughter of a furnace repairman and a waitress from tiny Comox, British Columbia. But even while she juggled movie offers, Pamela couldn't resist a trip to St.-Tropez--our fifth get-together with her. "I've never had a bad experience with Playboy," she says. Posing nude is like modeling swim-suits, she adds, except that you don't have to worry how the suit looks. In St.-Tropez, she had nothing at all to worry about. We made the arrangements; all Pamela had to do was show up, show off and enjoy herself. Now she says, "It's my favorite place in the world. I want to move there."
Fantasies do come true. For proof, check Pamela's life story. In 1989 some neighbors invited her to a Canadian Football League game in Vancouver. A cameraman put her on the stadium's big-screen TV. The crowd went wild. Pamela happened to be wearing a Labatt's T-shirt that day; the company, noting that its logo had never before looked so good, signed her as a spokes-model. That's when we spotted the girl in the Labatt's beer ads. Her Playboy appearances led to Home Improvement and Baywatch. The world went wild. Playing one of the TV lifeguards People magazine called a "super-sexy amalgam of hormones and Coppertone" on the syndicated surf opera Baywatch, Pamela is seen weekly in 140 nations by nearly 20 percent of the earth's population, and the show has made her an international star. She's so popular in Europe that she can't make a move on the Continent without being mobbed. With the CBS movie and two feature films on the horizon, Pamela is now approximately as hot as the St.-Tropez sand at midday. "It's all pretty hard to believe," she says in her soft, little-girl voice, "but then I have always believed in fantasies."
Being young and beautiful and blonde is a good way to be mistaken for a mannequin. Pamela told People magazine, "I love the dumb-blonde image. I have nothing to live up to. I can only surprise people." So she doesn't bother reminding people that her Baywatch character has gotten deeper as the writers make C.J. more like Pamela, whose idea of bedtime reading is Bulfinch's Mythology. Even her Playboy portfolio reflects a philosophy, that "sexuality is an expression of spirituality." Pamela certainly didn't need to explain herself in St.-Tropez, where body language is a native tongue.
