The Dirt (60 page)

Was Pamela Anderson around during the recording?

Well, we all went through some really good times with Pamela and some really shitty times with Pamela during the recording of that album. She used to do this thing every Friday where she’d come by the studio with a bottle of vodka. She’d say, “Okay, it’s Friday, you guys are getting drunk.” She insisted that Tommy get shit-faced every Friday. Then fast-forward a few months, and she’s on Jay Leno saying, “My husband’s an alcoholic.” I was just thinking, “What is she talking about?”

So what was going on in your mind during this whole recording process? Were you thinking, “Get me out of this nightmare?”

It was really hard, because when it was convenient, I had two coproducers; when it wasn’t, I was on my own doing all the work. In the end, I went out screaming. I’ll never forget this because my mother was sitting beside me at Christmastime and I was talking to Nikki on the phone. I was saying, “If you don’t come up with a better first single, your career is finished, and six months from now you are going to blame it all on me.” And he goes, “No, I know exactly what I’m doing and I’m doing the right thing. And this is the perfect first single.” At that point, I was sure that the reunited Mötley Crüe wasn’t going to blow up just because the material wasn’t good. If they had the right record, they could have easily gone double or triple platinum.

So you decided to wash your hands of it all?

What else could I do? You get tired of constantly saying, “No, no, no, no” and arguing with people all the time. When the first single stiffed, I got a call from Nikki, who said, “I think we released the wrong single.”

“You fucking asshole!” I screamed at him.

It didn’t matter anyway, because by the time the album came out, Mötley Crüe had become celebrities on a scale they probably never could have imagined in their worst nightmares. It was really strange to me because, all of a sudden, their personal lives became more important than their music.

fig. 1

Tommy with Jozie, dancer
,
Greatest Hits Tour,
1999

I
thought she was the funniest girl on the planet. She should have been a comedian. She was nonstop action, talking faster than any girl I knew. Basically, she was a maniac and I fucking flipped out over her.

The first night we spent together was during time off from the Corabi tour. She lived in Reseda with her daughter, Taylar, from her marriage to Warrant singer Jani Lane. I remember seeing the video for “Cherry Pie” and thinking she was the hottest chick on wheels. She had perfect blond hair, huge doe eyes, big glossy lips, and huge tits—who cared whether it was all real or not. Her name was Bobbie Brown, and she stole my heart the second she opened her mouth.

I was sleeping in her bed after our first date at about four in the morning when all of a sudden the frame started shaking. I had no idea what was going on: At first I thought it was some kind of crazy dream, then I thought some dude was trying to break in. As I slowly returned to consciousness, I realized the whole house was just pounding. We lay naked in her bed, not sure what to do, when suddenly her armoire came crashing to the ground, shattering the screen of her TV into a thousand little pieces.

“Taylar!” Bobbie suddenly cried. Her daughter was alone on the other side of the house, and who knew what was going on there. We slithered off the bed and dropped to the ground, almost shitting in our pants. We pushed open the door and went into the hallway. Everything was falling onto the floor, and the house was shaking so badly we kept getting thrown against the walls as we tried to crawl. The closer we came to Taylar’s door, the more the house rattled, until it seemed like it was about to just fucking collapse. As we reached her room, I looked behind me and the whole house ripped apart. The kitchen and the living room just completely split off and disappeared, leaving a gaping hole of darkness. I was sure we were going to die.

Taylar was on the floor, crying as the earthquake tossed her around the room. I grabbed her and yelled, “Fuck, let’s go for it.” Then Bobbie and I ran out of the room and toward the front door, careful not to get thrown onto the open side of the house and whatever abyss was waiting below. The front door was gone, so we ran through the space where it used to be and into the street. Outside, the earth slowed to a tremble and we joined her neighbors, who were crying over the remains of their homes.

After a first date like that, there was no going back. Bobbie and Taylar moved into my pad on the beach and, after six months of partying together, I slipped a fifteen-thousand-dollar engagement ring onto the top of a brownie she had ordered in a diner, then got down on my knees and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and that was when everything started to go downhill. But it rolled downhill slowly, so slowly that I hardly even noticed it.

Scott Humphrey was over one day listening to some music I was writing, and Bobbie snapped at me because I hadn’t washed the hair out of the sink after I shaved or something. “Hey, dude,” Scott said. “Do you let her talk to you like that?”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“She’s not even treating you like a human being. Is she always like this?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. And all of a sudden, those love blinders came off and I started to notice things I never had before. Things about her just seemed off: She’d sneak around the house, hide things from me, disappear on strange errands, receive phone calls from guys I didn’t know, and, when I woke up in the morning, she usually wouldn’t be in bed. Now, any other guy would think she was cheating on him. But I knew Bobbie better than that.

With the love goggles off, I also noticed that she was wasting away, and she was always fucking cranky. Sometimes I would come home from tour or the studio, and she’d be sitting on the floor with all these arts and crafts spread around her. She’d be hot-gluing fruits and flowers together or covering a bowl of potpourri with gold spray paint.

The next time I was alone with one of her friends, I asked her, “Dude, is Bobbie doing fucking speed?”

“I’m not going to answer that,” she said. “But why don’t you look in her purse? Or check her makeup bag. And, remember, we never spoke.”

Sure enough, I grabbed her purse and found fucking speed in there. It made everything in our relationship seem like bullshit, and it explained the crazy random mood swings that I was always a victim of. When I confronted her, she denied it at first, then she attacked me for drinking, then she blamed it on me. The end result was a huge fucking fight that ended with me sleeping on the floor like a dog.

After that, all this deep-seated resentment that had been building up in Bobbie started to pour out daily. Everything I had begun thinking about her, she had simultaneously been thinking about me. She felt that I was the one going through mood swings; that I had become cranky, suspicious, and miserable to live with; and that I was sneaking around behind her back—not with drugs, but with other women. She was especially mad because she felt like I had asked her to give up her acting and modeling career because I was so scarred from my marriage with Heather and wanted children and a full-time wife. After a while, whenever Heather called (because we had remained friends), Bobbie would freak her shit; and whenever a guy called for her, I’d flip out. A few days before Christmas, when I wanted to go out to a holiday party, our mutual jealousies and mistrust exploded in an ugly, out-of-hand fight in front of Taylar.

We were fighting every day by then and that couldn’t have been good for Taylar’s development, let alone mine. I tried to think of a single reason why she should stay in my life, and I couldn’t think of one. Even her sense of humor, which I had originally loved about her, had disappeared as our relationship became all about negativity and accusations.

When I asked her to leave, she threw a fit and said she wasn’t going anywhere without her clothing and furniture and shit. “You know what,” I told her. “You can have your stuff when you give me back my engagement ring. Because we ain’t getting fucking married, that’s for damn sure.”

“Drop dead,” she spat, adding about a hundred rapid-fire oaths on top of it.

“Well, then, you ain’t getting your shit.” And with that, I grabbed her and marched her to the door. Strangely, I didn’t have to force her. She went a little too willingly, it seemed. I was surprised that she didn’t put up more of a fight, because she was a fucking fighter.

An hour later there was a loud knocking on my front door. I looked at the security monitor, and she was standing there with the fucking cops. I figured the cops would be fair since the house was mine and I had the right to ask her to get off my property. But I was wrong. Way wrong. She had used all her powers to conjure up the greatest sob story the cops had ever heard. She set me up.

“Mister Lee,” the officer said on the intercom. “You are going to have to let her in to collect her things.”

“Dude,” I protested. “She’s got my ring.”

“That’s not my concern,” he said. “She needs to come in and remove her possessions.”

I threw up my hands and opened the fucking door. The cop barged in, followed by Bobbie. She marched straight to the bedroom. I tried to follow her, but the cop stopped me.