60swildchild
Member
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2006
- Messages
- 972
- Reaction score
- 0
SEX AND IRONING AND ROCK 'N' ROLL; Revealed, the groupie queen who bedded British pop stars galore - but who has got nothing out of the hit movie based on the story of her torrid life.
From: The Mail on Sunday (London, England) | Date: February 4, 2001
Byline: SHARON CHURCHER
PAMELA Des Barres got nothing out of the hit movie Almost Famous . . . even though star Kate Hudson relied on her life story to create the part of a serial rock groupie and the screenplay is remarkably similar to a book Pamela wrote about her experiences.
But then getting nothing seems to be the story of Pamela's life.
Picked up then discarded by Keith Moon, Mick Jagger, Noel Redding and Jimmy Page - plus a string of others from the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Nonentities - she traded an odd mixture of sexual experiment and domestic expertise for a place on the edge of the spotlight.
'The trouble was,' she reflects, 'the men whose love I wanted were all musicians.
'Just breathing the air around them was exciting but, of course, there were so many other groupies out there who also wanted to be with the band. It all became very competitive. . .' The BAFTA-nominated movie - set in the hedonistic Seventies and written and directed by former Rolling Stone journalist Cameron Crowe - has a sugary ending. When Hudson's character, Penny Lane, is sold to another rock god for [pounds sterling]30, she tries to kill herself.
Then an aspiring writer, not unlike Crowe, saves her life and declares that she's the girl he adores.
But, sadly, Pamela's life didn't quite go that way. For nearly a decade, from the age of 19 in 1968, she was the most sought-after groupie in the British-dominated world of rock.
The daughter of a Los Angeles vacuum cleaner salesman, Pamela commuted constantly between North America and Britain to attend her idols' concerts, where she found that attracting the lustful attentions of rock stars came naturally to her. Sometimes she would fly by private jet or with tickets paid for her by the rock stars.
Luminously lovely when she began hanging around in revealing outfits at stage doors, 'Miss Pamela' - as she teasingly called herself - had fleeting affairs with so many Seventies idols that she was nicknamed 'the Queen of the British Groupies'.
Her fascination was with British stars . . . and it began because of a schoolgirl crush on Paul McCartney. Yet, ironically, the Beatles were the only major group which appears to have failed to succumb to her seductive charms.
To her rivals at least, Pamela seemed to have a glamorous life. Flanked by bodyguards and swaddled in faux-fur and virginal voile, she would be ushered from the concert stadiums to her latest suitor's waiting limousine or helicopter.
Behind the scenes, however, she didn't much mind what she did - however demeaning and perverted.
Moon, the notoriously debauched, alcoholic drummer of The Who, would have her pretend to be a schoolgirl while he acted out a fantasy of being a r*pist priest.
While Page, whose band, Led Zeppelin, made him one of Britain's richest men, produced a suitcase full of whips on their first date.
In 1977, Pamela ended up marrying one of her 'masters' but, tellingly, he was never in the super-league. Michael Des Barres, British-born lead singer of the glam-rock band Silverhead, fathered her only child, Nicholas.
Des Barres was a cocaine-snorting descendant of the minor aristocracy who, like others, cheated on her constantly. They have been divorced for nearly ten years.
TODAY, she lives alone in a small house in an orange grove near a marina in Los Angeles - and her rooms are stuffed with rock memorabilia. She has seen the movie and, in public at least, seems relaxed about the lack of a credit.
'I regard Cameron Crowe as one of my oldest friends,' she says, 'and it's startling how he has created a character just like me. You could say the film's a rip-off. But that's OK. Kate gives her character an innocent streak that really brings alive what I was like.
'When people use the word "groupie," it makes it sound as if I was a throwaway for these men . . . but that wasn't how I regarded it at the time.
I truly believed these were real relationships.
'Because these men travelled a lot, there were other girls. But when they'd get back to London or New York or Los Angeles, they always said I was the one they wanted - Miss Pamela. I really was a girl with old-fashioned ideals, looking for love and devotion and marriage, just like Kate in the film. But if you
didn't give yourself to a man and please him sexually and in every other way, he'd just go on to the next girl.' What was as humiliating was that it wasn't just the sex that these rock gods wanted - they needed someone to mother them: sex and drudgery and rock 'n' roll.
Pamela says that when she saw Kate - daughter of actress Goldie Hawn - 'babying' the rock star in the film, it was just the way it had been with her.
'The first thing I'd do was hang up their clothes in the closet when we were on tour and lay out their hair products on the dressing table. Then I'd iron their clothes and perform a sex act to show my affection. I'd make them shirts if the relationship lasted. I really thought of myself as their road wife.' She tries in vain to justify intellectually her days as a groupie by setting her rebellion against the constraints of her middle-class, traditional background.
Growing up in the stifling urban sprawl of the Los Angeles Valley, the girl born Pamela Miller fell under the spell of two trends - one cultural and one political - which she combined into a recipe for escape.
SHE says: 'I had such a fatal dose of Beatlemania that England was my mecca.
I practised a Liverpudlian accent. Paul McCartney personified my perfect man.
The other factor was that I was growing up in the Sixties. I had watched my Mom be the Fifties Mom, the slave Mom.
'This was the era of free love and women's lib. I wanted to be the Fifties Mom, the slave Mom.
'This was the era of free love and women's lib. I wanted to really fall in love one day. But I believed it would be liberating and pleasurable in the meantime to have sex fall 1/2in love one day. But I believed it would be liberating and pleasurable in the meantime to have sex whenever I wanted it - like men.' In I'm With The Band, a diary that Pamela published as a book in 1985, is her scribbled entry for July 21, 1968: 'Me. Pamela. Age 19 and three-quarters. 5ft 4in in height. Blonde.
Blue eyes that don't see very well without spectacles. Dreams of fame.
Ready, willing and able to LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST! TAKE ME! I'M YOURS!'
She recalls, 'I'd lost my virginity with a bass player in the band Step-penwolf when I was 19 and a half. I was the perfect type for rock stars because I totally fancied giving men what they wanted. I used to train younger girls in my techniques, using a banana. But I really didn't need techniques because I was pretty darn cute.
'I had this real ethereal quality that Kate captures in the film and I'd wear very few clothes, just see-through dresses and bare feet and flowers in my hair. And I'd talk about how I really loved their music. What was there not to like about me? 'Other women of my age didn't have what I had,' she says defensively. 'They were staying home, having babies by their high school sweethearts. I was being ushered to the side of the stage by the roadies to watch the Stones perform or sitting on top of Jimmy Page's amplifier as he played to the screaming girls in the crowd. To be thought of as a real girlfriend by a British Someone was the pinnacle.' And she insists her 'relationship' with Page fell into this category. 'I met him and it was on and off for a couple of years during the early Seventies,' she says. 'The first evening he swept me into his white limo and looked hard at me with a tiny smile on his rosebud lips.
He put somethng in my hand, a silver ring. I wrote in my diary, "Such a face,
so gentle and soft, I'm amazed at his sadistic tendencies." It was really frightening at first but all he did was chew and slap me a little.
'Underneath, he really was the most romantic of all the stars I met and I was crazily in love with him. I never would have contemplated suicide in the way Kate does in the film, but I was devastated when he left me for a younger groupie.' However, plenty of other stars were begging for her services. Rod Stewart and his best friend, Ron Wood, sent her a letter with their photographs, asking if they could join her for what they described as a 'sleepover'. Mick Jagger was also begging her to go to bed.
'I told Mick I couldn't because Jimmy was still in love with me,'' she says.
'Mick laughed. He said, "Miss Pamela, you are acting like a schoolgirl from Indiana". ' By her confused logic, she gained equality by imitation.
'I did everything in that era that the guys did, took all the same drugs except for heroin. I'd try anything. I never thought of it as dangerous and I was lucky. I didn't have an addictive personality, except maybe I was addicted to the excitement.
'I was stronger than many of the men I met. Keith Moon, for instance, was really unhappy. He broke down one night when we were in bed and started to cry, calling himself a murderer.
MOON, then 23, confessed he had crushed a chauffeur under the wheels of his Bentley during a fracas outside a disco in Hertfordshire. A verdict of accident was recorded at an inquest but Pamela says: 'Keith told me he was to blame because he was stoned.' He died of an overdose eight years later.
When Pamela married Des Barres she believed her band-chasing days were reaching a happy conclusion.
He kicked an addiction to drugs and alcohol but continued to play around with other women.
But as his musical career slowly burned itself out, Pamela was obliged to take charring jobs and she worked briefly as a door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman. Today she scrapes by writing about showbusiness on the e! online website.
She hasn't had a relationship for some time. 'Maybe it's because my formidable reputation goes before me but men in my age group are frightened,' she says with a laugh.
'It's a little easier with younger guys because they're intrigued by the legend. The last guy I saw was 24 and an actor-musician. That's over now . . . but I still have hopes. I still have my dreams.
'That's the real story of what it's like to have been almost famous. You are left with a lot of dreams.' It's a poignant comment from a woman who gave everything and received little in return from men who ended up either dead or as multimillionaires.
Yet Cameron Crowe, chief scribbler of those wild times, was an onlooker who never slept with 'Miss Pamela'.And, ironically, even though he gave her no official credit for the film's inspiration, at least through him and his movie she will gain a kind of immortality.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Solo Syndication Limited
Thank you EvaLaDiva! I've never seen those before. Glad you posted them!
I'm sohoho sorry guys, please forgive me, you must have been confused.
I really dont know why I thought of it that way, somethings wrong with my eyes.
