Pamela Anderson - Star Struck

Though she didn’t know it and couldn’t have predicted it, a squall was shaping up.

She had given careful consideration to the Lifeguards dilemma. She wanted to be honest with Jimi, but he wanted to hear only what he wanted to hear.

In the end, Hank’s down-home sensibilities won the day.

He overheard a phone conversation Star had with Theresa and picked up enough to figure out what was going on.

“You want a beer?” he called to her after she’d hung up.

“Root beer,” she called back.

“Here you go,” he said, cracking one for her, his own long-neck tucked under his arm. “You know, it’s none of my business…”

“I know it isn’t,” she said, afraid of what was coming.

“All’s you really have to do is make arrangements for him to be somewhere else when you shoot the scenes. Just make sure that he’s not there.”

“Isn’t that deceptive?”

“Maybe.” Hank shrugged, taking a pull off his beer.

Perhaps the most original idea had come from her costar Sven. Though he was still as in the dark about the Swedish Meatball conspiracy as Star, he was much better informed about the whole situation since Jimi’s big scene at the shoot.

“Why don’t we just get it over with,” he suggested, his sparkling blue eyes glinting at her from his top-ten-most-beautiful face.

Star laughed it off, but the irony of the situation was not lost on her. She was actually being persecuted for something she wasn’t doing, even though she easily could have… and it would hardly have been unpleasant. It had crossed her mind, but Sven was just a little too clean-cut for her tastes.

Hank was working as an extra on Hammer Time. In fact, like many newcomers to Hollywood he got his union membership card doing walk-on parts. And like all but about 5 percent of the members of SAG, he barely made enough to cover gas to the shoots, let alone to support himself.

On this particular day he was hanging around Star’s dressing room at the end of a long production day. Star was giving him a ride home, as he did not yet have a car, and they talked as she got ready to leave. She did not have the kind of personal crew on Hammer Time that she did on Lifeguards, so it was just the two of them as she got out of makeup and costume on her own.

“Have you heard from Mom?” she asked, still waiting to hear back from her mother. She had suspected that her father was just not passing the messages along, at first, anyway. But too many were unreturned.

“Nah,” Hank said, leafing through a magazine and not really paying attention.

“When was the last time she called you?” Star put her costume on the rack for the wardrobe lady to pick up.

“Not exactly sure.” Hank looked up from a spread on NASCAR drivers.

“Hank, be serious,” Star said irritably as she sat at the makeup table to survey what, if any, of Billy’s work she wanted to take off before heading home. She frequently got her makeup done by her personal crew on Lifeguards before coming to the Hammer Time set, where she was at the mercy of the general cast crew—they were good, they just weren’t Skip, Billy, and Missy.

“I am serious,” Hank said, going back to his magazine. “And I kind of prefer it that way. She’s always bossing me about something.”

“I just wanted her advice,” Star explained.

It was an unreasonable but manageable level of stress.

And then the world just completely went out of control.

Star had called her mother once again, and was surprised when her grandmother Gitta answered the phone.

“When will they be back?” Star asked, confused as to why Mama Gitta was there if her parents weren’t home.

“Oh, I don’t rightly know,” Brigitta said in a singsong kind of way she had when she was nervous.

“Where have they gone?” Star said, growing tired of the runaround and determined to track her mom down.

“Well, that’s the thing,” her grandma said evasively.

“What’s the thing? What’s going on there?” Star said, getting anxious. “Are they all right, is everything okay?”

“Well,” the old woman said, drawing it out, clearly deciding how to answer, “Star, your mom’s in the hospital. She’s had another attack.”

“Another attack?” Star shrieked, unaware of any attacks.

“She can’t walk at all anymore.” Brigitta sighed sadly. “And the doctors say that without the surgery she never will again, and even then…”

It was more than Star could take.

Her mother’s illness gave Star something to focus on at a time when she needed it most.

The couple, already the darlings or the target, depending on how you looked at it, of every tabloid and paparazzi, and they followed Star to Cedar Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills, where Star had her mother transported to get her the best specialists and find out what could be done.

Much to Lucille’s—Star’s mother’s—dismay, her arrival at the hospital made the evening news. “I’ve never been on TV or had my picture in the paper in my life,” she said disgustedly as she was wheeled into the hospital. “And they wait until I’ve got two weeks’ worth of bed head, I’m strapped to a gurney, and have tubes sticking out of my nose.”

“Is this what you have to do to make it in Hollywood nowadays?” Lucille joked through her oxygen mask.

“I don’t know,” Star said, taking her hand. “I do know it’s the first time I got you out here for a visit.”

The two women laughed until they cried.

Lucille never said, but she was plenty scared. And Star was overwrought and terrified over the developments surrounding her mom’s health.

She turned her full attention to her mother’s condition. It was serious and life-threatening. Her mom had lost the ability to walk because her circulatory system was so devastated by her years of chain-smoking. She simply didn’t have the strength.

Star had always kidded that she was a committed secondhand smoker. She had never even tried smoking herself, but her mom and many of Star’s boyfriends over the years were big-time smokers.

Her mom’s problem had a surgical solution, but it was invasive and risky. However, the alternative was for her mom to spend the remainder of her brief life strapped to an oxygen tank, never to walk again.

There was also the cost, and Lucille had no insurance. For the first time, Star was truly grateful for her success. She simply wrote the hospital a check for the hundreds of thousands needed for the procedure.

And so, the surgery was scheduled, but it was far from a sure thing.

Star wanted to commit her time and resources full-time to taking care of her mom.

“This is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, young lady,” Lucille called to her daughter as she was wheeled off to surgery, delirious from all the medications they’d given her for the procedure.

“I’ll be right here waiting for you,” Star said, trying to act brave, but not doing a very good job of it as she walked alongside the gurney wheeling through the halls of the hospital. “You get better, you hear? I can’t do this without you.”

Lucille reached out and took her daughter’s hand.

“You can do anything you want,” Lucille said, giving a little squeeze. “Remember, it’s your choice who you are. I’ll be watching, whatever happens. I love you, Star.”

Their hands separated as they reached the operating room doors and Star was left behind.

“You just get well, old woman,” Star said, releasing her mother’s hand and blowing a kiss after her. “I love you, Mom,” she called, waving as Lucille passed through the swinging double doors into the land of authorized personnel only. The tears came as soon as her mom was out of sight. Once she felt she didn’t need to be strong for her mother, Star collapsed onto the cold tile outside the OR doors.