What: Pam Grier reads from "Foxy: My Life in Three Acts
There are a couple of reasons people read celebrity memoirs. One is to glean the juicy bits, the scandals, the love affairs, the details of how wealthy, famous people live. In her memoir "Foxy," Pam Grier doesn't skimp on the particulars of her romances with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze, Sr., Richard Pryor, and others, and shares stories about the time she got thrown out of a club with a rowdy, drunken John Lennon, the time she drove Pryor's injured pony to the vet in the back seat of her yellow Jaguar, and how she escaped the untoward advances of Sammy Davis, Jr.
But "Foxy" is more interesting for the second reason people read celebrity memoirs: to find out how an ordinary person ended up living an extraordinary life. If you didn't know that it had happened, it would hardly be possible to believe that a shy, stuttering, horse-loving black girl growing up in 1950's segregated Denver turned out to be the confident, brash, sexy star of Jack Hill's "blaxploitation" films "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown," Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," and most recently, the Showtime television series "The L Word." Tarantino once remarked that Pam Grier might have been the first female action movie star.
Grier was born in 1949 into a military family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and moved to Colorado when she was three weeks old. Grier's family moved frequently as her father, in the Air Force, was transferred from one assignment to another, but they considered Denver home, and moved there permanently when he retired. Grier currently lives in a rural area south of Denver ("Foxy" doesn't specify the town), where she looks after her horses and dogs when she's not working.
Grier's early years were a haphazard mix of security and danger. She was close to her large family, particularly her mother, but one day when Grier was six, her father was away, her mother was at work, and the aunt that was supposed to be watching her was off on a bender, two older boys raped Grier.
"Pretty girls got all the attention, which made them targets," Grier reflects. "At the tender age of six, I'd had enough of being victimized because I was pretty and naive. It never occurred to me to fight back, and I withdrew more and more, becoming a scared, withdrawn, stuttering little girl--except when I was on the back of a horse." She enjoyed riding horses at her extended family's ranch in Wyoming, and she never told anyone what had happened to her.
When Grier's father was assigned to a base in England, she thrived, finding the British people she interacted with had less racial prejudice than did white people at home. A few years after they returned to Colorado, Grier's father left her mother. Grier became determined to save for her education so that she wouldn't have to depend on anyone. While Grier took classes at Metropolitan State College of Denver, she worked a job as a receptionist at the KHOW radio station office. A coworker convinced her to enter the "Miss KHOW" beauty pageant.
Success in this pageant encouraged Grier to enter the Miss Colorado Universe Beauty Pageant, in which she finished as the first runner-up. But the agent David Baumgarten spotted Grier and suggested she move to L.A. and try to start a film career. She did so, still aiming to save money and enroll in UCLA. For several years, no film roles materialized as Grier worked as the receptionist at American International Pictures along with two other jobs, took acting lessons, and dated Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was then known as Lew Alcindor.
When Grier was at a crossroads with Abdul-Jabbar, who wanted her to convert to Islam so they could marry, she accepted an offer to fly to the Philippines and act in a movie that an agent explained was "about women in prison in the jungle. Bondage, torture, attempted escape, punishment, drug addiction, machine guns, sex. The usual."
The movie, 1971's "The Big Doll House," became Grier's first speaking role, and although her fame rose and fell over the years, she essentially has never been without acting work for a long stretch since then. Grier has no regrets about making her name in a genre that became known as "blaxploitation." "To me," she writes, "what really stood out in the genre was women of color acting like heroes rather than depicting nannies or maids."
Grier, who didn't indulge in drugs, alcohol, or the celebrity excesses of the men she dated, survived cervical cancer, and has never been anybody's nanny or maid, continues to lead a singular life on her own terms, flying from one project to another and returning home to her ranch in Colorado, where she entertains the occasional notable guest (such as Snoop Dogg, who became lost with his entourage when trying to locate Grier's modest house). "Foxy: My Life in Three Acts" shows that when a character described Foxy Brown as "a whole lot of woman," he didn't know the half of the story behind the woman who portrayed her.
Jenny Shank's first novel, "The Ringer," will be published by The Permanent Press in May 2011. She lives in Boulder.
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