More than blaxploitation babe

My Life in Three Acts

By Pam Grier with Andrea Cagan

Grand Central Books. 280 pp. $24.99

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Reviewed by Karen E. Quiñones Miller

She was the beautiful buxom beauty who was the Queen of Blaxploitation back in the '70s, and an African American pinup for decades, but the real Pam Grier is finally revealed in her new memoir, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts.

Surprise, surprise, surprise - she's not just the hot smoking chick who could deliver a karate chop and rid the streets of dope dealers.

Grier, the daughter of a career Air Force noncommissioned officer and a nurse, was born in 1949 and lived in a small town in Colorado for most of her early life. She refers to herself as a "country girl," and she did, indeed, enjoy the frolicking carefree life of a child growing up in the countryside, until she was raped by relatives when only 6.

I climbed into the empty bathtub, rolled up into a ball, and sat there for a good hour, confused and crying. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was. When all the outer sounds were gone and I was sure everybody had left, I came out the bathroom. I hurt so badly I could hardly walk. I left the bedroom and was startled to see one of the boys sitting on the stairs, waiting to talk to me.

"Pammy," he said in a whisper. "You better not tell. If you do I'm really going to whoop you. Do you understand?"

When my cousin Krista got home, she took one look at my face and asked me what was wrong. I looked back at her a moment, debating what to say. When I finally opened my mouth, I said, "N-n-n-nothing's wrong. I'm f-f-f-fine."

Traumatized, she never told anyone, but she turned from an extroverted fun-loving girl to a stuttering child.

While enrolled as a premed college student, she entered a couple of beauty pageants to help with tuition. Not only did she win the pageants, but she caught the eye of a couple of film agents who persuaded her to move to California to pursue a film career.

Not long after she settled in Los Angeles, she met a UCLA basketball star named Lew Alcindor, and began an intense affair with the man who would later become NBA All-Star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The romance was a serious one, and probably would have led to a trip to the altar, but his conversion to Islam had a strong effect on the relationship when she raised concerns about the restrictions she felt Islam put on women.

Her movie career finally took hold when she flew to the Philippines in 1971 to costar in a Roger Corman movie, The Big Doll House, about scantily clad women in a prison jungle.

Grier played a tough-talking bisexual prostitute and described her wardrobe as "one long T-shirt," sometimes wet. Grier and her 38DD's were a hit, and she went on to star in a couple of other Corman low-budget films before getting the lead roles in the blaxploitation flicks Coffy in 1973 and Foxy Brown the following year. In both roles she was a kung-fu-kicking, karate-chopping hot mama going after drug dealers and making the streets a safer place for mankind.

My kind of woman.

Grier also talks about her romantic relationships with the late actors Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor, and their struggles with drugs; an amusing run-in with comedian Carol Burnett; and a rather disturbing incident in which she had to be spirited away from Sammy Davis Jr.'s mansion by Liza Minnelli after the mega-star hit on her while his wife was in the house.

And she talks about the chance meeting with Quentin Tarantino in 1996 that led to her starring role in his movie Jackie Brown, which resurrected her flagging film career.

Finally, she deals with her battle with cervical cancer, and the people who stood by her through her medical problems, and those she thought would but abandoned her in her time of need.

Foxy: My Life in Three Acts is tastefully written - Grier gives great detail, but never resorts to being salacious. As an example, for those who wonder what Abdul-Jabbar is like in bed (Sorry, but I do have to admit my mind went there!), she delicately states that he's perfectly proportioned, and lets the reader's mind take it from there.

One thing I do wish she had concentrated on more is an analysis of her film career. Although she was a '70s movie icon, and managed to snare minor roles in B-movies and guest roles in a few television series after that decade, it was only after her outstanding star turn in Jackie Brown that Hollywood started thinking of Grier seriously as an actress rather than a comic-book female action hero.

I commend Grier on making her memoir about more than her life as an actress - as the life of a woman struggling to make it on her own and doing so with grace and class. I'm glad to have had the chance to get to know her.