“When You Earn It, They Can’t Take It Away”: An Interview with Pam Grier (2024)

Pam Grier came to Hollywood in 1970, as the film industry was straining to catch up with a counterculture fuelled by sexual freedom, women’s liberation, and Black Power. Grier was an Army brat who had grown up in Denver, Colorado, and on Air Force bases across the world, though she felt most at home at her grandparents’ farm, in Wyoming. Within four years, she became an icon of blaxploitation: off-the-wall black action movies that were made on the cheap but raked in millions of dollars. After decades in which black women typically appeared in movies as maids, Grier broke the mold completely. In films such as “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown,” she played empowered heroines who fought back against drug dealers and pimps—while often winding up in outrageous catfights. (These movies were, after all, made by men.)

One of her fans was Quentin Tarantino, who two decades later gave Grier the role of a lifetime, in “Jackie Brown,” as a flight attendant who gets caught up in a smuggling heist. Since then, Grier has appeared in the Showtime series “The L Word” and released an autobiography, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts,” which is now being developed as a bio-pic. In the book, she revealed a history of sexual assault, starting at age six, when she was raped by a group of older boys. The incident left her deeply scarred, and she was never quite comfortable being the sex symbol that Hollywood wanted her to be. After a cancer scare in the late eighties, she bought a small ranch in Colorado, from which she commutes to Los Angeles when there’s work.

I met Grier on the set of the ABC sitcom “Bless This Mess,” co-created by and starring Lake Bell, about a city couple who relocate to a farm in Nebraska. Grier plays Constance, the owner of the local general store and the town’s sheriff. She looked the part: black cowboy hat, a fringed deer-hide jacket, turquoise jewelry. We were in the mountains of Santa Clarita, California, on a Hollywood version of Main Street, U.S.A., lined with tractors and bales of hay. “It reminds me of my family way back, in Wyoming,” Grier said, sitting by the window in her character’s store. As we spoke, there was little trace of Foxy Brown. At seventy, Grier has relaxed into the simple country life she has always craved, though her life story—especially the seventies portion—is littered with mind-boggling tales. In the course of two hours, she spoke in an ebullient stream of consciousness, drifting from her present to her past and then back again. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

When you’re not in this Hollywood version of a rural town, you live on a ranch in Colorado. What is your day-to-day life like?

I’m up at three or four, before the sun comes up. I get my coffee and all the dogs, and we go down to the barn and check on the horses. I kiss them and hug them. Because I’m a cancer survivor, I say, “If you wake up breathing, you’re going to have a good day.” Then I go back up, check the fences. All the animals eat first, before I do: here’s your grain, here’s your hay. We’re so glad to see each other for twenty-some years. That’s longer than my relationships!

What’s the town called?

It’s not a town; it’s an unincorporated area, an intersection really. But if I tell you, you’ll have everyone out there going, “There’s no plumbing!” I do have fresh, clean mountain water from my well, which I like.

Do you ever have to fend off wildlife?

No, we respect each other’s space. I know when they’re hibernating, and I know when they’re pregnant. I know when the fauns are born. They come really close to me, because they know I won’t harm them, and my dogs are taught not to be aggressive. There are bears and mountain lions and coyotes and bobcats, but we respect each other’s habitat.

Is it true that Snoop Dogg has visited you on the ranch?

They had a concert—him and Xzibit and Dr. Dre and the whole crew—so I said, “Come on out for breakfast!” They came out in a van, about twelve or fifteen of them. My ranch house is a small brick house. It’s inconspicuous, so they drove by. They turned around and said, “We thought that was the help’s house.” I said, “I’m the help!” They expected, you know, Pam Grier’s ten-thousand-square-foot house, with wall-to-wall carpeting. No. I have hard wood, because I have animals. Easy cleanup.

So they opened up the door and the smoke billowed out. It hit my mom in the face. She said, “Oh, that smells spicy.” They all had the munchies later on, and they ate about a thousand eggs and fifty gallons of orange juice.

Why did you originally move out there?

I’ve always been out there. As a child, I’d gone up to my grandfather’s property in Wyoming, where everybody was attuned to the elements and to the earth. That’s how I was raised. And then it can be stripped away when you move to the city, because everything’s given to you. You go to the store for everything. My equilibrium depends on me going home to a quiet place.

Why did you first come to Hollywood, and what was it like in 1970?

Another planet. I was putting myself through school, at Metropolitan State University, up in Denver, and at the same time was the women’s movement, with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan. So I needed to do what I wanted to do. I said to my psychology professor, “I like television. I like movies. I don’t know what that’s called.” He said, “That’s film school.”

So I went to California to try to get into U.C.L.A., and stayed with relatives who had a garage that I could sleep in. I was on military bases all my childhood, so to come out to California and drive down Sunset Boulevard—I went into shock. I didn’t know where I was. And I met some film students who were loading up a van with cables and cameras. I had on a plaid shirt and probably the same Timberland boots that I have on now, with my Afro. That’s not the appearance most people were accustomed to seeing. I said, “I’m here trying to get into film school.” And they said, “Well, why don’t you join us, see if you like it?” They were so inclusive. I wasn’t “black.” My heart is beating, because I feel the same thing in my heart that I did then, watching them. I said, “Oh, my gosh, this is what I want to do.”

And then suddenly you’re in the Philippines, starring in women-in-prison movies for Roger Corman.

I said, “Roger, I’m leaving three jobs, and I want to get into film school, and you want to hire me? I don’t know anything about acting. I don’t want to leave these jobs and have you fire me.” But in a sense, he was sponsoring me to learn whatever I could. I did my own makeup. I read Stanislavski, and that was my bible. And that’s how I learned what an actor does.

You have a line in your book that interested me. You were doing “The Big Doll House,” which was your first big role in a movie—

Without a bra!

—and you write, “Jack Hill”—the director—“had told me that I needed to reach into my gut, not my mind, to find the real emotion. I tapped into my intensity and Roger was thrilled that I could bring so much organic frustration and anger to my performance.” You had described yourself as a shy kid who was most comfortable around horses. Where did that anger come from?

“When You Earn It, They Can’t Take It Away”: An Interview with Pam Grier (2024)

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