When Pam Grier walks into the restaurant, no soundtrack underscores the icon’s cool-breeze arrival. There’s no theme song like the one in her first blaxploitation hit, 1973’s “Coffy.” There’s no soulful ballad like Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street,” which begins and ends “Jackie Brown,” director Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 love letter to the actress that put her back in the pop-culture mix for good.Oh, she’s got the shades on. As she slips into the booth and greets me, she’s got the smooth cadence of a woman with the skills to both gentle a horse and bark the line, “So, you wanna play with knives, huh? Well, you picked the wrong player!”
Grier, 60, is in town because she calls Colorado home. She was raised in Denver. Left for Los Angeles at 19. Returned 37 years ago and now lives in a rural community where development loses ground to scrub, woods, wildlife.
She’s at the restaurant across Colfax Avenue from the high school she graduated from in the 1960s — our shared alma mater — in support of her memoir, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts.”
“Foxy” makes it clear that Grier tussles with the notion of legacy. Will hers be merely the cult-beloved slew of ’70s revenge flicks in which a fierce sistah with a gun, a knife and the occasional karate chop battles drug dealers and corrupt cops in the ghetto? Or something grander?
Although her four decades of acting in a variety of often-important roles should provide its own resounding answer, it doesn’t take her long to settle the question.
“There’s no guarantee I’ll sell two books. But I’m hoping I do, because I want to start the Pam Grier Legacy Fund, a nonprofit that would service organizations that deal with women and children of abuse,” she says over her artichoke soup and shaved asparagus salad.
“I feel even now, we’re seeing abusive behavior passed on generation to generation. We have a dysfunctional society.”
“Foxy,” cowritten with Andrea Cagan, weaves aching, infuriating stories of sexual abuse with pop-cultural tidbits and spirited societal observations. Above all, it’s a survivor’s saga. If her breakthrough roles were about vengeance, her life and memoir are about repair. For all its visceral satisfactions on screen, violent payback is seldom a real-life option for women.
At 6, Grier was raped by two young cousins. Later she was date-raped by a football player she does not name. At 39, she was diagnosed with cancer and given a dire prognosis. Her then-boyfriend abandoned her to a painful, uncertain recovery.
Grier also gives a thoughtful spin to her time as a bold-faced name romantically involved with bolder-faced names: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and tragicomedians Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor.
Still, she says, the book is “about me, about how I survived and had a career and a personal life. How society socially, politically affected me. How I was able to move forward to today. How I found sanctuary.
“I wrote the book basically to inspire people. To let them know they are not alone.”
Of course, those who like their Hollywood tales with a plunk, plunk, plunk of names won’t be disappointed. Here’s John Lennon, behaving boorishly at a Smothers Brothers concert. There’s Sammy Davis Jr., hitting on the buxom lovely at a party that his wife had invited Grier to. Liza Minnelli and then-husband Jack Haley Jr. spirited Grier away, tucked and covered in the back seat of their Rolls Royce.
And Grier’s deep love of the actor’s craft gets more than a walk-on role. After all, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her turn as Jackie Brown. Grier also won an NAACP Image Award for her turn in a bruising production of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.”
Last Friday, you could find Grier on the small screen as Amanda Waller in the Clark Kent series “Smallville” or on the big screen as Queen Latifah’s mom in the winning romance “Just Wright.”
While on her book tour, she’s been flying to Los Angeles to work on writer-director-star Tom Hanks’ “Larry Crowne.” Grier plays Julia Roberts’ best friend who likes to date younger. Her go-to tome, Constantin Stanislavski’s “An Actor Prepares,” has served her well.
In considering Grier’s career and her life, a mauled lyric comes to mind: “She’s a little bit country. She’s a little bit lock and load.”
The fact that blaxploitation’s most durable star came from a “cow town” whose African-American population, though long-standing, has never been large, might strike some as a fine hoot.
“There are black people in Colorado?” was the incredulous question that rising basketball star Lew Alcindor Jr. (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) asked the hard-working secretary and student when they met at a Los Angeles nightclub.
Freddie Prinze “loved my stories about the Black West,” writes Grier.
And Richard Pryor was clearly onto her when he observed, “Pam Grier. You’re just a farmer. A hick.” A comment she no doubt appreciated.
“Have you ever had a fresh-picked carrot?” she asks amid a fervid mid- meal riff about farmers, produce and subsidies that would make slow-food advocates grin. “Do you know what it tastes like?”
Although she was born in Winston-Salem, N.C., Grier’s roots in the West run deep. Forget all the big-box stores, ribbons of asphalt and terabytes of info that connect us as a nation. Home is planted on terra firma with an identity all its own.
Although there was an indelible stint in Swindon, England, where her father was stationed, Grier spent much of her young life in Denver. Father Clarence retired from the Air Force here. Mother Gwendolyn became a nurse. Her father left the family when Grier was a teen.
Her maternal grandfather’s farmhouse in Cheyenne figures heavily into the memoir as a sanctuary for Grier after she was saddled with the secret of her assault. “A small slice of heaven on earth, this wonderful farm was precious and charming,” she writes. “I felt safer and healthier there than anywhere else.”
The woman who spent healing time in Wyoming as a girl never shook off the discovery that wild open spaces could offer solace. It’s little wonder that 12 years ago, Grier was drawn to the parcel near Castle Rock with a simple brick house and barn that she shares with four rescued horses and three dogs.
“I watched the Oscars in the barn. I wrote parts of ‘Foxy’ in the barn. I have a little bit of forest. I have cougars, bear, bunnies and fox dens. It’s my sanctuary.”
Asked if she ever regretted making Colorado, not Los Angeles, her base, she replies without hesitation. “That’s how I’ve been able to survive for 37 years in an industry that had gender issues, race issues, political issues. Me not living there and commuting for 37 years.”
It turns out I’ve been stalking Pam Grier for years.
It wasn’t intentional. And I didn’t really know just how much until I read “Foxy.”
Grier was raised in Park Hill. I was, too. Her dad was in the Air Force. Ditto. Grier went to Smiley. Ten years later, I entered that junior high. She graduated from East High School, same as me — although there are real luminaries with whom she shares the alma mater, among them Don Cheadle and Hattie McDaniel.
Her flicks played Park Hill’s Crest theater — now Korea Smyrna Presbyterian Church — on Kearney Street. I was too ratings-abiding to sneak into the R fare, but I did see “Cooley High” and “Sounder” and “Uptown Saturday Night” there.
More recently, Grier costarred on the Showtime series “The L Word” as Kit Porter, the straight gal to all those West Hollywood lesbians. I’ve lived a fairly tame L-Word kind of existence for the past 30 years. And like Grier, I was drawn back to my hometown.
The coincidences say little about either of us, but plenty about how this city has evolved, and they illuminate the tumultuous times Grier grew up in. What a difference a decade can make. Changes can be marked in the life of a place; they can be even more distinct between generations of African-Americans.
Even in the ’60s, when Grier was in junior high, the country was fresh from the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision on school desegregation, Brown vs. Board of Education, and its goal of equalizing the quality of education between blacks and whites was still far off.
“Our social studies teacher read to us from one book. The class was predominantly black; everyone was asleep on the desk. I asked her, ‘Where are our books?’ (I was used to taking books home.) There are none, she said.
“If it was me, it was thousands. It was a hard time. We were just cleaning up the laws. It was an uphill battle. It was not an easy time. Life and Look magazines, Ebony and Jet, National Geographic were our library — and our Encyclopedia Brittanica collection. We used it religiously.”
Little more than a decade later, an elementary school that fed into Smiley had two African-American men actually teaching sixth grade. One was a Nixon Republican, the other a wild-haired McGovern supporter. They couldn’t have been more different.
Standing outside the restaurant, Grier looks across Colfax to stately East High School.
How did she like it? She expresses a regret that race relations didn’t allow her more opportunity. “When I was coming up, I wanted to be a scientist, a zoologist,” she recounts. “My counselor told me I could be a secretary.”
Ten years later, in that same building, two African-American youngsters went head-to-head for school president, or “head girl,” as it was called.
“We didn’t even want to take the buses. We’d walk to school. Do you know how far it is from 35th and Dahlia to East?” Five miles, it turns out.
Still, “Foxy” isn’t a book of resentment. Grier doesn’t pick at these wounds. Much of the racial hurt she recounts has to do with the affronts her parents faced. But the fact she’s made Colorado her home says something about forgiving a place for its sins. And better: that sometimes a city wises up.
“I love being here. I love the gentility of the city,” says Grier. “It’s a whole new area; why leave it?”
In 1975, Grier became the first black woman featured on the cover of Ms. Magazine. The profile, written by Jamaica Kincaid, had the tart, “The Mocha Mogul of Hollywood.”
It was quite a statement. After all, the action flicks were as artistically flimsy as Grier’s characters Coffy, Foxy and Sheba were fierce. And yet, Kincaid argued, the movies “have one outstanding redeeming value. They are the only films to come out of Hollywood in a long time to show us a woman who is independent, resourceful, self-confident, strong, and courageous. Above all, they are the only films to show us a woman who triumphs!”
Grier acknowledges she is a child of “the women’s liberation movement.”
Rife with insight about how the movement was informing her sense of self — professional and romantic — “Foxy” is a feminist work.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Grier jokes at this observation. She then adds “But I know some males who are feminists.”
Indeed, a month after lunch, she shares a discovery from the book tour. “Men who usually purchase and read biographies by and about men are buying my book and reading it, having discussions en masse, talking about gender issues. It’s extraordinary,” she says.
Grier was part of a ’70s wave of art and culture, from Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” to television’s “Good Times,” that took a more authentic approach to telling stories, and, in a sense, those stories were more influential because of that. For her part, Grier managed to show, even in the midst of some pretty soft-core silliness, that a gal could take a more muscular route to empowerment.
Sure, it was sexy — all those halter tops and tight jumpsuits. But it was more than that. It was an example of onscreen attitude fueling off-screen possibilities — and vice versa.
And the gals — and the guys like Quentin Tarantino — who followed Grier dreamed they could be tougher, bolder, blacker, sexier — no matter what race they were.
In a sense, many of us stalked Pam Grier without knowing it.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
PAM GRIER
Book signing.The Tattered Cover Bookstore LoDo, 1628 16th St. Actress Pam Grier discusses “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts,” her memoir about her arc from Park Hill youngster to blaxploitation icon to tirelessly working actor. 7:30 p.m May 18. Free, numbered tickets for the book signing will be handed out beginning at 6:30 pm. Seating for the presentation is available on a first-come, first-served basis to ticketed customers only. 303-436-1070 or tatteredcover.com
