The video went everywhere, even as social media platforms were still in their infancy. A shirtless David Hasselhoff struggled on the floor, slurring at his teenage daughter as she filmed him drunkenly attempting to eat a burger.
It was 2007, and Hasselhoff, then 54, had finalized his divorce the previous year from Pamela Bach, the mother of his two daughters.
They’d been married since 1989, and the Oklahoma-born actress had been a staple at his side for the better part of two decades – but the marital collapse had been wildly contentious.
‘I believe a man needs a wife just as much as children need a mother, so it was a very, very difficult time for me trying to cope with the new arrangements,’ Hasselhoff wrote in his 2007 autobiography.
The divorce granted the parents joint custody, but the Baywatch star temporarily lost his visitation rights after the video shot by his daughter surfaced. It marked a particularly rock-bottom point in a romantic relationship that, since its very inception, had enjoyed spectacular highs and lows – which tragically came to an end on Wednesday when Pamela was found dead in her LA home. She was 62.
Hasselhoff and Pamela were both in relationships with other people when they first met on the set of his hit show Knight Rider in 1985.
Like Hasselhoff, she’d been performing since childhood, raised with her two sisters by her mother and stepfather in Will Rogers’ old ranch house in Tulsa. She’d studied engineering for two years before following her love of performance to Hollywood, where she acted in plays while hoping to carve a career in broadcasting.
By 1985, she’d been spotted by an agent and decided to pursue acting professionally instead – and that landed her a guest spot on Knight Rider’s 71st episode.
Calling her a ‘beautiful blonde with green eyes,’ Hasselhoff admitted in his book how he’d ‘seen her on set and, as a joke, a crew member had sent her an invitation to join me in my trailer.’
Pamela, who had a comedian boyfriend at the time, declined. Hasselhoff was still married to his first wife, Catherine Hickland.
Their paths crossed again, however, at a club opening in 1988; Pamela was single and Hasselhoff was divorced, though he was dating a South African singer he never mentioned to her. He invited Pamela out jogging and they hit it off; he tried to fly her to Hawaii for their second date, where he planned to disclose his love in a hotel suite – while still dating another woman – but Pamela said no.
‘She wasn’t in a hurry to jump into bed with me and I respected that,’ Hasselhoff wrote in his book.
She also insisted on separate bedrooms when he flew her to Germany to join him on the second leg of his Freedom tour, but she packed her bags and checked out of the hotel – after he barely made time for her and she noticed beer bottles outside his room. Hasselhoff insisted they weren’t his.
‘I spent the day searching Munich for her … I hadn’t told Pamela anything about Patricia Lewis, but Pamela had seen a picture of Patricia and me on the cover of a German magazine,’ he wrote. ‘She had asked the maid to explain what it meant, in English. I didn’t know she had seen this – I was hiding every article I could find – but she said: “You know what? I don’t think this is for me.”’
Hasselhoff declared his love and swore he’d broken up with Patricia; then he moved from hiding articles to hiding her passport so she couldn’t fly home.
‘Then we went to Bruges, where we made passionate love for ten days,’ Hasselhoff wrote. ‘We returned to Los Angeles very much a couple.’
He proposed within weeks, and the couple married on December 9, 1989 in Studio City’s Little Brown Church, the same place where Ronald Reagan had married Nancy. Pamela was pregnant, and Hasselhoff’s father was his best man; by the next month, the newlyweds were on their way to Germany for Hasselhoff’s legendary New Year’s Eve performance above the Berlin Wall.
It wasn’t long before the couple’s first child would arrive in fittingly dramatic fashion. Pamela was on a flight home from Germany on April 30, 1999 – weeks before her June 11 due date – when she went into premature labor ‘over Iceland.
‘It wasn’t full blown labor, but the people on the plane weren’t taking any chances,’ she told Tulsa World. ‘The contractions were coming six minutes apart.
‘When my friends came to the airport to pick me up, they found the plane had been greeted by the police and an ambulance because of me. It turned out that my gynecologist was on the same plane. It was like fate.’
Taylor Ann arrived on May 5, weighing five pounds, while her father was still touring in Europe.
‘I was in the hospital for five days and had told David not to rush back, that there was no hurry,’ she told her hometown paper. ‘He would have lost $100,000 for every concert date he missed.’
The couple’s second daughter, Hayley, was born a little more than two years later – again arriving six weeks premature.
Hasselhoff rushed to the hospital, where Kurt Cobain was waiting to see his wife, Courtney Love, and their new daughter, Frances Bean. The Baywatch actor made it in time for the birth and ‘even held her head as she was coming out of the womb and cut the umbilical cord.’
The actor, meanwhile, was reaching the apex of his fame, enjoying Baywatch success throughout the 90s alongside singing superstardom in Germany and Europe. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1996 and Pamela was at his side, along with their two daughters.
Hasselhoff, during this period, had an interesting perspective on his wife’s role in his life.
‘Being married to Pamela enabled me to enjoy the beauty of women on the set, to respect them and to let them know it wasn’t okay to come by and throw themselves at me,’ he wrote in his book – released the same year as the burger-eating video leak.
‘There were many occasions when girls would sashay past my motor home. It would have been easy to invite them in but I thought, “If I jump at that, my marriage is over.”’
Pamela, meanwhile, ‘stayed at home to raise our daughters’ and ‘was out of the work force for 16 years,’ she wrote in later court documents.
‘We did not want our children to be raised by nannies even though we could afford it … I had not developed any job skills nor work history.’
Still, she and Hasselhoff enjoyed a jet-setting lifestyle amongst the richest of celebrities, business people and even royals. Pamela once wore a scarily similar Escarda gown to that worn by Princess Diana, whom the actor claims in his book was flirting with him; he also details how Linda McCartney once took Pamela’s arm to say: ‘We need to talk about what it’s like being married to two living legends.’
As the years went on, though, Hasselhoff and Pamela weathered their fair share of challenges.
In 2002, she dropped him off at the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, she told the Mail on Sunday in 2008.
‘After years of drinking, he’d finally admitted he had a problem and had agreed to go into rehab,’ she said.
Just two days later, however, Hasselhoff called her drunk – and she discovered he’d downed the entire contents of a hotel minibar before a maid found him semi-conscious and half-naked on the floor. The police had been called, but she and her husband’s team kept it quiet.
‘Had news leaked out, it would have destroyed the image he created for himself and the image I created for my friends and family,’ says Pamela. ‘We were both living a lie but the biggest tragedy was that David loved the bottle more than me.’
In February 2003, she was riding with her arms around the actor’s waist as they cruised down the 405 on a motorcycle Pamela had given him as a Christmas present.
‘I was telling myself not to pass out when I looked over at Pamela,’ he wrote. ‘She was lying beside the road looking incredibly beautiful … there was a bone sticking out of her wrist, several ribs had been cracked, and every bone beneath her left knee had been broken.’
His wife had been thrown onto the hard shoulder of the road, also breaking her wrist and crushing her ankle. Hasselhoff broke an elbow, two vertebrae and several bones in his hand.
Hasselhoff emphasizes in the book that blood alcohol and drug tests proved him ‘clean’.
‘While I couldn’t blame myself for the accident, it was painful for me to see the agony that Pamela was in,’ he wrote. ‘She received the best medical attention that money could buy but she still had to endure several operations and months of treatment.
‘I was there for her physically and emotionally at every appointment, every operation. When we got her home, she was frustrated with the slowness of her recovery. I was frustrated with not working, and the situation had a damaging effect on our marriage. Instead of bringing us closer together, it drove us apart.’
Three years later, he filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences – and a nasty battle ensued. Pamela filed her own documents and accusations, accusing Hasselhoff of infidelity and domestic abuse.
‘Everybody thought (David) was the golden star in swimming trunks on the beach with Pamela Anderson, but the drink was taking over his life,’ she told the Mail on Sunday in 2008. ‘To me, he was the man who fell over on the bedroom floor.’
In court filings, Pamela claimed Hasselhoff ‘grabbed me and pushed me hard into a car’ the month before he petitioned for divorce.
‘In the past, he has also broken my nose and called me ‘whore,’ ‘c**t,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘slut’ and ‘drug addict’ in front of our children,’ TMZ reported that the documents continued.
Pamela also claimed the actor ‘told me that he was going to break through my security gate, drive his car through the house, beat the door down and go into the house and take my(sic) all of my jewelry and sell it.’
Hasselhoff denied all allegations and hit back, even snapping at CNN’s Soledad O’Brien: ‘The only person who broke my wife’s nose was a plastic surgeon, darling.’
While the divorce was finalized in 2006, battles about custody and money continued for years. Until 2016, Hasselhoff was paying about $21,000 a month to support Pamela and their daughters; after that, the payments were reduced by about half.
The world and their families looked on as, once again, a Hollywood marriage between two beautiful people fell apart, nastily – but even through their troubles, both acknowledged the bond they once had.
In 2008, speaking to the Mail, Pamela looked back fondly on their early days.
‘We were in love, we truly were.’
On Thursday, as news of Pamela’s death spread rapidly, Hasselhoff released a statement.
‘Our family is deeply saddened by the recent passing of Pamela Hasselhoff,’ it said. ‘We are grateful for the outpouring of love and support during this difficult time but we kindly request privacy as we grieve and navigate through this challenging time.’