Remember last week when I said I get to have some incredible experiences doing this column? Well, here’s one of them now. Pam Grier has been an icon for women and people of color for as long as I can remember.
Many of us know Grier from her groundbreaking title roles as Foxy Brown and Coffy. A new generation was introduced to her when Quentin Tarantino created the role of Jackie Brown as an homage to Grier’s title as cinema’s first female action star, and of course most of us in this community know her as Kit Porter from her six seasons on “The L Word.” In between those seminal roles, she has been on numerous shows, from “Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child” (she received an Emmy nomination for that work) to “Law and Order: SVU.”
With a career that spans four decades, Grier is best known for her kick-ass roles — but did you know in reality she’s a country girl who grew up in Colorado and Wyoming, fishing and farming? Gardening, food safety and the environment are passions of hers, and among the reasons she’s the featured guest at this year’s LGBT party at the Philadelphia Flower Show. Grier shared so much with me that, for the first time, I’ve decided to split the interview into two parts. I wanted time to look up all the fun and historical references she threw out here. Enjoy.
PGN: How’s the weather there in Denver?
PG: Good morning, or good afternoon your time. It’s cold and snowy.
PGN: I’m so bad with geography, in my head I think of anything west of us being sunny and warm.
PG: Well, it was in the 70s last week.
PGN: Wow. Mother Nature is going crazy.
PG: We keep messing with her! Because we’re at a higher altitude, any rain we get turns into snow, which melts and runs into tributaries that distribute it through the Grand Canyon and into Arizona, Utah, etc., and we need the moisture here. It’s part of the natural process but it’s much more aggressive than ever before.
PGN: It seems like we chop down all the trees and there’s nothing to contain the water anymore, leading to floods.
PG: Yes, and with too much water, the trees can’t grow and we don’t get the oxygen they provide. It’s just really an imbalance and we have to take notice.
PGN: So, learning about you, I found that, like me, you also come from a family of mixed people.
PG: Yes, a melting pot. I’m a mix of several races: Hispanic, Chinese, Filipino. My dad was black, but was so light-skinned he could pass for white, which caused him a lot more trouble than if he had clearly looked black or white. He was a kind and loving, strappingly handsome man. My mom was Cheyenne Indian.
PGN: Tell me a little about them.
PG: My dad, Clarence Grier, was in the military, an Air Force mechanic, which is how we got to Denver. My mom is from Wyoming and was a nurse. In the movie “Coffy,” I played a nurse who takes care of the family, and that was my mom. Because of the Jim Crow issues in the ’50s and ’60s, it was hard to get an ambulance to come to our community, so my mom was always stitching up someone or patching a leg. She had a compassion that I saw and brought to my roles in film. My maternal grandfather, Raymundo Parrilla, whom we called Daddy Ray, was the first feminist in my life; he taught all the girls to hunt, fish, shoot and be self-sufficient. His mother was the owner of a hotel for black and Chinese people who worked on the railroad. She was quite independent so he learned early on that a woman could do anything. He always told me not to be the kind of woman who acted helpless, that a man would respect a woman who could do things for herself. He encouraged me to be a businesswoman or run a farm, whatever I wanted, and it gave me great confidence to navigate my life and career independently, to reluctantly go to California and film school and become the reluctant actress and embrace the humbling title “icon” that I’ve been given. I always wanted to empower women with that self-assurance and self-esteem which I was given, in my blood and genes.
PGN: One thing I enjoyed reading was your descriptions of growing up on the farm. People tend to think “urban” when they think of black folks in this country.
PG: Yes! We know so little of our history, people forget there were black farmers and teachers and inventors, black townships and a black underground railroad, black doctors; Justina Ford was the first licensed African-American female doctor in Colorado and practiced gynecology, obstetrics and pediatrics for half a century. Caucasian women came to her because of her professionalism and care. We had Barney Ford, an escaped slave who became one of the wealthiest men in Colorado and a civil-rights pioneer. He had a hotel and barbershop that presidents would visit. The KKK would burn him out every few weeks and he’d just rebuild again. All you see in the media is people in urban communities, but we’re farmers, people raising livestock … One of the first black stagecoach drivers delivering mail was Mary Fields in 1863. Gary Cooper wrote about her in Ebony magazine and we’ve been trying to get a project off the ground, a Western about the great women of that era, Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley. There’s a huge rural population of African-American people but you won’t find it in the history books or see it in the media. There’s a balance and equilibrium in every community and we have that too.
PGN: How was life on the farm?
PG: Oh, I loved it so much. It was so pristine, Wyoming is very pristine, but you have to be a hearty soul to live there. You could smell the weather and everything was so clean and fresh. You felt a part of nature. We need to listen to our trees and our flora and fauna or we’re not going to make it. They’re our barometer, that’s why the Flower Show and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society are so important. It’s a place where you can learn about gardening and talk about organics. One of my favorite books is “The Organic Manifesto.” When I go into a supermarket and see organic food on one side and the toxic food on the other, it makes me crazy. That toxic stuff shouldn’t be in a grocery store; all food should be organic and available to everyone at the same price. In my family, no one had cancer and the illnesses we have now, and they lived long, healthy lives because they ate clean, non-toxic food. Things are just not right now — when factories can dump their waste from making plastics and coal into our waterways? That’s the drinking water for all life forms — deer and birds and humans; how are we allowing this? We need to be smarter. We’re building new million-dollar homes without solar, it doesn’t make any sense. I knew we were in trouble when President Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House. I knew we were going down a slippery slope. Forget about all the earthquakes, we need to worry about erosion, and when the land erodes, so do people’s minds and hearts.
PGN: I cried when Sarah Palin took up her “Drill, Baby, Drill” chant.
PG: I know, it’s sad when a few can bankroll that kind of toxicity. It’s mind-boggling. I know people want to make a living, but at what cost to the rest of us and the land?
PGN: What was one of your favorite memories from your grandmother’s farm?
PG: I remember riding our horses to Cheyenne Frontier Days and having fun. Back then there was more racism in the urban areas. In the rural areas, people needed each other. There was a Chinese family raising cattle next to a mixed family raising crops, and we didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. We helped each other out. And I loved the fact that they expected me to think and know things, to understand that you used flies for trout and sinkers for catfish and bass, how to survive off the land. It was a true community.
PGN: I understand that you wanted to be a vet?
PG: I loved science and biology but at that time it was difficult for a woman to get into veterinary school and near-impossible for a woman of color. People forget that I’m 65. I went to Metro State University but I didn’t want to be a straight-A student and have my only options be teacher or secretary. It was stunning how short the list was of what women could be. I remember telling my dad I wanted to be a pilot and him saying that women couldn’t be jet pilots because our bone density was too thin for the G force. So I looked for something that was not gender-based, non-racial, and that was filmmaking. By the way, I’m getting my private pilot’s license and should have it by next summer. I’m just getting so much work I don’t have much time. It seems I’ve cornered the market for actresses my age! And the content is so rich I can’t turn it down. Extraordinary stories that need to be told. I’m going to be in the “Michelle Knight Story.” She’s one of the three girls who was kidnapped and held hostage for 11 years in Cleveland. The script gave me the chills, I read it and cried. It’s just … oh. It was a role that needed authenticity and a strong heart. It will be on Lifetime this spring.
PGN: How did you get into the business?
PG: I was standing around with some friends and someone asked us, “Do you want to be an extra in a Russ Meyer movie?” I said not really, I was more interested in being on a crew, but film school was so expensive. I remember meeting with the dean at UCLA and the price of tuition was the price of a house in Denver. I called my mom sobbing and said, “I’m going to have to live here for two years so I can get a resident price, but I’m alone and don’t know anyone.” She said, “You have two years to try and, if not, you can always come home.” But it was a great time to be on a college campus. There were protests happening and the women’s movement and the black-power movement, so much going on. Though I wasn’t attending yet, some of the film-school kids asked me to come along on a shoot. I loved it because they didn’t treat me as a black person or as a woman, they just treated me as crew. I was like, yeah, this is what I want to be a part of. We were shooting without permits, jumping in and out of a van that kept breaking down, and it was so much fun! I knew then that I wanted to work in films.
PGN: How did you become Pam Grier, action hero?
PG: It was through Roger Corman. I was working at his agency and he offered me some roles, which I turned down — I wasn’t an actress and wanted to focus on getting into filmmaking school. I wasn’t aware of his films; he’d done biker movies and was doing films with scantily clad women in the jungles, hot nurses, etc. Not porn, but with a tongue-in-cheek European sensibility about sex. All the film students — who at that time were people like Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Jonathan Demme and Jack Nicholson — wanted to cut film for him and learn from him. I was doing an internship and finally agreed to do a film to help pay for my tuition. They said that I’d be a natural but I was afraid I’d fail and I couldn’t afford to. So Roger suggested I read Stanislavski and study the craft. I began to understand how to discover the authenticity in any role and the first led to another and another. But I kept my three jobs and put the film money away for school. The agency would call and say, “Where are you?” I’d tell them I was working and they’d assume it was on a set. I’d say, “No, I’m doing accounting for a drug store!” They thought I was quirky, but I was pragmatic. It was never my dream to be an actress. I think what they saw in me was that I was a strong country girl who could shoot and ride a horse and I was centered and grounded. When “Coffy” was written, it wasn’t meant for a woman of color. Most of the roles were more domestic or subdued, but the ’70s were a new era in film. There were a lot of films being made with male leads that were testosterone-driven and action-packed but they didn’t know what to do with me, and I said, “Just do the same thing. We need to see women who can shoot a gun, be courageous, fight.” And they said, “Really, you can do all that?” and I told them a lot of women could. You just don’t see them because of the repressive political state in our society.
PGN: Of course I have to ask you about “The L Word.”
PG: I had to do “The L Word” … had to. I believe I am a light to a lot of people, especially a lot of people in African-American families who still find it taboo, who don’t understand oppression, people who I hope watched the show because I was in it and learned something about LGBT inequality. The LGBT community, especially 11 years ago when we started, was so oppressed and discriminated against: losing children, jobs, in banking, taxes, insurance, in so many different aspects, things straight people take for granted. I was floored. It shouldn’t even be an issue. I was like, They can’t adopt children? As many children as there are that need homes? To think that there are gay people who can’t come out even today, this second! Brilliant people, wonderful people. Let me tell you, I got criticism for doing the show: “Why you helping them people?” “Are you? Did you turn gay because you were around them?” I said, “Did you turn white from working next to white people at your job? It doesn’t work that way.” Stupid stuff. You claim you’re a child of Jesus and religion and spout all this dogma, it’s just ignorance. It’s bigger than you, it’s authentic and biology. Do your own critical thinking and don’t follow some emotional or religious dogma. To think that people have ostracized and kicked out family members because of it makes no sense to me. In Native-American culture two-spirit people are highly valued. It’s precious. But I think it’s getting better, I really do. We just have to learn to look and move forward.
Grier’s interview continues next week.
The Philadelphia Flower Show runs Feb. 28-March 8. The LGBT party, with Grier as the special guest, will take place March 1. For more information, visit www.phsonline.org/events/lgbt-party.