Carmen Electra: Trump’s Verdict on Her Boob Job and Signs of a Comeback

When the 90s bombshell Pamela Anderson sensationally left the hit body-beautiful drama Baywatch in 1997, panicked producers scoured the planet to find someone else who could look nearly as good bursting out of a red lifeguard’s swimsuit while running down a beach.

They found Carmen Electra.

Like Anderson, Electra hailed not from acting school but from the Playboy empire and whose ex-boyfriend and mentor, Prince, had dreamt up the improbable stage name to replace her rather less racy real one, Tara Leigh Patrick.

And just as her Baywatch character, Lani McKenzie, was a lifeguard who dreamt of pursuing a dancing career, ex-centerfold Electra was a glamour model who dreamt of pursuing a life in showbusiness.

She left the much-loved show after just one season but sadly her on-screen resume was infinitely less momentous than a private life scarred by a string of family deaths and failed relationships with bad boy boyfriends, who included basketball player-turned-North Korean envoy Dennis Rodman, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and guitarist Dave Navarro.

Electra might have faced the same fate of other sex symbols, disappearing from sight as age took its toll. But then last week, aged 53, she popped up looking remarkably unchanged on the red carpet for the premiere of horror movie Final Destination Bloodlines at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

The day before, Electra posted a sultry photoshoot online, in which she wore a tiny, cropped black tee emblazoned with the words ‘sex symbol’ across the chest.

Between the carpet cameo (she’s not actually in the film) and the racy pictures, it all seemed like a cry for attention, providing Baywatch aficionados with the perfect opportunity to wonder online what had happened to her.

After all, following a string of sporadic gigs – TV and movie cameos, role in the 2004 Starsky & Hutch movie, a 2023 SKIMS campaign and the launch of her OnlyFans platform – Electra has been laying relatively low in recent years.

Some had even expressed concern for her after she appeared on a podcast interview – Dear Media’s The Skinny Confidential with Lauryn Bosstick – last September. Worried fans felt that she seemed so heavily medicated that she could hardly complete a sentence. Sources claimed, however, that her sluggish behavior was simply down to a bout of Covid.

It was hardly the first time that Carmen Electra had made headlines in her rollercoaster life and career. In her determined quest for stardom, she’s had to weather repeated setbacks. Even Donald Trump provided one when in 2005 he told shock jock Howard Stern on-air that Electra’s ‘boob job’ was ‘terrible’ and looked like ‘two light bulbs coming out of a body’.

Born in Ohio, her father and mother had both worked with funk legend Bootsy Collins (dad was a guitarist and mom was a backing vocalist), so they supported her artistic ambitions and paid for her to study ballet, modern dance and singing at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati.

She started her career in 1990 as a dancer with aspirations on Broadway but suffered from painful shyness.

‘I would not want to go into auditions, I’d leave and say everyone’s so pretty, I can’t do this, I can’t memorize anything,’ she told the People last year.

She first caught Prince’s eye when, aged 18 in 1991, she auditioned for a girl group signed to his record label. She has recalled how he sat at a piano and made her sing Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music (which fortunately she knew as she’d once been in the musical).

While she didn’t get the girl group job but a few weeks later Prince contacted her at the Holiday Inn in Glendale, California, where she was living. He promised to make her a solo star, despite having been so unimpressed with a demo recording she’d made for Capitol Records, that he told her: ‘I could use that as a coaster or a Frisbee’.

‘Basically, he said, “Well, I want to sign you to Paisley Park Records, but you have to come to Minneapolis. And your flight is leaving at 7 a.m.,”‘ she told the New York Times in 2018.

‘I remember landing in Minneapolis to a purple limousine, and it was just so strange, taking such a chance. It just seemed like a dream or something, like it wasn’t real.’

The relationship was both romantic and professional. Prince produced her one and only 1993 album, ‘Carmen Electra’, which never made it into the charts. However, he invited her to be the opening performer when he went on tour in Europe that year. He also styled her look, which at the time was luscious eyelashes (inspired by Priscilla Presley), corset, hot pants and heels. In other words, classic Prince.

She claims that the singer came up with her stage name after seeing her dance and telling her she ‘looked like an Electra’. She was initially hesitant as she thought it sounded like a superhero (which, in the case of ‘Electra’, was true) but it grew on her. Prince was a relentless taskmaster but taught her so much, she said.

In 1995, she started seeing another man in LA without Prince’s knowledge and, when he found out, the superstar wrote the single, ‘Eye Hate U,’ an ode to her infidelity.

The notoriously controlling superstar gave her ultimatum to either stay in Minneapolis and ‘live by his rules’ or go to LA and make it big on her own.

Determined to prove herself and far from convinced Prince had been faithful to her, she went to Los Angeles.

It was tough – she couldn’t afford a car or even a phone. At one point she was homeless and owned little more than a pair of Versace shoes and some glitzy clothes. Her boyfriend stole $5,000 she’d hidden and gambled it away.

She found a home but it was in such a rough neighborhood of LA that she kept a knife in her back pocket when she went out to use a pay phone. ‘I didn’t have a penny. I had a nice wardrobe and my makeup bag, so people did not understand or realize my life situation,’ she said. She’d occasionally slip into red carpet events uninvited just for the opportunity to be snapped by paparazzi.

After she finally swallowed her pride and confided her financial troubles to Prince, he offered her a job in his weekly dance show – called Erotic City – at his club, Glam Slam LA.

In May 1996, she overcame her shyness and appeared nude in Playboy, the first of five appearances – three of them on the cover – and in 1997, she made her acting debut playing a particularly buxom member of the undead in the cult horror flick American Vampire – the same year, of course, she was cast in Baywatch.

Baywatch naturally opened all kinds of showbusiness doors and she actually left the series after one season because of her hectic schedule, and her mother being ill.

In 1997, she started hosting a dating show, Singled Out, on MTV. Two years later, she appeared in a music video for rock band The Bloodhound Gang’s and, the same year, co-starred with Frasier star David Hyde Pierce and Lucy Liu in a mockumentary, The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human.

Then, Electra spent a couple of years in the all-girl group, Pussycat Dolls, singing and dancing alongside guest stars like Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani and Kelly Osbourne.

The following year, 2000, she starred – parodying herself – in the horror comedy movie Scary Movie, the first installment in a successful franchise (sending up the Scream films) to which she’d return in 2006 for Scary Movie 4. And the latter came two years after she appeared in Starsky & Hutch, the 2004 remake of the 1970s TV series, which starred Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as the two eponymous police detectives. The film earned Electra an MTV Award for Best Kiss, which she shared with Owen Wilson.

It wasn’t exactly a Best Actress Oscar but by then Electra’s career had long been overshadowed by her turbulent private life and, in particular, a succession of headline-grabbing romantic relationships.

In August 1998, Electra’s beloved mother, Patricia, died of brain cancer and she was followed just two weeks later by her older sister, Debbie, who died of a heart attack.

At the time, she had started drinking heavily and was in a relationship with the Chicago Bulls basketball star Dennis Rodman. They suddenly married that November in Las Vegas, only for Rodman to file for an annulment just nine days later, saying he’d been of ‘unsound mind’ on the night they wed.

Not exactly the perfect gentleman, then, but Electra attempted to be understanding, recalling in 2013: ‘It’s easy to get caught up in a moment. You think it’s romantic, but then you realize, God, we did it in Vegas? It’s like getting a cheeseburger at a fast-food restaurant.’

They reconciled shortly after but ended up splitting in April 1999 after Electra filed divorce papers.

Proving that she and Pamela Anderson could have more in common than just starring in Baywatch and posing nude in Playboy, Electra briefly dated Anderson’s ex-husband, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, during that year.

That November, however, she and Dennis Rodman were arrested for misdemeanor battery after police were called to a domestic dispute at a hotel in Miami Beach. Officers found Electra with a cut lip and Rodman with a torn shirt and scratches on his arm.

They were released on bail but ordered to stay away from each other. The charges were eventually dropped.

‘I was completely numb,’ she recalled to Glamour magazine in 2004 of her emotional state after losing her mother and sister in such rapid succession. ‘[Rodman] was such a fun person to be around, and we went out every night. I remember thinking, this is my out. I’m just going to have fun, and I’m not going to worry about anything. That’s why we got married,’ she said.

‘I guess I was trying to cling to whatever I had. I’d lost my mom and my sister; I didn’t want to lose anyone else. When I started going through some really hard times with Dennis, I became addicted to feeling that pain instead of dealing with my feelings about my mom and sister.’

She certainly developed something of an ‘addiction’ for relationships that weren’t going anywhere.

In November 2003 – a period of her life when Electra was having huge success by producing a range of aerobic striptease DVDs – she married Dave Navarro, lead guitarist in the rock band Jane’s Addiction. Navarro, who’d already had two short-lived marriages, had a similarly fraught family history – his mother and aunt were murdered by his mother’s ex-boyfriend, John Riccardi, in 1983. Navarro said Riccardi’s abusing behavior towards him drove him into drug addiction.

Navarro and Electra collaborated on an MTV reality show about their relationship but its title, ‘Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen and Dave, proved somewhat over-optimistic as they announced their separation just two and a half years after marrying. Their divorce was finalized in 2007.

Electra clearly liked heavily-tattooed rock guitarists with a weakness for heavy eyeliner as, in 2008, she announced she was engaged to Rob Patterson, a former touring guitarist in Korn. They remained engaged until 2012 when they broke up, Electra appearing that year as one of the celebrity bachelorettes on The Choice, a TV dating show.

There have been no more marriages since then but still controversies. In late 2012, she had a two-month fling with British TV talent show mogul Simon Cowell in LA after he’d earlier hired her to be a guest judge on his show, Britain’s Got Talent, in London.

Rather more clean-cut than her previous men, Cowell seemed an odd choice for Electra. However, media reports claimed it was indeed the case and that she became an unwitting part of a love triangle with Cowell and socialite Lauren Silverman, who was pregnant by Cowell but still married to husband Andrew Silverman.

Electra reportedly ended her relationship with Cowell after she ‘literally busted him with Lauren’ at his home. A source told E! News that Carmen ‘high-tailed it out of there. There was no way she was going to stick around and be a third wheel.’

Electra hasn’t been in a movie since Good Burger 2 in 2023 and it appears unlikely that dreams of A-list acting stardom are destined to materialize. However, she briefly made headlines last year when it was revealed that, for reasons that weren’t immediately apparent, she had legally changed her name – to Carmen Electra. Was it a prelude to a new chapter in her career?

She boasts that she still has her Baywatch swimsuit hanging up at home and, impressively, it still fits. Perhaps we shouldn’t give up on her just yet.