Obituary: B.C.’s Pamela Gordon was Canada’s first Playboy playmate


B.C. playmate led tempestuous but very private life

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Vancouver has had some famous Playboy playmates, such as Pamela Anderson and Dorothy Stratten.

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But the city’s — and Canada’s — first Playboy model dropped from the public eye after she appeared in the March 1962 issue of the magazine.

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Newspaper accounts at the time said Pamela Gordon was moving to Chicago to work as a Playboy bunny at the Playboy mansion. But after that, nada.

It turns out she had returned to B.C., and in recent years she lived in Mission. After a bout of pneumonia, she had a heart attack, and died Jan. 25 at the Abbotsford Regional Hospital. She would have turned 80 on Feb. 10.

Pam Gordon “had become very private” after her brush with fame, and in recent years had become a Christian, said her daughter.

But India Gordon said her mother didn’t seem to have any regrets about posing nude when she was 18.

“I remember her saying, ‘I thought: What the hell, why not try it?’” she said.

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Few people knew it at the time, but Pam Gordon was pregnant when she posed for Playboy. She gave birth to her daughter Jan. 23, 1962, just over a month before she appeared in the magazine.

She left her baby daughter in her mother’s care when she moved to Chicago to work as a Playboy bunny.

“It was quite a weird story,” said India Gordon. “My grandmother and my mom were pregnant at the same time. So I was born three months before my uncle.

“And you want to know (another) weird thing? … My oldest son Andrew is three months older than my brother. So my mother and I were pregnant (at the same time) as well.”

Pam Gordon never married the father of her first child.

“He was in her life, on and off,” said India Gordon. “Apparently he was in Switzerland skiing when I was born. He came from a fairly well-to-do family, I don’t think that would have been a cool thing” to have a child out of wedlock.

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Canada’s first Playboy playmate, Pamela Gordon.
Canada’s first Playboy playmate, Pamela Gordon. Vancouver Sun

In Chicago, Pam Gordon became good friends with actor Danny Kaye and hung out with the Rat Pack.

“She went to parties, and Sammy Davis Jr., she danced with him quite a bit,” she recounts. “She got into some really different cliques there.”

She turned heads wherever she went.

“She was quite a magnet to men, I will tell you that,” said her daughter.

But she also could be somewhat tempestuous. She was married and divorced three times, and had several other relationships, including with a Norwegian blueblood who she gave her Playboy scrapbook to.

“I thought, ‘Oh my god, why did you do that?’” said India Gordon, who lived parts of her youth with her mom, and parts with her grandmother.

It contained “letters from Hef and stuff like that.”

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Pam Gordon worked as a go-go dancer in Montreal in the 1960s, did some acting in the TV show The Littlest Hobo and, at one point, lived in Miami.

But she didn’t seem to stay anywhere long. India Gordon said her mother lived at various times in Golden, Kelowna, Osoyoos, White Rock and Mission in B.C., as well as Calgary, and Clinton Creek and Whitehorse in Yukon.

At one point Playboy tracked her down in Whitehorse and asked if she would like to attend a playmate reunion, but she passed.

“She was living a more private life and I guess she didn’t want to draw attention to all sorts of things,” said her daughter. “They promised her game shows and all sorts of things, but she declined.”

This was when she was married to her second husband, Bob Johnson, with whom she had a son, Robin. She kept his surname after their divorce, so she was Pamela Johnson when she died.

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Asked why she always wound up back in B.C., her daughter said: “Family. Marriages didn’t work out, there’s no better place than home.”

That said, she didn’t keep in contact with many of her old friends, or boyfriends.

“When relationships were over, so were they,” India Gordon said. “Regardless of how that would affect anybody else.”

Pam Gordon did remain friends with Vancouver photographer Ken Honey, who she met when he put out a casting call for potential Playboy playmates in 1961. Honey got some photos of Pam Gordon into her pictorial, but the nude shots were done by a Playboy photographer in Los Angeles.

Pam Gordon is survived by her daughter and son.

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August 30, 1961. Canada’s first Playboy magazine playmate, Pamela Gordon.
August 30, 1961. Canada’s first Playboy magazine playmate, Pamela Gordon. Vancouver Sun
Pamela Gordon worked as a secretary before she became a Playboy model and moved to Chicago to become a bunny in the Playboy mansion.
Pamela Gordon worked as a secretary before she became a Playboy model and moved to Chicago to become a bunny in the Playboy mansion. Vancouver Sun

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