Carmen Electra is wearing nothing but a black string bikini. A faux breeze blows back her long, honey-blonde locks as she poses next to a red Ferrari, gripping a garden hose. She’s the picture of the girl-next-door remodeled by raunch culture, and seemingly in on the joke. Zooming in on Skims’s recent swimwear campaign, a 20-something friend expands Electra’s assets to a size visible from space. “God,” she exhales. “Imagine being this hot at, like, 50.”

Several days prior, I’m awaiting Electra, who is actually 51, at the Hollywood Roosevelt’s poolside restaurant. A rare Southern California rain is falling, and the staff are aimless, repolishing too-shiny silverware. Then there’s a clatter of cutlery as the servers spot Electra and rush to escort the woman whose image may once have lined their bedroom walls. In person, she is everything her ’90s-era rise in the public imagination promised. Her leather moto jacket is zipped to her chin but still fitted enough to hint at a pinup figure. Her eyes, rimmed in black eyeliner, seem bluer than ever.

More than two decades after her MTV success, Baywatch stardom, and turns as a Playboy cover girl, Electra continues to compel. In the last year, Electra reprised her role as Roxanne for Good Burger 2, a follow-up to the 1997 Nickelodeon film; Kim Kardashian recruited her to front a swim campaign alongside Jenny McCarthy for the ubiquitous shapewear and clothing brand Skims; she collaborated on an Electra collection with Australian clothing brand I.AM.GIA; and Hailey Bieber dressed as her Scary Movie character, Drew Decker, for Halloween. Electra doesn’t really understand the renewed interest, but she’s grateful nonetheless.

“It’s so very sweet,” Electra said. “My philosophy has been, Let’s stay here in a balanced place of gratitude because not everything works…You have an ego, and it will kill you.”

In the ’90s, an unknown dancer-actress-singer-model could not afford an ego—let alone pride. At 18, Electra was introduced to Prince, then in his 30s, whose romantic interest translated to a yearslong investment in her music career. After her Playboy appearances, agents and managers appeared on Electra’s photoshoot sets, pointing to dotted lines. Her role in 2000’s Scary Movie was written specifically for her by Shawn and Marlon Wayans.

Standing at 5’3” with doll-like features and Midwestern affability, Tara Leigh Patrick was the kind of girl Hollywood could have swallowed whole. At a young age, her parents—who met and moonlighted as musicians—built her a dance studio and sent her to performing arts school, determined that she leverage her natural ability into an entertainment career. It was Prince who anointed her “Carmen Electra.” Graffiti Bridge actor Robin Power was casting for a Prince-produced all-girl band when she spotted the then teenager in a nightclub in LA. That night, Power invited Electra to Prince’s home.

“He was standing in a doorway looking very mysterious,” Electra said of meeting the musician, who invited her to perform vocal exercises and then, in a note left for her in a guest bedroom, asked her to watch movies with him. “I really wanted to be in this band, but I didn’t want to have an intimate relationship. I didn’t feel that for him.”

Electra didn’t make the band but never lost Prince’s interest. Fast-friend Powers set her up with a Capitol demo deal, but by 1991, Prince had negotiated Electra out of her contract so she could live and record with him as a solo artist. By the time she joined him at his Minneapolis estate, Paisley Park, he had redesignated songs written for Powers to Electra. He commissioned a photo shoot and hung pictures of her all over the Park. Soon, Electra had become his muse.

“It was over time that I fell in love with him,” Electra said. Prince would have her outfits custom-made, or instruct her to shop for looks reminiscent of what he’d seen in the pages of Vogue. “He was very soft-spoken, very kind, very funny…But Prince, we do know, was very controlling with artists and his own music…He started giving me music he wrote for other people. If I had known, I would have said no.”

During her years at Paisley Park, Electra vacillated in rank among the other women there—sleeping in full hair and makeup with heels at her bedside, should he ever arrive at her door in the early hours of the morning. Electra’s mother would call, pitching Electra on becoming her manager, but she declined. Over time, she said her mother grew concerned with Prince’s intentions—namely his control over her daughter. It wasn’t long before her mom began making the 10-hour trip to Paisley Park. “What do you guys want with my daughter?” Electra recalled her mother demanding of Prince’s team.

Electra delivers such anecdotes deliberately, the way someone who has a long history of being misunderstood might. It’s not difficult to imagine how she might have inspired protectiveness—or possessiveness—as a young woman.

“People at Paisley Park were saying, ‘You can do this on your own. Do you want to end up living here forever?’” Electra said. “I had an assistant that worked with him, and one day she said, ‘Open your eyes. There’s more to life than this.’”

While Prince often assured Electra that she was his only girlfriend, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the parade of new talent at the Park. After her musical debut (a self-titled melodic rap album that failed to chart), Electra decided to leave both Paisley Park and her relationship with Prince. He eased her into the transition—offering her a condo in LA with security detail. Eventually, Electra concluded she would make it on her own or not at all. 

Without Prince’s protection, Electra was introduced to a much different Los Angeles. Overnight, she was “pretty much homeless,” bouncing between friends’ couches. When she was held at gunpoint, she finally gave in. “I called [Prince] and I said, ‘Listen, I’m in an abusive relationship. I don’t have any money. I’m hungry.’”

Prince threw her a lifeline in the form of Erotic City, a weekly dance show at his Hollywood nightclub Glam Slam. Making around $100 a week, the show became her launching pad. It led to the first of her Playboy pictorials in 1996 (“They gave me two contracts, playmate or celebrity pictorial, and I’m like, Well, [looks like] playmates have to do a lot more for less!”). Independent movie roles soon followed. When MTV host Jenny McCarthy quit the popular dating show Singled Out to pursue acting full-time, Electra seemed like a natural replacement.

“She was a firecracker,” McCarthy said. “I remember being totally blown away by how gorgeous she was.” 

In 1996, Baywatch called. To this day, Electra is unsure how the producers discovered her or why they overlooked that she couldn’t swim. But Pamela Anderson was retiring from the show, leaving Electra very big shoes—and a tiny red swimsuit—to fill.

“For some reason, our suits didn’t come in for a long time so I had to wear hers. I knew that she was leaving, so I think a big cast was brought in because it was like, Wow, Pam’s leaving. How are we going to make up for it? She is Baywatch.” 

Despite being cast in some of the decade’s most beloved parodies, Electra claims she never had real acting ambitions. That’s perhaps why she still seems most at home playing—or parodying—herself, appearing in almost 20 films and TV shows as “Carmen Electra.” Her breakout role in Scary Movie also pulled from her biography, subtly alluding to her career as a Playboy pinup. 

“She had all the jokes, she was pop culture,” Marlon Wayans said of Electra, recalling her willingness to make fun of herself. “She was so pretty, so funny, so cool. We had to send back three actresses—the producers wanted Melissa Joan Hart and Jenny McCarthy—and Keenen [Ivory Waynans] kept saying no, that we wanted Carmen.”

Scary Movie went number one at the box office, raking in $278 million worldwide on a $19 million budget, and spurring an avalanche of spoof movies. Over the next decade, Electra would be written into Date Movie, Scary Movie 4, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, and *Meet the Spartans—*an inside joke in Hollywood that both the audience and Electra herself, could enjoy.

“What Scary Movie did was on another level,” Electra said. “It changed something for [people who thought] maybe I was stuck up. We never knew it would be a number one movie.” 

By the late ’90s, Electra had unlocked another level of fame. MTV, a starring role on Baywatch, and racy red carpet looks made her a target for paparazzi…and then, she met Dennis Rodman. She was 26 when she began dating the bad boy rebounder of the Chicago Bulls, and the chemistry was electric. They’d had one date when she said Rodman told her they were going to be “together forever.”

Representatives for Rodman did not reply to a request for comment.

“[He said] ‘I’m never leaving you. You’re never leaving me.’ He was very ‘your mine’-type thing…then I kind of realized, Wow, this is going to be my responsibility. Because if he doesn’t play good, it’ll always be the girlfriend or the wife’s fault. From the public, but also from the players.”

Michael Jordan personally requested Electra to appear in his ESPN docuseries about the 1997–1998 Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance. In her interview, Electra recounted disappearing with Rodman to Vegas—only to be woken up by Jordan himself when Rodman missed practice. Electra says Rodman began demanding her presence before he’d play, which meant she would balance her Baywatch shooting schedule and Bulls games. In August 1998, Electra’s mother died of brain cancer. Two weeks later, her sister died of a heart attack. That fall, as Electra worked and partied through her grief, she married Rodman in a Las Vegas ceremony, but they were divorced by April 1999. The following November, she and the basketball player were both arrested after a fight in a hotel room for simple battery, a misdemeanor—further fueling the media frenzy surrounding them. (Prosecutors later dropped the charges.)

“People couldn’t understand why I would be with him,” Electra revealed. “I was trying to get away. He’d say, ‘If you don’t let me in [to your house], I’m taking all my clothes off in the street.’ It’s like, I don’t want any more attention. We were so on the news so much that we didn’t even want to watch TV.”

Still, she’s not without regret over the Rodman relationship. “If we could have grown more together, I really saw myself being with him forever,” she continued. “I know how much he loved me.” 

By 2003, Electra had found her twin flame in another star, Jane’s Addiction and Red Hot Chilli Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro. The wise-cracking musician and Electra shared an instant, camera-ready connection. Photographer David LaChapelle styled the pair naked on gurneys for their wedding invitation, she said Hugh Hefner attended their wedding with playmates in tow, and the pair was tapped for their own MTV reality show, Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen and Dave. “It was really beautiful in a gothic, beautiful and kind of dark [way],” she said. “Dark and light combined.”

The marriage lasted four years, throughout which, Electra remembers Navarro’s substance abuse and alleged infidelity were front-page news. “I had never been around a junkie,” Electra said. “My friends told me that you have to be there because if you’re not, he’s going to die…it was very, very hard for me and something that I didn’t understand. And [his cheating] was on the cover of every magazine, I was really embarrassed. Dealing with that publicly on top of everything.”

A representative for Navarro did not reply to a request for comment. 

Electra still is on good terms with all her famous exes. Before Prince died, she said they had plans to reunite in the studio. She and Rodman share the same representation, whom she says has implied Rodman might like to get back together (“I would if we could,” she says today). The actor has also considered reconnecting with Navarro, with whom it has always been a case of “wrong place, wrong time.” She feels it’s kismet that Navarro and Prince share the same birthday.

“I was very codependent,” she said of her earlier relationships. “My feeling was, Wow, when I needed you, where were you?”

While Carmen Electra might be single, she’s not without admirers. You can pay for the pleasure of her virtual company via OnlyFans, where she leverages her enduring status as a sex symbol and even shares exclusives on the site alongside the likes of Sopranos actor Drea de Matteo. These days, Electra cedes control to no one, save Kim Kardashian. She and McCarthy, also 51, had a “good laugh” about reuniting in bikinis for the Skims campaign.

Marlon Wayans compared her to the Skims founder. “She was the Kim Kardashian of that day,” he said. “She was the Julius Erving to Michael Jordan. She was likable—all over MTV, all in the magazines, every guy wanted to be with her and every girl wanted to be like her.”

The storm has subsided, and with it, the servers’ attention. By now, they’re well-acclimatized to Electra—moving on, as fans so often do, to the next unknowable thing. Electra seems unbothered that in this café, at least, she’s yesterday’s news. She has survived and thrived this long because of a 30-year resolution to never take herself too seriously. And no matter what’s next, she’s not about to change course.

“This is me, this is it,” Electra continued, moving a hand up to her biggest, and most underrated asset: her heart. “Another step, another step.”