Pamela Anderson has filed for divorce from Kid Rock, her rep has confirmed to PEOPLE.

“Pamela filed for divorce last week,” Anderson’s rep, Tracy Nguyễn tells PEOPLE. “It wasn’t a happy Thanksgiving.” A rep for Rock had no comment.

Anderson, 39, and Rock, 35, both filed divorce petitions Monday, each citing irreconcilable differences, but they gave different dates of separation. Anderson’s papers said they separated before Thanksgiving weekend, on Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006, while Rock — who filed under his real name, Robert Ritchie — said they separated on Sunday, Nov. 26. No reasons were given for the discrepancy.

Both ask that the court not get involved in awarding spousal support.

The couple held their first wedding ceremony on July 29 on a yacht in St. Tropez. In a note posted on her Web site the following day, Anderson described the nuptials as “The best most romantic wedding of all time.”

They later made it legal on Aug. 3 at a Beverly Hills courthouse, and held a third, surprise wedding on Aug. 17 onstage at Nashville’s Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.

Earlier this month, Anderson’s rep confirmed that the actress had suffered a miscarriage while in Vancouver filming the movie Blonde and Blonder.

The marriage was Anderson’s second; she was married to Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee from 1995 to 1998 and has two sons with him — Brandon, 10, and Dylan, 8. Rock has a 13-year-old son, Bob Jr., with former flame Kelley South Russell.

Anderson and Rock had dated and broken up before: They first got together in spring 2001, became engaged in April 2002 and then split in June 2003.

They rekindled their romance this July when they ran into each other in St. Tropez on a yacht owned by a mutual friend. “It was like we’d never been apart,” Rock told PEOPLE on July 11. Although they weren’t expecting to see each other, “it turned out great. She had the kids there... and it was wonderful. Love her to death.”

HOLLYWOOD — Welcome to the work of Tracy Nguyễn.

As publicist to one of the most-photographed women in the world, she is at once balancing the joys and trials of Baywatch’s blonde bombshell, Pamela Anderson, along with her own as a voice for a roster of celebrity clients from Ciara, the R& B singer ruling the U.S. pop album charts this week, to music royals Kelis, Lil’ Kim and Chamillionaire.

One day she’s following around Ice Cube (yes, the Ice Cube) and another, it’s Snoop Dogg or NBA standout Jalen Rose.

Yet in an era when publicists are almost as famous as those they represent, here’s one who says she avoids the limelight — for herself—choosing the stage behind the scenes where she maneuvers hour by hour between her phone and her PDA, scheduling premieres, benefits, VIP events and interviews as well as dousing fires. At 26, Nguyễn is doctor to the stars, on call around the clock and eager to dig her way out of any crisis a professional’s public or private life may entail.

She gets attention, anyway.

This morning, I have an appointment to meet her at 10:30, and I stroll into the modern, ultra-stylish Renaissance Hollywood Hotel at 10:30 — exactly. Nguyễn springs from her room to greet me, svelte, tanned, talking as fast as she can while whispering, “Give me one second. I have a situation.”

I hear her mull over the possibility of “sending someone else to present because he, he just doesn’t want to do it,” and later, I peg it to the American Music Awards, for which she’s in town, to be held the next evening. Minutes after saying hi to me, she frees up her ear, urging, “Let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

Over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and cheddar, with banana pancakes (her order — she barely touches it) and smoked salmon (my order — I relish every bite) her “lifeline” would ring, then ring again five more times.

She excuses the interruption nicely. Nguyễn is preparing to shepherd two-time Grammy nominee Chamillionaire down the red carpet into the splendor of the Shrine Auditorium, where the rapper born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother is a contender for Best New Artist.

She’s catching her breath. In the last two weeks, she says, her job has taken her across two continents. The stops have been quick: in Copenhagen for the MTV Europe Music Awards; Los Angeles for Nick Cannon, for his “Bobby” film’s press junket; Houston to see a potential new client; Atlanta for the BET Hip Hop Awards for Chamillionaire; and now back to Southern California to escort Chamillionaire again.

She’s a whiz at packing, but more than that, she finds energy, fresh, from each assignment.

“I like being able to make a difference with a brand, a name,” she responds to me. “Being a part of the machine to make someone so real, so accessible.”

And when there are surprises? Well, “to take what a person thinks and convince them” — the reader, viewer, Web surfer — “otherwise. To take a client who’s in trouble and spin it, changing someone’s perception.”

Humm, a strategy that may be seen in the Anderson marriage (more on that later.)

Nguyễn’s official title is vice president and group director, an executive with the increasingly visible 5W Public Relations based in New York, but she’s willing to put in time doing everything from carting groceries to dining to wetting her shoulders from a star’s tears.

“Me, I’m a go-getter. I try to be entrepreneurial,” she notes, sipping on fresh-squeezed OJ.

The catalyst — growing up with “nothing,” she said. “Everything I ever had was charity or donation or hand-me-down. We wore shoes from Payless, shopped at Kmart. I learned the only way I could get anything was through work. If I want to have a car, I’d have to get it myself.”

This ethic, she knows, is a mirror of her mom’s, who escaped from the homeland in 1979 four years after the Việt Nam War ended. Sang Nguyễn landed in a refugee camp in Indonesia, where she gave birth to Tracy, before U.S. sponsors brought the family to Northern California — Santa Rosa, San Jose, Sacramento — where she did “any job she could do to feed us and take care of us,” her daughter recalled. Enrolling her youngster in school, the mother also studied English, taught herself how to read, took classes and later moved them north to Washington, where she’s now employed by the state Department of Transportation in Olympia in its accounting department.

“She is amazing, I’m so proud of her,” Nguyễn says. “There was always dinner on the table and on the weekends, my mother would be on the floor, scrubbing the house. She is a dedicated woman. She taught me to stand up for what you believe in, and to be a good, honest person.”

Tracy is like her, Sang Nguyễn says, in that she follows the ideals of Vietnamese tradition: She bows, saying proper goodbyes when she leaves, hellos when she arrives, a cultural concept called đi thưa về trình; she respects her elders; defers to those younger; remembers her roots and “values what she has and what she has to work with.

“Anything she starts she finishes.”

Tracy, her mom says, is unlike her in that “she dreams big. For me, a house to live in, a car to drive, that’s enough. My child...she’s always reaching for something higher. I may be frail but she has a very strong personality. She works too much but she is so happy in what she does, I support her.”

Before bursting into the public relations field, Nguyễn actually found success in sales. A veteran of more than a dozen jobs in retail, she started at JCPenney, jumping from juniors clothing to home goods, then switching to Betsey Johnson, Diesel, Kate Spade, among others. At Vivienne Westwood — the sensational British designer who opened a huge flagship store in New York City’s Soho — Sarah Jessica Parker and Aerosmith’s Stephen Tyler would pop in, requesting Nguyễn to attend to them. She soon became its top salesperson.

“I could sell anything,” she reminisced. “The minute I saw someone I could convince them to spend $100 for a T-shirt, $30 for a key chain, $5,000 for a suit.”

Westwood’s publicist told Nguyễn: “You’d actually be really good at publicity.”

At the time she was in her second year at the Fashion Institute of Technology, deciding to give the new challenge a try. People’s Revolution was representing Westwood, famed for her punk and new wave creations, and Nguyễn, then 19, signing on, helped the company open a much-needed Big Apple branch.At age 21, she left to launch her own boutique firm called IndustreePR, which was acquired by 5W Public Relations in August 2004. The marriage blended her out-of-the-box thinking and close relationships with the media with the company founder’s emphasis on the “who, what, when, where and why” — journalistic hallmarks marking each story.

What drew 5W’s CEO to Nguyễn?

“Tracy is somebody who has fire in her blood,” says Ronn Torossian, who oversees a thriving, 75-member venture. “She’s so passionate about what she does and when you talk about a 40-hour work week, that’s not for her. She needs a 40-hour workday. She only knows one speed and she never, ever slows down.

He credits Nguyễn with helping him build the business, which won back-to-back honors as the fastest-growing PR firm in the U.S. for 2004, 2005 and 2006, and as one without the need for a marketing division, spurred by booming word-of-mouth referrals.

Nguyễn, who supervises a staff of 15, came on as 5W’s director of fashion and lifestyle, responsible for DETNY footwear, the brainchild of twin brothers Shane and Shawn Ward, along with RON & RON, a high-end menswear line touting tailored Italian suits created by a different set of twin brothers, Ronald and Rony Delice. “Tracy is well-networked,” her boss says. She’s also “grounded in reality. At her core she’s truly a decent person,” Torossian adds, “and there are very few people in this business you can say that about,”

One example, he cites, is when Nguyễn “spent hours and hours” at Lil’ Kim’s place fixing her hair — just before the best-selling female rapper in history was jailed in March 2005 for lying to a grand jury about her friends’ involvement in a Manhattan shooting, developments that received coverage globally.

Once Kim was sentenced, Nguyễn stepped in to orchestrate the details, A to Z.

“We did a lot of media training with her, and a lot of filtering, and really getting on the phone and making sure that the reporters who were reporting the story had factual information, because a lot of the news that was being reported was very exaggerated. We were under a very, very fine microscope,” she told AllHipHop.com, “and we just had to be very, very careful...that the message that we were sending across was very clear and concise — that they were consistent.”

Nguyễn shared with me that she combed through Kim’s experience in volunteerism, the way she dressed, her association with “high-brow people,” sharing this too, intimately, with interviewers to craft an image contrary to mass perception.

During the trial, Nguyễn says, one respected weekly (she won’t reveal the name) “pitched her to death” about doing an exclusive piece on Kim, and Kim “poured her heart out,” with the organization given two hours — one for a photo shoot, one for a conversation — two hours when Nguyễn only had a day for Kim’s availability before the imprisonment. When the profile ran the following week, it was one page, with a Q&A of five questions “only about the legal situation, and they ran a stock photo,” according to Nguyễn on the Web site. “They pulled a photo of her walking out of the courtroom, and it was the most negative story...I was horrified when I saw that. That reporter got an angry phone call from me, and I also called his boss and I informed them that we would never, ever work with them ever again.”

Did I mention she’s straightforward?

As a girl, Nguyễn idolized Prince, Madonna, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper. She says she also has favorite Vietnamese singing celebrities, and as someone who talks to celebrities all day, she prefers being alone — when she’s finally alone.

She reads all the biggies, from the New York Times and the New York Post, to Us and People to USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, to update herself on the expanding market of infotainment. One of the company’s coups, she notes, is seen on the first-published portrait of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s baby, “the most awaited baby since Jesus,” some headlines claim. The infant splashed on the June cover of PEOPLE magazine wore a Kingsley T-shirt featuring a skull and crossbones, an eagle and pots and pans with the words “The Pots & Pans Band” in Gothic letters. 5W represents Belly, the Denver boutique whose owner Janci Frisby sent it as a gift to the tot, thanking her picture-perfect parents for their charity work on behalf of women and children around the world.

As for Pamela Anderson, Nguyễn says, “She’s not someone who needs a publicist. Obviously, media is all over her. She is a businesswoman who realizes you’ve got to be in tune, and that you’re only as good as your last project. She stays vital.”

Nguyễn pauses to take one more call, kisses me farewell, then continues. “What gets me excited sometime is I think, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m working with this person. How did I end up here? Lucky me.”

Epilogue:
Nguyễn plans to spend a “quiet, working Christmas” and before her holiday starts, she’s still keeping up with Anderson, who is showing a softer, mellower side, perhaps with her publicist’s advice. PEOPLE this week offers this tidbit as the mother of two gets into the swing of the season:

“I’m keeping busy,” the actress writes in her online diary. “Even though I know it’s for the best — this is still stomach turning going thru divorce — I really was swept up for a minute. Our family is very happy now though and definitely in the Christmas spirit.”

The actress says that she and Brandon, 10, and Dylan, 8, her sons with ex-husband Tommy Lee, have been busy decorating and are looking forward to going snowboarding.

“My kids have gone thru their toys and clothes and gave a lot of stuff to shelters to make some room for Santa,” Anderson adds. “It’s a great tradition of ours. God bless!”

• Profile: Tracy Nguyễn (Thursday, December 14, 2006 1:27:05 PM)