The Punch Line
In death, as in life, Anna Nicole Smith is a joke. Which is less than she deserves—but not that much less.
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Seeing her on the witness stand nearly a decade later, then, was an object lesson in the power of image. The real Anna Nicole clearly had a screw or three loose. It had been the Guess ads, photographed by then-undiscovered masters like Ellen von Unwerth and Wayne Maser, that were iconic, not the models. Unfortunately, Anna Nicole never figured that out.
Even so, for quite some time, her success grew in accordance with that particularly comforting American (female) mythology: Small-town beauty makes good. If you read her early press, she admitted to being poor, and she admitted to being from Mexia, but that was it. In particular, Anna Nicole never mentioned her life as a dancer in Houston’s men’s clubs, because she knew that that was the side of the story no one wanted to hear. She was supposed to be fresh-faced and innocent—even for Playboy, where the centerfolds by then were baring it all—and being an exotic dancer clashed with the wholesome-ish narrative that she and everyone who stood to profit from her success had created and maintained.
The reality was much darker, and anyone who has spent any time in those clubs knows it. (The only people who don’t want to see or sense the truth are the patrons.) To put it mildly, they are unhappy places where all kinds of needs and dysfunctions meet in semi-anonymity. Drugs and alcohol are a big part of the mix, as confidence builders and self-medication, and there’s a lot of what psychiatrists call acting out: people, particularly the dancers, reliving past traumas like early sexual abuse in updated settings. When various stories took me to those clubs years ago, I was forever meeting “SMU coeds” and “nursing school students” who claimed, not very convincingly, to be working just for the money. And the men were there ostensibly for fun, but their neediness permeated the stale, funky air. These were damaged people who couldn’t make intimate connections in the real world, and that included losers in expensive suits and losers in blue-collar jumpsuits, as well as guys who would fly into a rage if you accidentally blocked their view and guys in wheelchairs for God knew what reason.
Anna Nicole learned all she needed to know about American sexuality in those clubs (like a lot of women who worked in them, she had lesbian affairs, partly in self-defense). It was her high school, college, and Ph.D. program rolled into one, though I’ve always suspected her sexual education began much, much earlier, sometime during that poor and tumultuous childhood, when she was shuttled from relative to relative and no one seemed to be paying much attention. As an adult, she made damn sure that never happened again.
FROM THE MOMENT ANNA NICOLE GOT FAMOUS, she told the world that her role model was Marilyn Monroe. It was a shrewd move, as it linked her image with one of the greatest American icons of all time, and it had a neat logic: one platinum-haired sex symbol taking after another, one poor, deprived child latching onto the success of another. But Anna Nicole couldn’t keep up the act to ensure icon status of her own. Monroe had talent, but Anna Nicole’s gifts were limited—she was just beautiful, and she never had any sense of how to operate in the world. She had bad manners, she was impulsive, she lied, and she was fiercely derivative. D’Eva Redding told me years ago that when Anna Nicole went for her first Playboy test shoot at Eric’s studio, he took some Polaroids and wasn’t interested; the woman he knew as Vickie had been dancing for a while by then, and in posing for the camera she was too sexually overt, too cheap, too tarted up. He finished the session with bored dispatch. But D’Eva saw something in her that he had missed. It happened after Anna Nicole had gone back to the dressing room and was taking off her clothes and makeup, unaware that anyone was watching—when she was quietly herself. “Wait, Eric,” D’Eva told him, as he was about to send Anna Nicole packing. “That’s a really pretty girl.” Even then, Anna Nicole couldn’t fathom that anyone would want her unless she was pretending to be somebody else. From the beginning, she was always trying too hard.
Monroe was probably just as needy and just as self-destructive, but all that time spent at the Actors Studio and in psychoanalysis gave her insight into herself and her culture: She saw herself as a modern-day Aphrodite, someone who could rescue the populace from the sexual constraints of the fifties and early sixties. As James Hollis, the executive director of the C. J. Jung Educational Center, in Houston, told me, “She conceived that her role in life was to embody, represent, and channel that missing, exuberant sexual energy.” Carrying that burden tends to take its toll—the authentic self has to take a backseat to perpetuating the dreams and fantasies of the public—and Anna Nicole, “an imitation of an imitation,” in Hollis’s words, had it a lot worse than Monroe. By the time she became a celebrity, in the early nineties, most people didn’t need to be cured of their sexual inhibitions. They could watch music videos (now we have Fergie in her Girl Scout uniform), learn bedroom fashion tips from Victoria’s Secret models, and enjoy 24/7 access to porn on cable and the Internet. When Anna Nicole showed up on the ubiquitous red carpets stoned, bloated, and bursting out of her clothes, she was nothing more than the embodiment of a supersexualized, celebrity-besotted culture: Aphrodite as a drunken, drug-addled slut. No wonder people turned away.
In some ways, Anna Nicole’s troubles more closely resembled those of another Texas sex symbol, Farrah Fawcett. Fawcett, like Monroe, was a genuine talent, but her best role was as a seventies-era Aphrodite: healthy, athletic, all-natural. The image most people still treasure is that of the poster girl with the bountiful blond mane, beaming in a scarlet bathing suit that isn’t at all revealing by today’s standards. Fawcett looked then as though she was having more fun than anyone else and wanted you to do the same.
Eventually she became a nut too, trying to be both the ingenue and the serious actress to the public. When I wrote about her in 1999, she was just a little over fifty and as fragile as a wren, having ruined her face with too many futile efforts to stop time. The Emmy and Golden Globe nominations didn’t matter; her most famous role had become that of space cadet on the David Letterman show. The tabloids delighted in featuring her cellulite and wrinkled knees.
We spent a lot of time driving around Bel-Air and the Hollywood Hills in her black Jaguar as I tried to get her to talk about being beautiful then and being … older now. Not surprisingly, she wouldn’t go there. Instead, she retreated frequently to various restrooms for extended stays—at home, in restaurants, at a movie premiere. It was easy to imagine that she was doing drugs or staring at her reflection, Dorian Gray—style, but I think now that she was just hiding from it all, especially the anger and the cruelty that resulted from a set of expectations she’d engendered and then, thanks to the ruthlessness of nature, betrayed. Well, hadn’t she been betrayed too?
Last October, however, Fawcett was diagnosed with cancer, which in the celebrity world can be just another opportunity for a comeback. She issued publicist-perfect statements about staying positive (“Throughout the journey of my life, I have maintained a strong faith in the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity”) and appeared to reconcile with ex-lover Ryan O’Neal (giving him a much-needed publicity boost too) and her former Charlie’s Angels co-stars. Declaring herself cancer-free earlier this year, Fawcett was rewarded with another round of positive press, including the all-important tribute from People. “I have never seen anyone go through so much with such dignity and determination,” fellow Angel Kate Jackson told a reporter. “I am in awe of her strength and courage.” In other words, Fawcett, unable to relinquish her celebrity status entirely, engineered a return to public life as a different sort of icon: the survivor.
Anna Nicole could never have resurrected herself that way. Despite suffering horribly—growing up deprived, struggling with all sorts of addictions, losing a child—she was incapable of generating sympathy. She was either too needy (even she made jokes about her appetites) or too enchanted with the surface of things (playing at being Monroe, for example), always both too near and too far from everybody else. In the end, there was nothing for the public to connect with except her slow, determined decline, and since no one much wanted to be party to that, Anna Nicole became a reliable punch line instead. She died as she had lived: as a bit of tabloid ephemera, sandwiched between a diapered, love-crazed astronaut and Britney Spears’s new skinhead do. That’s where Anna Nicole must have really believed she belonged; it just took her a lifetime to convince the rest of us she was right.
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