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.
MY FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD CALLED ME FROM SCHOOL to tell me that Anna Nicole Smith had died, and he was laughing. I happened to be at Universal Studios in Burbank, working on a story, when I got the news; once it ricocheted from multiple BlackBerrys to the makeup trailer to the set courtesy of CNN, ABC, and the like, people there were laughing too. My guess is that the news broke a record for the shortest time between the registration of shock and ensuing black humor. “No joke, Anna Nicole Smith DEAD,” vibewire.net reported on February 9, at 8:22 a.m., revealing a clear grasp of the problem. For some bizarre, best-unexplored reason, Richard Nixon came to mind; on that first morning I could hear him saying that we wouldn’t have Anna Nicole to kick around anymore.
I was wrong about that, of course. In no time, her death from as-yet-undetermined causes was mirroring her life, which is to say it was an unmitigated disaster: The words “train wreck” conjoined with “Anna Nicole Smith” turned up 135,000 hits on Google a week or so after she was gone. Highlights included the ever-growing list of potential fathers for her then-five-month-old daughter, Dannielynn, and the melodramatic fight over a burial site between Anna Nicole’s enervated mother, Virgie Arthur, and Anna Nicole’s omnipresent faux spouse, Howard K. Stern, while her body lay rotting at the medical examiner’s office. There was some good news: Wal-Mart was interested in a bulk buy of Great Big Beautiful Doll, a biography of Anna Nicole written by Eric and D’Eva Redding, her former manager and his wife, a hair and makeup artist. Others who’d had their piece of Anna Nicole rallied just as quickly. In a story headlined “TrimSpa Moving On Without Anna Nicole,” the CEO of the diet pill company, Alex Goen, admitted that Anna Nicole had “helped to catapult the brand” to fame but that its success was “not simply the result of Anna Nicole Smith.”
Within days, otherwise intelligent, highly sophisticated people—the kind who visit modern-art museums and read complicated books and know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis—were obsessively floating theories that could make you dizzy enough to beg for Dramamine. One friend speculated about a link between Anna Nicole’s death and that of Lady Walker’s, the late J. Howard Marshall II’s first stripper-lover, who, you may or may not recall, died on a Houston operating table during cosmetic surgery, in 1991. “These were not nice people,” my friend said ominously. Another sent me a clip on Anna Nicole’s embalming, suspiciously querying, “Why did they need to embalm? She was in a cooler in the morgue.” My favorite, however, came from an Austin therapist, who passed on her hairdresser’s suggestion that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the father of Anna Nicole’s daughter was Anna Nicole’s twenty-year-old son, Daniel, who died last fall. It was as if Anna Nicole had provided so much entertainment value over the years that no one could let her go—the slug for the news of her death on the Houston Chronicle’s Web site was, in fact, “Entertainment.” The only idea that didn’t hold much appeal was taking Anna Nicole seriously. I had the feeling that if she had ever succumbed to the temptation herself, it might have killed her even sooner.
LIKE A LOT OF TEXAS JOURNALISTS, I had the pleasure of writing about Anna Nicole Smith in the early days, when her life had more twists and turns than a tangled Slinky. My opportunity came in 1994, the year she married wizened, rheumy 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall II. There was a frantic need on the part of almost every man, woman, and child on the planet to understand something that wasn’t really all that mysterious, which was how and why a poor 26-year-old girl from a small Texas town managed to ascend from stripper to Playboy centerfold to Guess Jeans model to sometime actress to wife of a very rich and very old man. (Hint: She was a nearly-six-foot knockout, and she knew how to work it.) Back then, Anna Nicole ignored my requests for an interview, so I never met her; I didn’t see her in the flesh until nine years later, after Marshall had died and she was locked in a lawsuit/death struggle over the billionaire’s fortune with his son Pierce.
There are a couple of salient things I remember from that trial, which took place in a windowless courtroom of the old Harris County Family Courts building. The first was a mammoth, satiny black bra that I found stuffed behind a toilet paper dispenser in a restroom stall. Had Anna Nicole taken it off to look sexier in court, I still wonder, or had it just been … uncomfortable? That question was soon eclipsed by Anna Nicole’s performance on the witness stand, for which the county could have sold enough tickets to finance dozens of new libraries, hospitals, and community college branches.
Anna Nicole was heavy then but appeared to have dressed in what passed for appropriate in her mind: a tight skirt, stilettos, and a sweater so taut over her massive chest that she seemed in danger of suffocation. Maybe, in fact, it was cutting off circulation to her brain: As accounts of the trial frequently mentioned, Anna Nicole lolled her head, rolled her eyes, scratched her strange arrangement of platinum pin curls, nodded off, wept, smudged her mascara, smeared her lipstick, stared into space, and generally had difficulty staying present. She had trouble following questions too, particularly from Pierce Marshall’s attorney, the boyish but deadly Rusty Hardin. Anna Nicole accused Hardin of being “sick” and “perverted” when he asked intimate questions about her marriage to the elder Marshall; at one point she even retorted, “Screw you, Rusty!” in open court, providing trial followers with a punch line to just about anything and everything for most of the next week. On so many levels, Anna Nicole seemed not to know or not to care where she was. Whatever her intention, as a trial witness on her own behalf, she seemed to be working overtime to persuade the jury to rule against her.
That public appearance offered convincing proof that Anna Nicole had lost her feel for the difference between who she was and who she imagined herself to be. Maybe it had been her plan all along. When her mother emerged from obscurity to discuss her death on Good Morning America, she shared Anna Nicole’s explanation for exaggerating her small-town past. “Mom,” her daughter had told her, “nobody wants to read books or see people on TV concerning, you know, ‘Middle-class girl found a rich millionaire and married him.’ There’s not a story in that. The story is, I come from rags to riches, and so that’s what I’m going to tell.”
It was an easy sell. Anyone who’s ever driven up Interstate 45 and passed the Mexia exit can think they know all they need to about Anna Nicole’s history. (I did, when I wrote about her twelve years ago.) It is a small, dusty town in which not much appears to happen, and so it’s natural to assume that after Anna Nicole ended up working at the now-famous Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken and, at seventeen, was married to and swiftly divorced from a pimply faced fry cook one year her junior—with a son born along the way—she was ready to get the hell out of Dodge. Not too long after that, in the early nineties, she burst on the scene as one of Playboy’s most successful centerfolds and then one of the glamorous faces of Guess Jeans. (In the kind of minor but niggling blow that must have intensified Anna Nicole’s mood swings, her name at some point stopped appearing on the list of Guess girls on the company’s Web site. Naomi Campbell, whose behavior has been equally cuckoo at times, still rates.)
Her youthful, abundant beauty from that time continues to startle. Anna Nicole could convey both purity and sophistication; she was innocence in a plunging bustier, on satin sheets, in a hay field, on the beach. Not coincidentally, her career took off at a time when the country’s divide between rich and poor was widening and the price of blue jeans became an odd if critical marker. The owners of Guess, the Marciano brothers, followed a trail blazed by former socialite Gloria Vanderbilt and transformed denim from a proletarian uniform to something aspirational. Their sexy black and white ads worked a little like hip Rorschach tests—you could spend a lot of time trying to decide whether the young, hot, beautiful types pictured had just done it or were about to do it—and so created a compelling link between casual clothes, casual sex, and casual glamour. In front of the camera, Anna Nicole embodied it all effortlessly.
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