|
|
Features
|
|
The Anna Nicole Habit
The truth behind everyone’s favorite blonde bimbo is this: she was the junkie; we were the pushers.
Monday, February 12, 2007 at 10:00 PM
By Telly Davidson
|
|
|
Michael Caufield/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
At the 2005 Australian MTV Music Awards
|
|
Had enough of hearing about the tacky terrors of Anna Nicole Smith? I know I have – yet I must confess, that the sheer “Train Wreck” quality of her life - as a soon-to-be-bestseller expose of Anna’s life is titled, written by her estranged sister - makes her tawdry story hard to turn away from, even in death.
Of all the punditry and blather about Ms. Smith’s - suicide? murder? accidental death? - Caryn James’ recent New York Times spot “Why Did We Watch?” was without question the best. “Without any actual career to back up her claim on the public, the question becomes: why did we watch? The unsettling reason: because we could.”
But that’s only half the story. Anna Nicole was a symptom, not the disease. We watched because the new media of the 1990's and 2000's enabled her to live out her reality-based horror show for the cameras. That was perhaps appropriate, as a camera was likely the only thing that she ever made love to that actually loved her back.
|
|
R.J. Capak/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
Raising awareness at Live 8
|
|
|
Compare Anna with the secondary celebrities of years past, the giggly ‘40s and ‘50s gum-chewing starlets and never-quite-were’s who relentlessly “pimped” themselves before the cameras and the gossip columns. They wanted to be Rich and Famous, yes – but they were out to enable their dreams of being Rich and Famous as an actress or singer or model. On the other end of the spectrum, there was a sort of bittersweet and lovable, gallant-in-the-face-of-disaster Scarlett O’Hara quality to the Rosemary Clooney’s, Helen O’Connell’s, Jo Stafford’s, Jaye P. Morgan’s, Rose Marie’s, Pearl Bailey’s, Peggy Casse’s, Peter Lawford’s, Nipsey Russell’s and Joey Bishop’s, who went on Dinah & Friends and Cross-Wits and Match Game and Gong Show and Merv Griffin in the 1970's, because they didn’t have anywhere else to go anymore.
While Generation X and Y might not have known it, these seemingly hacky Hollywood has-beens were big, once upon a time - and with good reason, too. It was only time and fame’s second law of thermodynamics that had made them seem small.
The media fell in love with Anna Nicole precisely because she was wasn’t an aging has-been clinging to relevance with face lifts and parties and guest shots. She wasn’t a sweaty, straggling young actor or singer trying to look chic while unglamorously working her butt off (or giving bl*w jobs to execs and starving and begging) so that she could get her break and show the world how talented and smart and fabulous she really was. She was one of the first truly post-modern media celebrities, who got her fame from the tabloids and pornography first, and then legitimate sources after. A goddess of white trash culture, a Phoenix who rose as if from the ashes of a thousand videotapes of Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake.
|
|
Carlos A. Rios/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
J. Howard Marshall II probate trial, 2001
|
|
|
That’s no mean distinction. When we hear Aimee Mann or Dido or Erykah Badu singing songs they wrote, or a Chris Botti or Michael Leonhart improvising jazz, watch a Julianne Moore or Meryl Streep on screen or a Broadway stage, or a Letterman or Raymond or Seinfeld doing stand-up comedy, we’re looking up. Slightly in awe of someone who can do what we most certainly can’t. Anna Nicole’s appeal was the exact inversion – we could watch her do what she did and totally, guiltlessly, completely look down on her. Even her money was no obstacle. (“If only I had a hundred million dollars... think what I could do. Instead, it goes to a trashcan like her... Hoo hah!”)
Her idol, Marilyn Monroe, was more than just a ditsy blond bombshell - her two closest friends were straight from the top of Oscar and Tony royalty, Shelley Winters and Maureen Stapleton, who freely admitted she had as much acting talent as they did. Jayne Mansfield was a Phi Beta Kappa who played classical violin. And Lauren, Angie, Farrah, and Madonna - hell, even Suzanne Somers and Vanna White - all proved that they had more than just nice t*ts and a Cinerama smile to offer.
But Anna Nicole went beyond even the ditsiest bimbo – the poor thing could barely speak a coherent sentence. One of Kathy Griffin’s funniest routines was recalling the time they were co-panelists on Tom Bergeron’s Hollywood Squares, as Anna was in Xanax-ed oblivion while real, honest-to-God STARS like Little Richard, Chaka Khan and Ellen DeGeneres politely introduced themselves at the backstage dinner party. For all Anna seemed to affect, chewing polenta (“I thought it was mashed pataters!”) with her mouth open and slurring “Haiy” with limp handshake, they could just as well have been the cleaning crew.
|
|
Steve Ueckert/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
J. Howard Marshall II Houston trial, 2007
|
|
|
Yet Anna’s mandate lives on. Talented writers like Stephen Glass, Laura (“J.T. LeRoy”) Albert and James Frey consciously made the decision to cheat because it was hipper and hotter and more biffo-boffo that way. On Courteney Cox’s hit cable show Dirt, her fabulously despicable character, Lucy Spiller, merges two magazines (owned by the same media mogul) together – one her prize baby tabloid Dirt, the other a “respectable” news publication. Why even pretend that there's a difference?
The same week that Anna Nicole died, it was appropriately reported that a 29-year-old former assistant of controversial publishing doyenne Judith Regan is about to come out with a Devil Wears Prada-style roman-a-clef of her life as handmaiden to publishing’s Boss from Hell. A woman who makes deals with murderers, mistresses, high-profile junkies and Heidi Fleiss-style madams while refusing to return phone calls from young, unknown journalists and novelists working at Starbucks and Kinko’s. Why does this bee-atch take such a low road, you ask? Her title says it all: Because She Can.
And that was why Anna Nicole lived her life as she did. Because she could, not just because we could watch. I suppose all of us who traffic in those handy-dandy catchall phrases of “pop culture” writing and “arts journalism”, however much good Scouts we may be as individuals, have a few flecks of Anna Nicole’s blood on our hands. She would simply have had no place to go if it weren't for our enabling her, and she paid the price with her very life, which was by all accounts a living hell long before her actual death. She was the junkie; we were the pushers.
|
|
Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
At the 2004 World Music Awards
|
|
|
The aforementioned Times piece also added that the “lesson of Anna Nicole's life is that there is no lesson.” Au contraire. While she probably never really knew it, Anna Nicole had the courage to do something that few if any of us who are dependent on today's media-industrial complex for pay and stature would have ever dared to do ourselves.
Her life was a performance-art satire of an age when porno starlets, Presidential mistresses and even probable double-murderers really can get million-dollar book deals thrown at them – while a bunch of talented, anonymous authors and screenwriters get kicked to the back of the bus. Where people watch I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here! and can't wait to see how Simon Cowell & Co will destroy some pathetic wannabe this week. Anna Nicole was an “answer” to the monopoly media landscape that only Dante or Oscar Wilde, if not Paddy Chayevsky or Norman Lear or Robert Altman, could have come up with. She was the prophecies of Network, The Player and Dirt come true.
A world where six companies rule 100 channels, the Top 12 publishing houses, major billboards, cable companies, newspapers, and ISPs, and the major film studios, and two or three more own most major bookstores, station groups, and theatre chains. (And as such, have all of us young actors, scribes, and wannabe filmmakers and TV producers' b*lls on the ornament hood of their cars). A world where the marketing – or the media, rather than the medium – is the message.
[Telly Davidson, a regular FilmStew contributor, is the author of the brand new glossy paperback TV’s Grooviest Variety Shows of the ‘60s and ‘70s (Cumberland House). For more information, please click here.]
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|