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Lifetime Photographer
Join Date: Nov 2002
Member GG#: 35309
Location: Atlanta
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IP: 68.211.191.193
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...in today's New York Times:
Why Did We Watch? The Answer Isn’t Pretty
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By CARYN JAMES
Published: February 10, 2007
Becoming famous is relatively easy: Anna Nicole Smith was born with a beautiful face, a big smile and a voluptuous body she was happy to bare for Playboy. Staying famous for nothing much is hard work, and that is the real story of Ms. Smith’s life and death. Her desperation for fame was so raw that she didn’t mind being the butt of the joke if it helped maintain her place in the spotlight. Her career started out tacky, went downhill from there and ultimately says more about the culture’s fascination with celebrity than it does about Anna Nicole Smith.
While most stars play a clever cat-and-mouse game with the media, Ms. Smith’s sport was Extreme Fame. Her sense of how to court attention was simply to show up, pose and practically say, “Come get me, use me.” In that blatant desire for publicity she embodied the ultimate symbiosis of celebrity: between an individual who acted as if life out of the spotlight were worthless, and a press and public eager to indulge her craving for attention.
But without any actual career to back up her claim on the public, the question becomes: why did we watch? The unsettlingly vapid reason: because we could. She was a glittery spectacle who offered guilt-free voyeurism, as we watched her dramas with drugs and weight and inheritance laws. And the lesson of her fame is that there is no lesson.
All the attempts to justify her fame that have flowed in since her death on Thursday are hollow. She was not Marilyn Monroe; the closest Ms. Smith came to a real movie career was a small role in the spoof “Naked Gun 331/3 : The Final Insult.” She was not a rags-to-riches inspiration; most little girls don’t dream of growing up to be Playmate of the Year, marrying an 89-year-old billionaire and fighting for his money all the way to the Supreme Court. And she was not a cautionary tale; she courted attention too relentlessly to seem innocent or deluded.
There was the ring of truth in what her mother told “Good Morning America” yesterday: that her daughter said, “If my name is out there in the news, good or bad doesn’t matter, good or bad I make money, so I’m going to do whatever it takes.” It says a lot about the bubble Ms. Smith lived in that even her mother, Virgie Arthur, communicated with her daughter through the media. On “Good Morning America,” Ms. Arthur said she had tried to warn her estranged daughter about her drug use, and had done so by appearing on the Nancy Grace show.
Ms. Smith’s lust for fame coincided with a media explosion she could exploit. After her weight ballooned, and her modeling career declined, she latched onto the reality television craze. But her two seasons of “The Anna Nicole Show” on E! revealed how inept she was at shaping an image. Her speech was slurred, her voice was whiny, her manner was demanding, and the curiosity that fed the ratings quickly dissipated. She seemed beyond pathetic by 2004, after she became a diet-product spokeswoman and showed off her newly slim body in another slurry appearance at the American Music Awards.
Her story took an indisputably tragic turn in September, when her 20-year-old son, Daniel, died days after Ms. Smith gave birth to a daughter. Yet even then she couldn’t rise above the lurid nature of her fame. She sold photographs of her son and newborn in the hospital room where he died to In Touch magazine; even now, video of her Caesarean section is available on YouTube.
And soon an ugly paternity battle over the infant broke out in a flurry of media interviews, with two men claiming to be the father: Larry Birkhead, a former boyfriend, and Howard K. Stern, Ms. Smith’s longtime lawyer and confidant. (He seemed glued to her on the reality show.) It’s no surprise that Mr. Stern announced his fatherhood on “Larry King Live,” with Ms. Smith by his side.
The messiness of her death — its unknown cause, the continuing legal battles about the inheritance and the little girl’s paternity — have made its aftermath just as media-centric as her life, with cable news channels trotting out a parade of casual former boyfriends, sometime-friends and estranged relatives.
Donna Hogan, Ms. Smith’s half-sister, talked to Larry King on the phone about her forthcoming book (announced long before Ms. Smith’s death), predictably called “Train Wreck: Anna Nicole Unauthorized.” Ms. Hogan said she hadn’t seen her sister in about a decade.
And while commentators are struggling to find meaning in her life, the responses to her death in the hours just after it was announced may more accurately reflect the public attitude toward her as a joke who drew gawkers rather than fans.
Many reactions seemed to defy the usual courtesy of not speaking ill of the dead. A post by the Web site Wonkette.com said, “the dope-addicted floozy Anna Nicole Smith keeled over dead in a Florida hotel about an hour ago,” a fast turnaround of irreverence even for the Internet. Geraldo Rivera on the Fox News Channel put the blame for Ms. Smith’s sorry life on Mr. Stern, saying, “He’s a pimp,” who sold her to the media. (What does that make her?) And even Larry King, the friendliest of anchors, told Wolf Blitzer that Ms. Smith was “not the smartest person in the world” before praising her good humor and good heart.
The news of her death brought the inevitable jolt that comes when anyone dies suddenly at 39. And there is the inescapable tragedy of a 5-month-old left without her mother. But Anna Nicole Smith’s fame is as sad and shallow in death as it was in life, just as much of a tawdry compact between her and us.
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