Letter From the Editor—021507
For the week of Feb. 4-9, The Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that Iraq Policy occupied 12 percent of the television news reporting; events in Iraq took 10 percent; Anna Nicole Smith, the force of a nation behind her, had 9 percent. Anna Nicole Smith died Feb. 8, leaving her less than two days to ratchet up ratings.
Within hours, an anonymous vandal edited Smith’s Wikipedia entry. Viewers called into CNN to protest the station’s continued coverage of the event. A patrimony suit ensued, involving her longtime partner, Howard Stern, her ex-boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, the cryogenically frozen sperm of her second husband, J. Howard Marshall, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, and a former bodyguard.
This was news, and the public couldn’t stand it.
Before this week only two public deaths had ever had a sustained impact on me. Like a dutiful American housewife, I remember exactly where I was when Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. were announced dead. The third will be Anna Nicole Smith (I was in the Spectator offices).
Kennedy carried the name of American royalty; Diana was of an even more celebrated line. Each had seen turmoil—the bar exam; divorce—only to melodramatically re-emerge with a middle-brow magazine or a very rich boyfriend. All his flunking, all her indiscretion, all criticism subsided for the glorious, stifling spectacle of death.
A New York Times column published after Smith’s death accused her of exploiting the media for her selfishness: “Anna Nicole Smith’s fame is as sad and shallow in death as it was in life.” What is it that people are so offended by?
From the beginning, Smith was a grotesque replica of her fatefully chosen role model Marilyn Monroe. Like Monroe, she was rescued by Hollywood from poverty, premature marriage, and a dreadful given name—Vickie Lynn Hogan. While Monroe got Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio, and cuckolded Jackie O, Smith got a liver-spotted octogenarian. Monroe’s minor plastic surgery went unmentioned; Smith’s 42DD unmentionables were anything but. Marx reminds us that history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.
But America lifted Smith, no matter her faults. Viewers made her television show a gruesome ratings coup. She was poised to secure her widower’s millions.
Since childhood, Smith had escaped into her future—when she got there, the emptiness was in her outmatched eyes—even her trusty breast implants leaked. And three days after her daughter, Dannielynn, was born, her son died.
The Times was right: Smith’s fame was bought cheap. Her fluctuating weight occupied the same headlines as her obituary. Even shock-jock Howard Stern took pity on her. Smith’s suicide, her final, Cleopatran act of despair, amounts to camp. That is Anna Nicole Smith’s offense: How could a woman that animal have access to so much sadness?
Naysayers be warned: there’s a little Anna in all of us.