An American Death
It will be easy to sneer at
the death of Anna Nicole Smith, because the media frenzy will be off-putting and because Smith herself didn't always seem to have much self-respect. Already the manufacturers of high culture are writing about her disdainfully, like
these two (female) reporters from the Times:
Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy centerfold, actress and television personality who was famous, above all, for being famous, but also for being sporadically rich and chronically litigious, was found dead on Thursday....
I can't say that her death rises to the level of the tragic; it is probably closer to the pathetic. But still—let's pause for a moment to consider.
Smith wasn't "famous for being famous"; she was famous for being a sex symbol, which is something altogether different and considerably more interesting. Nor was she "sporadically rich and chronically litigious"—what a condescending, bitchy little remark that is, in the first sentence of someone's death notice. (The only litigation Smith was involved in that I can think of was brought against her by someone else.)
The Times goes on to say,
Ms. Smith, at least in her mature years, was obtrusively voluptuous and almost preternaturally blonde.
That's a snarky way of saying that she was a thin, flat-chested teenager who remade herself into a (very) buxom blonde. "Obtrusively voluptuous." Would a Times reporter ever be allowed to inject such snark into an article about a man who died?
I won't say that there is great profundity in Smith's life and death. Much of the former was tawdry, and probably the latter will turn out to be the same.
Still, there was something distinctly, wonderfully American in her story, whether we care to admit that or not. Her real name was Vicki Lynn Hogan. She grew up in Mexia, Texas, population about 6,000, located,
as its own website says, "at the intersection of U.S. Highway 84 and State Highways 14 and 171." Embedded in that self-description is a claim—"We exist! Really!"—and a plea—"Please visit."
She would marry when she was 16, give birth to a child at 18, divorce the same year. She was a rural Texas girl from a white-trash family—and I'm not a fan of that phrase, but if any family ever merited it, Smith's did—of no particular schooling or intelligence who used the only real asset she had, her body, to advance herself. After changing her name, one of the great American means of remaking yourself, she went from working in a topless bar to
the pages of Playboy to a Guess! jeans model, which may not sound like much to some of us but is, in American popular culture, a perfectly legitimate upward progression. We can trace this from Ben Franklin to Sister Carrie to Jay Gatz to Bill Clinton. It is possible that, when men follow such a progression, they are celebrated, and when women do, they are disrespected—even by other women.
And though her physique and her looks were not always constant, and
her body was so curvy it was almost cartoon-esque, there is no question that, for a time, Smith was truly beautiful. If you were to choose one woman over the past twenty years who
epitomized the American sex symbol, no one else would even come close.
Like many women, Smith married for money—she was just more over the top about it than most. (She was more over the top about everything than most.) Her husband, Texas billionaire J. Howard Marshall, was about 130 years old at the time of their marriage. Well, so what? Each, presumably, gave the other what he or she wanted, and who are we to judge?
When Marshall died and left the bulk of his fortune to Smith, his family sued and
the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Thus we were treated to the spectacle of a Playboy pin-up walking up the steps of the United States Supreme Court in Washington. The case may not have been of enduring importance—but again, there is something powerfully American in the image of a Playboy pin-up getting her day in court, just like the rest of us, and not just any court but the highest court in the land. Our democracy extends from the high to the low, and that moment encompassed everything in between. Mocking it misses what is inspiring about it.
Her life seemed to have spiraled out of control in the last few months, after the death of her son occurred almost simultaneously with the birth of a new daughter of uncertain lineage. She died yesterday in—where else?—a
Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on a Florida Indian reservation. (A slip of the tongue, and it's the "hard luck hotel and casino.") Her body was taken to a hospital in a town called Hollywood.
Think of all that is American in this—the strains of heritage and culture and fable, of gambling and glitz and illusion and heartbreak.
That, I think, was Anna Nicole Smith's genius, if not her intelligence: She believed so deeply, so uncritically, in a certain kind of American dream, that everything she did fulfilled it, even the manner in which she died.
And though some of the carping creators of elite culture may not approve, there is something quite sad and moving in that, something that tells us a bit about our country and its myths. For who among us can say that, if we were born Vicki Lynn Hogan, to a poor, uneducated family in the dusty town of Mexia, Texas, we would have not dreamed the exact same dream that she did?
