The life and death of Anna Nicole Smith demonstrate our hatred for anyone who dares to pursue the American Dream using skills from their own class and culture of origin. We demand that socioeconomic migration be permitted only if the traveler promises to adopt enough white middle-class values to reaffirm that we have chosen virtuous ones. But they must retain enough of their premigration values to make us feel charitable in our welcoming of diversity. Those who argue that Anna Nicole Smith was born in the United States and therefore disqualified from an immigration narrative are willfully unfamiliar with the entirely foreign place that our nation’s poor actually live in. She did not have to physically leave a country, but she did have to arrive in what amounted to a new one.
The American Dream is to be pursued on strict terms dictated by a class of people who generally had the luxury of being born into a family that had already achieved the dream. We want everyone to pursue good grades and obedience in school, which culminates in acceptance to an institution of learning where one can find a degree that is often more ceremonial than useful. Anna dropped out as soon as she could. Those who find fortune without these accoutrements of middle-class respectability better have some enormous talent that got them where they are. Anna did not have any of the talents that we give any credit or credence to in America. And so Anna did not accept these terms.
This alleged lack of talent is what often makes her an object of derision even after her death. She could not act. She could not sing. Even as a stripper, she did not dance especially well. But what so many find objectionable about her, I think, is her greatest strength. We accept happily-ever-after stories of people with untapped talent trapped in little towns and grinding poverty who chance across the right opportunity to prove themselves. But Anna would have no such chance because she had no such talent. She wanted to be famous and didn’t have any of the tools or skills to make that happen. She was functionally illiterate and deeply traumatized. Yet she made it happen anyway. She turned nothing into something. And not just a cozy middle-class American life but an empire and a seat among icons. That is skill. That is ambition. I do not hesitate to say that it is genius.
There are few among even her most vocal sympathizers who would acknowledge her brilliance. It is customary instead for them to characterize the life of Anna Nicole Smith as one marred by tragedy. But it is more accurate to call it a life characterized by pain. In childhood she suffered undiagnosed pain and then endured abuse at the hands of her caregivers and, later, her partners. Her plastic surgeries came with their own particular set of agonies.
Much of Anna’s pain went dismissed or outright ignored during her life. In interviews, her family members are quick to roll their eyes at the idea that she suffered, dismissing her as dramatic, but her doctors took the claims more seriously. In 2010, Anna’s lawyer, Howard K. Stern, was charged with conspiring with two of her doctors to provide Anna with an excess of prescription drugs. A third doctor testified in the trial that he had met Anna in 2001 and began treating her for chronic pain, a condition she suffered from most of her life. This doctor said that Anna was indeed an addict but that she, too, had the right to pain relief.4 All charges were eventually dismissed.
Her plastic surgery provided another source of physical suffering. Much of it she did not disclose the details of, but it is fairly obvious when comparing photos across different years that her breasts were substantially enhanced. According to one account, she had two implants in each breast containing three pints of fluid, resulting in a 42DD bra size, which ruptured, according to multiple accounts. At one point the pain caused by her breast implants required “approximately three times the normal levels of Demerol to control her pain.” Yet in interviews no one thought to ask Anna about her health in regard to these implants, only to gawk in unison at the very disfigurement that made her worth talking to in the first place.
“I don’t know how any dictionary would define the word ‘family,’ but in Anna Nicole’s dictionary, it means ‘pain in the ass,’” Anna says in an episode of her show featuring her cousin Shelly. Those people with whom Anna shared blood and other bonds of kinship were often the quickest to condemn her. Everyone from distant cousins to her own mother and half siblings stood ready to jump in front of any camera that would switch on the red light for them in order to humiliate her with titillating details about her younger years. To read their accounts or watch them on video is an exercise in exploitation. Their tales of Anna’s youth usually meander quickly back to their own life stories, complete with a lot of dead-end marriages to deadbeat men in decaying towns that litter certain corners of Texas. Their stories, too, are marred by pain.
The most thorough of these accounts is an unauthorized biography called Train Wreck: The Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith, which was completed around the time of Anna’s death in 2007. I use the term “biography” loosely, because while it does chronicle many elements of Anna’s life, it also appears to be a work made up largely of speculation by her younger half sister, Donna Hogan, who offers the as-told-to account. It sheds far less light on who Anna Nicole Smith was as a person than it does on Donna. Reportedly, the two did not grow up together, and Anna didn’t speak to Donna for most of her adult life, making many of her already dubious claims sound absurd because there seems to be simply no way for her to have known them.
“You want to hear all the things she did to me? All the things she let my [stepfather] do to me, or let my brother do to me or my sister? All the beatings and the whippings and the rape? That’s my mother,” is how Anna described her upbringing to a television reporter, visibly shaking at the memory. Donna disputes these claims, as does her mother. “Her [Anna’s] claims of abuse were hugely exaggerated—she may have been disciplined under a strict hand, but she was never badly hurt nor sexually abused,” Donna writes before launching into a series of underhanded jabs at behaviors Anna exhibited that are considered hallmarks of people who have suffered abuse.5 It would be a lot to demand that people besides social workers or psychologists be aware of signs of abuse, but it is basic decency to trust a victim when she reports having been abused, which Anna did throughout her career.