Jealousy and judgment ooze from every page of this embarrassing document, but so, too, do personal suffering and self-doubt. Donna had the misfortune of living with their biological father, Donald, a man who was by all accounts a monstrous person who divvied up his time between low-level crime, animal torture, and severe physical and emotional abuse of his partners and children. Following a trip to Los Angeles to see Anna, Donald allegedly lamented to his son and Anna’s younger half brother Donnie, “It’s tough when you want to do your own daughter.” Since Anna had the good fortune to not share a home with this man, one cannot blame Donna for seeing her life as anything but charmed by comparison.
Donna was not alone among Anna’s family in her compulsion to report to tabloids and entertainment shows. Anna’s cousin Shelly features prominently in a documentary about Anna titled Dark Roots: The Unauthorized Anna Nicole. It is during the filming of this documentary that Shelly shows up unannounced at Anna’s door while the shooting of her reality show is in progress. Shelly appears thin in a way that hints at a predilection for methamphetamine more than rigorous exercise, her teeth are blackened, and her prematurely aged face appears even more worn out as she grows distraught when Anna’s attorney, Howard, tells her that Anna does not wish to see her. Shelly appears desperate to just be in near to Anna, breaking down in tears and leaving a pile of photos at her doorstep. The photos feature a sickly infant; it is implied that the child is one of Shelly’s five children, though this is never made explicit.
Anna looks through the photos and eventually relents. “I wanted to see a piece of my family and hear what everybody was up to,” she explains. Despite the frequent protestations Anna made against her family for taking advantage of her fame, there is evident warmth and care between the two women when they take Shelly to dinner. “I’m still your big sister,” Anna says to Shelly, both of them in tears at their reunion. “You don’t have a painkiller, do you? I’ve got a migraine and my back is killin’ me,” Shelly whispers to Anna at the dinner table. The shot cuts away as Anna digs around for her purse, in search of a pill. When they part ways, Shelly is crying again, frantically repeating “I love you” to Anna before whispering, “I gotta ask you, can I borrow a couple of dollars?” As Anna’s car drives away, Shelly gazes longingly at it, drunk on tequila shots and the exhilaration of being in close proximity to the living evidence that it is possible to escape the place from which they came. There is footage on YouTube with the title “Anna Nicole Smith’s Toothless Cuz Shelly,” wherein Shelly is visibly hung over and apparently in pain, yet prompted to keep talking. It was taken the following day, presumably by the Dark Roots crew. She is disoriented and eventually cuts the already awkward interview short in order to vomit. There is an unkindness to the video that signals it is not the mother of five from Texas whose teeth rot from her mouth and whose children are ill at home doing the exploiting in the scenario, but rather those standing behind the camera.
“I love Texas but it looks a whole lot better in my rearview mirror,” Anna says in the eighth episode of the first season of her reality show.6 Texas represented not only the physical spaces where Anna suffered the neglect and abuse of her early life, but the family that so often betrayed her. These humble beginnings in forgotten Texas towns and her ascent to fame are already well-known to most people who had a cable connection and a predilection for tabloid vulgarity in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her story featured in a very popular episode of E! True Hollywood Story, and she appeared in countless stories on shows like Entertainment Tonight and The Insider.
These programs, alongside their more erudite cousins in the form of high-end profiles and interviews, have produced a kind of new American mythology wherein celebrities serve as our national heroes instead of the patriots or politicians of yesteryear. Anna’s breast implant stories are akin to tales of George Washington’s wooden teeth; her marriage to an ancient billionaire is a lower-brow version of the Kennedy-Monroe affair. Anna’s often-retold biography offers a cautionary tale at its conclusion but primarily serves as a vehicle for telling the stories that illuminate why we valued or gave attention to a certain person in a particular place and time.
When people first came to value Anna, it was for her physical appearance. The very body that produced the pains she struggled against became her greatest asset when she was a stripper in a Houston club called Rick’s Plaza. It was this physical self, so beautiful in its shape and in the face that adorned it, that drew the attention of J. Howard Marshall. “The family all spoke of Anna’s super-rich admirer as ‘Old Man Howard,’ figuring him for a pervert; they didn’t believe a word of her protestations about how much she loved him and actually felt sorry for him,” writes Donna.
The eighty-eight-year-old Texas billionaire who would become Anna’s husband often plays the role of a hapless senior citizen in her story. Marshall appears in only a handful of photos with Anna and is mostly remembered for one where he appears in a wheelchair and Anna is kissing his cheek. Marshall looks frail with old age and pocked with ill health but is smiling big in the presence of his beloved, whom he would often refer to as the “love of my life.” People see him and think the poor old thing never stood a chance against the deception and gold-digging of the unscrupulous Anna Nicole Smith, but taking the time to look at Marshall not as a perpetual octogenarian but as a multidimensional human being tells a different story. J. Howard Marshall had a sharper mind even in old age than he was given credit for and did not exactly wheel into Rick’s Plaza under the impression that it was a storefront church or an early bird buffet. He possessed, by all accounts, a brilliant ability in law and business and was a successful legal scholar before he turned his focus to energy investment. And he was not new to dalliances with young, beautiful women. A decade earlier, he had a notable affair with another stripper named Jewell Dianne “Lady” Walker, on whom he lavished jewelry and inappropriately high-level business roles at his companies.