It would be a relief that she died so soon after Daniel were it not for the daughter she left behind: Dannielynn Birkhead. Her father, Larry Birkhead, is not especially present in the ghoulish fairy tale of Anna Nicole Smith’s life, but there is a trail of slime left by his actions, too. “That’s the one thing that I’m most proud of that I’ve done, trying to keep everything as normal as I can, in just a really crazy, crazy situation,” Birkhead told Entertainment Tonight without a hint of irony in 2015.10 Every year he takes Dannielynn to the Kentucky Derby, where he met Anna, and every time, the child creates a media spectacle with her startling resemblance to her mother. When she was six years old, Dannielynn began appearing in GUESSkids advertisements, circumventing the more salacious channels that Anna had to wade through in order to be considered worth looking at with clothes on. The girl appears happy, but to those of us raised on Anna Nicole’s suffering, we can’t help but wonder when the other shoe will drop.
In the same first episode where Anna watched the news in such dismay, she was encouraged by Howard K. Stern to endorse Israeli military action when news of the Second Intifada came on the screen. She looks shell-shocked and says, “I know nothin’ ’bout nothin’.” And while her scoffing critics would see this as a moment of clarity for the idiotic Texan who happened upon the billions, I see a calculated move to deny culpability. She knows all too well the conflicts that grow from taking sides and the violence of arbitrary allegiance, and she knows that at the end of the day, all she wants is the love of her family. Her rejection of her station in life was duly punished by some members of her family and by the press, but their attempts to destroy her could not thwart the enduring love that made her fight for the family she cobbled together herself. It is perhaps a small victory that it was not the injuries inflicted by the public eye that would kill her, but the final pain of a heart held together by will and wit, breaking at the death of the one she loved more than all the raindrops in the world and all the fishies in the sea.
A Bigger Fairy Tale
On Anjelica Huston and the Inheritance of Glamour
MY FRIEND PHOEBE SPENT SEVERAL years working at the Anthropologie clothing store in Santa Monica, where seeing celebrities was common enough to warrant an informal store policy about not losing one’s shit in their presence. For the most part, employees were able to hold it together. I’ve been treated to many stories about the antics of celebrities on shopping excursions, most notably that Alec Baldwin is a goofball dad to shop with and Helena Bonham Carter likes to get buck naked in the communal area of the fitting rooms. But my favorite is the story of Phoebe helping Anjelica Huston find a jewelry box as a gift and keeping her cool throughout, only to have two boneheads at the register fuck it right up when the striking actress approached to pay.
“I know who you are! You’re an actress! ADDAMS FAMILY!” shouted Enoch, a grown-ass man. “I loved you in The Royal Tenenbaums, personally,” said Ray, yet another grown-ass man who simply could not be cool for five minutes around Anjelica Huston. Phoebe recalls that Anjelica was generally gracious and good-natured about it but doesn’t remember much because, she reports, “I immediately went into the back office, mortified, and sat on the floor for like five minutes.” For a certain type of American girl raised on the distant glamour of 1970s Hollywood, being embarrassed in front of Anjelica is tantamount to having a bucket of pig’s blood poured on you at the prom.
I was just too young to be introduced to Anjelica Huston, the Oscar-winning actress of Prizzi’s Honor and the long-term partner of Jack Nicholson, to develop an admiration of her based on these accomplishments. Instead, I was raised on an exceptional fear of her. When I was five, her pointed features and raven hair were perfectly befitting the charismatic leader of a brutal, child-loathing coven in the film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and the same served her well as Morticia Addams in the reboot of The Addams Family the following year. It is for this iconic role that Phoebe’s colleague had such an enthusiastic response. To him, Anjelica was a piece of nostalgia. But for a certain type of girl who grows out of children’s films and seeks a specific kind of feminine magic in the pages of Hollywood history, Anjelica Huston might as well have been born on Mount Olympus.
I spent my childhood and adolescence devouring celebrity scandals and gossip, but it was not until meeting Phoebe in college that I turned the interest backward in time in search of more worthy legends from Hollywood. I was amazed by Phoebe’s wealth of knowledge in matters ranging from pop culture to high art and still wonder how she came to possess it. She inexplicably knew how to speak Italian and bought fur stoles on a whim and recounted Hollywood legends with a familiarity that suggested she’d witnessed the scandalous events with her own eyes. Phoebe and I took a road trip from New York to California in 2008 when we were both twenty-three and stopped at a large, cavernous thrift store in South Dakota along the way. With its massive inventory of both classic and kitsch vintage goods, it would have been a gold mine in a major metropolitan area. Phoebe bought a basket full of well-maintained old magazines, including a 1990 Vanity Fair with Anjelica on the cover and the headline “Anjelica Huston Hots Up: Life After Jack.” Phoebe tells me that Anjelica Huston first came to her attention in a different Vanity Fair spread that was dedicated to portraits of Hollywood dynasties. “All of the other families were mugging, leaning into each other, looking relatable and comfortable,” she told me. “Then I turned the page and it was the Hustons. Standing in a line, wearing mostly black, nobody smiling with teeth, against a kind of bleak outdoor terrain. It goes without saying that this was the Hollywood family I would want to join.” The gods, after all, do not have anyone to impress with smiling. The 1990 cover is shot in the desert, and Anjelica wears a sparkling red off-the-shoulder evening gown and matching pumps, with a bold but coy grin animating her handsome face. It is in sharp contrast to the family portrait but at home in her tradition of remaining elegant even when she is being defiant.