The Meaning of Anna-Nicole
By Zachary Sire
I can still remember that surreal Thursday afternoon, standing dumbstruck in my living room with a tuna fish sandwich in one hand and the TV remote in the other, when Wolf Blitzer announced that Anna-Nicole Smith had died. I’ll never forget it. At home for what was supposed to be a quick lunch break, I was compelled to forego the rest of my day’s plans and sit in front of the television.
In a move usually reserved for terrorist attacks or natural disasters, Blitzer’s CNN program, The Situation Room, abandoned its routine political and international affairs reporting in favor of Breaking News on Anna-Nicole. On The Situation Room set, an enormous wall of multi-tiered video screens traditionally used for remote shots of places like Baghdad or the White House and for correspondence with people like Christiane Amanpour or Henry Kissinger was now showing file footage of Anna-Nicole Smith in a hot tub.
Then there was Anna-Nicole in her infamous “Like my body?” Trim-Spa ads, followed by incoherent award show appearances, reality show clips, a cameo in "Naked Gun 33 1/3," and various modeling photos. The images shuffled and flipped on the video wall behind Blitzer, the author of Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook, like a deck of dirty playing cards, alternately sexy then sad, sexy, sad.
But Blitzer didn’t waiver, tossing to reporters on the scene at the Hard Rock Hotel in Florida, consulting with medical experts on how Anna-Nicole might have died, and, less than an hour after her death, calling in legal experts for analysis on the fate of her questionable fortune.
Things were even more frantic on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto. Cavuto, a more portly, quieter version of Bill O’Reilly, had been about to start an interview with Clint Eastwood when the news of Anna-Nicole’s death broke. Rather than keep Mr. Eastwood waiting, Fox cut away from a police press conference outside the Hard Rock to proceed with the interview. Of course, Cavuto’s first question was in regards to Anna-Nicole.
“Anna-Nicole Smith has died […] and she was sort of a whimsical character in the eyes of the press; a here-again, gone-again celebrity…” he prefaced, before asking the bewildered Eastwood, “How do you feel?”
An obviously uninterested Eastwood replied as only he could: “I feel fine.” Then he added, “I’m sorry that life ended tragically for this lady.”
Lady?
Whimsical?
But it wasn’t the death of Anna-Nicole Smith that was so shocking. What struck me (and undoubtedly anyone else with a passing interest in things like dignity or relevance) was that people like Wolf Blitzer and Clint Eastwood were talking about the death of Anna-Nicole Smith. What about Iraq? Darfur, anyone? Lingering effects of Katrina? At the very least, could somebody please give me an update on that crazy astronaut in a diaper?
Over the course of the afternoon, I displayed my outrage over the lack of real news by channel surfing from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, and by checking the front page of Yahoo! news, the celebrity gossip blogs, and Drudge, but it was all Anna, all the time. I put some popcorn in the microwave (I had finished the tuna sandwich), poured myself a Diet Coke, propped up some pillows on the couch (might as well get comfortable), and settled in. I wasn’t prepared to leave my post in front of the television and my laptop until there was some sort of substantive report on Global Warming or Hillary Clinton or…Sugar-Pie, Anna-Nicole’s dog?
Something was happening to me. I needed answers. I needed a sign that responsible journalism was alive and well. Most importantly, I needed to know how Anna-Nicole died and whether or not she had a will. What?! Four to six weeks for a toxicology report? Come on! I wouldn’t be surprised if Howard K. Stern had something to do with this…he’s always rubbed me the wrong way.
And so somewhere between the tuna and Larry King Live a metamorphosis occurred in me, in everyone maybe, that allowed for all of this. This cultural tendency towards all that is sensational and naughty and significantly meaningless. It rears its seductive head ever so coyly so that we might gawk, most of us never admitting that we enjoy the gawking, until we finally succumb. Accepting the coverage of Anna-Nicole’s death was the right thing to do, in part, because it was the only thing we could do.
By all means, the nonstop, endless, knockdown, drag-out reporting on Anna-Nicole was not only appropriate—it was a public service. It was simple supply and demand. If you build it, they will come. Trickle-down Anna-Nomics. If an Anna-Nicole falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Who cares? My name is Zach and I’m an Anna-Holic.
***
Obsession with Anna-Nicole permeated all forms of media because there were endless developments and angles from which to report, and no single media outlet was more tuned in to our addiction than Entertainment Tonight. For weeks after she died, ET devoted the majority, if not all, of its 30-minute nightly programming to Anna-Nicole. Highlights included video of Howard K. Stern’s tearful reunion with his alleged daughter Dannielynn in the Bahamas, “unseen” archive interviews with Anna-Nicole, courtroom recaps of the trial determining the fate of Anna-Nicole’s body, and a chilling re-enactment of Anna-Nicole’s private nurse discovering her body (Anna’s actual nurse participated in the re-enactment while an ET staffer stood in for Anna’s body).
Striving for authenticity, ET used a Hard Rock hotel room with a floor plan matching Anna-Nicole’s old room, and the nurse got a chance to show off some acting ability. Accompanied by a sweeping and mournful piano soundtrack, the nurse approached “Anna-Nicole’s” bed and recited her name as if questioning a lint brush.
“Anna?” she said. With the same inflection: “Anna. Wake up.” She limply pulled on the ET staffer’s pretend limp wrist and broke character to tell the camera, “I could tell something was wrong when she didn’t answer me and her hand just sort of plopped down on the bed,” before plopping said hand down on the bed and shrugging her shoulders with a sort of “are we done yet?” ennui. Ok, it wasn’t exactly Hamlet but what do you want from a private nurse?
In a similar vein, the National Enquirer magazine published photos of Anna-Nicole’s decomposing body. The photos weren’t real, of course, but were an artist’s rendering of what her body might have looked like three weeks after rotting in a morgue and awaiting burial. But creating the blue-lipped and green-skinned corpse took more than just Photoshop wizardry; the pictures were based on “eyewitness accounts,” according to the accompanying story.
"If you had our images side-by-side with the actual photos,” Enquirer editor in chief David Perel said, “I don't know if you'd be able to tell them apart."
The images quickly penetrated the internet, blogs and message boards, which hyperventilated with their usual mix of speculation, hate speech, and, of course, “OMG.” User comments on the photos that were posted to the gossip blog dlisted.com included, “She looks better here than while alive!” and, my favorite, “That is sick and tacky and disgusting! I love it!”
Web traffic on the blogs exploded in the days after the death of Anna-Nicole Smith, rivaling the audiences of traditional media and ensconcing the online medium as a valid source for news. “ANS,” an acronym bloggers had adopted in undoubted exhaustion over having to type her full name so many times, had drawn a record 5.5 million “unique hits” to websites like perezhilton.com, which clearly provided an outlet for working people to commiserate in the privacy of their cubicles.
After clocking out, these same people, along with millions of others, went home and watched television, catapulting Entertainment Tonight to its highest ratings period since the week after Janet Jackson exposed her nipple during the Super Bowl. On the Thursday, February 8th telecast alone (the first day of coverage), ET ratings were up 33% from the previous Thursday (an unbelievable feat for a syndicated show), and hadn’t been that high since the day after the Academy Awards in 2004. In fact all of the media, including newspapers and local news broadcasts, had benefited from the Anna-Nicole Smith or ANS story because it had multiple layers from which all types of media could pick and choose and then cobble into the kind of story they would ordinarily report on anyway: legal, financial, human interest, tabloid, or medical. The pegs, and the entertainment, were perpetual.
Granted, it’s not revelatory to admit that it doesn’t take much to entertain people in a culture dominated by amateur singing competitions, shrill political punditry, and the televised entrapment of pedophiles. And the successes enjoyed by ET et al. will only serve to fuel the notion that it provides what we want regardless of whether or not anyone asked for it in the first place (the media have no use for “chicken/egg” type musings—their best indicator has always been their profit margin). But the fact that shoddy re-enactments and phony pictures delivered record ratings and increased revenues does reveal something about our thirst for insider access (e.g. The Insider, Access Hollywood) to the lives (or deaths) of famous people and, perhaps more acutely, it reveals our striving for basic knowledge and connection during tragedy.
It wasn’t enough to merely know that Anna-Nicole had died in a hotel room or that her body lay unburied, there was something of greater and more immediate value in actually watching it happen for real, even though re-enactments are by definition “unreal,” with our own eyes. That, or re-enactments are just entertaining in general, no matter the subject. A bevy of re-enactment laden 9/11 and Amy Fisher TV movies have proven that.
Such an attractive faux reality also helps to explicate the appeal of the pre-dead Anna-Nicole. Because when she was breathing, stripping, posing, marrying, divorcing, stuttering, and gallivanting from one unbelievable scenario to the next, she was just absurd enough to seem unreal, and yet just fallible enough, just human enough to be thought of as somewhat accessible; the kind of girl who’d share her lip gloss with you. And what could possibly be more unreal and alluring than this buxom chimera, this embodiment of the American Dream, platinum blonde and out of reach, out of her mind even, who was savvy enough to have gone from being a honky-tonk Texas waitress to dying on the cusp of becoming a millionaire four hundred times over. Anna-Nicole, whether we believed it because the media had obscured the chasm between the celebrity and the civilian, or because it fulfilled our innate need to be close to the fabulous, was just like us.
This is not to say that Anna-Nicole shared our values or had lived life as commonly as someone like me (fascinating and charismatic as I may be), nor is it suggesting that we were only interested in her because she was a train wreck. We related to her because her pursuit of happiness in the face of so many failures was a commonality among us. Hers was that great American narrative wherein the heroine, pitted against insurmountable odds, achieves the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. She was like a classic fiction character (some have been reminded of Dickens, or at least Jackie Collins) whose story had all the trappings of grand and romantic literature: a childhood in semi-poverty, a youth of quasi-prostitution, a wedding to an elderly millionaire, the death of her beloved son, and her declining reputation in the public sphere. She even dies in the end.
To be less literary about it, and to point to its explicitly American details, there was, in no particular order, her marriage to the oil tycoon she met while working as a stripper, her fluctuating weight, a tumultuous relationship with drugs and alcohol, a Supreme Court inheritance battle, the overdose of her adult son three days after the birth of her daughter, the paternity of her daughter, her dropping out of high school at 17 to marry a man she met while working at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken (she had also worked at a Red Lobster), the Playboy spread, the reality show, and, most importantly, the obsession with her very own heroine, that other great American narrative called Marilyn Monroe.
Anna-Nicole had always, even at the peak of her success, dreamed of being something other than what she was. And for every friend, spokesperson, groupie, lawyer, personal stylist, or Bahamian ice cream truck driver who told us she was Larger Than Life, there were equal voices that referred to her as having lived The American Dream. How could we not root for her when she was alive? How could we not grieve for her after her death?
***
Many in the media were quick to mock Anna-Nicole and to take issue with the coverage surrounding her. On The Situation Room, the cantankerous Jack Cafferty, who reads viewer e-mails to Blitzer at the end of each hour, rhetorically asked in the midst of the coverage on the day she died, “Anna-Nicole still dead, Wolf?” Later, on Anderson Cooper’s self-important Anderson Cooper 360, Anderson Cooper announced he would not be reporting on the Anna-Nicole story because, he said, “There’s a war on. There’s a war on. There’s a war on.” (He would later end up reporting on the court proceedings regarding her burial.) And Judge Judy Sheindlin, appearing on Larry King Live, had this to say:
The entertainment industry […] seems to be devoting an inordinate time to this nonsense, and you and I both know that in the scheme of the world where we are today, this is really irrelevant. I mean, we are about to embark upon a great election where we might elect the first African-American president, the first woman president of the United States. And every time you turn on the television, all you see are pictures of Anna-Nicole Smith.This, from the woman who made a career out of awarding damages to people who got bad perms.
Regular people had harsh words for the media too. I overheard a woman at my Aunt's birthday party say, “You know, all this [Anna-Nicole] crap is just a trick that the Republicans pulled to distract us from what’s really going on, and [the media] are letting them get away with it!” She may have had a few glasses of wine, but insinuating that the GOP had assassinated Anna-Nicole seemed a bit much. Or, she could have been trying to suggest that the Republican Party controlled the media, but this wasn’t exactly a cutting-edge observation. Even if her allegations were true, it’s nothing new.
The media don’t need to be controlled by the Republicans in order to behave irresponsibly. This is, after all, the same media that allowed for claims of WMD in Iraq to go unchecked and unverified. Surely, the media that couldn’t investigate a flimsy and easily discredited excuse for war couldn’t be expected to ever tell us what was “really going on,” not that they or my Aunt's friend ever knew what was “really going on” from one minute to the next anyway. But blaming and ridiculing a dead woman for attracting our full attention—that was easy.
This is, after all, the same media that chose to investigate why Britney Spears shaved her head, but couldn’t quite explain what Scooter Libby had been found guilty of. This is laissez-faire journalism, with occasional crybabies like Cafferty and Cooper who feign stirring the pot either by being crass (of course she was “still dead”), or patronizing (there’s a “war on”), respectively, but fail to realize that their paychecks are dependent upon the very stories that they are so loathe to report. And this is still the same media that spent years covering JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson but never had a harsh word to say about them (apparently those two weren’t sexy or outrageous enough to be demonized).
Even if those who criticized the Anna-Nicole coverage were justified (they weren’t), at what point did it become ok to attack Anna-Nicole herself? You can’t shoot the messenger if she’s already dead.
But it continued. Judge Judy’s tirade on Larry King was perhaps the most vitriolic, and yet as sad as her words were (Anna-Nicole’s daughter would one day be aware of everything that everyone was saying), there was an irony in them that finally revealed the truth behind why Anna-Nicole, and all the coverage, mattered. Judge Judy said:
I don't know one thing she did. Can you tell me what she did? I mean, was she—did she write anything that I should know about? Or did she paint anything…that I should know about? Did she create anything? Did she act in a wonderful movie? Did she—what did she do? She married an old guy and he died and then there was a lawsuit.
It took me a few hours on the afternoon that she died to realize that Anna-Nicole had mattered for precisely the reasons that Judge Judy had listed. That someone who had not achieved anything Important was garnering such attention meant that the meaning of his or her life was fleeting and subjective, that meaning itself was meaningless. It meant that Anna-Nicole was just as meaningless, based on the amount of coverage, as someone like Gerald Ford, and that means something. The never elected president who had died shortly before Anna-Nicole was praised because he had once been the president, but what else did we know about him? He had fourteen funerals and Anna-Nicole could barely get one, but the girl who didn’t “do anything” will be remembered far more affectionately than he.
I’d much rather care about those who lived and died without seeming to matter because it means we’re all on an even keel. Who better to emulate than someone who made nothing out of nothing but still made it look like something? Anna-Nicole is an inspiration to so many of us who will die having achieved nothing; so many us of who will not or can not see her death as any sort of result of having lived a “get rich quick,” “lose weight fast,” “Like My Body?” “Who’s Your Daddy?” life—when that’s just what it was, a tragic and fitting denouement.
Because we are of a culture that doesn’t care for context or consequence, it’s easier for us to assert that the only reason Anna-Nicole died was because it was “her time” instead of getting "real" and admitting that she was doomed from the start. We like to gloss. Romanticize. Whimsicalize. Anna-Nicole is, if nothing else, an inspiration to so many of us who like dreams, particularly those of the American persuasion. And especially those we can watch, from beginning to end, on TV.
