Howard Marshall made her a national punchline. “Sharon Stone is a close second.”) Then, just as suddenly, her 1994 wedding at the age of 26 to 89-year-old Houston oil tycoon J. (“She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen without makeup,” the magazine’s photography editor, Marilyn Grabowski, who had been casting the magazine’s centerfolds since 1964, said at the time. It was a shrewd move, as it linked her image with one of the greatest American icons of all time, and it had a neat logic: one platinum-haired sex symbol taking after another, one poor, deprived child latching onto the success of another.”Īnna Nicole Smith first rose to celebrity as a dirt-poor single mother from Mexia, Texas, who went from rags to riches after being discovered by Playboy when she went to an open call for models at a boyfriend’s urging. “From the moment Anna Nicole got famous,” reporter Mimi Swartz later wrote in Texas Monthly, “she told the world that her role model was Marilyn Monroe. 8, 2007, Anna Nicole Smith occupied the story of the beautiful girl lifted up from the dust, and then the story of the beautiful woman destroyed, and sometimes both. And when the public finds out a goddess is in fact a striving mortal, this revelation will push her into a very different kind of myth: one whose satisfying conclusion comes not when a woman is exalted, but when she is destroyed.įrom 1992, when she made her first appearance in Playboy, to her death on Feb. It’s one thing to be chosen as a goddess it’s quite another to claw your way to the top of Mount Olympus. If the heroine's allure is the product of not just blind luck but sustained effort and intent - let alone strategic surgical alteration and courtship of wealthy benefactors, as Anna Nicole Smith’s was - then she is too powerful to remain sympathetic, and becomes an object of jealousy, rather than aspiration. Especially if she is to be remade as America’s next great sex symbol - as Anna Nicole Smith was in 1993, when she suddenly saturated American media, appearing on magazine covers, billboards, and screens of all kinds, and found herself touted as her decade’s Marilyn Monroe. Or 16-year-old Judy Turner, cutting class at Hollywood High School, going to a soda fountain, and being “discovered” as Lana - “discovered” being the operative word.įor the Hollywood origin stories we know to be satisfying, the heroine in question must have no idea she is worthy of such attention until she is suddenly rescued from obscurity. How does a woman turn from a mortal to an icon overnight? Think of Pamela Anderson, in a tight Labatt Blue shirt, at a football game with her friends, and finding herself featured on the stadium jumbotron long enough for the crowd - and later the world - to fall in love with her.
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