2007-02-10 - 2:46 p.m.
Ahhh, that poor Anna Nicole Smith. Did you hear? She’s dead. I must confess that the story fascinates me. A young fellow with whom I chat on line frequently noted that the former stripper and gold digger’s demise was a bit of a “tragicomedy.” I actually consider it more on the line of grand opera. She had everything! She had money, friends – but she could not buy happiness. Nor could she buy class and intelligence! Or at least so it seemed from her cultivated TV and public persona.
If you wished to relate it to the narrative form, which is something all script readers do when they gossip about any news story, you would say that the writer of the story started out by making Anna Nicole Smith a buffa comic character whom one laughed at – and then turned her into a tragic heroine. Create sympathy through laughter – and then play on the sympathy with tragedy.
It’s such a sad story, really. And it’s so obvious that the woman quite simply never recovered from the death of her beloved son, six months earlier. I daresay they will find drugs in her system – how could there not be? But it doesn’t matter: You and I both know she died of a broken heart. She had everything in the world, and yet she still felt the need to essentially commit suicide. See? Operatic.
Someone I was talking to noted with some asperity that “we’re never going to hear anything else but all this Anna Nicole stuff.” But, really, why would you WANT to hear any other news story? I mean, what story is more arresting to our base imagination? I would be happy to hear nothing but Anna Nicole news all day and all night. Other news stories of the day simply pale in interest in comparison. What other tale can possible be as absorbing?
Certainly not the story of Speaker of the House Pelosi’s use of a jumbo jet to fly from Washington to California (and I don’t get what possible rationale there is for ridiculing her for wanting such a jet, since her district is out here – it plays totally like anti-West Coast bias). Nor the story of this stupid Astronaut Lady who was plotting to kill her romantic rival. Though I must admit that is one awfully good story. I don’t know the details of the crazy Astronaut’s story, but I must admit I love the idea of this woman with all these glittering prizes suddenly turning out to be a self destructive, maniacal freak-a-zoid. Warms the cockles of my heart, it does.
No, as far as I am concerned, it should be All Anna Nicole, All The Time. CNN should just bring home all the reporters from Iraq and put them to work finding out more details about the woman’s demise and what is going to happen to that poor little daughter, less than five months old, who is being besieged by daddies with designs on her 400 million bucks. I wonder if I can file for paternity myself.
It is like I have several New York Times from earlier this week piled up on my table, and I honestly think there is no point in reading any of them. I mean, there are no stories about Anna Nicole before Wednesday! It is like you can divide the world into two eras – there is Before Anna Nicole and there is Anna Domini. And nothing that happened before Anna Nicole can possibly matter.
My own experience of Anna Nicole Smith centers on seeing her walking around West Hollywood one night with Bobby Trendy. I think my pal James, who was visiting town at the time, was with me that night – I wonder if he will remember seeing her. It seems to me, we were too much in awe of her charisma and power to dare to approach her. It would have been like trying to talk to the Sun or Venus or Athena.
Mind you, I see Bobby Trendy out and about all the time – almost every time I visit WeHo, in fact. He always seems to be making the boulevard jaunt. In person, he seems to dress rather conservatively – or, at least, nothing like his horrifying on camera persona. He does have an eye for the twinks, though. I remember once hanging out in the Weho Starbucks and listening to several kids in their late teens debating whether they should go to a “party” being held at Bobby Trendy’s mansion.
“But he’s so UGLY!” noted one child.
“But he’s RICH!” noted the other. In the end, I believe they all went to the party.
These are not, I suspect, the most consequential connections to the dead Anna Nicole, but they are what they are. I can’t ALWAYS have mighty things to say. And at least I am not writing about Harry Potter’s appearing naked on the London stage in Equus. I mean, I have no doubt that his treasure trail will not be enough to make up for the fact that he is likely to be as bad an actor in Equus as he is in Harry Potter. Yucko!
