She came out swinging, swaying her newly reedy body. At the podium, she cooed, lifting her arms and then again, dragging her hands vertically across her enormous, half-exposed breasts. Both hands settled on the stand to give her a slight slouch and then her head nodded sideways, verifying the intoxication we’d already suspected. After about 25 seconds onstage, she finally spoke: “Like my body?” And then she pointed to the pink and white bling around her neck that read “TrimSpa.” She moved her finger under her diet-pill sponsor’s letters from her left to her right, guiding the viewer in a perception-altered right-to-left reading. How perfect.
You probably don’t remember much of the 2004 American Music Awards, but you might remember Anna Nicole Smith’s contribution. In a room socially engineered to give celebrated people further attention, Smith stole the show by being her messy self. She seemed to have little choice: She could barely read the teleprompter.
“I was honored to be on our ... next? Performer’s new video ...” she recited, like she was holding back a hiccup. Smith and her body were undergoing something of a renaissance, having publicly transformed from Playboy pinup to fashion model to movie starlet to trophy wife to washed-up, plus-sized widow in a little over 10 years. She was the laughingstock of reality TV, which felt a bit pitiable in those early days (her series on E!, “The Anna Nicole Show,” ran two seasons from 2002-2004), but now is something few aspiring celebrities and Kardashians would turn down. At the AMAs, she was TrimSpa thin, and her appearance in the Kanye West video “The New Workout Plan” was a sign of triumph.
“... And if I ever record an album ...” she went on. There was always a plan with Smith (often involving securing the inheritance from her late, 90-year-old husband’s estate that she claimed was rightfully hers), but she was more successful in existing in the moment.
There were so many moments. At VH1’s Big in ’04 Awards, she flung a giant prop bra into the audience, telling them: “Scratch and sniff.” Onstage at the 2005 MTV Australia Awards, she exposed pasty-covered breasts that read “MTV.” For years, you could count on Smith to pop up at some point and do something utterly bizarre, like launching a subscription website in tandem with her pregnancy or melodramatically waging familial drama on “Entertainment Tonight.”People called her a train wreck, but that’s too simplistic. A train wrecks and is then cleaned up, something Smith rarely was. She wasn’t a train wreck; she was a fireworks display, and it was different every night.
“... I want this guy to produce mine and make beautiful duets ... ’cause he’s freakin’ genius!” she continued and then applauded over her head. When she said “mine,” she inhaled it in a thin voice, a sign of her vulnerability, a gasp of clarity or maybe both. But she wouldn’t let the biggest enemy of any addict (herself) get in the way. Not this time.
“Make some noise … for … my boy, Kanye West!” she shrieked after taking so many between-word beats that West’s music had already started, the producers figuring she’d failed her task. But she hadn’t. She proved them wrong after their minds were already made up. A career underdog, she never got that chance in life, and many say she was doomed as soon as her son Daniel died of a drug overdose in September 2006. Smith would suffer her own fatal overdose less than five months later.
Smith died five years ago on this day. Her life was sad and hilarious. It was perhaps an unwittingly open book, filled with our cultural priorities — the good, the bad and the entertaining.
You probably don’t remember much of the 2004 American Music Awards, but you might remember Anna Nicole Smith’s contribution. In a room socially engineered to give celebrated people further attention, Smith stole the show by being her messy self. She seemed to have little choice: She could barely read the teleprompter.
“I was honored to be on our ... next? Performer’s new video ...” she recited, like she was holding back a hiccup. Smith and her body were undergoing something of a renaissance, having publicly transformed from Playboy pinup to fashion model to movie starlet to trophy wife to washed-up, plus-sized widow in a little over 10 years. She was the laughingstock of reality TV, which felt a bit pitiable in those early days (her series on E!, “The Anna Nicole Show,” ran two seasons from 2002-2004), but now is something few aspiring celebrities and Kardashians would turn down. At the AMAs, she was TrimSpa thin, and her appearance in the Kanye West video “The New Workout Plan” was a sign of triumph.
“... And if I ever record an album ...” she went on. There was always a plan with Smith (often involving securing the inheritance from her late, 90-year-old husband’s estate that she claimed was rightfully hers), but she was more successful in existing in the moment.
There were so many moments. At VH1’s Big in ’04 Awards, she flung a giant prop bra into the audience, telling them: “Scratch and sniff.” Onstage at the 2005 MTV Australia Awards, she exposed pasty-covered breasts that read “MTV.” For years, you could count on Smith to pop up at some point and do something utterly bizarre, like launching a subscription website in tandem with her pregnancy or melodramatically waging familial drama on “Entertainment Tonight.”People called her a train wreck, but that’s too simplistic. A train wrecks and is then cleaned up, something Smith rarely was. She wasn’t a train wreck; she was a fireworks display, and it was different every night.
“... I want this guy to produce mine and make beautiful duets ... ’cause he’s freakin’ genius!” she continued and then applauded over her head. When she said “mine,” she inhaled it in a thin voice, a sign of her vulnerability, a gasp of clarity or maybe both. But she wouldn’t let the biggest enemy of any addict (herself) get in the way. Not this time.
“Make some noise … for … my boy, Kanye West!” she shrieked after taking so many between-word beats that West’s music had already started, the producers figuring she’d failed her task. But she hadn’t. She proved them wrong after their minds were already made up. A career underdog, she never got that chance in life, and many say she was doomed as soon as her son Daniel died of a drug overdose in September 2006. Smith would suffer her own fatal overdose less than five months later.
Smith died five years ago on this day. Her life was sad and hilarious. It was perhaps an unwittingly open book, filled with our cultural priorities — the good, the bad and the entertaining.
