by Alana Massey
The boys I knew who partook in the countdown were not more ghoulish than any other undergraduate men I knew. They were no older than twenty-two and most were younger still. Their desire for Mary-Kate and Ashley was age-appropriate, and though the countdown to legality was vulgar, I am not especially precious about the consent of seventeen-year-olds to give to partners two or three years their senior. But the anonymous hordes of much older men awaiting a Playboy shoot to which neither of the Olsen girls had given any hint of participating in, much less sex with strangers, was something more sinister. There was something darker than sexual attraction in it. The whole spectacle carried with it a sense that these men had been waiting for these girls to grow into adults since they debuted on television as infants on Full House in 1987.
Though we did not yet have our generational moniker, millennial childhoods were marked by frequent interactions with the faces of Mary-Kate and Ashley, though which one we were seeing at any given point remains mysterious. The casting of the twin infants as Michelle Tanner on Full House simply because they did not cry at their audition has become part of their legend in the entertainment industry. The viewing public of the show adored the bright smiles and good natures of the baby girls so much that they were not recast in later seasons, an almost unprecedented move in a television environment that likes to expedite the growth of infant characters into affable preschoolers to keep them interesting. Michelle Tanner was America’s beloved little sister, feisty and stubborn but always good for a one-liner. However, the real sisters who played one do not recall the time with as much warmth. Mary-Kate referred to herself and Ashley as “little monkey performers” in Marie Claire in 2010.1 Watching Full House again as an adult makes her meaning even more clear. Watching them perform with a more mature eye, their acting talent appears primarily rooted in the ability to mimic and obey rather than to improvise or emote. This was the price of not crying.
Long after Full House ceased production, Mary-Kate and Ashley could be found starring mostly in straight-to-video movies of the two engaging in twin hijinks and shilling merchandise imbued with power by association with them. Their company, Dualstar Entertainment, turned the onetime performers into adolescent moguls, businesswomen whose brand was not to be dismissed. It was something of a shock, then, when they both completed high school and chose to pursue higher education at NYU.
Despite the excitement at their arrival, Mary-Kate and Ashley seemed to treat their NYU experience as little more than an afterthought to their otherwise glamorous new move to New York’s West Side. While the unwashed peon masses waited for NYU shuttle buses to schlep us to and from our dorms, the girls were whisked directly into Yukon SUVs from their classes. I recall the strangeness of seeing Mary-Kate this way. The ritual of celebrities rushing into vehicles was familiar to me at this point, but I realized that though the world was introduced to the twins as the fictional and decidedly singular Michelle, outside the context of the show, I had never seen Mary-Kate without Ashley or Ashley without Mary-Kate. They came as a unit. The separation of their bodies seemed an affront to the natural order of things. Even writing their names out again and again instead of relying on the shorthand of “the Olsen twins” remains difficult as I try to actively empathize with so foreign an experience of sisterhood, childhood, and privacy.
Mary-Kate was the first to drop out of NYU. She told W magazine, “I need to be able to go to yoga and work out and just read scripts and go on auditions, because that’s what makes me happy. You know? Like, papers don’t really make me happy.”2 This quote was widely ridiculed for its alleged vapidity rather than acknowledged for its more quotidian explanation that teenagers from Los Angeles speak a certain way and don’t especially love schoolwork. Ashley would follow suit not long after so the two could embark on careers in fashion. As is so often the case when performers turn to fashion, the public cast their glance askew at the change of heart. That they pursued careers in fashion and adjusted their aesthetics to match was the ultimate betrayal against their lusty male admirers. Mary-Kate and Ashley retained all of their conventional beauty but chose the art of high fashion even when it meant sacrificing conventional sex appeal. At least when objects of desire gain weight, they forfeit the possibility of being desirable to the sort of superficial man that might ogle and fantasize about pretty, femininely dressed teenagers. But the twins were instead photographed in witchy, drapey, and decidedly unsexy clothing over their slight frames. And while their exorbitant wealth has never been a secret, as adults, they began to obscure it less and less as their vocal affects went from giddy girlish sounds to sophisticated inflections. They have become the eccentric millionaires it never occurred to their adoring public they might become.
The reality that these were never America’s little sisters grows more and more evident with each new luxury collection they deliver from their line, The Row, and in every ultrastylized look they don. It would seem odd at first that Mary-Kate and Ashley chose to go into business with one another after a childhood spent tethered to each other’s side, expected to smile and perform the brightest parts of sisterhood on command. But their lived realities are so foreign, so entirely other, that it is difficult to imagine they can find anyone with sufficient empathy for that reality. Knowing that their vast fortunes and international fame would never have materialized if just one of them had burst into tears on audition day is a strange and very particular burden to bear. But they share that burden, appearing alongside each other on red carpets and catwalks and at interviews, supporting each other with words more than physical strength as they remain small like girls even as they are settled fully into adult life. That support is much needed as the public resists allowing them to be the adults they have become.
Mary-Kate and Ashley made a rare national television appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to promote two fragrances in 2014.3 In the segment, even the affable Ellen DeGeneres could not resist a nostalgic trip to the Tanner house. “It’s really amazing that y’all started out on Full House,” Ellen starts but is unable to finish her sentence because there is uproarious applause from the audience at the mere mention of the show. She goes on to note that it was rare for child stars to turn out well-adjusted, much less wildly successful. It is meant as a compliment, but the more grim subtext is clear: We never expect types like you to make it. She mercifully omits the period during which their birthday was declared a national holiday by a horde of lecherous sexual deviants or when Mary-Kate battled anorexia and alleged heroin addiction and was the first person Heath Ledger’s masseuse called when he died of an overdose in 2008.
Ellen asks the sort of softball questions that are typical of these daytime shows, mentioning a BuzzFeed article that went over things the twins are tired of hearing and proceeding to ask what they are tired of being asked—tedious but generally innocuous questions like “Which one is the oldest?” and “Can you read each other’s mind?” Mary-Kate and Ashley are not asked these ordinary questions because they are not ordinary twins. They are the most famous twins in the world and have been for close to thirty years. The show proceeded with a game wherein photos of them as infants on the set of Full House were put on a screen behind them and they were asked to identify which one of them is in each photo. As if all infants don’t already bear striking resemblances to one another, they make clear early on that it is easier to tell once they get older on the show. As they flounder at the game, Ellen realizes its cruelty and says, “Yeah, it’s not fair. It’s a ridiculous game.” But not before the girls have been subjected to a question they are likely haunted by every time one of them alone is referred to in the plural: Do you know who you are?
The show is one of many sprinkled throughout the archive of their interviews that feature Mary-Kate and Ashley being asked to revisit a childhood they would not have picked for themselves. “I look at old photos of me, and I don’t feel connected to them at all… I would never wish my upbringing on anyone,” Mary-Kate told Marie Claire.4 There is a bittersweetness in th
at they had each other to rely on during that childhood but also that they had to watch one another’s suffering through it.
As the cruel game draws to a close, an image of the two of them as toddlers appears on the screen and their befuddled stares give way to recognition. Ashley points at the photo and declares, “Mary-Kate’s on the right!” to which Ellen replies, “How do you know that?” Ashley says, “Because Mary-Kate still makes that face today,” much to the amusement of the studio audience. It seems a charming sisterly jab. But it is also a declaration that her sister is and always has been her own person—despite rampant insistence that the two are fused into a single unit as they inhabit separate bodies and minds. In the end, only the sisters themselves could bear meaningful witness to the peculiar marvel of the other, a lesson learned only by those who have felt what it means to be merely half of something.
American Pain
The Suffering-Class Spectacle of Anna Nicole Smith
ANNA NICOLE SMITH WEARS A floor-length royal blue gown and a full face of makeup as she stares in disbelief at the local news on the television. It is 2002, and she is in a hotel suite preparing for a party hosted by Guess, the brand that launched her from moderate fame as a Playmate to iconic stardom as the face of their 1992 denim campaign. “You know those bumper stickers where it says, ‘Shit happens and then you die?’ They should have ’em where ‘Shit happens and then you live’ because that’s really the truth of it,” she says, shaking her head at the volume of violent stories plaguing the news. This moment of poignant clarity is captured halfway through the first episode of The Anna Nicole Show, a reality series that ran on the E! network from 2002 to 2004.
The Anna Nicole Show was a study in the grotesque even before anyone knew the extent of her dysfunction. “Anna, Anna, Glamorous Anna, Anna Nicole!” the show’s theme song starts, a joke that is either ironic or tone-deaf about the actual content of the show, none of which is especially glamorous. Anna is visibly under the influence of either drugs or alcohol for most of the season, often slurring her words and losing her train of thought. Her lawyer and future husband, Howard K. Stern, would go on to notoriety for having seized control of Anna’s life and enabled her drug dependence in the years before her death, but on the show he just seems to leave a layer of slime behind him wherever he walks. There is a larger-than-life interior designer named Bobby Trendy who never met an animal print or a shade of pink he didn’t think would make great furniture. It is not clear if it’s genius performance art or sincere affection when he calls velvet couches and feather boas “luxurious.” There are cameos by cousins from Texas whose appearances and antics make Anna look positively refined in comparison.
Her son, Daniel, features in most episodes, and it is hard to watch, knowing he would die within five years of the show, and not focus exclusively on him. He lingers mostly in the background, his head instinctively turning away from the cameras. Though he is embarrassed by Anna’s antics, he gives his mother reassuring smiles through braces and unabashedly embraces her substantial frame with his slight one when she wants a hug. In one episode, Anna slurs at him over the phone in her signature baby voice, “Do you love me? More than all the raindrops in the world and more than all the fishies in the sea?” He sighs and responds, “Yes.” Daniel speaks with a hesitation that sounds less like the reluctance of dishonest appeasement than the sadness of a particular kind of truth.
“It’s not supposed to be funny. It just is!” was the tagline that E! used to promote the show, making clear their intentions of portraying Anna as a sideshow attraction from the beginning. A New York Times review called it “freakish” and a “cruel joke of a reality series” but did not hesitate to take its own cheap shots at Anna’s weight gain and her seeming lack of self-awareness.1 The Chicago Tribune review describes Anna as “voluminous” in its first sentence and “a zaftig celebrity-for-no-particular-reason” later on.2 Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker was the only critic who seemed to bring his empathy or his intuition to work the week the show premiered when he wrote, “In exploiting a barely coherent Anna Nicole Smith, E! is doing something that comes pretty close to being obscene.”3 Though it is mostly remembered for an eating contest scene, that first episode primarily focused on the family finding a new home in Los Angeles. The last line of the episode is Anna speaking to the cameras, not a slurred word to be found, her eyes focused and her posture determined. “Our future absolutely seems brighter.” I remember watching the show in high school and believing her. If not because the future looked especially bright but because their present reality looked so very grim.
The idiomatic remix of “Shit happens then you die” is a combination of the expression “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” with the standalone “Shit happens,” and is just one of the many verbal mishaps that Anna experiences on the show. It demonstrates the distance between Anna and mainstream American linguistic norms: She is close enough for her meaning to be understood but far enough off the mark to reveal herself as an outsider. The American public would keep her at this distance for the duration of her fifteen years in the public eye. From her rise to fame as a model in the early 1990s to 2006, when she endured the sudden death of her son, few saw fit to extend her the benefit of any doubts when it came to acknowledging her as a human being. Anna was never more than a punch line when people were being kind and nothing short of a deserving pariah most of the time.
The life and death of Anna Nicole Smith demonstrate our hatred for anyone who dares to pursue the American Dream using skills from their own class and culture of origin. We demand that socioeconomic migration be permitted only if the traveler promises to adopt enough white middle-class values to reaffirm that we have chosen virtuous ones. But they must retain enough of their premigration values to make us feel charitable in our welcoming of diversity. Those who argue that Anna Nicole Smith was born in the United States and therefore disqualified from an immigration narrative are willfully unfamiliar with the entirely foreign place that our nation’s poor actually live in. She did not have to physically leave a country, but she did have to arrive in what amounted to a new one.
The American Dream is to be pursued on strict terms dictated by a class of people who generally had the luxury of being born into a family that had already achieved the dream. We want everyone to pursue good grades and obedience in school, which culminates in acceptance to an institution of learning where one can find a degree that is often more ceremonial than useful. Anna dropped out as soon as she could. Those who find fortune without these accoutrements of middle-class respectability better have some enormous talent that got them where they are. Anna did not have any of the talents that we give any credit or credence to in America. And so Anna did not accept these terms.
This alleged lack of talent is what often makes her an object of derision even after her death. She could not act. She could not sing. Even as a stripper, she did not dance especially well. But what so many find objectionable about her, I think, is her greatest strength. We accept happily-ever-after stories of people with untapped talent trapped in little towns and grinding poverty who chance across the right opportunity to prove themselves. But Anna would have no such chance because she had no such talent. She wanted to be famous and didn’t have any of the tools or skills to make that happen. She was functionally illiterate and deeply traumatized. Yet she made it happen anyway. She turned nothing into something. And not just a cozy middle-class American life but an empire and a seat among icons. That is skill. That is ambition. I do not hesitate to say that it is genius.
There are few among even her most vocal sympathizers who would acknowledge her brilliance. It is customary instead for them to characterize the life of Anna Nicole Smith as one marred by tragedy. But it is more accurate to call it a life characterized by pain. In childhood she suffered undiagnosed pain and then endured abuse at the hands of her caregivers and, later, her partners. Her plastic surgeries came with their own particular set of agonies.
Much of Anna�
��s pain went dismissed or outright ignored during her life. In interviews, her family members are quick to roll their eyes at the idea that she suffered, dismissing her as dramatic, but her doctors took the claims more seriously. In 2010, Anna’s lawyer, Howard K. Stern, was charged with conspiring with two of her doctors to provide Anna with an excess of prescription drugs. A third doctor testified in the trial that he had met Anna in 2001 and began treating her for chronic pain, a condition she suffered from most of her life. This doctor said that Anna was indeed an addict but that she, too, had the right to pain relief.4 All charges were eventually dismissed.
Her plastic surgery provided another source of physical suffering. Much of it she did not disclose the details of, but it is fairly obvious when comparing photos across different years that her breasts were substantially enhanced. According to one account, she had two implants in each breast containing three pints of fluid, resulting in a 42DD bra size, which ruptured, according to multiple accounts. At one point the pain caused by her breast implants required “approximately three times the normal levels of Demerol to control her pain.” Yet in interviews no one thought to ask Anna about her health in regard to these implants, only to gawk in unison at the very disfigurement that made her worth talking to in the first place.
“I don’t know how any dictionary would define the word ‘family,’ but in Anna Nicole’s dictionary, it means ‘pain in the ass,’” Anna says in an episode of her show featuring her cousin Shelly. Those people with whom Anna shared blood and other bonds of kinship were often the quickest to condemn her. Everyone from distant cousins to her own mother and half siblings stood ready to jump in front of any camera that would switch on the red light for them in order to humiliate her with titillating details about her younger years. To read their accounts or watch them on video is an exercise in exploitation. Their tales of Anna’s youth usually meander quickly back to their own life stories, complete with a lot of dead-end marriages to deadbeat men in decaying towns that litter certain corners of Texas. Their stories, too, are marred by pain.