All the Lives I Want

by Alana Massey

  The most thorough of these accounts is an unauthorized biography called Train Wreck: The Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith, which was completed around the time of Anna’s death in 2007. I use the term “biography” loosely, because while it does chronicle many elements of Anna’s life, it also appears to be a work made up largely of speculation by her younger half sister, Donna Hogan, who offers the as-told-to account. It sheds far less light on who Anna Nicole Smith was as a person than it does on Donna. Reportedly, the two did not grow up together, and Anna didn’t speak to Donna for most of her adult life, making many of her already dubious claims sound absurd because there seems to be simply no way for her to have known them.

  “You want to hear all the things she did to me? All the things she let my [stepfather] do to me, or let my brother do to me or my sister? All the beatings and the whippings and the rape? That’s my mother,” is how Anna described her upbringing to a television reporter, visibly shaking at the memory. Donna disputes these claims, as does her mother. “Her [Anna’s] claims of abuse were hugely exaggerated—she may have been disciplined under a strict hand, but she was never badly hurt nor sexually abused,” Donna writes before launching into a series of underhanded jabs at behaviors Anna exhibited that are considered hallmarks of people who have suffered abuse.5 It would be a lot to demand that people besides social workers or psychologists be aware of signs of abuse, but it is basic decency to trust a victim when she reports having been abused, which Anna did throughout her career.

  Jealousy and judgment ooze from every page of this embarrassing document, but so, too, do personal suffering and self-doubt. Donna had the misfortune of living with their biological father, Donald, a man who was by all accounts a monstrous person who divvied up his time between low-level crime, animal torture, and severe physical and emotional abuse of his partners and children. Following a trip to Los Angeles to see Anna, Donald allegedly lamented to his son and Anna’s younger half brother Donnie, “It’s tough when you want to do your own daughter.” Since Anna had the good fortune to not share a home with this man, one cannot blame Donna for seeing her life as anything but charmed by comparison.

  Donna was not alone among Anna’s family in her compulsion to report to tabloids and entertainment shows. Anna’s cousin Shelly features prominently in a documentary about Anna titled Dark Roots: The Unauthorized Anna Nicole. It is during the filming of this documentary that Shelly shows up unannounced at Anna’s door while the shooting of her reality show is in progress. Shelly appears thin in a way that hints at a predilection for methamphetamine more than rigorous exercise, her teeth are blackened, and her prematurely aged face appears even more worn out as she grows distraught when Anna’s attorney, Howard, tells her that Anna does not wish to see her. Shelly appears desperate to just be in near to Anna, breaking down in tears and leaving a pile of photos at her doorstep. The photos feature a sickly infant; it is implied that the child is one of Shelly’s five children, though this is never made explicit.

  Anna looks through the photos and eventually relents. “I wanted to see a piece of my family and hear what everybody was up to,” she explains. Despite the frequent protestations Anna made against her family for taking advantage of her fame, there is evident warmth and care between the two women when they take Shelly to dinner. “I’m still your big sister,” Anna says to Shelly, both of them in tears at their reunion. “You don’t have a painkiller, do you? I’ve got a migraine and my back is killin’ me,” Shelly whispers to Anna at the dinner table. The shot cuts away as Anna digs around for her purse, in search of a pill. When they part ways, Shelly is crying again, frantically repeating “I love you” to Anna before whispering, “I gotta ask you, can I borrow a couple of dollars?” As Anna’s car drives away, Shelly gazes longingly at it, drunk on tequila shots and the exhilaration of being in close proximity to the living evidence that it is possible to escape the place from which they came. There is footage on YouTube with the title “Anna Nicole Smith’s Toothless Cuz Shelly,” wherein Shelly is visibly hung over and apparently in pain, yet prompted to keep talking. It was taken the following day, presumably by the Dark Roots crew. She is disoriented and eventually cuts the already awkward interview short in order to vomit. There is an unkindness to the video that signals it is not the mother of five from Texas whose teeth rot from her mouth and whose children are ill at home doing the exploiting in the scenario, but rather those standing behind the camera.

  “I love Texas but it looks a whole lot better in my rearview mirror,” Anna says in the eighth episode of the first season of her reality show.6 Texas represented not only the physical spaces where Anna suffered the neglect and abuse of her early life, but the family that so often betrayed her. These humble beginnings in forgotten Texas towns and her ascent to fame are already well-known to most people who had a cable connection and a predilection for tabloid vulgarity in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her story featured in a very popular episode of E! True Hollywood Story, and she appeared in countless stories on shows like Entertainment Tonight and The Insider.

  These programs, alongside their more erudite cousins in the form of high-end profiles and interviews, have produced a kind of new American mythology wherein celebrities serve as our national heroes instead of the patriots or politicians of yesteryear. Anna’s breast implant stories are akin to tales of George Washington’s wooden teeth; her marriage to an ancient billionaire is a lower-brow version of the Kennedy-Monroe affair. Anna’s often-retold biography offers a cautionary tale at its conclusion but primarily serves as a vehicle for telling the stories that illuminate why we valued or gave attention to a certain person in a particular place and time.

  When people first came to value Anna, it was for her physical appearance. The very body that produced the pains she struggled against became her greatest asset when she was a stripper in a Houston club called Rick’s Plaza. It was this physical self, so beautiful in its shape and in the face that adorned it, that drew the attention of J. Howard Marshall. “The family all spoke of Anna’s super-rich admirer as ‘Old Man Howard,’ figuring him for a pervert; they didn’t believe a word of her protestations about how much she loved him and actually felt sorry for him,” writes Donna.

  The eighty-eight-year-old Texas billionaire who would become Anna’s husband often plays the role of a hapless senior citizen in her story. Marshall appears in only a handful of photos with Anna and is mostly remembered for one where he appears in a wheelchair and Anna is kissing his cheek. Marshall looks frail with old age and pocked with ill health but is smiling big in the presence of his beloved, whom he would often refer to as the “love of my life.” People see him and think the poor old thing never stood a chance against the deception and gold-digging of the unscrupulous Anna Nicole Smith, but taking the time to look at Marshall not as a perpetual octogenarian but as a multidimensional human being tells a different story. J. Howard Marshall had a sharper mind even in old age than he was given credit for and did not exactly wheel into Rick’s Plaza under the impression that it was a storefront church or an early bird buffet. He possessed, by all accounts, a brilliant ability in law and business and was a successful legal scholar before he turned his focus to energy investment. And he was not new to dalliances with young, beautiful women. A decade earlier, he had a notable affair with another stripper named Jewell Dianne “Lady” Walker, on whom he lavished jewelry and inappropriately high-level business roles at his companies.

  Pat Walker owned the White Dove Wedding Chapel where Anna Nicole and Marshall were married and later told the LA Times that Marshall said to him before the ceremony, “I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve made a lot of money. If I can make her happy, I’ve made her happy today.”7 Accounts of Marshall’s behavior during the marriage reveal him to be a scoundrel and a playboy until almost the very end. He was always ready with a perverted but good-natured joke about Anna’s enormous breasts, and he regularly resisted her suggestions that he change his will to explicitly give her his entire fortune after h
is death. And let us not forget that he was a billionaire by virtue of investing with the Koch brothers. Though Koch was not yet a household name synonymous with corporate interference in campaign finance, their dealings in energy investment were not especially ethical at the time. J. Howard Marshall did his fair share of deals with far more sinister devils than single mothers working in Houston strip clubs.

  The marriage lasted fourteen months, ending when J. Howard Marshall succumbed to pneumonia. The ensuing legal battle to keep Marshall’s fortunes away from Anna was headed by his son, E. Pierce Marshall. The ways he tried to prevent Anna from inheriting any of the Marshall fortune were petty in his calmer attempts and pathological in his more spirited ones. He did not simply want Anna away from the Marshall fortune, he wanted to humiliate her in the attempt to get it.

  Though much is made of Anna’s apparently shameless family in their attempts to grab a few moments in the spotlight, it was E. Pierce Marshall, the boy who was born into billions and at no risk of losing them, who proved himself the greater monster in this American tale. In a profile on the billionaire boy, Dan P. Lee writes that “E. Pierce Marshall, drenched in bitterness, made what was undoubtedly the most shortsighted decision of his life. He filed a claim against her bankruptcy, arguing that she owed him damages for allegedly slanderous comments she’d made about him. The court was now obligated to determine the truth, and so launched an investigation into their entire history. Another discovery process commenced.”8 Despite being notoriously private, E. Pierce was determined to make a public spectacle of his late father’s third wife and devoted over a decade of his life to keeping her in the headlines. His fortunes were massive and his livelihood was not under threat by any stretch of the imagination, yet he doggedly pursued legal action intended to punish Anna for having the audacity to be a poor girl who used the back door to get in good among America’s more obscene wealthy.

  The poverty of the particular pockets of the American South from which Anna came was made real in the urgency with which Shelly tried to enter Anna’s property. The desperation of invisibility was made clear in Donna Hogan’s distasteful but ultimately forgiving account of Anna Nicole’s life. Donnie was nothing short of a saint, if for no other reason than that his book is so short. But E. Pierce Marshall made it necessary for legal teams to make millions of pages of documents available for public record, for public scrutiny, and intended for public humiliation. He is the American Dream made sickly by its own hubris. He is the shameless gold digger, poking at corpses to prove a point. He is the one without taste or class or likely the capacity to reach out to a loved one to say, “I love you, too,” despite geography and tax brackets tearing them apart. He is America’s disgrace.

  On June 1, 2006, Anna cheerfully announced on her website that she was pregnant with her second child and would be posting updates about her progress. Within three weeks, E. Pierce Marshall would be dead of a brief but deadly infection. There is a certain amount of poetic justice at the idea of his being literally eaten up inside at the sight of Anna thriving, despite his relentless assault on her legal claims to a portion of the Marshall fortune. But the scope of his true moral poverty was made clear in 2012, when it was revealed that his widow was the fourth-richest woman in America. To have all that money and cling to mere crumbs in comparison because a poor woman from Texas charmed your clever father for a handful of months in the early 1990s is a kind of bitterness I cannot fathom. It seems painful to be that petty. But the death of E. Pierce Marshall was not the end of Anna’s suffering.

  Just three days after giving birth to a baby girl in the Bahamas that September, her twenty-year-old son, Daniel, died in the hospital room where she was recovering. The toxicology report stated that a lethal combination of methadone, Lexapro, and Zoloft was the cause of death, but it doesn’t take a pharmacologist to read that list and know methadone was likely doing most of the heavy lifting. Methadone, of course, is a painkiller. The latter two drugs are antidepressants, redirectors of pain more than numbing agents but prescribed to the suffering nonetheless. Despite her most diligent efforts to protect her son against the suffering that plagued her own childhood, Daniel died dependent on a drug combination that appears designed for all intents and purposes to kill pain. Anna was dead within six months from a lethal overdose of painkillers. But not before the public and her own family would hurt her one last time.

  Anna’s estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, went on the reliably macabre Nancy Grace after Daniel’s death to all but blame Anna, portentously claiming that Anna might be next. Virgie told In Touch Weekly that she knew it was a murder and added, “Someone has to pay,” for dramatic effect. Of the call she got from Anna to tell her of Daniel’s death, she told Nancy Grace, “You could tell she was clearly under some kind of—of drug because she was very upset. She was mumbling like a drunk does. You know, all I got out of it was that Daniel’s dead.”9 Virgie was right: Anna was on drugs. She had to be heavily sedated after she became inconsolable at the loss of Daniel, reportedly screaming, “No, no,” and continuing to perform chest compressions long after the young man had passed. When she became lucid and had to be informed again of the news, tabloids took it as an opportunity to claim that Anna had “forgotten” her own son died. Texas blondes, you know?

  It would be a relief that she died so soon after Daniel were it not for the daughter she left behind: Dannielynn Birkhead. Her father, Larry Birkhead, is not especially present in the ghoulish fairy tale of Anna Nicole Smith’s life, but there is a trail of slime left by his actions, too. “That’s the one thing that I’m most proud of that I’ve done, trying to keep everything as normal as I can, in just a really crazy, crazy situation,” Birkhead told Entertainment Tonight without a hint of irony in 2015.10 Every year he takes Dannielynn to the Kentucky Derby, where he met Anna, and every time, the child creates a media spectacle with her startling resemblance to her mother. When she was six years old, Dannielynn began appearing in GUESSkids advertisements, circumventing the more salacious channels that Anna had to wade through in order to be considered worth looking at with clothes on. The girl appears happy, but to those of us raised on Anna Nicole’s suffering, we can’t help but wonder when the other shoe will drop.

  In the same first episode where Anna watched the news in such dismay, she was encouraged by Howard K. Stern to endorse Israeli military action when news of the Second Intifada came on the screen. She looks shell-shocked and says, “I know nothin’ ’bout nothin’.” And while her scoffing critics would see this as a moment of clarity for the idiotic Texan who happened upon the billions, I see a calculated move to deny culpability. She knows all too well the conflicts that grow from taking sides and the violence of arbitrary allegiance, and she knows that at the end of the day, all she wants is the love of her family. Her rejection of her station in life was duly punished by some members of her family and by the press, but their attempts to destroy her could not thwart the enduring love that made her fight for the family she cobbled together herself. It is perhaps a small victory that it was not the injuries inflicted by the public eye that would kill her, but the final pain of a heart held together by will and wit, breaking at the death of the one she loved more than all the raindrops in the world and all the fishies in the sea.

  A Bigger Fairy Tale

  On Anjelica Huston and the Inheritance of Glamour

  MY FRIEND PHOEBE SPENT SEVERAL years working at the Anthropologie clothing store in Santa Monica, where seeing celebrities was common enough to warrant an informal store policy about not losing one’s shit in their presence. For the most part, employees were able to hold it together. I’ve been treated to many stories about the antics of celebrities on shopping excursions, most notably that Alec Baldwin is a goofball dad to shop with and Helena Bonham Carter likes to get buck naked in the communal area of the fitting rooms. But my favorite is the story of Phoebe helping Anjelica Huston find a jewelry box as a gift and keeping her cool throughout, only to have two boneheads at the register fuck
it right up when the striking actress approached to pay.

  “I know who you are! You’re an actress! ADDAMS FAMILY!” shouted Enoch, a grown-ass man. “I loved you in The Royal Tenenbaums, personally,” said Ray, yet another grown-ass man who simply could not be cool for five minutes around Anjelica Huston. Phoebe recalls that Anjelica was generally gracious and good-natured about it but doesn’t remember much because, she reports, “I immediately went into the back office, mortified, and sat on the floor for like five minutes.” For a certain type of American girl raised on the distant glamour of 1970s Hollywood, being embarrassed in front of Anjelica is tantamount to having a bucket of pig’s blood poured on you at the prom.

  I was just too young to be introduced to Anjelica Huston, the Oscar-winning actress of Prizzi’s Honor and the long-term partner of Jack Nicholson, to develop an admiration of her based on these accomplishments. Instead, I was raised on an exceptional fear of her. When I was five, her pointed features and raven hair were perfectly befitting the charismatic leader of a brutal, child-loathing coven in the film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and the same served her well as Morticia Addams in the reboot of The Addams Family the following year. It is for this iconic role that Phoebe’s colleague had such an enthusiastic response. To him, Anjelica was a piece of nostalgia. But for a certain type of girl who grows out of children’s films and seeks a specific kind of feminine magic in the pages of Hollywood history, Anjelica Huston might as well have been born on Mount Olympus.