A year ago yesterday,
Anna Nicole Smith died.
God. I know this is gonna mark me a sucker, but Anna Nicole always reminded me of Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. She was simultaneously mercenary and vulnerable; a platinum blonde vortex; the musky-sweet, baby-voiced essence of the archetypal madonna/whore. I never romanticized her (any more than the fictional Daisy romanticized herself), but the palpable Little Girl Lost vibe Anna Nicole exuded gnawed at my heart. I always pictured her clutching Gatsby's shirts, ravenous and overwhelmed by their transitory beauty:
While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher - shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before."
She was so terribly, laceratingly hungry.
Maybe it's because I grew up Southern and understand that no matter how pretty you are, you can't truly dodge the trailer park. You have to be extremely canny and desperate to escape the caste system of the Junior League, the debutante balls, the St. Cecilia Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution. Maybe that's why my heart ached for her, why it still aches. She lived her life at a dead sprint, blindly running from the very things that defined her. She was streetwise and cunning, needy and toxic, utterly voracious in her single-minded desire for attention. She clawed her way out of one hell and into another.
There was something about her that made the rejected, damaged, raw parts of me stand up and cheer. She used her god- and -surgeon-given assets to make something nouveau for herself - her very own unapologetic creation - something ravishingly tacky, something pink and spangled and scented and feathered that had its genesis in a little girl's dream of being a princess, of being universally loved and liked and accepted. She was a dish, a tart, a morsel; she satisfied appetites: that was her gift and her downfall.
She was the embodiment of every female insecurity and every man's deepest, wettest dream. She wasn't Marilyn Monroe; she was in a consumerist, populist, lonely league of her own. She was a Greek goddess and a cautionary tale. She sold herself, and she wound up completely bankrupt. She peddled an illusion of herself, and she ended her life alone with a grasping sociopath in a seamy Florida hotel room.
There's no romance there, just a hard-bitten, hardscrabble memory planted like a tombstone in the red Texan dirt. She's tragedy writ large by a near-illiterate hand, her bones picked clean and white by the vultures of a diseased culture. I didn't like her, but part of me loves her.
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.
- A Song for Saint Cecilia
by John Dryden