Dinheiro bem gasto
Anna Nicole Smith, no Economist
NAMES were a problem for Anna Nicole Smith. She was born Vickie Lynn Hogan, but never liked it. At high school, before she was kicked out for fighting, she went by Nikki Hart. As a model for Guess jeans in 1992 she was called “Anna Nicole”, and settled for that; later she acquired the title “Gold-digger”, though she indignantly rebuffed it. “Vickie always wanted a different name,” her aunt said. The name she really wanted, from childhood onwards, was Marilyn Monroe.
NAMES were a problem for Anna Nicole Smith. She was born Vickie Lynn Hogan, but never liked it. At high school, before she was kicked out for fighting, she went by Nikki Hart. As a model for Guess jeans in 1992 she was called “Anna Nicole”, and settled for that; later she acquired the title “Gold-digger”, though she indignantly rebuffed it. “Vickie always wanted a different name,” her aunt said. The name she really wanted, from childhood onwards, was Marilyn Monroe.
Yet all this was somewhat beside the point; because what you saw first, on meeting Ms Smith, were the Breasts. There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic. They burst out of tight red dresses—preferably red—or teased among feather boas, or flanked a dizzying cleavage that plunged to tantalising depths. These were celebrated, American breasts, engineered by silicon to be as broad and bountiful as the prairie. With them, a girl from nowhere—or from Houston, Texas—could do anything. The body behind them waxed and waned, sometimes stout as a stevedore's and sometimes almost waif-like, matching the little-girl voice; but the Breasts remained. “Everything I have”, Ms Smith admitted, “is because of them.”
“Did you have breast augmentation?” asked Larry King redundantly, bow tie a-quiver, when she appeared on his show. “Up or down?” “Both.” “Aren't there downsides to it?” Yes, Ms Smith said; they hurt her back. But, she might have added, it did no harm to flaunt them in gentleman's clubs in Houston in the half-dark, where ancient oil tycoons would try to grapple them. One such withered specimen, with a twinkle in his rheumy eye, made the attempt in October 1991; three years later, she married him.
J. Howard Marshall was not the first. That was Billy Wayne Smith, whom she married when she was 17 and he was 16, he the cook and she a waitress at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken in Mexia, Texas. They had a son, but the marriage didn't last. To make ends meet, Ms Smith worked at Wal-Mart, danced topless and slipped naked photos of herself in the post to Playboy, hoping to be noticed. She was. By the time she and Marshall tied the knot at the White Dove drive-thru Wedding Chapel—he 89, she 26, the Breasts barely contained in white satin—Ms Smith had become Playboy's Playmate of the Year 1993. In her questionnaire she confirmed she wanted to be the new Marilyn, and in a dozen ways, from the blonde curled hair to the bright red lips to the gorgeous pouts and poses, she was.
She acted too, though it was the Breasts that stole every scene, full in Leslie Nielsen's astonished face in “Naked Gun 33 1/3”. The spotlight loved her, but unlike Marilyn she was not favoured by high-flying politicians; there was always too much of the tabloid queen about her, besides her tendency to start slurring and stumbling and writhing, as if on something illegal, in the presence of a microphone. Her fame came, in the end, from being in court.
Prozac and Sugar Pie
The case of Marshall v Marshall, a name suitably Dickensian, started almost as soon as Marshall died in 1995. It had been a brief, strange marriage, with Ms Smith hardly ever at home. Each evening she would telephone him after seven, his bedtime; he called her his “sleeping pill”. Outsiders imagined that she was simply waiting for his money. But when his will was read, he had left her nothing.
She was sure this was wrong. While alive, he had given her cars, a little ranch and $50,000 a month; orally, she claimed, he had also promised her half of his estate of $1.6 billion. Without it, she was bankrupt. Over a decade various courts found for her, then against her. In 2004 an appeals court ruled that Ms Smith should get nothing. But in 2006 the Supreme Court, no less, said she could go on fighting.
By then her life revolved round the case. She told Larry King she did nothing else, and her reality TV show, which ran from 2002 to 2004, suggested the same. The show followed her to the dentist and to the lingerie shop; trailed Bobby Trendy, her decorator, as he continually redesigned her bedroom; and watched as she gave Prozac to her poodle, the oversexed Sugar Pie. Her lawyer, Howard Stern, was so constantly in the frame that in 2006 she married him, on the catamaran Margaritaville off the Bahamas, before tumbling fetchingly in her white veil into the surf.
Americans watched and enjoyed it all; and were also aware, like gawkers driving past the scene of an accident, that they might at any moment witness something awful. The story of poor-girl-makes-good was never quite straight, the fame never without its tawdry side, the money never reliably there, the behaviour rarely unembarrassing. In later years, Ms Smith was seen more and more in black. She often looked beautiful in it, but seldom happy.
Within three days last September she had a daughter, Dannielynn, by no certain father, and lost her son Daniel, at 20, to an accidental overdose of methadone and anti-depressants. Five months later she was dead herself, of causes still unknown, after collapsing in her hotel room at an Indian casino in Hollywood, Florida. She was far from the real Hollywood; yet not so far, in her young, lonely death, from the great name she had most longed to be.
J. Howard Marshall was not the first. That was Billy Wayne Smith, whom she married when she was 17 and he was 16, he the cook and she a waitress at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken in Mexia, Texas. They had a son, but the marriage didn't last. To make ends meet, Ms Smith worked at Wal-Mart, danced topless and slipped naked photos of herself in the post to Playboy, hoping to be noticed. She was. By the time she and Marshall tied the knot at the White Dove drive-thru Wedding Chapel—he 89, she 26, the Breasts barely contained in white satin—Ms Smith had become Playboy's Playmate of the Year 1993. In her questionnaire she confirmed she wanted to be the new Marilyn, and in a dozen ways, from the blonde curled hair to the bright red lips to the gorgeous pouts and poses, she was.
She acted too, though it was the Breasts that stole every scene, full in Leslie Nielsen's astonished face in “Naked Gun 33 1/3”. The spotlight loved her, but unlike Marilyn she was not favoured by high-flying politicians; there was always too much of the tabloid queen about her, besides her tendency to start slurring and stumbling and writhing, as if on something illegal, in the presence of a microphone. Her fame came, in the end, from being in court.
Prozac and Sugar Pie
The case of Marshall v Marshall, a name suitably Dickensian, started almost as soon as Marshall died in 1995. It had been a brief, strange marriage, with Ms Smith hardly ever at home. Each evening she would telephone him after seven, his bedtime; he called her his “sleeping pill”. Outsiders imagined that she was simply waiting for his money. But when his will was read, he had left her nothing.
She was sure this was wrong. While alive, he had given her cars, a little ranch and $50,000 a month; orally, she claimed, he had also promised her half of his estate of $1.6 billion. Without it, she was bankrupt. Over a decade various courts found for her, then against her. In 2004 an appeals court ruled that Ms Smith should get nothing. But in 2006 the Supreme Court, no less, said she could go on fighting.
By then her life revolved round the case. She told Larry King she did nothing else, and her reality TV show, which ran from 2002 to 2004, suggested the same. The show followed her to the dentist and to the lingerie shop; trailed Bobby Trendy, her decorator, as he continually redesigned her bedroom; and watched as she gave Prozac to her poodle, the oversexed Sugar Pie. Her lawyer, Howard Stern, was so constantly in the frame that in 2006 she married him, on the catamaran Margaritaville off the Bahamas, before tumbling fetchingly in her white veil into the surf.
Americans watched and enjoyed it all; and were also aware, like gawkers driving past the scene of an accident, that they might at any moment witness something awful. The story of poor-girl-makes-good was never quite straight, the fame never without its tawdry side, the money never reliably there, the behaviour rarely unembarrassing. In later years, Ms Smith was seen more and more in black. She often looked beautiful in it, but seldom happy.
Within three days last September she had a daughter, Dannielynn, by no certain father, and lost her son Daniel, at 20, to an accidental overdose of methadone and anti-depressants. Five months later she was dead herself, of causes still unknown, after collapsing in her hotel room at an Indian casino in Hollywood, Florida. She was far from the real Hollywood; yet not so far, in her young, lonely death, from the great name she had most longed to be.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário