Reconsidering Anna Nicole Smith

Attention E! Channel: time to update The Anna Nicole Smith true Hollywood story.

Just as her claim to the title of America’s Sweetheart of Crazy was put in minor jeopardy this week thanks to astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak, Anna Nicole managed to write her own surprising, and kinda sad, ending.

What with the reality show and the TrimSpa and the gold-digging and the court proceedings and the weird marriage(s), it’s hard to remember that there used to be a bit of mystery and allure about Anna Nicole. When she first appeared in the pages of Playboy, she was something of a throwback to the era that launched the magazine with her Marilyn Monroe-esque looks and actual womanly figure (as opposed to the balloons-on-a-stick look that invaded the mag in the early 90s).

When this news broke, current TOC music editor and former Playboy.com staffer Antonia Simigis mentioned that she once interviewed Anna Nicole for a retrospective the site was running, and found her to be “really sweet,” even if she was a little ditzy. Still, following Claudia Schiffer as the Guess? jeans model seemed a smart – and possibly career-making - move.

And then she went and married Ross Perot’s older, less-attractive cousin, and thus began the downward spiral.

It’s pretty obvious that Anna Nicole then became a victim of both circumstance, and her own ambition. Picking up with the Monroe comparison again, Marilyn was never as dumb as she wanted others to think. It was a savvy move that led many to underestimate her own ability to manipulate her image for the best possible payoff.

Was Anna Nicole as savvy? Probably not. But even though there were innumerable examples of Crazy Anna Nicole (this being just one of them), I wonder if there wasn’t a little more mystery behind the eyes of the erstwhile Vickie Lynn Hogan than most people would imagine. At the very least, she went out in a Monroe-esque way. So maybe she had that “image” thing down pat after all.