Finally, a funeral for Anna Nicole
Posted: Thursday, March 01, 2007 10:42 AM by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper
Filed Under:
Grab bag
A week ago, when I wrote about how ridiculous the whole Anna Nicole Smith fight was, I never thought seven days would pass and the poor woman still wouldn't be buried. We need a whole level of vocabulary beyond "ridiculous" to describe the case at this point. Thankfully, it looks like she will finally be buried Friday, in the Bahamas, with pink flowers and a custom-made gown and a rhinestone blanket covering her coffin.
Did anyone get anything out of the weeks of wrangling, besides the lawyers who grew richer? As a nation, are we better informed for the useless and gratuitous detail the cable networks threw at us? We know more about Anna Nicole's various court trials than we do about the current situation in Iraq, more about the details of her funeral than about the wills and funeral plans of our own loved ones. If anything good comes from this media circus, perhaps it will be that -- maybe regular people will look at what a mess this is and think "I didn't think I needed a will, or a funeral plan, but I do."
Virgie Arthur, Smith's mother, keeps appealing, trying to get her daughter's body buried in Texas, but as the comments on this Weblog attest to, Arthur has got to be one of the most reviled women in the nation right now. Even those who are normally sympathetic to grieving mothers don't cut her much slack.
After all, Anna Nicole was a grieving mother, too, who lost a son far too young, a son who, whatever Smith's faults, she apparently loved with all her heart and soul. It's a stark contrast to the relationship Anna Nicole apparently had with her own mother, who hadn't seen her in a decade.
If her mother failed Anna Nicole while she was alive, she was far from the only one. Whatever substances Smith was on, someone was prescribing them, someone was getting them to her, someone was enabling her. Because of her beauty, her fame, and her tie to late husband J. Howard Marshall's billions, people surrounded her who wouldn't have given her the time of day back when she was Vickie Lynn Hogan, an eighth-grade dropout working at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken.
If you ever saw "The Anna Nicole Show," Smith came across childlike and naive, often seemingly incapable of facing the regular challenges of a normal day.
She confessed to a panic attack at the dentist. She visited a pet psychic. She failed her driving test. She decorated her house with leopard prints and pink, announcing that she didn't have a childhood, so she was indulging herself now. She needed people around her, and most if not all of those people had agendas that had nothing to do with Smith as a person.
In one of the episodes, her son Daniel, a teen at the time, told his mother he didn't want to participate in her show any more. He didn't want to be famous, he said. Although that must have been shocking for Anna Nicole to hear -- she, apparently, wanted nothing more than to be famous -- she immediately told her son that all he had to do was ask, and now that she knew his feelings, he didn't need to appear on the show again. For all her problems, you have to give her that. Fame was vital to her, but it didn't outweigh family.
How ironic that, in the end, she was perhaps the only one who thought that way.
