#jayne mansfield redux

[bitter69uk]

It’s been fascinating to read the mixed reviews by Hollywood Reporter and Variety for Netflix’s new exposé Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (which follows hot on the stiletto heels of the recent documentary about Smith’s contemporary, Pamela Anderson). Is director Ursula Macfarlane’s show biz cautionary tale about the tumultuous, ruined and abbreviated whirlwind life of the Playboy playmate, pin-up and reality TV star guilty of precisely the kind of prurience and voyeurism it criticizes? I watched it last weekend and found it mesmerizing. Like many Gen Xers, my introduction to Smith came via her dazzling 1990s Guess jeans ads, where she evoked golden age Hollywood bombshells like Mansfield, Monroe and Anita Ekberg (in the same way Claudia Schiffer did for Bardot). Who then could have anticipated she was doomed to die by 39? Some of the doc’s revelations: it depicts Smith as someone whose identity was always in flux. Long before she adopted the name Anna Nicole Smith, when teenage single mom Vickie Lynn Hogan from the shitkicker town of Mexia, Texas first started dancing in topless bars, she asked to be called Nicky. Smith’s painkiller addiction began pre-fame: her breast implants caused her a lifetime of agony. (Towards the end she was taking the heroin replacement methadone for pain management). I’m already inclined to sympathize with Smith for how she was exploited by the sneering tabloid press, but You Don’t Know Me doesn’t shy from her darker side. Smith cynically exaggerated and fabricated aspects of her childhood to garner press coverage. Her relationship with her 86-year-old billionaire husband J. Marshall Howard was – um - problematic. (His forlorn answering machine messages beseeching Smith to call him are a painful listen). For better or for worse, Smith was the closest I’ll ever get to a Jayne Mansfield equivalent in my lifetime. Now Let’s hope her 16-year-old daughter has a happy life out of the limelight.