Citizen Anna

Americans love self-made men and women. And who was ever more literally self-made than Anna Nicole Smith? Described by acquaintances as a flat-chested teen, she shaped, nipped and tucked herself into a living hood ornament. She styled herself à la Marilyn Monroe and then, after fighting drug problems and ballooning, whittled herself down as a spokeswoman for TrimSpa diet supplements. According to her mother, she even invented her childhood, mythologizing her middle-class upbringing into a hardscrabble one, like Jay Gatsby in reverse. Feral, brazen and vacant, Smith was not talented in most usual senses, but in one way she was an artist. She was her own sculpture.

Even after she died of undetermined causes at age 39, Smith was commodified. Men squabbled over her body, which a judge preserved for a possible DNA test because of challenges to her baby daughter’s paternity. A photo of the inside of her refrigerator appeared on TMZ.com A video of paramedics trying to revive her sold for $500,000.

People saw Smith out of the world, in other words, the same way they saw her through it, by ogling her while judging. And she gave ample reason to judge–the stripping, the pills, the reality show, the sexcapades, the conveniently timed marriage to the about-to-burst piñata that was ailing octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall II. She could be in the dictionary under the word tawdry. She became famous for appealing to our worst instincts and was ruined by indulging our worst appetites.

But that’s just another way of saying that she knew too well what Americans wanted. Smith’s body could have been designed by a focus group of the American homme moyen sensuel: blond and cartoonishly bodacious. Her life could not have been better scripted by a reality-TV producer. She was a supersized meal of pop culture. We gobbled her down–in Playboy or on the E! network–felt a little sick afterward and then blamed her, like heart patients suing a fast-food chain.

You don’t have to look too far to see why people looked down on Smith. In fact, you need only look precisely where she wanted you to: at the double-D twin attention rockets that helped blast her to stardom. (In life Smith was coy about the specifics of her plastic surgery–its existence confirmed, grimly, by the medical examiner after her death–even if she was not shy about displaying the results.) We have a Puritan suspicion of people who improve on what nature gave them. FX’s Nip/Tuck both glamorizes and moralizes about plastic surgery. Last year Hillary Clinton dealt with a smear that she had had work done, just as in 2004 John Kerry was attacked with Botox rumors. (As cosmetic work becomes more common, one wonders whether it will be the new marijuana: “I tried it once, I didn’t like it, I’ll never do it again.”) Just look at the word: Plastic. Malleable. Phony.

But should it be an insult? Plastic surgery may be self-indulgent. It may reflect poor priorities. But it is also essentially American. The U.S. is the country of self-invention, of new names, new faces and new starts–the land of plasticity. To be American is to refuse to be limited by the circumstances of your birth–ethnic, economic or genetic.

This spirit of ambition and reinvention isn’t automatically good or automatically bad. It gave us upward social mobility, and it gave us teenagers with butt implants. It gave us Manifest Destiny and reality TV. But it is part of what defines us. Maybe Smith made people uncomfortable because she crassly, gluttonously embodied ideals that are familiar, even celebrated, in American culture: determination, drive and the faith that the good are rewarded materially. “I think heaven’s a beautiful place,” she told Los Angeles magazine in 1994. “Gold. You walk on gold floors.”

Whether or not Smith is in her 24-karat heaven, in life it sometimes seemed as if her physique, her creation, was all she had left. In 2004 she appeared at the American Music Awards, fingering her cleavage and slurring, “Like my body?” Some people called it an intoxicated rant, others a lost girl’s plea for love. But is there a touch of professional pride in there too? This is my life’s work, she seems to tell us. This what I made for you. I did a good job. Didn’t I?