The strange, sad story of Anna Nicole Smith is retold in this Netflix documentary by Ursula Macfarlane, who made Untouchable, about Harvey Weinstein. Smith was the former Playboy centrefold and Guess Jeans model who wound up dead of a drug overdose in 2007 at the age of 39, soon after her 20-year-old son had tragically died the same way. There are eerie similarities with the life of Pamela Anderson, also a recent Netflix subject, though Anderson survives and thrives.
Smith was a smalltown Texas girl from a tough background – although she was accused by her mother of manufacturing abuse stories for publicity. She embraced Playboy superstardom, tabloid notoriety and media letching that so easily flipped over into misogynist hate. Like Anderson, Smith used the “blonde” image as a kind of persona or disguise or armour and (as with Anderson) it is strange to see her pre- or non-blonde normality from private photos.
Smith started out as a dancer in a Texas strip club, having already had a baby from a rash teenage marriage; one of the customers in the club was 86-year-old oil billionaire J Howard Marshall who became infatuated with Smith, showered her with money and gifts, and finally married her – to the rage of his grownup son Pierce, who succeeded in ringfencing the old man’s entire estate in a trust so Smith could get none of the money after his death.
It is an incredible story, although, frustratingly, this movie is too coy to just ask the Mrs Merton question: what first attracted her to the billionaire oil baron? Oddly, the film cites Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – and Anna Nicole’s life is an amazing real-life revival of that story – but doesn’t quote Marilyn’s classic, impenitent line: “Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You may not love your girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness doesn’t it help?”
This documentary uses a great deal of existing archive interview material (though annoyingly without giving provenance) including what appears to be Playboy TV footage of her reality-TV-style meeting with her long-estranged dad, who had left home when she was a baby, together with a half-brother; neither of them knew who she had become before their reunion. A more facetious film would have wondered about the circumstances in which these two men might already have been familiar with Smith’s image, as Christopher Hitchens did in his vignette for Vanity Fair. But this film suggests, grimly, that this estranged dad then tried to assault her.
In the end, Smith was a prisoner of her image, of the paparazzi celeb industry, and her own abuse of alcohol and drugs, having got addicted to pain pills after her breast enhancement operation (a gruesomely metaphoric event). It’s an effective retelling, though the film could have concentrated more on her tragicomic relationship with her oil plutocrat husband. Could it actually have been a love story after all?
• Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me is released on 16 May on Netflix.
