Fame-bridging, stereotypes, and the celebrity labour of Anna Nicole Smith

ABSTRACT

When actor and model Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007 she was known to the public through two central stereotypes: gold digger and white trash. Likewise, the news and entertainment media remembered Smith as ‘famous for being famous’, not for her ostensible talent or entrepreneurship. We critique the dominant understandings of Smith through a critical reading of cultural production by and about her. Analysis of Smith’s celebrity and its cultural antecedents allows for a better understanding of the production of celebrity and a greater appreciation of what it means to be ‘famous for being famous’. A careful consideration of Smith’s controversial life and work reveals an instance of celebrity where gender, race, and class-based stereotypes worked to delegitimize her celebrity labour. Specifically, interlocking stereotypes undermined Smith’s attempt at ‘fame-bridging’, cultural work she did to forge a link between Marilyn Monroe and her own claim to fame.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity
• stereotypes
• gender

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Joane Nagel and Nikki Perry for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the research.

Notes

1. A Note on Methods: We began a study of Anna Nicole Smith by reading popular biographies of her. A number of sensitising concepts emerged from the initial assessment of Smith’s celebrity. Next, we read widely, consulting magazine and newspaper articles as well as legal documents that related to her ongoing legal battles. We also watched, took notes, and transcribed sections of every available episode of her reality television series. The Nexis-Uni news database has over 20,000 articles that refer to Anna Nicole Smith from 1994 to 2007. We used the Nexis-Uni database to create a convenience sample of articles about Anna Nicole Smith during key flashpoints in her life (her marriage, inheritance lawsuit, the debut of her reality television show, and her death). We gathered, and read carefully, a total of 481 unique articles about Anna Nicole Smith. Our analysis, however, is primarily qualitative, or interpretive. We engage in a close reading of cultural production by Anna Nicole Smith and about Anna Nicole Smith; we do not make claims based on a quantitative content analysis or representative articles.

2. On the qualities of the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ aesthetic, its relationship to ‘camp’ and ‘paracinema,’ and how it engenders specific (and sophisticated) viewing strategies among audiences, see Bonnstetter (2012).

3. This number is derived from a keyword search of unique newspaper articles in the Nexis-Uni database (yielding 867 articles). It is an imperfect number due to limits of the database, but the size of the number suggests the popularity of the ‘gold digger’ frame in discussions of Anna Nicole Smith.

4. News of Smith’s death eclipsed the deaths of over forty U.S. soldiers that month and a major scandal about staff neglect at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre. On 8 February 2007, NBC Nightly News showed fourteen seconds of coverage of the Iraq war, but devoted over three minutes to cover the death of Smith. References to Anna Nicole Smith on MSNBC were 522 percent more frequent than references to Iraq. These statistics come from the blog Think Progress. See, https://thinkprogress.org/video-compilation-anna-nicole-smith-and-our-national-media-embarassment-d826f05fcd4e/(accessed 4 October 2018).

5. https://thinkprogress.org/gibson-reporters-who-ignore-anna-nicole-smith-to-focus-on-iraq-war-are-snobs-3a2d32682515/(accessed 4 October 2018).

6.. (Iacono 2007)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a 2018 Humanities Research Fellowship from the Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas.

Notes on contributors

Brian Donovan

Brian Donovan is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas. He is a historical sociologist and cultural historian with a focus on gender. Donovan is the author of White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1877–1917 (Illinois, 2006) and Respectability on Trial: Sex Crime Trials in New York City, 1900–1920 (SUNY, 2016). Donovan’s third book, American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020.

Elyse Neumann

Elyse Neumann is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Kansas. Her work focuses on fat studies, gender, and the body.