‘She was a hustler’: the fascinating true story of Anna Nicole Smith
In the recent wave of documentaries demanding justice for the tragic blondes of the 1990s – Britney Spears, Princess Diana and Pamela Anderson among them – it’s unsurprising to find a new film about Anna Nicole Smith next in the queue.
Anna Nicole: You Don’t Know Me, a Netflix production directed by Ursula Macfarlane, revisits the life of the titular model and Playboy centerfold best known for marrying an octogenarian billionaire, then very publicly losing it all; in 2007, she was found dead in a Hollywood, Florida, Hard Rock hotel at the young age of 39, having taken a toxic mixture of methadone, Valium and a variety of sedatives. Diverging from the precedents set by the Britney and Diana films, however, this new documentary treats Smith less as a powerless victim of the media than the savvy protagonist of her own story. “She was a hustler,” Macfarlane tells the Guardian. “She made things happen on her own terms.”
Smith, born Vickie Lynn Hogan, began her life in the working-class, Godfearing town of Mexia, Texas. “She was born beautiful,” says a voiceover from her late mother, a police officer named Virgie Mae Hogan, as she recalls memories of grown men following her child through the local shopping mall. As an adult, Smith rarely spoke of her childhood except to say that she hated her abusive mother, and Macfarlane pieces together these early years with interviews with her subject’s brother and her uncle. From a young age, they say, Smith was rebelliously enterprising, fixated on gaining both attention and money. She dropped out of high school to get a job at a fried chicken restaurant, where at age 17, she married a coworker who allegedly kept her locked inside the house. She gave birth to her son Daniel to soothe her own loneliness, then took off with him in pursuit of fame and fortune when he was six months old.
“She had an incredible work ethic,” recalls a former co-worker simply known as Missy who witnessed Smith on her early ascent to fame. Smith had modeled her Hollywood persona after the humor of Carol Burnett and the sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe, and played a record of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend on her first Playboy photoshoot to soothe her camera-shyness. Later revealed to have been lovers, Missy and Smith had met working at a Houston strip club called The Executive Suite, where Missy initially though she was taking a beautiful young novice under her wing. She quickly realized what becomes a recurring theme throughout the film: “No one needed to give her any pointers on how to attract a man … She doesn’t need a lot of help manipulating anybody.”
Smith first met the billionaire oil tycoon J Howard Marshall at the strip club in 1991, when he was 86 years old and she was only 23. Media treatment of their relationship had presented Smith as an opportunistic gold digger in Macfarlane’s mind, but during the film-making process, “one of the things that really surprised me was that their relationship, regardless of the distance in decades, was actually genuine,” the director says. “It was love, whatever love means, and it felt very important for us to set the record straight.”
The film approaches Smith and Marshall’s relationship with a measured tenderness, offering montages of the couple’s personal photographs and recordings of affectionate phone calls, plus home movies of loving exchanges between Marshall and Smith’s son. (As for how the film-makers got them, says producer Alexandra Lacey: “We can’t disclose the source of those, I’m afraid.”)
The film is largely sympathetic to the titular blonde bombshell, touching only briefly on the negative aspects of her marriage. “She was getting to where she was no longer grateful to Mr Marshall, just treating him like an ATM,” Missy says, recalling a change in Smith’s formerly warm-hearted personality as she developed an addiction to painkillers. Footage of a tearful Smith testifying her love for her late husband resounds with a heartfelt authenticity, particularly because she was known for her poor acting skills: “It wasn’t a sexual, ‘Baby oh baby I love your body’ type of love. It was a deep ‘thank you’ for taking me out of this hole, and ‘thank you for saving my life’.”
Marshall’s death in 1995, just 14 months after their wedding, marks an inflection point in the film where Smith’s upward trajectory quickly turns into a downward spiral. Despite the majority-woman jury, she lost her highly publicized legal battle over her late husband’s $1.6bn fortune to his son, Pierce Marshall. “She didn’t lose because she was a gold digger,” says Pierce’s lawyer Rusty Hardin. “She lost because of who she was.” Marshall had spent an estimated total of $14m on Smith hoping that it would be enough to support her after his death. On the witness stand, she described expenses “that the average person would find ludicrous”, Hardin adds. “It did not matter if it was alcohol or sex or drugs or food, she was a glutton”
Despite Macfarlane’s attempts to portray Smith as a sympathetic character, the rest of the film unfolds as chaotically and cringe-inducingly as it did in real life, from her short-lived reality TV show, to the custody battle over her infant daughter, to the tragedy of her son Daniel’s fatal drug overdose. Without the PR and management infrastructure Marshall had put in place for her, Smith’s career devolved into a series of clownish, visibly drug-addled public appearances.
“Throughout her life, she tried to be what she thought other people wanted her to be,” producer Alexandra Lacey says. Consequently, Smith also turned out to be a thoroughly unreliable narrator; her stories of childhood abuse were actually stolen from Missy’s life in order to garner attention and sympathy.
The real Anna Nicole Smith is a figure of many contradictions, says Macfarlane, “and we’re grateful to have had the time and the space to dig down and pull out all the nuances of someone who is extremely complex”. While her film presents few revelations about its subject, the director values the opportunity to revisit the tabloid era of the 90s “with fresh eyes”.
“If [Smith] were forging her narrative today, I really like think that she’d be living a joyous social media life where she was in control of the narrative,” Macfarlane says. “In the post#MeToo world, I want people watching this film to come away with more empathy and less judgment.”
Anna Nicole: You Don’t Know Me is now available on Netflix
he says with a wry smile. His single Kawabis (meaning nightmares in Arabic) was drawn from a harrowing moment – “I had a nightmare about having a nightmare. I could not touch myself and had so much pain from life” – and incorporates sounds and beats found on the internet, “softening the harshness” of the maazoufeh rhythm.
In Basra there are no venues to perform in, due to the conservative nature of society, so the only places in which to perform non-classical styles of music are public parks.
So Hafs has released a large number of albums via YouTube, the chief medium for releasing music in Iraq. More recently he has put out work on the indie record label Shlonak Records, founded by Canada-based Iraqi rapper and professor Narcy, who established it to aid releases in a country where Spotify only arrived in 2021 and the physical production of music relies on piracy. Producer Abdulisms, a principal voice on the Iraqi music scene in London and another vital part of Shlonak Records, explains the logistical barriers in Iraq: “Most tracks are distributed on Telegram channels; there’s often no way of getting MP3s apart from ripping them off YouTube.” The other issue is that PayPal is not available there.
But Covid lockdowns deepened the ties between musicians in Iraq and around the world. Unable to collaborate with people in London, Abdulisms joined Iraq-A-Fella Radio, a show started by Mocity, a Delhi-based Iraqi label owner and DJ, exploring many branches of sonic heritage, “from chobi to chalghi, to more nostalgic tunes, presenting Iraqi female singers, rappers and football anthems,” Abdulisms says. UsFoxx was also involved, “feeding us all the tracks and information from Iraq. Iraq-A-Fella started as heart surgery” – something to heal its wounded listeners – “and took on a life of its own. It was mad!”
Meanwhile, London-based BritishIraqi artist manager Nazar Risafi has been working with Iraqi duo Tribe of Monsters, who are based in Amman, Jordan. Their trailblazing single Cypher took the voice of legendary Iraqi singer Sajda Obeid and blended it with Cardi B and Gucci Mane, spiced up with a trip-hop groove and Iraqi percussion and interwoven with samples of Arabic instruments such as the oud and nay.
Risafi explains that the Tishreen uprising, which lasted almost two years and saw a mass movement of Iraqi youth take to the streets demanding a new homeland and Iraqi identity beyond sectarianism, had a huge effect. “We started seeing rap artists online and on the streets, rapping about the revolution,” he says. “From there people started to connect – in 2020 you saw collaborations between artists in Iraq with artists outside Iraq.” Rapping about state corruption as well as the insidious effects of sectarianism, economic downturn, unemployment and international interference in Iraq, the music is both anti-establishment and anti-interventionist.
The first Tribe of Monsters single Dheil A’waj (Crooked Tail) meticulously described the daily struggles young people faced on the streets during the uprising, followed by Albo October, which referenced the protests where more than 700 protesters were killed and more than 17,000 injured. “October boys, we salute you, the Iraqi flag flies high above us and all the corrupt politicians are beneath our feet,” Ameer Shamy raps. The duo has been preparing a compilation album titled Made in Iraq, bringing together the cream of the Iraqi rap scene. There are female rappers too – at least in the diaspora – such as Nayomi or Psi.ko, but Iraqi music is not all about electronic music and rap.
In the US, Iraqi-American jazz trumpeter and musician Amir ElSaffar has been touring with the Two Rivers Ensemble; a sextet of international and south west Asian musicians making innovative strides between American jazz and the maqam modal system which ElSaffar explains is “a repertoire of melodies that are sung to poetry and practised in Iraq for hundreds of years, going back to the Abbasid era [750 to AD1258]”. For him, playing this specifically Iraqi music is a political gesture, reminding listeners of how the country endures. “I’m glad that some people are remembering and acknowledging the horrors, but it seems like [most of] the world has moved on,” he says. “We still need to think about the impact on ordinary Iraqis.”
He has just returned from a visit to Iraq for the first time in 20 years, and was wowed by a 40-strong ensemble of musicians all under the age of 35. “I was getting tears in my eyes, because they were playing from memory and putting their hearts into it in a very intimate way.”
Nadin Al Khalidi is an Iraqi multi-instrumentalist and singer for the Sweden based group Tarabband who plays another style altogether: veering between the ecstatic Arab urban music of tarab and western folk and classical arrangements, Al Khalidi adds a touch of Iraqi chobi (an upbeat folkloric rhythm local to Iraq), jazz and north African rhythms.
Growing up in an artistic household, with weekly visits to the Baghdad Opera House, she recalls sirens and bombs soundtracking her childhood during the Gulf war. After that, she says, “there were the sanctions on Iraq; there was the dictatorship and constant spying, and then the invasion.” The Iraq war in 2001 forced Al Khalidi and her sister to flee as refugees – she speaks to me from her home office in Malmö. She had been taught to play the violin at The Music and Ballet School of Baghdad as a child, but had to abandon her musical education due to the wars. Upon arriving in Sweden Al Khalidi worked in a pub, where the Serbian owner encouraged her to sing in Arabic. “I had no responsibilities; my parents had died and I was eager to live. I dreamed of playing the guitar and there I was, playing the music that I loved for the first time, with a PA system and a mic.” Within a week, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra asked her to take part in a project sharing Arabic folk music, where she met her eventual Tarabband collaborator Gabriel Hermanson.
For the 2022 album Yekhaf (I Intimidate Him) she worked with an Egyptian poet, Hazem Wefy, “who helped me understand how I’m writing from personal experiences. The album is about encounters with fellow Iraqis, Arabicspeakers and kindred spirits, the young generation of Iraqis demonstrating on the streets,” and about “new friendships and support systems created en route.” One of the most touching songs is Sedra, dedicated to a refugee girl from Mosul who Al Khalidi met during a performance in 2018. “She kept interrupting me as I was singing in Arabic. Later she told me that she saw the execution of both her parents by IS. She asked me to sing about her – and this song is for her.”
Farther south in Europe, the experimental, innovative work of Khyam Allami, a Berlin-based British-Iraqi multi-instrumentalist, researcher and founder of the label Nawa Recordings, draws from the past to look into the future. Allami studied oud in London and engaged with Iraqi maqam which are the basis for his debut album, Resonance/Dissonance, “but I always wanted to understand what makes an Iraqi song and what’s the thumbprint carried within,” he says. “We can forge new ideas and a new future by learning from the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean reviving the past or taking it literally. What I’ve been trying to get at is the essence of something.” He says he’s been inspired by African American artists, who, “whether it’s hiphop, jazz, or other artistic and musical forms, have had to define their own future based on their past, in a way that’s owned and committed.” Allami is now delving into 9th and 10th century Arabic manuscripts by Iraqi polymaths Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, and how they relate to today’s culture.
The deep desire for Iraqis such as UsFoxx and Hafs to connect with the outside world is met, then, with a similar desire from the Iraqi diaspora to connect with their homeland – which needs to be handled sensitively. Allami collaborated with the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq a few years ago – “It was the first time that I’d been able to connect with this generation who had lived through these catastrophes” – and while studying in Cairo, met a young man “whose entire family was killed in an air raid; that generation has a look in their eye that tells us that we haven’t lived what they’ve lived through. But I’ve learned that we need to think about our contributions regardless of our positions.” What he contributes, he says, is “allowing others to do a different kind of work”.
ElSaffar also often thinks about how he can “connect the jazz improv scene to that in Iraq”, and for Al Khalidi it is a similar story: “I would love to perform in Iraq with Tarabband, but I would come back home to Sweden”. Every Iraqi has a story of why they had to leave, Abdulisms explains: “The question of returning is far too complex and intersects with a lot of power [structures].”
Despite the challenges, Iraqi musicians are asserting the longstanding plurality of their country’s identity and adding to the remarkably eclectic fabric of its music. It seems that even the Iraqi government is catching up: prime minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani recently gave the green light for works to resume on Baghdad’s Opera House. One of the oldest symphony orchestras in the world can once again become a space nurturing culture and creativity – qualities that are clearly in abundant supply in Iraq.