Vanessa Williams Redux

About twenty years ago, I wrote a piece about the Vanessa Williams/Miss America scandal that examined how morally ambiguous our society has become, and how difficult it is to really assign roles like "hero" and "villain" anymore, well, "anymore" meaning in 1984.

Looking at the players in the recent Anna Nicole saga, it's safe to say things haven't changed much. If anything, the line between "good" and "bad" behavior and motivation has blurred even more.

There are really four major players in the Anna Nicole saga; Anna herself, her lawyer/boyfriend Howard K. Stern, her "other" boyfriend Larry Birkhead, and Virgie Arthur, Anna's mother. As with the Williams story, it's easy to quickly jump to conclusions and point the finger at who was to blame for the unquestionable tragedies that befell Anna Nicole, but ultimately all we find is a collection of tragic human beings swept up in a story that seemed destined to end badly.

It's easy to ridicule and judge Anna. She was really famous for little more than being very beautiful (something she had in common with a lot of others, incidentally). She behaved bizarrely in her "reality" TV show; at times being childlike, at others insolent and selfish, and almost always demanding. Her weight fluctuated wildly, and she didn't seem to have the slightest knowledge of what was going on in the world that existed outside of her strange Hollywood existence. She slurred her speech, whether it was from having a "Texas drawl" or the use of prescription medications or a combination of the two, we'll probably never know. In short, she was an easy target and she received it in spades.

But she certainly didn't intend to harm anyone. She didn't force anyone to watch her show, or her handful of terrible movies, or to buy her magazines. We were fixated on Anna for a lot of reasons; her echoes of Marilyn Monroe, her "outrageous" lifestyle, her "rags to riches" history and the sheer audacity she projected which seemed to imply that all of the craziness in her life was no big deal.

Anna probably wasn't the world's greatest role model for her son, but who is, ultimately? For all her silliness, she obviously loved the boy and did what she at least thought was right for him. If it turns out she wasn't a perfect parent, again, I think she has plenty of company. Anna supported herself and her family, she took advantage of the scant opportunities life had given her and ran with them. We'll probably never know the whole story behind why she really left home, but it seems almost certain that it was more than just "running with a bad crowd".

She certainly didn't wish for the tragic turn of events that took Daniel's life, nor did she probably fully understand how self-destructive her own behavior was, or how difficult she must have made it to be her friend and still be honest with her. Regardless of what the show tried to project, it couldn't have been a lot of fun being Anna Nicole Smith. So while we all have to take responsibility for our own actions, I don't think it's really fair to say she was a "bad" person without a comprehensive account of where she came from and why she behaved the way she did. In the end, she seems a lot more like a lost little girl than a villainess to me, and wherever she is right now I hope she's bested the demons that plagued her during her short life.

Intertwined in Anna's life like a sad, needy Oroburos was the lovesick, enabling Howard K. Stern. I don't know anything of Howard's life before Anna, but it's easy to glean a lot about who he was from watching the TV show. Howard was Anna's yes man, her confidant, her "best friend" and her safety valve. He tried to apply the brakes when she needed them applied, keep her out of legal, financial and career trouble as much as possible. The media wants so badly to paint this poor nebbish as some kind of Svengali who orchestrated some mad plan to grab hold of Anna's fortune but it's so obvious that the tail was wagging the dog here. Anna screamed at Howard, relied on him, constantly threatened to stop speaking to him, belittled him, rejected him, teased him, in short, took advantage of what was undoubtedly his adoration of her to get what she wanted and needed.

Howard should be kicked in the butt for allowing his best friend to continue on her self-destructive ways without laying down the law, and for creating an environment where everything she did was "OK" somehow because he made it so and still loved her at the end of the day. But he's not a villain, either. He's just a poor guy who didn't know how to tell someone he loved to change and was probably afraid if he did so he'd lose her. That sounds like a lot of people I know, none of whom have horns or a pointed tail.

I don't really know that much about Larry Birkhead. He doesn't look like a member of Mensa, that's for sure, but he doesn't strike me as malicious at all, just a bit foggy and shallow. He slept with Anna but apparently she didn't want to marry him, or if she did, she got cold feet because she seems to have retreated to Howard for comfort and protection (probably a pattern). He seems to have at least some means of support so his entire motivation couldn't be monetary. I'm sure he didn't mind the dubious fame he achieved by being Anna Nicole Smith's boyfriend, but maybe we should take him at his word that he really just wants to have custody of what he, and apparently most others, feel is "his" daughter.

Last and to my mind, least, in this drama is Anna's mother, Vergie. It's hard for me to believe that Anna's problems stemmed totally from the "wrong crowd" explanation Vergie put forward. Certainly every situation is seen through the subjective prisms of all those who experience it, and from Vergie's point of view Anna (AKA "Vicki") was a troubled, willful girl who just wouldn't listen to Mama. But it's hard to look at that tape from "Entertainment Tonight" of Anna seething with rage (and uncharacteristic clarity) about the "Mommy Dearest" whom she wants no part of anymore. It can't all have stemmed from Vergie's allegations about her and/or Howard's potential role in Daniel's death. Some of that bitterness is old, hard and frozen in her psyche but God knows what type of history with her mother, but you can bet it wasn't particularly pleasant.

So if there is a "camp" to be in, this isn't the one I'd choose. Vergie seems hard, bitter, controlling and dictatorial and it's hard to dismiss her sudden entrance into her daughter's life after so long an absence as being motivated solely by concern over her daughter's wishes and legacy.

Still, regardless of the quality of her parenting, Vergie cannot really be blamed for all the decisions that Anna made after she was a grown woman. None of us have perfect parents, and at some point we have to take responsibility for our own actions and let go of whatever real or perceived wrongs our parents visited upon us. Anna obviously had a lot of pain associated with her memories of childhood and the allegations made by Vergie no doubt brought them all to the forefront, but Vergie didn't make her dream of Hollywood fame or choose the reckless, shallow lifestyle that Anna chose.

And denial can be a powerful motivator. If faced with the charges of being a terrible mother, Vergie would have no doubt fallen back on the old "I did the best that I could under trying circumstances" plea. Maybe in trying to insinuate herself back into Anna's life (if such can be said after someone has died) she was somehow trying to make up for the mistakes she'd made. She may well have reasonably thought she was "protecting" Anna from what she perceived as bad influences. Whatever her motivation, it's a lead pipe cinch that she didn't want her daughter dead, and would probably have wanted a richer relationship with her while she was alive.

In my old essay about Vanessa Williams, I more or less concluded that modern real life dramas are difficult to stage as "morality plays" because the moralities involved are inherently complex. We know so much about each participant and each comes equipped with the bully pulpit of the media so that we often aren't sure where, if anywhere, we can affix blame. My closing line was "they just don't make villains like they used to."

With the Smith story, I think that's true but there's also something deeper going on. I've noticed not only how hard it is to cast the players in terms of "hero" and "villain" but also how much people WANT to cast them in such terms. We want our heroes squeaky clean and our villains to be unredeemable devils. It makes life much simpler and easy because that's the way we want to see ourselves and our actions. We don't want to be able to see similarites between ourselves and someone we've judged to be bad, because maybe that means there's some "bad" in us as all and some "good" in those we dislike. That kind of thinking throws all of our calculations off, and makes us do the hardwork of evaluating people as people, in a very comprehensive and sympathetic way.

I guess it's not nearly as easy to point and laugh when you are pointing at a mirror.