Guessing

• In a new Netflix documentary, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, director Ursula Macfarlane weaves a tragic web from complex, at times conflicting, accounts of the life of the infamous model.
• You Don’t Know Me documents the unravelling of Smith’s public image, from small-town girl, to Playboy playmate and Guess model, to “gold digger” and “white trash”.
• Born Vickie Lynn Hogan, Smith spent most of her childhood in the small Texan town of Mexia.
• True to her word, she made herself a star and married him three years later, at Houston’s White Dove Wedding Chapel.

Smith’s star power

• First featured on its cover in March 1992, Smith was quickly made playmate of the month in May, before winning playmate of the year in 1993.
• Smith’s goddess-like figure, splashed across H&M lingerie billboards, even reportedly caused a number of car accidents in Norway.
• At times the coverage of the tragedy of Smith’s life in You Don’t Know Me, eclipses that of her accomplishments.

‘Adored by millions, but loved by few’

• Celebrity women are frequently criticised in the British and American press, particularly those who dare to exist outside the western norms of feminine acceptability and desirability.
• In one particularly striking clip, American radio presenter Howard Stern asks Smith to be publicly weighed, for the entertainment of his viewers.
• Instead of redeeming their subjects, these projects often cause further harm by perpetuating a sense of public ownership over them.

Who gets to tell Smith’s story?

• Stern was accused of being complicit in the drug abuse that led to her death.
• He was found guilty of illegally providing Smith with prescription drugs in 2009, before having his conviction overturned in 2011.
• Birkhead claims to be working on his own documentary of Smith’s life, utilising her archives to “let Anna tell her own story”.