So Anna Nicole Smith — the poor, talentless Texan girl who by virtue of the most enormous bosom became a stripper in a Houston clip joint and married one of its regular customers, a wheelchair-bound oil billionaire 63 years her senior — is to be the subject of a new opera that will receive its first performance at the Royal Opera House next year. The opera is an all-British effort, with music by Mark-Anthony Turnage and libretto by Richard Thomas, one of the creators of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Springer, widely attacked as blasphemous, was a sprightly satire on American trash culture, which ended with God and the Devil battling over the soul of the famous talk show host. But Anna Nicole, as the new opera is called, looks set to be more of a traditional operatic tragedy, ending with its heroine’s early death at the age of 39. Details of the plot have not been revealed; but its librettist has been quoted as saying: ‘Anna Nicole Smith’s tragic life is a classic American tale about celebrity, and the price you pay for trying to escape your roots.’
This seems a little unfair on Anna Nicole, whose roots were of a kind that anyone would want to escape. Born in Houston into a poor working-class family, with parents who were divorced when she was two, and a mother who subsequently married four more times, she dropped out of school in her teens to get a job as a fast-food waitress in Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken restaurant in the obscure Texas town of Mexia. There, aged 17, she married a 16-year-old cook, Billy Smith: and next year they had a son, Daniel, only to separate shortly afterwards. It was an unpromising start for a woman who had always dreamt of becoming famous and, as a girl, had kept a picture of Marilyn Monroe on her bedroom wall.
But things looked up when she moved back to Houston and got a job in a strip club called Gigi’s, which was regularly attended at lunchtime by the old and decrepit J. Howard Marshall II. (It was Anna Nicole’s good fortune that she had been demoted from the evening shift to be there at lunch.) Marshall became besotted with her, lavished gifts upon her and, once her divorce from Billy Smith had come through, married her in 1994. She was then 26, and he 89. Marshall died the following year; and although Anna Nicole apparently paid him little attention during their brief marriage and had several reported affairs, a Los Angeles judge awarded her $449,754,134 out of his $1.6 billion estate. This was challenged by Marshall’s children from a previous marriage and provoked litigation that continued unresolved until her death in 2007, fat, broke and generally falling to pieces.
There was an awful lot of tragedy involved in the Anna Nicole story. Her son Daniel died mysteriously, aged 20, while visiting her in hospital where she had just had another baby — a girl called Danielynn — five months before her own death of a drug overdose. Howard Marshall’s eldest son also died during the litigation. And just this month an appeals court ruled that none of Marshall’s money should go to three-year-old Danielynn, of whom three unscrupulous men had claimed paternity because of her prospective wealth. All very sad. But for an opera to work, it must contain at least one character with whom it is possible to empathise; and this could be a problem with Anna Nicole. J. Howard Marshall is a possible candidate for sympathy; for despite Anna Nicole’s insistence that she had married him for love and been ‘turned on by his liver spots’, her tenacity in fighting for his money cast doubt on this. But while she certainly made Marshall look a fool, he wasn’t actually taken for a ride; for he didn’t leave her anything in his will. And one can feel only limited compassion for a man whose only interest in a woman is for the size of her surgically enhanced breasts.
As for the Anna Nicole herself, she had some endearing aspects. One was her simple view that the only purpose of woman was to be attractive to men. ‘Are you a feminist?’ an interviewer once asked her. ‘I don’t understand the question,’ she replied. ‘Do you fight for women’s rights?’ ‘Whoever started that, I could kick them in the head.’ She denied having silicone implants, but was at least frank about having had breast surgery: ‘My nipples kind of pointed downwards, so I had them moved from here to there.’ And she had religious beliefs suited to a suspected gold-digger. Asked what she thought about heaven, she replied: ‘I think heaven’s a beautiful place. Gold. You walk on gold floors.’ But for all that, or because of it, Anna Nicole remains impossible to take seriously. It is difficult even to regard her as real, so alien seems the culture to which she belongs. However good the opera turns out to be, it is hard to imagine being much moved by the story,
Still, if opera as an art form is to broaden its appeal, it’s a good idea that new operas should draw inspiration from contemporary events. But while Richard Thomas regards the Anna Nicole story as ‘intrinsically operatic’, I think the same could be said more plausibly of situations involving British celebrities with whom we can more easily identify — David Beckham, for example, or Tony Blair. Surely the currently dismal state of British politics should be capable of yielding a tragic morality tale, involving such heroes as Stephen Byers and Geoff Hoon.
In contrast, there could be an excellent comic opera dealing with the mysterious proletarianisation of Samantha Cameron, whose accent when describing ‘Dave’ on television as a ‘fantastic dad’ was so estuarine as to make one wonder if she really could be the daughter of that plummy old throwback, Sir Reginald Sheffield. It could be a sort of My Fair Lady in reverse in which the well-born, well-spoken heroine is forced to talk cockney and go on singing ‘The roin in Spoin falls moinly on the ploin’ until she gets it right. The moral here, as with Anna Nicole, could be ‘the price you pay for trying to escape your roots’, and the price in this case could be a political one for the party of which Dave is the leader. For nice person though Samantha clearly is, her accent, however genuine, sounds phoney; and the British public has an instinct for phoneyness and an aversion to it in any form.
Hugo Rifkind returns next week.
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