Want celebrities to be perfect? Lots of people prefer they aren't
By ERIC DEGGANS
Published February 10, 2007
Just hours after news broke that professional bombshell Anna Nicole Smith had died Thursday, commentators were pondering one question about her glamorously troubled life:
Why do we care so much?
Beyond her obvious sex appeal, there's a clear answer. Smith was among the first practitioners of a new class of celebrity career fed by the nation's caustic media establishment.
The professional screwup.
These are not talented performers with troubled personal lives - classic names such as Erroll Flynn, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Robert Downey Jr. and Smith's inspiration, Marilyn Monroe.
Those stars were all A-list talents. For today's celebrity screwups, disintegrating in public seems to be their only job description.
And in a media culture where reality TV shows barely pretend to have a purpose beyond humiliating their subjects, these screwups also are cutting to the chase - securing their tenuous hold on fame with a deluge of YouTube video clips and tabloid news stories focused on their latest high-profile misstep.
"The new celebrity reality shows (have) dropped the surface layer," said Andy Dehnart, editor of the reality TV-focused Web site Realityblurred.com. "They say to viewers, this is an absolute joke and you know and I know so let's just have fun (watching shows) that are absolutely about humiliating the celebrities."
This roster includes former Partridge Family star Danny Bonaduce, whose public drunkenness, street fighting and emotional abuse of his wife fueled the VH1 reality show Breaking Bonaduce. Joanie "Chyna Doll" Laurer is a former professional wrestler who now mostly shows up barely clothed on Howard Stern's radio show, slurring her words and babbling about one ill-fated showbiz venture after another.
But Smith may be the mother of the modern breed, handed the title when her own reality TV series, The Anna Nicole Show debuted to record ratings in 2002, showing the model struggling with her weight, freeloading relatives and a tenuous grip on reality.
Appearing on various tabloid "news" shows recently to deny charges her 5-month-old child was fathered by an old boyfriend, the former Vickie Lynn Hogan was in typical form. Slurring words through lips surgically swollen to an almost cartoonish degree, Smith seemed propped up by her attorney and faux-husband Howard K. Stern (not the radio guy).
Now that Smith is gone, an uncomfortable question remains: Did our interest in her train wreck of a personal life help make this possible?
You can expect the media interest in Smith to only grow, now that her death has left a tangle of legalities worthy of at least two Law & Order episodes.
True enough, Smith was an adult just like Bonaduce, Laurer and all the others who have made careers of feeding the media their personal foibles.
But maybe we bear responsibility for paying too much attention. And for allowing people with open psychological wounds to earn six-figure salaries brandishing their pain.
Eric Deggans can be reached at deggans@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8521. See his blog at blogs.tampabay.com/media.