The search for the next rags-to-riches-and-notoriety story of Anna Nicole Smith continues. Who knows where the next true gossip superstar will emerge?
WASHINGTON DC: On FaceBook, one of the Web’s fastest-growing social networking sites, you’d find a section on Barack Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois and America’s latest political heartthrob, who is running for the presidency of the United States. Among other links and tidbits on him, there is also this section on his best quotes. One of them goes: “I am so over-exposed, I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse.”
It’s funny, all right. And true. Obama, together with his Democratic rival and former first lady Hillary Clinton, are surely one of the most written personalities in the US media these days. But if a 45-year-old presidential candidate’s swimming trunks make as much news as pop singer Britney Spears’ getting-out-of-the-car-without-underwear act, surely the days of gossip superstars are long over? Anna Nicole Smith, the greatest of gossip’s modern superstars, died on February 8, and has left behind a legacy — herself. After all, who can emulate a middle-class Texan who rose from being a waitress and a stripper to the wife of an octogenarian billionaire and the heir to more than $400 million?
The world will never be the same when Baywatch Babe Pamela Anderson takes to activism, singer Jennifer Lopez takes to scientology, porn stars Jenny McCarthy and Jenna Jameson respectively take to writing books about motherhood and becoming entrepreneurs. And the world will never be the same again when, apart from the nocturnal adventures of America’s three most-spoiled brats — Hilton Group heir Paris Hilton, singer Lionel Richie’s daughter Nicole Richie and Britney Spears — gossip magazines have not much to say. Indeed, Anna Nicole makes as much news after her death, probably more, as she made when she was alive.
Perhaps, then, it is too early time to anoint the threesome to take Anna Nicole Smith’s place in gossip history. Together, they can hope to reach the levels of notoriety achieved by Smith’s or Marilyn Monroe or even Anderson. Individually, however, they are no match.
Admittedly, Britney, now 25, does try to fill into the shoes of Monroe or of Madonna. But with little success. Her latest escapade — shaving her head after a failed rehab attempt — is a case in point. Her personal assistant, Felicia Culotta, wrote in a letter to a Hollywood blog: “There is only just so much you can do to help a person... I cannot save her from herself.” Britney’s attempts at notoriety — a virginity pledge, a failed marriage to a wannabe rap star, two kids whom she drops while drunk and the famous no-underwear photo-op — have only evoked laughs, perhaps even apathy. Nicole Richie’s drunken driving makes more news than any attempt to earn a living, except a failed reality show called The Simple Life which she co-hosted with her now-on, now-off best friend Paris Hilton. Fox did not renew the show in 2005, and the latest season is on hold because of her continuing health problems. She did state that she is working on a music album, but that has not materialised yet.
The greatest newsmaker of the three is, undoubtedly, Paris Hilton — heir to the Hilton millions and the staple of gossip writers and the paparazzi who track her every move. But can she really match up to Anna Nicole? Hilton comes from a moneyed background, Anna Nicole worked as a waitress at a chicken outlet. Hilton makes news for wearing the skimpiest of clothes, Anna Nicole never even made news when she was a stripper in Houston, Texas. It was only after Playboy father figure Hugh Hefner discovered her in 1992 that Anna Nicole’s star rose over the horizon. “The Next Marilyn Monroe,” people called her. Hilton, on the other hand, has no such problems.
The search for the next rags-to-riches-and-notoriety story of Anna Nicole Smith, therefore, continues. It took nearly two decades after Marilyn Monroe’s death for a Madonna to make herself visible and nearly a decade after Madonna’s rise for Anna Nicole Smith to rise to superstardom. With Anna Nicole’s death, who knows where the next true gossip superstar will emerge? Once again, we wait.
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