Anna Nicole Smith, Playmate of the Year, 1993

Playmate of the Year

You've Seen the Guess Jeans ads. The ultimate blonde, fighting her way out of tight dresses, straps falling off her shoulders, eyes smoldering into the camera. She reminded me of someone--several someones--when I first saw the pictures.

A hint of Marilyn Monroe and the great Dane, Anita Ekberg, yes, but someone else, too, a blonde version of Jane Russell, perhaps.

She has that attitude: Don't mess with me, mister, not if you know what's good for you. The challenge when she leans against a sun-bleached pole, cigarette coolly poised between long fingers. That look on her face: Does it say drop dead? Get over here, big boy? Or both?

There was no clue to the answers when I called this familiar stranger to set up an interview. She was staying at an old-fashioned five-star hotel on Chicago's Gold Coast. That's all I knew--that, and the fact that my call woke her up.

"What time is it?" Her voice was soft, small, sleepy.

"Just after noon."

"Call me at two, please."

By four in the afternoon I was knocking on the door of room 444, counting the plates piled outside on a room-service tray. Seven, all empty. This was a hungry woman. And there she was, on the threshold of a darkened room, blinds drawn, one shaded lamp on a table, TV blurting and squelching in the background. Happy Days. The Fonz and the gang, in that diner where they hang out.

She was maybe an inch under six feet. Hair pulled back in a ponytail. Baggy top. Tight jeans. Cute socks, flat shoes. The voice was still soft. "Please don't look at my hair. It's got plastic in it. Plastic snow. For the movie. They haven't let me wash it for the past three days."

That was my first glimpse of Anna Nicole Smith, the Guess Jeans girl, Playboy's Playmate of the Year.

I knew Playboy put her on the cover in March 1992 and then chose her for Playmate two months later, when she went by her original name, Vickie Smith. But the rest was unknown territory. Who was she? Where did she come from? How did she get here from there? When did it all start?

She sat on the side of the table with the lamp, I sat on the other, taking notes. Four o'clock in the afternoon and the bed wasn't made. It looked as though wild animals had been mangling the sheets and blankets. What kind of hotel was this?

"Lousy," said Anna. "I've spoken to everyone from the maid up to the manager, trying to get the TV fixed. My bodyguard next door gets full cable service, I get the networks. I've given up asking. They don't listen."

What's the point of having a bodyguard, I thought, if you can't use him to brutalize hotel people who fall down on the job? But I said nothing. Anna did all the talking. Never raised her voice, never displayed outrage or anger, none of that "don't they know who I am" business. While she talked, she chewed vitamin C tablets, kept an ear and sometimes an eye on Happy Days, laughing at the jokes, and called me sir.

There wasn't a lot of Texas left in her accent, but you could tell it was there, hiding, perhaps, until she was back with friends and family.

Texas is where she was born 25 years ago and lived most of her life, some of it in and around Houston, much of it in a small town about 70 miles south of Dallas. From the age of 15 to 19 she was breakfast cook at the Chicken House. "Its real name was Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken," she said, "but we all called it plain old Chicken House. I did eggs. I was real good with eggs. And okra. Mashed potatoes. Home-fried chicken. All that good stuff you can't get in these fancy hotels."

"What was that," I asked, "a five-day week?"

"Mostly seven," she said.

Anna worked with a girlfriend. They gave themselves nicknames. Anna was Cricket. "I was always jumping around." The two girls married two brothers, one of whom, Anna's husband, worked at the Chicken House. He'd been her boyfriend in high school. She was 17 when they married, he was 16. Both girls had babies a month apart, both got divorced.

Anna took her son, Daniel, to (text concluded on page 170) Guess Who? (continued from page 136) Houston and moved in with her mother, a police officer. They didn't get along, so Anna and Daniel found a place of their own, a tiny studio apartment in Houston. She took two jobs, waiting tables at a Red Lobster and working as a Wal-Mart cashier.

"I knew that something would happen one day. I just had to keep trying."

She went for an interview at one of Houston's biggest modeling agencies. "They asked me for money, told me to darken my hair, lose weight, change the way I looked and go to modeling school. I dyed my hair. Then I cried for two weeks, and they told me to forget it. You just don't have it, that's what they said."

A local photographer took a few pictures. He sent them to Playboy's Los Angeles studio, Playboy flew Anna to the West Coast for tests. Impressed by the results, the magazine signed her up for the cover and as a Playmate.

"She has that look," said Gary Cole, Playboy's Photography Director. "You can be sitting next to her and you think, Well, she's OK, she's not bad. But then you put her in front of a camera and, damn, it's another woman--not just another great blonde but someone extraordinary. That's what we saw."

Paul Marciano, the man who invented Guess Jeans, saw the same thing when he picked up the March and May 1992 issues of Playboy.

"I was totally mesmerized by that March cover," he said. "Her face drove me crazy." He looked inside the issue for more pictures but found none. When Anna's Playmate pictorial came out in May he called Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy's West Coast Photography Editor. He had two questions: Who was she? Where could he find her?

"I met Paul in Houston," Anna said. "He was shooting a new series of Guess ads in San Antonio and he invited me down to watch them work. No promises, he said, and that was the deal. After I'd been in San Antonio for a couple of hours he told them to put some makeup on me, just for a little test. Then they looked at the pictures and kept shooting me for the next two days. That's how I got to sign up with Guess Jeans for three years."

Paul Marciano, who called me after I'd seen Anna, confirmed the essentials. "We went to San Antonio to shoot a catalog of clothing for babies and kids," he said. "When I met her, I wasn't sure how it would turn out. She didn't walk like a model, she didn't look like a model. But in front of a camera she was magic. It was absolutely astounding, just seeing it happen. And it wasn't easy work, either. We were shooting in temperatures of a hundred and six. After ten minutes her makeup melted. She carried on as if she'd been doing it all her life."

Back at the hotel in Chicago, the Fonz was doing his Happy Days shtick. Anna giggled.

"Here's a copy of the script," she said.

Script? Right, almost forgot, the movie she had come to Chicago to make. I looked at the cover. The Hudsucker Proxy. An industrial fantasy, it said on the bottom. A film by Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coen brothers! The guys who made Blood Simple. Raising Arizona. Barton Fink. Miller's Crossing. Cinematic milestones, in my humble view.

"It's got Paul Newman and Tim Robbins in it," said Anna. "I play the part of Tim's girlfriend, then I dump him for an elevator man. It's going to be one funny movie. I was laughing so hard watching Tim the other day, they had to take my mike off."

I was thinking: From Red Lobster and Wal-Mart to the Coen boys, Newman and Robbins. I thought life didn't write that kind of story anymore.

"What's next, Anna?"

"I'm just waiting for things to slow down," she said. "It's all gone so fast. We've been shooting from six at night until four in the morning. Same again tonight."

Ah, that explains her reaction to my wake-up call at noon. Sorry, Anna.

"I'd give a lot for a little more sleep. Next week we move to North Carolina and start shooting again."

She has three months of solid bookings after she finishes Hudsucker. Modeling jobs, guest appearances, making movies. In between, she flies home to be with seven-year-old Daniel, or takes him with her when she's working close to home. She'll be in Cannes for the 1993 International Film Festival. Later she wants to rent an apartment in New York City for a year and get serious about acting lessons.

"I'm young and I'm blonde and I'm Texan," she said, "but I'm a serious person. I take work seriously and I take Daniel seriously, even though he drives me nuts when he beats me at Nintendo. Which he does all the time. He just laughs--he's too quick for me."

She admits it, she doesn't take kindly to losing. "Watch out if you play Monopoly with me. You send me to jail and I will kick that whole game over." She could do it, too. The woman has some powerful legs. They come from years of hard work.

She's reading more scripts and has found at least one she likes. Her ambition is to be an actress in the Monroe tradition: sexy, cool and funny. "I can't explain it because I don't understand it, but I've always felt this strong connection to Marilyn Monroe, always. She's who I turn to when I get upset. I play her songs, look at her pictures, watch her movies. I've got them all except River of No Return. I sure wish I could find that one."

As for actors, the one she said had the most lethal effect on her was Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise. "The strange thing is, he's not even my type, but when I saw him in that sex scene in the motel with Geena Davis, I couldn't take my eyes off him. I just could not sit still. He drove me totally nuts. It was all I could do to make it through the movie."

I swear she squirmed, ever so gently, at the memory.

"I don't know about that kind of stuff. Beiron, the guy I work with in the Guess ads--he's the young one with the dark hair hanging over his face? He's so cute. When they told me to kiss him I couldn't stop laughing, he looked so good. Those big lips of his."

That Beiron guy, I was thinking, is one lucky stiff. I bet Anna doesn't call him sir. The only people she calls sir, I bet, are the ones who remind her of customers lining up at Wal-Mart for their hearing-aid batteries.

I asked her if she ever feels like calling up the Houston modeling agency and saying, "Yoo-hoo, just thought I'd say hi. Thanks for the career advice."

She has no such need. "I don't have to be mean to anyone now. I just smile and keep right on going."

She recently bought a 15-acre ranch not far from Houston. Anna and Daniel share it with 30 guinea fowl, three turkeys, three pigs, three horses, 20 cows, a breeding bull, two parrots, a tame squirrel and six dogs.

"I'm looking for a couple of zebras and a chimp," she said. "I want one of those chimps that shake hands and like to be hugged."

Those are not the only items on her live shopping list.

"Well, I've got the ranch," she murmured in that soft voice--and she had a wicked smile as she said this--"Now all I need is a cowboy."

Bet your boots on it, she won't be calling him sir.

How many pairs of jeans can fit in a closet? Anna doesn't care anymore. She used her first Guess paycheck for a wild shopping spree, then had to build a new closet to hold all the goodies. At this rate, she'll have to build a new house.

Success is sweet for Anna, even though her hectic schedule doesn't allow her much time to enjoy it. She takes a moment to wax philosophic on the subject of exes: "When I think about all those boy-friends who cheated on me, I smile. I'm happy." Guess who's sorry now?

"'I'm young and I'm blonde and I'm Texan,' she said, 'but I'm a serious person. I take work seriously.'"