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Years before Anna Nicole Smith became a Playboy centerfold, reality star, and pop culture fascination, she was Vickie Lynn Hogan—a Texan single mother who was starting a new job at a Houston strip club. Hogan was naive, flat-chested, and physically awkward—she danced like “an emu trying to fly,” remembers a fellow dancer named Missy in Netflix’s new documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me. Missy, who would go on to be Hogan’s lifelong friend, sometime lover, and witness to her celebrity transformation, took Hogan under her wing, teaching her about dancing and the new gig. But there were two subjects on which Hogan needed no education.
“No one needed to give her any pointers on how to attract a man,” says Missy. “She knew what she was doing.” She also “didn’t need any help at manipulating anybody. She was better at it than me.”
Such is the complicated portrait of Smith that emerges in the Netflix documentary, directed by Ursula Macfarlane and available today. Macfarlane traces Smith’s hungry pursuit of the American dream, and reveals how Smith mythologized her own backstory to market herself—claiming she grew up in poverty and hijacking Missy’s own story of childhood abuse, Missy claims, to allege that her mother, Virgie Mae Hogan, mistreated her growing up. Multiple sources in the documentary claim that Smith’s family was not poor and that Virgie, a retired policewoman who died in 2018, was a sweet woman who loved Smith and, if anything, helped keep her out of trouble.
In a never-before-heard interview, Virgie claims her daughter told her point-blank why she was throwing her under the bus to the public: “I make more money telling sad stories than I make telling good stories,” she claims Smith told her. When Virgie asked Smith whether she wanted people to think good things about her, she says Smith replied, “Not if bad pays better.”
Ironically, Missy alleges in the documentary, Smith was later the victim of a horrific actual assault—one that was too painful to share with the public.
Smith grew up not knowing her biological father, and blamed his absence on Virgie, according to the documentary. Like many fatherless children, she idealized her dad in her head—believing that he was thinking of her as much as she was of him. After Smith established herself in Hollywood—securing a contract with Guess Jeans and appearing multiple times in Playboy—she hired a private investigator to track down her father, and flew both him and her biological brother out to meet her in California.
Anna Nicole Smith in Anna Nicole: You Don’t Know Me. Courtesy of Netflix.
The meeting took place around 1993, the same year Playboy named Smith Playmate of the Year. The Netflix documentary cuts to home movie footage of Smith, still coherent and bubbly in her mid-20s as she goes to meet her father, Donald Hogan, and brother, Donnie, at the airport. During that reunion in California, Smith brought both men to the Playboy mansion to attend the party Hugh Hefner threw in her honor, and to Disneyland for a family excursion with her young son, Daniel.
But Donald was not the caring father Smith had envisioned, Donnie explains in the film. “My father is not the type of guy you want to be alone with. You’re not going to feel safe,” he tells the camera—a warning he shared with Smith. Indeed, according to The Guardian, Donald, who died in 2009, pleaded guilty to raping Smith’s aunt when she was a child, as well as another underage girl, and spent six months in prison for the offenses. He was also accused of sexually abusing his other daughters, per The Guardian. It’s unclear whether Smith knew of her father’s crimes, but according to the Netflix documentary, Smith—who had been so excited about her reunion with her father—was uncharacteristically silent when he left California.
“When we were alone [later], she told me her father had tried to have sex with her,” Missy says in the film. “It was really sad…because I know how happy she was when she met him. She had all of these ideas in her head of what he was like, and what it was going to be like, and then she was just so, so disappointed.”
Source: VanityFair | Read More
