Citizen Anna
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This spirit of ambition and reinvention isn't automatically good or automatically bad. It gave us upward social mobility, and it gave us teenagers with butt implants. It gave us Manifest Destiny and reality TV. But it is part of what defines us. Maybe Smith made people uncomfortable because she crassly, gluttonously embodied ideals that are familiar, even celebrated, in American culture: determination, drive and the faith that the good are rewarded materially. "I think heaven's a beautiful place," she told Los Angeles magazine in 1994. "Gold. You walk on gold floors."
Whether or not Smith is in her 24-karat heaven, in life it sometimes seemed as if her physique, her creation, was all she had left. In 2004 she appeared at the American Music Awards, fingering her cleavage and slurring, "Like my body?" Some people called it an intoxicated rant, others a lost girl's plea for love. But is there a touch of professional pride in there too? This is my life's work, she seems to tell us. This what I made for you. I did a good job. Didn't I?
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