TrimSpa, Baby

Emmeline Clein recounts an “American Icarus story” spelled out in diet pills and rhinestones in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Emmeline CleinAugust 13, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

• Biography & Autobiography

• Nonfiction

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print. And join us to celebrate Gossip’s release at our end-of-summer launch party on August 22.

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SLURRING, SLIM, HANDS thrown to the heavens—her voice warbles, flirtatious or afraid. Her index finger is on her chest, pointing to the pendant resting between her breasts as she asks us, again, as she did in ad spot after ad spot, Like my body? She’s heard every version of the answer, lived so many lives in so many bodies in so little time. A few decades, a few surgeries. Dye jobs and modeling jobs and tabloid hack jobs, injections and incisions and then the inquisition: What did you get done, Anna, and what do you weigh? Operating theaters, green rooms, reality television sets, award shows—spotlit stages we promised would be warm then abandoned her in once they got hot enough to burn. Singed and trapped in the spotlight, our line of sight, a camera’s crosshairs.

Like my body? She doesn’t need to ask. Still, she’ll indulge us. After all, indulgence is what we accused her of: immoderation, intemperance, an appetite for eyes and sighs. And of course, fries, burgers, the all-American food we want to watch our All-American Girls bite into, but not really eat—“I like fast men, fast cars, and fast food,” she once announced through stoplight-red lips, trapped in the confessional cam of her reality show. While she’s remembered as an addict, Anna Nicole Smith was also an ascetic of a sort, a saint for the cause we sacrificed her for—beauty bought and bruised, chiseled and incised into submission. Disciplining her body, bending it to her will despite the bleeding, the abscesses; enduring the whirring tools of an industry intent on whittling her away.

Vickie Lynn Hogan was a flat-chested brunette, but she became Anna Nicole Smith, plasticine Marilyn Monroe of the new millennium. “After I got my body—then I really could relate to her,” Anna once said of Marilyn, her mother in another dimension and her role model in this one, a woman who understood the dangers a dream body can pose to a real one. Anna’s autopsy report name-checks Marilyn twice—once in the list of possible reasons to classify her death as a suicide (“Miss Smith declared that she wished to die in the same fashion as her idol […] Miss Monroe employed chloral hydrate,” which was also found in Anna’s blood), and once in the list of possible reasons to classify her death as an accidental overdose (“Miss Smith’s obsession with Marilyn Monroe had waned somewhat over time”).

An American scam, an Icarus story: The breasts that became her calling card condemned her. They caused physical pain, incited scorn and stares, sent her spiraling into an addiction to painkillers. And, eventually, diet pills, including the ones she was hawking when she wondered, winkingly, how we felt about her body. When she attended the 2004 Billboard Music Awards, Anna Nicole Smith had been the spokeswoman for TrimSpa diet pills for just over a year. In ads, the star stepped out of a limousine into a crowd of flashing cameras. I’m back, she said, smiling, as a photo of a heavier her floated across the top of the screen like a haunting. Anna! How did you do it? the paparazzi screamed. TrimSpa, baby.

A fairy tale told in before-and-after pictures: A shrunken princess, white trash touched by Midas, skin gone golden and flesh lit lambent, bent and burnt and turned plastic, souped up and silicone slick. In another ad, Anna writhes around in a silk slip as a voiceover calls hers “The Ultimate Comeback.” Or she drives a convertible by the beach, asking us (of course) if we like her body, before she asks whether we’d like to party—enter TrimSpa’s Million Dollar Makeover Challenge and you could win a chance to party like Anna Nicole at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel.

During her onstage appearance that night in 2004, which would be mocked and memed into eternity, Anna wore a necklace that spelled out “TRIMSPA Baby” in rhinestones inlaid against fuchsia metal. At her funeral three years later, mourners would be asked to wear pink. The night before Anna clasped that necklace and stumbled onstage, she suffered two seizures. Seizures—in addition to stroke and heart damage—are known side effects of ephedra, one of the ingredients in TrimSpa diet pills. This was not The Ultimate Comeback but the final push off a pedestal we stranded her on, the strong suction current down a drain. When Anna died, she was still a spokeswoman for TrimSpa; she was scheduled to host a contest for customers two weeks after her death. Have you heard the naked facts? a TrimSpa ad wants to know. It also wants to announce Anna’s total weight loss: 69 pounds. Had it happened, the contest’s prize would have been the opportunity to party like Anna at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel, the place where, instead, Anna was found naked and couldn’t be revived, her body riddled with abscesses linked to weight-loss injections.

Fate was far more terrifying than fiction in Anna’s life, in which coincidences harrowed and harm accumulated, men malingered and manipulated. It was the radio announcer Howard Stern who first told Anna about TrimSpa, during a 2002 episode of his show in which he spent 10 minutes attempting to get her to step on a scale because he’d made a bet about how much she weighed. A lawyer with the same name, Howard K. Stern, was meant to become Anna’s husband in the Bahamas just weeks after she died; he was subsequently sued for giving her pills she was not prescribed.

Anna’s glitter-dusted, forged fingerprints are, in fact, all over the US legal system. Her case against the estate of her late, billionaire husband J. Howard Marshall went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the decision. Anna and TrimSpa were co-defendants in another suit brought by dissatisfied customers who, despite taking TrimSpa pills, found that they were not suddenly decked out in their “DREAM BODIES” as promised. Published in a legal journal, an article titled “Not Just Anna Nicole Smith: Cleavage in Bankruptcy” promised to investigate an opaque legal concept known as the “cleavage effect of a debtor’s filing.” Yet the silicone breast implants that ruptured in Anna’s body, banned by the FDA in the 1990s, were reapproved in the early aughts despite the anguished testimony of tens of thousands of women like Anna—women whose real lives, like Anna’s and Marilyn’s, had been destroyed by their dream bodies.  

This is not a story about lost innocence, because Anna was never guilty of anything but yearning. We simply wouldn’t allow her that. “I didn’t have a childhood,” Anna once said, “so I’m living my childhood now.” In the end, she drank out of a baby bottle. She wanted to take a long nap next to her idol, Marilyn, but Hugh Hefner had already bought the adjacent cemetery plot by the time Anna tried to. Laid side by side or not, both women’s bodies were bought, sculpted, sold, printed, glossed, and gossiped over—never left alone, even nude or in death. Julien’s Auctions just sold a calorie-controlled diet a doctor once typed out for Marilyn for nearly $3,500; various undergarments and used lipstick tubes that once belonged to the star still crop up all over the site and store. A month after she died, Playboy published a commemorative issue featuring a selection of Anna’s past centerfolds as a “tribute.” It took a court order to keep the plastic surgeon who performed her breast augmentation from selling the two-hour video he filmed of her surgery. An Anna Nicole TrimSpa T-shirt currently goes for around $1,000 on eBay.

Mocked, maligned, misunderstood, stolen from, and sued, Anna might have been in the mood for something to free her mind from her body that night at the Billboard Awards. Like my body? Anna Nicole’s soul was stuck inside a never-ending gut renovation, a construction site complete with leaks and holes, demanding expensive upkeep and violent maintenance. “It’s terrible the things I have to do to be me,” she once said. Want a cocktail? Pick your poison: envy, vitriol, chloral hydrate, rhinestones, SlimFast, sedatives, snickering, sobbing, syringes, scalpels, bathtubs, bad boyfriends, hospital beds. TrimSpa, baby.