The women who paid the price of fame

She is wearing the white dress, of course, and her hair is platinum too, curls teased towards the Los Angeles sky, her red lips parted in ecstasy-on-cue. The entire photo has an uncanny air, the effort at Marilyn mimicry so sincere that the effect soars past camp and into the hyperreal. The hair is too high, the eyebrows too dark; even the sky is too blue, in that Californian way, so that it seems like a fabrication, painted on the backdrop of a set on a nearby lot.

When this photo of Anna Nicole Smith, in costume as Monroe in her iconic Seven Year Itch halterneck, was taken in 1993, Smith had just accepted Playboy magazine’s award for Playmate of the Year, personally presented by Hugh Hefner along with a brand new Jaguar XJS convertible and a cheque for $100,000. “That’s a big cheque!” she vamps to the crowd in video footage of the award acceptance. Her voice, breathy and high-pitched, is that of a toddler surprised with a new doll, although her arched eyebrow implies a shrewd and knowing irony. Later, after she has mimed the iconic fluffed-out skirt pose – subway vent absent – for the photographers, she pretends to drive the car away. “This is my dream come true!” she yells, extending the “u” of the last word – both a reminder of her Houston upbringing and a hope, perhaps, that the dream does not have to end, that it can become reality, if you wish hard enough.

This desire is the engine of Philippa Snow’s new essay collection, It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me, a vodka-and-valium-fuelled drive through the beauty and bloodshed of female celebrity. Each piece in the book takes two women, often although not always from different eras, and places them in conversation.

In this way, Snow is able to examine how those such as Smith, or Monroe before her, chose to mould themselves into the icons of beauty and femininity the public both needs and demands, and the trauma that results from rendering oneself more image than human. Perhaps this is why, more often than not, It’s Terrible is concerned with those who have either teetered on the precipice of self-destruction or fallen into the chasm completely.

In her essay on Lindsay Lohan (paired with Elizabeth Taylor), Snow speaks of how “a car crash – now a common metaphor for a woman with a self-destructive streak – compels rubberneckers precisely because the sight of it provokes a feeling of alarming nearness to its heat, and people do not hesitate to warm their hands on Lindsay Lohan’s blazing reputation, nor to fan its flames by pointing to her worst mistakes.” Such language has been used to describe many of the subjects in the book. These are women who were once “the ultimate exclusive product, a commodity a little like a brand new sports car”, until they become destructive and are destroyed in turn. They are car crashes, train wrecks; anything that suggests something once strong devastated by sheer force, steel twisted into cruel shapes, glass sparkling like diamonds on the asphalt. Far from an aberration, Snow suggests, this is the price of entry.

Snow is never better than in the title essay, adapted from a 2021 White Review article of the same name, about Smith and Monroe and their sad, intertwined fates. Smith’s obsession with Monroe, her desire to actually be her, was, to Snow, a matter of almost religious fervour, a need for transubstantiation. Since reading the piece, I have thought often of a quote that appears in the book, written by Monroe in her diary: “Help, help, help … I feel life coming closer, when all I want is to die!” Snow uses the phrase as a kind of dialogue between the two women, placing it in italics alongside an account of Smith having a public breakdown at the 2004 Billboard awards. We are left unsure whether the red, dark mouth the cry comes out of is Monroe’s or Smith’s.

Just as Snow never chastises her subjects, she does not scold us for clamouring for the more prurient aspects of the story, presumably because she, like all the women in her book, understands the value of a story – particularly one that beckons towards sex and death with a scarlet, come-hither fingernail. My favourite of these was the detail that Smith’s breast implants were supposedly created by Dr Gerald Johnson, “the rich Texan doctor who had made so many millions of dollars out of breast implants that he had built a breast-shaped hot tub in his yard as a boast”, an aside that is characteristically funny, gauche and a little horrifying. Crucially, this fun never feels directed towards the women at the centre of the pieces. Instead, gossip is offered on the understanding that we reckon with our own complicity.

The mirroring of pop stars Britney Spears and Aaliyah is an effective exploration of teen stardom, how the girls caught in its vortex are forced to act as both adult and child, prey to much older men. Snow’s careful unpicking of how race affected the public perception of Spears and Aaliyah is deft and insightful, although at times it tips into hectoring, as when she talks of how “intersectional feminism matters precisely because all women get fucked by the patriarchy to some degree or another, but Black women get fucked by the patriarchy and by white supremacy”.

The collection is strongest when, as in the piece on Smith and Monroe, there is an established link between the women. An examination of addiction and the music biopic anchors the essay on Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday, while Snow’s writing on Lohan and Taylor explores the women’s voracious appetites and attitudes to the press. In these incisive, skilful pieces, Snow’s status as one of the foremost analysts of celebrity culture is indisputable.

The book wavers in those essays where the pairing feels more tenuous, such as in the piece on the actor Kristen Stewart and silent-screen star Louise Brooks, two queer women whose similarities begin with naturalistic screen presences and the endurance of a misogynistic reception in Hollywood and, seemingly, end there. For someone so masterful at elucidating the complexities of female sexual autonomy – and asking to what extent a woman, particularly a famous one, can ever be said to hold the balance of sexual power – she seems oddly uninterested in such dynamics when it comes to Brooks. Instead, we are told, her story is “one of triumph and not tragedy, her determination to play herself expanding from the screen and into every element of her life”, and so Snow paints her as a woman of complete mastery and power, able to throw off patriarchal dynamics seemingly through sheer force of will. This feels at odds with the book’s other pieces (particularly the titular essay), which clearly outline the fallacy of believing that such a bargain can be struck: that a woman can truly negotiate the terms of her oppression.

But even in these less successful pieces, Snow’s prose is beautiful, white-hot and breathless, like a sports car speeding through the canyon. As somebody who grew up fascinated with the gossip sites of the nascent internet – browsing DataLounge forums to discover allegedly closeted celebrities and checking Perez Hilton in part-fascination, part-revulsion to see which party girls had been caught with drugs spilling from their nostrils – I have rarely seen the topic written about with this much style and skill.

Take these final lines in her account of Smith’s death, laid out in unadorned prose: “Just as Marilyn had been, she was naked, with her nakedness serving as a stark, sad reminder of the significance of her unclothed body – of the way that maintaining it, to say nothing of actually inhabiting it, cost her far more, in the end, than she could reasonably pay.” It is hard to think of a more incisive statement on the nature of female celebrity: then, now and perhaps in perpetuity.

It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: On Femininity and Fame by Philippa Snow is published by Virago (£20.). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Getty Images/WireImage