Anna Nicole Smith is force-feeding me olives stuffed with jalapenos and garlic as we lie on her giant pink-satin bed watching Jerry Springer. "Why do those women get up and take off all their clothes?" she asks. After the eighth olive, my mouth on fire, she offers me a swig from her strawberry-yogurt chaser. "I've been in my jammies all day," she drawls in a Texas accent. Next we share a bowl of sliced pickles in lemon juice. She is not pregnant.
On Aug. 4, the E! channel will use this kind of material for the first of 13 episodes of The Anna Nicole Show, a half-hour reality program about the former Playboy Playmate of the Year and Guess? model, now 34, who, assuming the final appeal of her inheritance case goes her way, will receive $88 million from her late nonagenarian billionaire husband, whom she met while dancing at a strip club. The Phantom Menace didn't have this much back story.
E! is the first of many networks to realize, in an Osbournes-inspired epiphany, that the only thing better than watching the real lives of ordinary people is watching the real lives of celebrities. VH1, which failed in its attempts to sign Tommy Lee to 24-hour surveillance, plans to announce a Liza Minnelli reality series. Later this week MTV aims to unveil a P. Diddy reality show. Cybill Shepherd, Gene Simmons and Courtney Love are looking to fill the camera void in their lives. Kato Kaelin taped three episodes of himself by himself, looking to sell his show, House Guest. In an affront to everything Robin Leach ever stood for, America has chosen to bask in the soothing truth that the lives of the rich and famous aren't all that much different from their own.
Smith's reality is probably less like that of a celebrity than that of most of her likely competitors, even Kaelin. Like Elvis' at the end, her life is mostly bed and pickles and bad TV. So the E! executives juice the show, prodding Smith into activities she might not otherwise pursue, like a workout with a personal trainer. "We've helped set her up to get her going on things. She wants to get a driver's license, get in better shape, find a new place to live," says E! exec Mark Sonnenberg. He's hoping the appeal of the show lies in the fact that you can't quite tell if Smith is kidding or just dumb. Jeff Shore, the show's executive producer, says he can't figure out whether it was a joke when she told him she's "5 foot 12." This may say more about the people who work at E! than about Smith.
The other strategy E! uses is pumping Smith full of Red Bull. Smith, who never has all that much energy to begin with, is cranky after driving an hour to an E!-suggested go-cart track with the other paid cast members of the show: her ever present (and unfortunately named) attorney, Howard Stern; her assistant, Kim Walther, who sports a tattoo of her boss; and Smith's son Daniel, 16, a sensitive kid who happens to hate being videotaped. Sensing the group's lack of energy, an E! exec appears from nowhere proffering Smith her seventh Red Bull of the day. The channel has a deal with Red Bull to install a refrigerator full of the supercaffeinated soft drinks in her bedroom. Not even Colonel Tom Parker thought of that.