White Trash Fairy Tale

Traditionally there are only three ways to get rich; birth, marriage, or theft.

Anne Nichole Smith, Texas sex bomb, stepped off the runway of a strip club into popular culture by wedding an admiring oil tycoon. Their sixty-three year age difference evoked cries of gold-digger from the billionaire's family. That accusation might have been true, but the old man certainly looked happy in all the photos of them together and upon his death his lawyers announced that Anne Nicole Smith had been bequeathed a third of his fortune.

This rags to riches fairy tale was denied a happy ending by her in-laws. They contested the last testament with the traditional viciousness of white rich people. $300 million was a fortune to give a buxom blonde high-school dropout. I was pulling for the blonde heiress, but each week her name tarnished in the tabloids by another scandal. The in-laws were playing for 'winner takes all'.

Nothing those scandal sheets liked better than to see someone from the lower class fall back to white trash earth.

First her son died of a drug overdose and then Anna Nicole Smith herself was found dead of a drug overdose administered by her 'doctor'. All the drugs were legal. She left a daughter and the US Federal Court has decreed that the deceased starlet's young girl will never see any of the money left to her by the tycoon, proving once more that the rich stay rich and the poor get dead.

Her daughter should be happy to be alive.

The only question is for how long.

BURNT ORANGE HERESY by Charles Williford

I could have taken State Road Seven straight away by picking it up west of West Palm Beach, but because the old two-lane highway was used primarily by truck traffic barreling for Miami's back door, into Hialeah, I stayed on U.S. 1 all the way to Boynton Beach before searching for a through road to make the cutover. I got lost for a few minutes and made several aimless circles where new blacktops had been crushed down for a subdivision called inappropriately Ocean Pine Terraces (miles from the ocean, no pines, no terraces), but when I finally reached the state highway, it was freshly paved, and the truck traffic wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected.

The rain, mercifully, had stopped.

The Burnt Orange Heresy. New York: Crown Publishers, 1971. Willeford's first hardcover original.

In The Burnt Orange Heresy, the critic -- James Figueras -- gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview a reclusive French “Nihilist surrealist” named Jacques Debierue. A collector tells Figueras where he can find Debierue, asking only one thing in return for the information -- that Figueras steal one of Debierue’s paintings for him. In fact, thanks to a variety of circumstances (e.g., a fire that destroyed much of his work), not a single one of Debierue’s paintings is known to exist; his reputation as an artist is entirely due to earlier critics’ interpretations of his work over the years. Figueras agrees to steal the painting, knowing that if he can interview Debierue and see some of his work, he could then write an article that would firmly establish his own international reputation as an art critic.

What follows is a gripping, dense plot that includes several twists readers won’t necessarily anticipate. In order to execute his plan, Figueras ends up having to bluff several people -- his girlfriend, the art collector, Debierue, among others. In the end, the novel puts forth the idea that all art is in a way a kind of bluff. As is art criticism. And everything else, really.

You Bet I Would # 4

A little white trash with that lap dance?

She ain't no cheerleader.