Gertrude Stein made that statement, rather offhandedly, about the place of her birth, which had vanished. The same can be said about Netflix's documentary "Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me." Although Smith is gone, she's not completely vanished, as a needless 116 minutes regretfully demonstrates.
Like Venus rising from the sea, or just grow'd like Topsy, she came forth from the dire straits of Texas to dazzle and dumbfound the masses. But don't look too closely for any deep truths or poignant lessons about life and death in her 7,884,000 minutes of fame because there's nothing there. Hers is a story no different from those of many vacuous beauties celebrated by the acquisitive for the inquisitive. Good looks, as the saying goes (and it goes for a good reason) are a dime a dozen. While a beautiful face can take one someplace far from the dusty plaines and crispy fried chicken shacks of Texas, it can take one only so far, and in Smith's case, not far enough.
The tragedy here is self-inflicted, although tragedy is maybe too big a word for so small a matter as the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Any parallels with the extraordinary career of Marilyn Monroe are entirely expedient and included here only to frame a narrative that has no other plausible basis for existing. Cashing her winning ticket in the genetics lottery may have gotten her face in print and provided the means for breast augmentation, but being photogenic without having any real talent is like getting all dressed up with nowhere to go. Except, apparently for Anna, only to wheedle her way into Southfork and land smack dab on the lap of wheelchair bound (eventually bedridden) billionaire J. Howard Marshall, who had by then when they met (at a strip club, naturally) reentered the id stage of his life for the instant gratification he had once gotten from breast feeding. In one inadvertently comical phone conversation (recorded for posterity and a future lawsuit), Smith coyly asks Citizen Marshall if he wants to see his "rosebud," which shows--although one doubts purposely--how anything relevant went over her head, like the use of that word.
Always seeming too much at home with sycophants, she was perhaps naive not to see (or maybe just playacting for cameras) that her shady biological father wanted more than the usual father/daughter relationship, or that her "attorney," Howard (dateless-at-the-prom) K. Stern, didn't have her best interests at heart (but knew he made for good television anyway)--and somewhere in the insanity lost sight of her troubled son. He's the tragedy in this meaningless story.
A statement in the epilogue, the purpose of which may not have been the filmmaker's intention, clarifies for viewers, once and for all, Smith's existence, in that her daughter Dannielynn "inherited nothing," nothing monetarily, but from her mother, getting nothing was always inevitable.
