Smith’s ‘hometown’ has had enough

MEXIA, Texas – The convoys of TV trucks, bristling with antennas, started rolling into town as soon as the news broke last week. Reporters were desperately seeking someone, anyone, with the slightest connection to Anna Nicole Smith.

The 39-year-old starlet, who collapsed and died suddenly, always claimed that the community, 90 miles southeast of Dallas, had played an essential role in the story of her life.

She fled Mexia in her late teens for a new life as a big-city bad girl. In Houston she became a topless dancer, a Playboy centerfold, designer jeans model and bride of an oil billionaire more than 60 years her senior.

But many of the 6,700 residents of Mexia (pronounced Muh-HEY-uh) appear to be just as desperate to put a distance between their city and the celebrity.

They want no part of this passion play.

Mexia, like many small towns, would like to attract more attention – but not this kind. Residents would like to see more businesses moving in. Young people would like more things to do. All would like to feel that life isn’t passing them by.

That ambivalence with the spotlight was most evident in Steve Hughes, owner of Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken. Ground Zero for the media, the fast-food restaurant is where Smith – then known as Vickie Lynn Hogan – worked in the mid-1980s and met her first husband.

It’s unclear how long Smith lived in Mexia. She was born in Houston on Nov. 28, 1967. Hughes and other residents say she came to Mexia during her high school years after her parents divorced. She lived with a maternal aunt for only a few years.

Smith’s mother, Virgie Arthur, had asked her daughter why she overstated her small-town roots in Mexia.

“She said, ‘Mom, nobody wants to read books or see people on TV concerning, you know, middle-class girl found a rich millionaire and married him. There’s not a story in that,’ ” Arthur recalled on “Good Morning America.” “She said, ‘The story is I come from rags to riches, and so that’s what I’m going to tell.’ “

A tall, skinny teenager, Smith was nice and unassuming, Hughes said. Nothing, including her brunette hair and average bust-size, revealed a glimpse of the ersatz Marilyn Monroe she became.

“She was just another teenager working in a fast-food restaurant,” Hughes said. “Only a handful of people in this town really knew her.”

Hughes, a trim and youthful 44, bought the restaurant from his father, an Air Force veteran, in 1986.

Already a popular restaurant, Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken became even more so late last week. Media vans and trucks jammed the perimeter of the property, the main business route through town. By Friday morning, Hughes was on guard to keep the media cameras at bay, permitting only a Fox TV crew in the door.

But his face and voice betrayed his tension when he was asked yet again what Smith’s life was like when she worked at Jim’s.

“Take a look around,” he said. “She was a teenager like everyone else in here.”

Then he added: “She had nothing and nobody really. She didn’t have any roots here.”

The phrase – “She had no roots here” – was often repeated around Mexia.

Some exasperated residents said the media were looking in the wrong direction. There were lots of other famous people from Mexia. Former NFL coach Ray Rhodes starred at football and helped integrate Mexia High School in the late 1960s.

And then there was Cindy Walker, the prolific songwriter and charter inductee to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. She wrote hits sung by Bob Wills, Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison, among others.

But some young people think folks in Mexia are living in the past.

Krystle Wilson, 21, never heard of Cindy Walker. Anna Nicole Smith was her hero. She followed Smith’s career closely and watched her reality TV show.

“Young girl goes off to the big city – that’s every girl’s dream,” said Wilson, a mother of two preschoolers. “I kind of looked up to her. She wanted to get out of here, and a lot of young people would like to get out of here.”

On her way to apply for a job at Cefco, a convenience store next to Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken, she said Mexia doesn’t offer much for young people.

“No movie theaters. No excitement. The same routine every day.”

From a parent’s point of view, however, Mexia is a good place to raise children, residents say.

Kelly O’Hare, 43, who renovates houses, said that, as a youth, he liked cruising “the drag” in his 1965 Mustang, from the Dairy Queen to the old traffic circle.

He has three daughters, ages 18, 16 and 11. But he can’t find many lessons for them in Anna Nicole Smith’s death – or the perils of leaving for the big city.

“You can’t prepare them,” he said.

He’d just as soon see them stick around. Good or bad, Mexia is not much different from any other small town, he said.

“It’s Anywhere U.S.A.”