According to Sunday’s Dallas Morning News, Anna Nicole Smith’s death at age 39 places her in dubious company of a surprising number of other Playmates who never lived to see their 50th birthday.
Movie star and original Playmate Marilyn Monroe and Playmates Willy Rey, Elisa Bridges and Paige Young all died of drug overdoses.
Both Star Stowe and Dorothy Stratten were murdered.
Eve Meyer, a 1955 Playmate, was killed when two airliners collided on takeoff at Tenerife in the Canary Islands in 1977.
Tonya Crews, Carol Willis and Claudia Jennings all died in car accidents in the 1960s and 70s while still in their twenties.
The exact cause of Smith’s death remains unknown. Still, all of these gorgeous women who led seemingly fabulous lives died before the age of 50.
When you consider the tragic circumstances surrounding these deaths, especially the drug-related ones, Ed Board has to wonder if the pop stars and “celebutantes” we adorn our tabloids with are headed in the same direction.
Pictures and video footage have surfaced of a horrified crowd looking on last weekend as 25-year-old Britney Spears shaved her head in what many would consider an act of self-mutilation. According to reports, the pop star was crying in her car for 10 minutes before shearing her golden-brown locks. She then spent the rest of the night getting more tattoos and avoiding curious paparazzi.
The saddest part is that the salon where Spears cut her hair has set up a Web site to auction off her hair, the razor she used to cut it off, the Red Bull she drank while doing it, and her cigarette lighter which she left at the salon for a minimum bidding price of $1 million.
Since the bizarre events of the weekend, Spears has voluntarily checked herself into rehab, but checked herself out after just one day. Ed Board wishes she would have stuck with the rehabilitation.
A good number of SMU students are wealthy. An even bigger number are absolutely gorgeous. But Ed Board doesn’t think any of us can understand what it’s like to be famous, to have our every move and misstep documented and held up for all to see and mock.
And we know their spiels about not having any privacy can be grating when you consider how much money they have.
But they’re people, too. And there has to be a psychological price to pay when millions of people are clamoring to be near you, to be like you, or simply to BE you.
There has to be a reason so many of “the beautiful people” die young. And so we wish all the luck in the world to the young celebrities whose reckless and self-destructive behavior is splashed around as entertainment.