Bling Empire's Anna Shay Has Arrived. It’s About Time.
Anna Shay is not like other people. And it’s not just because she’s richer than God—though she’s that, too.
As a star on Netflix’s reality series Bling Empire, Shay is captivating. The jewel-bedecked heiress presides over the reality series as its grande dame, enjoying herself, untouched by her costars’ antics. She flies birthday girl Kelly Mi Li to Paris in first class, and decides to play flight attendant while en route, grinning shyly as her new coworkers tuck in her Air France neckerchief; she segways around an L.A. shopping district, wagging her finger at the police when they insist she stay on the sidewalk. When she does occasionally sour—usually because someone has crossed her—the vengeance is swift and just, though simply falling in her estimation must be gutting in itself. You can’t help but wonder, from whence did this exquisite, Dior and Boucheron-clad creature come? Did she emerge from sea foam and float to shore on a clamshell? Burst forth from the head of her international arms magnate father?
From Japan, actually, where her American father—Edward Shay, the founder of leading global defense contractor Pacific Architects and Engineers—met her part-Japanese, part-Russian mother, Ai Oizumi Shay. She spent her first eight or so years in Tokyo, slipping away from her security guards (to the point that her father started auditioning them, testing if she could get away from new prospects), and attending international school. Oh, and caring for her pocket monkey, which her mother bought for her after it—they “never found out” whether it was a girl or a boy—caught her eye in a Japanese department store.
When Shay moved to L.A. with her family, she was terrified that someone would take the monkey away. So she dressed it up like a human. “The stewardess came up and said, ‘What would you like to drink?’ and I said, ‘I'll have …’ whatever it was, and she said, ‘And your friend?’ I said, ‘Oh, no, she's my sister. My sister will have some milk please.’ I was so scared my heart stopped beating.” Unbeknownst to Anna, her father had arranged everything in advance for her milk-loving sister. “He wanted to see how I would deal with” smuggling a monkey, Shay laughs.
Most people do not have one story this good. Anna Shay has a million.
Over the course of our Zoom chat, she tells me that she was once robbed at gunpoint at a Jack in the Box drive-through, and when the perpetrators took her friends’ wallets but missed hers, she jumped out of the car and hand-delivered it to them (“They came back and I said, ‘Here. Next time, three girls equals three wallets’”). She tells me that one time she saw a Cuban salsa band, decided they weren’t as successful as they should have been, given their talents, and resolved to become their manager and producer on the spot (“At the time, I didn't speak Spanish. I learned”). She tells me that she just found out about Target two years ago.
Surely, her rarified childhood helped shape her into the unique woman she is today. Not only was she surrounded by immense wealth, but the nature of her father’s chosen industry had its own peculiarities. He “did a lot of mostly government contracts, embassies, and a lot of things that I don't know about,” Shay says. “Basically, he was a businessman.” (Today, PAE—which Shay and her brother sold in 2006—operates on seven continents, serving as a contractor for the Department of Defense, State Department, Armed Services, and much more. On Bling Empire, Shay's costar, Kane Lim, puts it more bluntly: "Her money comes from weapons. Her father sells bombs, guns, defense technology.") When the Shays traveled as a family, she would go with her father, and her mother would go with her brother, and they’d meet at their destination, “for safety reasons.” She’d go to embassies and state dinners and “whatnot” while abroad. She trained with the military, where she learned to pilot a helicopter and run obstacle courses.
Shay wanted to join the family business, but to her father, that was out of the question; he instead passed the reigns to her brother, Allen Shay. “So I got married,” she laughs. Aside from her marriages ("even the divorce part was good," she says of her four splits in the show) and spoiling her 27-year-old son Kenny Kemp (best known as a cannabis paraphernalia collector), Shay fills her days working with the family foundation, and cavorting around the fashion world. Before the pandemic, she was living in Paris for half of the year. These days, she’s been spending her time reading philosophy books written by her maternal grandfather Kiyoshi Oizumi, and successfully training to become a licensed contractor.
Indeed, Shay’s first scene in Bling Empire shows her in a gown, taking a sledgehammer to the walls of her closet, because contractors are “stupid.” Jeff Jenkins, the show’s producer, explains that she’d been trying for years to start updating and renovating her estate, but in order to do so, she’d have to vacate the property—and with nine Golden Retrievers, no hotel or landlord would take her. So she started doing it herself. “Every time I would go over to her house, a little bit more demo has taken place,” he says.
Jenkins, an industry veteran best known for creating Keeping Up with the Kardashians, first met Shay 10 years ago through a mutual friend. He immediately entered her into his “mental filing system” of interesting people—Jenkins is always looking for his next project—and they set up a lunch date. After their meal, she decided to show him her new car: a stretch Rolls Royce with custom Chanel interiors. Jenkins was suitably impressed; in response, Anna told him to take it. “I’m like, ‘What do you mean, take it?’ She goes, ‘Drive it for a month. I'll take your car.’” (Jenkins politely turned her down.)
Over the years, Jenkins got to know the then-reclusive Shay, spending time in her Sunset Boulevard compound—an estate that dates to 1926 and once belonged to mob boss Tony Milano—and now in her new home, which was previously owned by Tim Burton. (At first, she loved how the director had decorated, but she’s since tired of it; recently, she told Jenkins, “I'm over the goth thing. I'm going to buy another house.") He met her Golden Retrievers, and heard more of her stranger-than-fiction stories—like the time she went to the flower market without security at 4 a.m., met a homeless man who introduced himself as Elvis, and put him up in an apartment and filled it with groceries for a month.
Lim, whose relationship with Shay has grown from costar to "basically my family" in a couple short years, has been taught the importance of giving back since birth—a charity afforded by his family’s immense resources, which he says are more on the level of Shay’s than some others on the show (“I'm not saying that we have more money, but…”)—and yet is still in awe of her beneficence. They’ll go to a luxury store, she’ll buy something, and buy the same thing for the salesperson. Recently, Lim’s been accompanying her on supermarket shopping sprees, stuffing $3,000 worth of food in his trunk so she can take it home and give it away. “She's like, ‘Oh, take some for you. Take this bread. Take this.’”
In our conversation, Shay stresses the trips to the grocery and her new love, Target (“You can buy so many things there!”), but Lim assures that they spend plenty of time looking for more opulent wares, too. In the early stages of the pandemic, when lockdowns were strictest, “she would stand outside of Gucci and she would literally point,” Lim says. “‘This one, that one, that one. We'll take all of it. Thank you.’” She has no sense of time—she’s never been hindered by such arbitrary strictures—so they’ll arrive after closing, but as long as Lim gives the shop a heads up, the lights will stay on for Shay. She also, Lim laughs, is just as unconcerned about changing in public as it seems on the show. She’ll be naked in a store in full view of the windows. “I'm like, ‘Anna, people are watching.’ And she just looks at them and she's like, ‘Yeah, but I'm a mannequin.’”
Once, at Shay’s insistence, they finished off the day by heading to a shooting range. Lim had never been, but everyone knew Shay (and, naturally, kept the place open after hours just for her). “She shot 600 rounds,” Lim says, still in awe of her performance. She passed out in his car on the way home.
No one knows how to have fun like Shay.
Speaking to Shay and hearing about her from her friends, it’s immediately apparent that she’s exactly the same idiosyncratic heiress seen on Bling Empire—an unusual feat within the notoriously unreal world of reality television. When I suggested once, casually, that this might not always be the case, she found the idea puzzling. “I mean, whatever it is on the show is how I am.”
It is a bit of a paradox that someone would spend the first six-odd decades of her life working to stay out of the spotlight, ensuring that her Google footprint remained negligible, only to make such an unrestrained reality TV debut. Shay says she thought about starring on Bling Empire as doing something for herself, after spending years looking after her son, in the wake of her parents’ deaths (her father in 1995, and her mother in 2015).
It certainly wouldn’t have happened without Jenkins. “I think he's an amazing producer, and an incredible friend. And when he said, ‘Anna, let's work together. I would love to work with you,’ I was so thrilled. I was like, ‘I would love to work with you too.’ And that was it. The next thing I know, I'm in front of a camera.” Jenkins says Shay urged him, unsuccessfully, to hire her as an assistant instead.
“It was held as high value in the family to be private,” Jenkins says of the way Shay was raised, adding, “She'll tell you the three most important people in her life are her mom and dad and her son. Well, her mom and dad are passed now, so maybe that gives her just a little bit of a feeling of their blessing to share her life.”
He was surprised, he admits, that she agreed at all. “I consider it a personal gift that she agreed to participate,” Jenkins says, “but it's also a gift to everybody watching.” Anna Shay is nothing if not generous.
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