sara1981
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Goodbye Anna Nicole
The Scotsman - International - Goodbye Anna Nicole
EVEN as a little girl, Anna Nicole Smith would tell people that she wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. Later, as a Playboy model with tousled blonde hair, bedroom eyes, a voluptuous figure and newspaper headlines hailing her as the new Blonde Bombshell, it seemed that she had achieved her wish.
However, behind all the purring and wiggling for the cameras, Smith's personal life was to play out - and end - as tragically as that of her idol. As she lay dead in a Florida morgue yesterday, as scandal-wracked in death as she was in life, comparisons were inevitable.
"Like Marilyn, Anna Nicole was one of those women who cast an awesome spell over a certain kind of man," wrote columnist Ellis Henican in the New York newspaper, Newsday. "But these weren't the Kennedys, novelists and sports heroes who'd gone gaga for Marilyn. Anna Nicole spun her special magic on old geezers in strip joints and producers of low-budget reality TV shows. No, diamonds were never this girl's best friend. Silicone implants were."
Yet she did not seem to pick her "old geezers" indiscriminately, homing in on one of the richest men in America when he rolled his wheelchair into the Texas strip-joint where she was working in 1991. The fact that he was 89 by the time she married him two years later, and that she was only 26, did not matter and the relationship had nothing to do with him having a $1.6 billion fortune, she insisted.
At that point, Smith's hopes of being taken seriously vanished. The public's fascination centred around the tawdry, tabloid intrigue she generated and her life became a downward spiral of drink, drugs, depression, tragedy and legal controversy.
She was found dead on the bed in room 607 on the sixth floor of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, on Thursday afternoon. Police removed several bags of evidence from the room, which they said included "large amounts" of prescription drugs including Valium, prescribed not to her but to her lover and legal adviser Howard K Stern, whose influence over Smith has long been questioned by her family.
Joshua Pepper, the coroner for Broward County, Florida, last night conducted a post-mortem in nearby Fort Lauderdale to determine what role the drugs may have played in the 39-year-old's death. The results of toxicology tests may not be known for several weeks.
Meanwhile in an extraordinary twist, her former boyfriend Larry Birkhead, who claims to be the father of Smith's five-month-old daughter, yesterday won a court ruling for Smith's remains to be preserved until a paternity hearing on 20 February. His lawyer, Debra Opri, said that DNA samples should be taken from Smith's body to ensure that Smith's latest lover Howard K.Stern, who also claims to be the child's father, does not pull a "bait and switch" tactic and swap the baby when it comes to having it tested to determine its paternity.
At stake is the future of a $1.6 billion fortune belonging to Smith's ex-husband, which has still to be settled in court. Should Smith's lawyers win some of the money on her behalf, it would pass to the baby.
And last night, in yet another bizarre twist, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, Prince Frederick von Anhalt, 64, also threw his hat in the ring as a possible father of Smith's baby. He claimed to have had a decade-long affair with the model.
"This has been one circus allegation after another," Smith's lawyer, Ron Rale, admitted last night.
Smith was born as Vickie Lynn Hogan on November 28, 1967, in the small Texas town of Mexia. Her mother Virgie, a police officer, raised her alone after Vickie's father, Donald, walked out on them when she was a baby.
She dropped out of school as a teenager in eighth grade and worked as a waitress in Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken Shack before moving on to Wal-Mart as a cashier. In 1985, at the age of 17, she met and married a fry cook, Billy Smith. They had a son, Daniel, before divorcing. She struggled to raise her one-year-old son alone and began stripping in Houston, calling herself on Anna Nicole.
In October 1991 she met J Howard Marshall, a billionaire oilman, after stripping topless for him. Shortly before he turned 90, they wed. After the wedding, the couple never lived together, while one of his nurses complained that Smith rarely visited her husband, yet Marshall lavished her with expensive gifts and paid her credit card bills. "I'm sick of being accused of gold-digging. It just so happens I get turned on by liver spots," she would later insist.
But few were convinced, including Marshall's son, E Pierce Marshall - who, although being her stepson was three decades her senior. Within days of his father's death in August 1995, the younger Marshall began a legal showdown with Smith over the rights to his $1.6 billion estate. In September 2000, a Los Angeles judge awarded her $449 million of the Marshall fortune, but the ruling was later reversed and the case has bounced around the court system ever since. The younger Mr Marshall died last year, aged 67, leaving the struggle in the hands of his widow.
The publicity - and notoriety - from her bizarre marriage landed Smith with the modelling career she had long dreamed of, and in 1992 the cover of Playboy magazine.
She later went on to get her own TV reality show on the E! television channel, in which cameras followed the bizarre ins and outs of her life as a singleton in Los Angeles. Scenes frequently included Smith in a mental fog, slurring her words. As her physical and mental health declined, her weight ballooned beyond the Monroe-esque curves she had once flaunted. But in 2003 she emerged 60 pounds lighter after becoming a spokeswoman for the dietary supplement TrimSpa. The product manufacturer's takings skyrocketed, tripling to $9.8 million that year alone.
It was only a temporary lift for Smith's personal life, though, and the initial joy brought by the birth of her baby daughter in the Bahamas last September was short-lived as her son Daniel, 20, died of a drugs overdose in his mother's hospital room days after the birth.
Mark Steines, a reporter with the celebrity TV show Entertainment Tonight and an acquaintance of Smith, revealed yesterday: "After the death of Daniel she did jump in her pool and attempt suicide. Howard found her face down and screamed for help. Her bodyguard, who is a paramedic, pulled her out and administered CPR and saved her life. Who knew if that led up to this? ... I don't know if that was too much for her."
"I believe she had too many drugs, just like Danny," said her mother, Virgie Arthur, yesterday.
Henican concluded in Newsday: "Anna Nicole will never be lionised in death the way her idol Marilyn has been. She'll never share an Elton John song with Princess Diana. Her Playboy spreads will never match that iconic photo of Marilyn.
"But despite their many differences, there is one question that these two women leave us with... did either woman ever feel loved?"
A FAILED FAIRYTALE
28 November 1967: Born in Houston, Texas, as Vickie Lynn Hogan.
4 April 1985: Marries Billy Smith, a fellow worker at a fast-food restaurant. Son Daniel is born 22 January 1986.
October 1991: Meets billionaire oil baron J Howard Marshall while working in Gigi's, a Houston strip-club.
March 1992: First appearance in Playboy magazine as cover model.
1993: Named Playboy's Playmate of the Year.
27 June 1994: Marries Marshall in Houston. She is 26 and he is 89.
4 August 1995: Marshall dies, sparking lengthy legal battle over $1.6bn fortune.
September 2005: Testifies in US Supreme Court and is given permission to pursue inheritance claim in federal courts. Awarded $88m, subject to appeal.
7 September 2006: Gives birth to daughter Dannielynn in Bahamas, three days before son Daniel dies in her hotel room of a drugs overdose. Photographer Larry Birkett, an ex-boyfriend, later launches a paternity suit.
28 September 2006: 'Marries' long-time attorney and companion Howard K Stern in civil ceremony in Bahamas.
8 February 2007: Found dead in room at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Florida.
The Scotsman - International - Goodbye Anna Nicole
EVEN as a little girl, Anna Nicole Smith would tell people that she wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. Later, as a Playboy model with tousled blonde hair, bedroom eyes, a voluptuous figure and newspaper headlines hailing her as the new Blonde Bombshell, it seemed that she had achieved her wish.
However, behind all the purring and wiggling for the cameras, Smith's personal life was to play out - and end - as tragically as that of her idol. As she lay dead in a Florida morgue yesterday, as scandal-wracked in death as she was in life, comparisons were inevitable.
"Like Marilyn, Anna Nicole was one of those women who cast an awesome spell over a certain kind of man," wrote columnist Ellis Henican in the New York newspaper, Newsday. "But these weren't the Kennedys, novelists and sports heroes who'd gone gaga for Marilyn. Anna Nicole spun her special magic on old geezers in strip joints and producers of low-budget reality TV shows. No, diamonds were never this girl's best friend. Silicone implants were."
Yet she did not seem to pick her "old geezers" indiscriminately, homing in on one of the richest men in America when he rolled his wheelchair into the Texas strip-joint where she was working in 1991. The fact that he was 89 by the time she married him two years later, and that she was only 26, did not matter and the relationship had nothing to do with him having a $1.6 billion fortune, she insisted.
At that point, Smith's hopes of being taken seriously vanished. The public's fascination centred around the tawdry, tabloid intrigue she generated and her life became a downward spiral of drink, drugs, depression, tragedy and legal controversy.
She was found dead on the bed in room 607 on the sixth floor of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, on Thursday afternoon. Police removed several bags of evidence from the room, which they said included "large amounts" of prescription drugs including Valium, prescribed not to her but to her lover and legal adviser Howard K Stern, whose influence over Smith has long been questioned by her family.
Joshua Pepper, the coroner for Broward County, Florida, last night conducted a post-mortem in nearby Fort Lauderdale to determine what role the drugs may have played in the 39-year-old's death. The results of toxicology tests may not be known for several weeks.
Meanwhile in an extraordinary twist, her former boyfriend Larry Birkhead, who claims to be the father of Smith's five-month-old daughter, yesterday won a court ruling for Smith's remains to be preserved until a paternity hearing on 20 February. His lawyer, Debra Opri, said that DNA samples should be taken from Smith's body to ensure that Smith's latest lover Howard K.Stern, who also claims to be the child's father, does not pull a "bait and switch" tactic and swap the baby when it comes to having it tested to determine its paternity.
At stake is the future of a $1.6 billion fortune belonging to Smith's ex-husband, which has still to be settled in court. Should Smith's lawyers win some of the money on her behalf, it would pass to the baby.
And last night, in yet another bizarre twist, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, Prince Frederick von Anhalt, 64, also threw his hat in the ring as a possible father of Smith's baby. He claimed to have had a decade-long affair with the model.
"This has been one circus allegation after another," Smith's lawyer, Ron Rale, admitted last night.
Smith was born as Vickie Lynn Hogan on November 28, 1967, in the small Texas town of Mexia. Her mother Virgie, a police officer, raised her alone after Vickie's father, Donald, walked out on them when she was a baby.
She dropped out of school as a teenager in eighth grade and worked as a waitress in Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken Shack before moving on to Wal-Mart as a cashier. In 1985, at the age of 17, she met and married a fry cook, Billy Smith. They had a son, Daniel, before divorcing. She struggled to raise her one-year-old son alone and began stripping in Houston, calling herself on Anna Nicole.
In October 1991 she met J Howard Marshall, a billionaire oilman, after stripping topless for him. Shortly before he turned 90, they wed. After the wedding, the couple never lived together, while one of his nurses complained that Smith rarely visited her husband, yet Marshall lavished her with expensive gifts and paid her credit card bills. "I'm sick of being accused of gold-digging. It just so happens I get turned on by liver spots," she would later insist.
But few were convinced, including Marshall's son, E Pierce Marshall - who, although being her stepson was three decades her senior. Within days of his father's death in August 1995, the younger Marshall began a legal showdown with Smith over the rights to his $1.6 billion estate. In September 2000, a Los Angeles judge awarded her $449 million of the Marshall fortune, but the ruling was later reversed and the case has bounced around the court system ever since. The younger Mr Marshall died last year, aged 67, leaving the struggle in the hands of his widow.
The publicity - and notoriety - from her bizarre marriage landed Smith with the modelling career she had long dreamed of, and in 1992 the cover of Playboy magazine.
She later went on to get her own TV reality show on the E! television channel, in which cameras followed the bizarre ins and outs of her life as a singleton in Los Angeles. Scenes frequently included Smith in a mental fog, slurring her words. As her physical and mental health declined, her weight ballooned beyond the Monroe-esque curves she had once flaunted. But in 2003 she emerged 60 pounds lighter after becoming a spokeswoman for the dietary supplement TrimSpa. The product manufacturer's takings skyrocketed, tripling to $9.8 million that year alone.
It was only a temporary lift for Smith's personal life, though, and the initial joy brought by the birth of her baby daughter in the Bahamas last September was short-lived as her son Daniel, 20, died of a drugs overdose in his mother's hospital room days after the birth.
Mark Steines, a reporter with the celebrity TV show Entertainment Tonight and an acquaintance of Smith, revealed yesterday: "After the death of Daniel she did jump in her pool and attempt suicide. Howard found her face down and screamed for help. Her bodyguard, who is a paramedic, pulled her out and administered CPR and saved her life. Who knew if that led up to this? ... I don't know if that was too much for her."
"I believe she had too many drugs, just like Danny," said her mother, Virgie Arthur, yesterday.
Henican concluded in Newsday: "Anna Nicole will never be lionised in death the way her idol Marilyn has been. She'll never share an Elton John song with Princess Diana. Her Playboy spreads will never match that iconic photo of Marilyn.
"But despite their many differences, there is one question that these two women leave us with... did either woman ever feel loved?"
A FAILED FAIRYTALE
28 November 1967: Born in Houston, Texas, as Vickie Lynn Hogan.
4 April 1985: Marries Billy Smith, a fellow worker at a fast-food restaurant. Son Daniel is born 22 January 1986.
October 1991: Meets billionaire oil baron J Howard Marshall while working in Gigi's, a Houston strip-club.
March 1992: First appearance in Playboy magazine as cover model.
1993: Named Playboy's Playmate of the Year.
27 June 1994: Marries Marshall in Houston. She is 26 and he is 89.
4 August 1995: Marshall dies, sparking lengthy legal battle over $1.6bn fortune.
September 2005: Testifies in US Supreme Court and is given permission to pursue inheritance claim in federal courts. Awarded $88m, subject to appeal.
7 September 2006: Gives birth to daughter Dannielynn in Bahamas, three days before son Daniel dies in her hotel room of a drugs overdose. Photographer Larry Birkett, an ex-boyfriend, later launches a paternity suit.
28 September 2006: 'Marries' long-time attorney and companion Howard K Stern in civil ceremony in Bahamas.
8 February 2007: Found dead in room at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Florida.
