She wanted fame and fortune, but Anna Nicole Smith was a public joke and her death a sad punchline, writes Denis Stauntonin Washington
As doctors in Florida performed an autopsy on Anna Nicole Smith yesterday morning, lawyers in California were making the first moves in a battle for custody of her five-month-old daughter and control of a fortune worth up to $474 million.
Smith claimed that Howard K Stern, a lawyer who says he married her on a yacht last year, is the father of the baby, Dannielynn. But one of her former boyfriends, photographer Larry Birkhead, has demanded DNA samples from Smith and her daughter, claiming that he is the child's real father.
"He is inconsolable, and we are taking steps now to protect the DNA testing of the child. The child is our number one priority," Birkhead's lawyer said.
Smith died at a Florida hospital on Thursday after she was found unconscious at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, a sprawling complex on Seminole Indian land where she had been staying for four days. Friends said the former Playboy centrefold, whose 1994 marriage to octogenarian billionaire J Howard Marshall III made her an overnight celebrity, had been complaining of flu-like symptoms and was grieving over the death of her 20-year-old son Daniel last September.
Smith's mother, Vergie Arthur, said yesterday that she did not need an autopsy to work out what was responsible for the deaths of both her daughter and her grandson.
"I think she had too many drugs, just like I tried to warn her about drugs and the people she hung around with. She didn't listen. She was too drugged up," Arthur told ABC's Good Morning America.
Married and separated in her teens, widowed in her 20s and now dead at 39, Smith's bottle-blonde, curvaceous beauty, her baby-voiced air of innocence and her turbulent private life put many in mind of her heroine, Marilyn Monroe.
"She always wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. She even wanted to do a remake of the movie Niagara," said Len Leeds, another of Smith's lawyers. "Sadly, there are so many parallels. They died at around the same age. She wanted to be like her; she wanted to look like her. She used to pretend to be her. It is so tragic that she met the same fate as her idol."
Where Monroe was a sexual icon with a unique cinematic talent who inspired almost universal affection, however, Smith had become a grotesque parody of America's celebrity culture, and her death has been greeted as the punch-line of a long-running national joke.
Born Vickie Lynn Hogan in 1967 in a small town south of Dallas, Texas, Smith was a high-school dropout whose first job was as a waitress at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken restaurant in Mexia, Texas. At 17, she married 16-year-old Bill Smith, a cook at the restaurant, and gave birth to Daniel a year later.
THE MARRIAGE ENDED after just two years and Smith moved to Houston, where she began working at a succession of topless bars, including Rick's Cabaret. It was here, in 1991, where she was onstage one lunchtime when Marshall rolled in in his wheelchair.
An oilman worth $1.6 billion, Marshall immediately decided that Smith was "the light of my life" and, to the dismay of his family, the couple married three years later. Marshall was 89; his bride was 26.
During their courtship, Marshall encouraged Smith in her career as a glamour model; she became Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Year in 1993 and won a three-year modelling contract with Guess jeans. Smith enjoyed her sudden fame and welcomed the attention of photographers.
"Oh, no, I like it. I love the paparazzi. They take pictures, and I just smile away. I've always liked attention. I didn't get it very much growing up, and I always wanted to be noticed," she said in 1994.
Marshall fell ill and died in 1995, just 13 months after his wedding day, leaving nothing to Smith in his will. She appeared at his memorial service wearing a white dress and her wedding veil and started a lengthy legal battle with Marshall's family for a share of the estate.
A court initially awarded her $474 million but the family contested the award and got it reduced, first to $89 million and finally to nothing at all. Last year, the US supreme court ruled that Smith could continue to pursue her claim through the courts in California.
After Marshall's death, Smith was hospitalised for drug and alcohol abuse and, as she began to put on weight, she became a staple target for misogynist comedians. In 2002, she launched her own reality TV series, The Anna Nicole Show, which became an instant, if short-lived hit, as millions tuned in to sneer at Smith's vain, vacuous progress through everyday life.
HER SON DANIEL was a constant presence on the show and appeared to enjoy a warm relationship with his mother, whose successful loss of 30kg won her a new job as spokesperson for Trimspa diet pills. Trimspa was last month fined $25 million (along with three other companies) by the US Fair Trade Commission for false advertising, in particular relating to its 'before' and 'after' shots of Smith. Last September, three days after the birth of Dannielynn, Daniel died while visiting Smith in her hospital room in the Bahamas. A pathologist engaged by the family said he was killed by an interaction between methadone and two anti-depressants.
Smith's grief did not prevent her from selling, within weeks of his death, photographs of herself, her baby and Daniel in her hospital room for a reported $650,000.
Meanwhile, Dannielynn's paternity became a matter of dispute, with Stern's name appearing on the birth certificate while Birkhead insisted that DNA testing would prove he is the father. In an interview last week, the last before her death, Smith told Entertainment Tonight that she saw no reason to take the test.
"You've got this guy who's saying, 'Take a paternity test'. But why should I? It's crazy to me that it's gone this far for him to go to a judge and say, 'I want Anna Nicole Smith to take a paternity test'. And, just because I'm Anna Nicole Smith, we have to do it. . . I think he's after money and fame. I think he's just trying to stay in the limelight," she said.
With lawyers predicting a legal tangle that could take years to unravel, Birkhead and Stern will both remain in the limelight as they struggle for possession of Dannielynn and the millions of dollars that could come with her. Among the first to express his sorrow at Smith's death was Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and the magazine's editors were reported to be meeting within hours of her death to discuss commemorating Smith in a forthcoming issue.