June 07, 2007

In death, Anna Nicole Smith received the same volume of press coverage as Princess Diana. But who was she, and what was the secret of her celebrity?

Anna Nicole Smith: wasn’t that the Playboy model who’d married a moribund millionaire? The overweight slimming-company spokesperson? Hadn’t she just had a baby? Hadn’t her son then died of a drug overdose in her hospital room?

It seemed impossible that all of these things could have happened to the same woman. It was garish, calamitous and more than just a tabloid story. Over time, people began to refer to it as ‘an American Tragedy’.

The Washington Post called her ‘a postmodern pin-up for a tabloid age’, and asserted that she had ‘got under our skin’. People were heard asking one another: “Will you always remember where you were when Anna Nicole Smith died?” However trashy she seemed, Anna Nicole Smith appeared to say something. But what?

The New York Times columnist Caryn James observed that “her career ultimately says more about the culture’s fascination with celebrity than it does about Anna Nicole Smith” –– in other words, she was all about us. Some observers of pop culture went so far as to suggest that her legacy was akin to that of a conceptual artist: she pushed the limits of celebrity so far that, by watching her, we came to understand something about the nature of fame.

Although her life and her death look like the greatest hits of blow-out tragedy, if you break them down into their component parts, each of them looks like a kind of success story. She modelled herself on Marilyn Monroe; she sometimes claimed Marilyn was her mother, though Monroe died five years before she was born. Like her, she wanted to die before she was 40, and she did die just weeks before her 40th birthday. She had positioned herself perfectly at the all-American intersection of sex, fame, money and tragic death.

These mythical, national obsessions had been fashioned in her case according to her will.

When Vickie Lynn Hogan, as she was originally named, was born in Houston, Texas on November 28, 1967, her father had already raped her aunt. Aunt Kay, her mother's sister, was only 10 years old at the time, and Donald Hogan was kicked out of the house when Vickie was a baby. He pleaded guilty to that rape and to that of another underage girl, and spent six months in jail.

Then he started a second family. Vickie’s mother, Virgie, spent her life trying to keep her away from her father, and Vickie resented her violently as a result, though her mother was right about the risk: Donald Hogan sexually abused the other daughters he went on to have.

One of them, Donna Hogan, remembers driving past Vickie’s house, and having her father point out her half-sister to her. The siblings finally met when Vickie was 23 –– she had hired a private detective to track down her father, who, as it turned out, had always lived close by.

When she went to high school, Vickie left her mother’s house (Virgie, a deputy sheriff, had never got along with her daughter and was known to handcuff her as punishment) and moved in with her Aunt Kay in the small Texan town of Mexia. She was expelled after getting into a fist fight, and took a job at a roadside restaurant called Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken.

Before long, she had fallen in love with Billy Smith, a spotty, limp-haired 16-year-old fried-food cook. In 1985, at the age of 18, she asked him to marry her. Later, Smith claimed he hardly abused her at all –– in fact, he only remembered kicking her once –– but either way, within a year or so, Vickie was out. She took her six-month-old baby Daniel, dropped him off with her mother, and moved into a trailer park in Houston with a hairdresser she knew, who transformed her mousy hair to blonde.

She got a day job at a bar. She got gigs at other bars, made money on the side in their parking lots, and developed a trademark baby voice modelled on Marilyn Monroe’s. Then, spotting an ad placed in a magazine by recruiters for Playboy, she turned up at a photographer’s studio that would change her fortunes. The photographer was Eric Redding. He thought she was beautiful, he recalls, but felt sorry for her –– she seemed so childlike.

In the questionnaire she filled out to accompany her test shots, she wrote that her ambitions in life were to become a Playmate and to have a daughter. Asked if there was one thing she would change about her character, she said: “I'm too kind-hearted at times. People take advantage of me.”

Vickie was chosen for the March 1992 cover of Playboy, on which she featured as a sophisticated, black ball gown-clad version of Jayne Mansfield -–– a ‘post-debutante’, as the cover line put it. She was paid $500. Two months later, she was given a centrefold ($20,000) and when she was voted Playmate of the Year, she received $100,000 and a brand new Jaguar.

And when Paul Marciano of the Guess? jeans company spotted her magazine spreads, he knew he wanted her to replace Claudia Schiffer and Eva Herzigova in their ad campaigns. She was offered a three-year, multi-million-dollar contract, and given the name Anna Nicole Smith. She took small roles in prominent films –– most notably, The Hudsucker Proxy and Naked Gun 33 1/3 –– and became a bona-fide celebrity. Vickie Lynn was well and truly over.

“I love the paparazzi,” she said. “I've always liked attention. I didn’t get very much growing up, and I’ve always wanted to be, you know, noticed.” It wasn’t that she was famous for being famous, exactly; it was more that, as her life went on and the most reasonable grounds for her celebrity disappeared, fame remained the idiom of her existence.

Money and fame were the only currencies she knew, and the people around her –– no strangers to those values themselves –– were familiar with the rate of exchange. Towards the end, Anna and her family only communicated with each other via TV shows on which they were paid to appear.

In her new book, Train Wreck: The Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith, Donna Hogan writes that she always felt that her half-sister’s claims to have grown up poor were exaggerated.

Whatever her financial circumstances, there was someone in her life who had been determined to improve them, from way back when she was Vickie Smith, working at Gigi’s Cabaret in Houston. J. Howard Marshall II was an octogenarian oil billionaire who had been married twice before.

Marshall visited Gigi's Cabaret and met Vickie Smith. He immediately fell in love with her, and with her sweet-talking baby voice. He would pass her envelopes across the table. Upon opening them, she would find anything from $1,000 to $5,000 in cash.

It wasn’t until 1992, when Anna became famous in her own right, that the couple went fully public. Marshall took her out to country clubs, and ostentatiously bought her jewellery. Then on June 27, 1994, before 11 guests of the bride and none of the groom, Anna Nicole Smith married J. Howard Marshall II at the White Dove Wedding Chapel in Houston.

The groom was ushered into the ceremony in a white tuxedo and a wheelchair. He was unable to stand for any part of it.

Though she dispatched accusations that she had married him for his money with the defence that he had been begging her to marry him for four years, the couple’s spectacular 63-year-age difference gave Anna Nicole Smith newfound fame as ‘America's No 1 gold-digger’.

The gags came thick and fast. In fact, it looked as though that might come about sooner rather than later. Within six months of their marriage, Marshall was so ill that his son E Pierce Marshall, to whom he'd given power of attorney over his estate, cut off Anna and refused to let her see him. Her bills were not paid and her allowance, which had been $50,000 a month, was stopped; she took Marshall Junior to court to demand visitation rights, and was granted the occasional half-hour slot, after which she was escorted from her husband's house by armed guards. The couple had never actually lived together, and on August 4, 1995, 403 days after their wedding, J Howard Marshall II died.

Three days later, Anna staged a private memorial service at the funeral home: so private that she invited People magazine and several cable channels to cover it.

Of course, the real issue was not whether Marshall would be buried or cremated. The issue was what to do with the $1.6 billion. Anna didn't sue E. Pierce Marshall for all of it, or even half of it. She sued for spousal support of half his earnings during the time they were married. Marshall contended that she'd already received what she demanded, in the form of gifts.

The legal battle –– which remains ongoing –– has now survived both parties to the dispute. E. Pierce Marshall died last year, at the age of 67. Until that moment, the long-running suit had had its momentous episodes. Fought in probate court, in federal court, in Texas, in California, and finally –– unbelievably –– in the US Supreme Court, the case went through various judgments, including one that Anna Nicole Smith should receive nothing, another that she should receive $475 million (after a bankruptcy judge ruled that Pierce Marshall had altered documents to cheat her out of the money), and one that she be given $88 million.

Last May, the Supreme Court –– to which it had been taken in order to ascertain whose jurisdiction such a case could come under –– ruled that Anna Nicole Smith had a right to pursue the $88 million the federal judge had decided upon, but the Supreme Court did not resolve the dispute.

In the middle of all this, Anna Nicole Smith could be seen wearing a smart black skirt suit and heavy black eyeliner, her hair bleached to infinity, emerging from the highest court in the land. It was an extraordinary moment: never mind the mingling of high and low culture, this woman who always strove to be noticed had attained a degree of visibility –– not just in Texas or in LA but in Washington DC –– that she could hardly have predicted. And next to her was a man familiar to viewers of her TV show, who suddenly looked like he might soon be cashing in a very hefty fee: Howard Number Two.

Howard K Stern, Anna’s zealous confidant and attorney, had booted out her friend and publicist David Granoff, and founded a talent agency in an effort to represent every aspect of her life himself. When Anna fought with family members, with friends, with her decorator, all of them said she was spending too much time with a single man who was intent on controlling her.

Death had been a possibility since the early years of her fame. In her days as a dancer, she carried around little bags of prescription tranquillisers and popped them as she drank. She took cocaine, she took ecstasy, she took pills to get to sleep, pills to wake up and pain killers if she so much as stubbed her toe.

She was first hospitalised for a drug overdose in February 1994. Later that year, her bodyguard Pierre DeJean claimed he'd saved her life when she had tried to slit her wrists. At least twice the following year, an ambulance took her to the emergency room after she'd had seizures her then-lawyer, Diana Marshall, said were due to migraine pills. And then she was admitted to the Betty Ford Clinic.

Towards the end of her life there were other rumours –– that she had taken methadone while pregnant, in order to come off heroin; that she had been seen holding a gun to her head and telling her son she would blow her brains out; that Howard Stern had to fish her out of a swimming pool in which he found her lying face down.

On September 7, 2006, Anna gave birth in the Bahamas, where she had recently taken up residence; to the daughter she had always wanted. Her 20-year-old son Daniel flew in to see the baby, and while he was at her bedside, three days after the birth, he suddenly collapsed and died. He had taken a lethal combination of tranquillisers and they were mixed with methadone.

She always said: “I'm going to die young,” says David Granoff, who had known Daniel since he was small. “Well, that's fine for her. But for a kid having to worry about her all through the years –– seeing her experience poverty, riches, poverty again, being in the limelight –– I think depression hit him like a ton of bricks.” It was not clear where the methadone had come from, but at least two people later said they were prepared to testify at an inquest that Howard Stern had given it to him, and that he had been in the room when he died. Grotesque sums of money hovered at the edges of each disaster. Anna sold pictures of her son to a tabloid for half a million dollars. She sold video footage of her Caesarean section for, reportedly, double that.

Four days before her death, Anna Nicole Smith and a private nurse checked into the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. It was not known exactly why she needed a private nurse, but one of her lawyers, Ron Rale, later said that she'd been suffering from flu-like symptoms. Howard Stern was in Florida with them -–– they were planning to buy a yacht.

From Monday February 5, 2007, which was the day she arrived at the hotel, other guests reported that she was ‘completely out of it’, and that she needed help standing up and sitting down. Some witnessed her being carried out from the audience at a boxing match, others said they saw her downing stunning amounts of alcohol. On Wednesday, she hit her head on the bathtub, and late on Thursday morning, she reportedly lay down for a nap, feeling feverish and sick.

At 1:39pm her nurse called the front desk and asked for an ambulance. When the emergency services arrived, they called headquarters: “She's not breathing, she’s not responsive. She’s, um, actually Anna Nicole Smith.”

Anna Nicole Smith was pronounced dead at 2:49pm on February 8, in a medical centre with a wing named for Joe DiMaggio, who was once married to Marilyn Monroe. The coroner's toxicology report, which was not released until 26 March, revealed that she had died of an 'accidental overdose' of prescription drugs, each of which was at 'therapeutic levels' but which together turned out to be lethal.

When Anna's daughter was born, it was not known who the father was, but this seemed relatively unimportant until Daniel died. At that moment, the baby –– Danielynn, as she was named, for her late brother and her mother –– became the sole heir to Anna's potential fortune. Before they had even planned a funeral service for Daniel, Howard Stern 'married' Anna Nicole Smith on a boat in the Bahamas, and put his name down as the father on Danielynn's birth certificate.

She was just a bundle of possible cash. Whoever was the father would have –– if the court case progressed and Anna's heir triumphed –– millions of dollars to spend on her behalf. And so, the contenders came forward: Larry Birkhead, a photographer who had met Anna two years earlier at the Kentucky Derby and claimed to have had a relationship with her up until she was five months pregnant.

Stern, who asserted his supremacy because he was already there, behaving as though the baby were his daughter. Prince Frederick von Anhalt, a man who had reputedly bought his title by arranging to be adopted as an adult, said he had been engaged in a decade-long affair with her.

A former bodyguard, Alexander Denk, claimed paternity, too. Larry Birkhead, who was serious about his claim, had already hired a lawyer to obtain a DNA test; in her lifetime, Anna's response to this had been ‘In your dreams’. But after her death her funeral was delayed, in part so that the procedure could go ahead. On 10 April, the results of the DNA test were released: Larry Birkhead was the father, and Howard Stern would not contest the result.

But the fight is not over: Howard Stern, as the trustee of the estate and the attorney in charge of ensuring that large sums are delivered to Danielynn, has already made a reported $4 million in media fees, and holds a number of valuable cards.

“In my heart, I still think she committed suicide,” says Eric Redding. “You know, she was found in the nude, with a sheet over her, just like Marilyn Monroe –– it's almost like she tried to mimic it. But she had a good life,” he adds, “She liked being a tabloid queen. As long as she was in the news, she was happy.” No one can say, of course, what life she deserved, but it does look a lot like the life she designed.