|
Anna lived in glare of tabloids
09/02/2007 09:38 - (SA)
|
|
|
 |
|
| Anna Nicole Smith on the cover of the February 2001 issue of Playboy. The 39-year-old blonde died on Thursday 8 February 2007 after collapsing at a hotel. (Playboy, AP)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Los Angeles - From her first Playboy centrefold and marriage to an 89-year-old oil tycoon to the mysterious death of her adult son, Anna Nicole Smith lived her
life in a special corner of America - the often garish world
of supermarket tabloids.
Few figures in modern pop culture have garnered as much publicity as the buxom, blond Texas native, whom the media alternately painted as a bubble-headed naive and a cynical gold-digger with the soul of an adding machine.
From troubled background to fame as sex symbol
Smith, 39, still enmeshed in disputes over the paternity of her 5-month-old daughter and the circumstances of her son's death in the Bahamian hospital where she had just given birth in September, died on Thursday in Florida.
Her sudden death bore an eerie parallel to the demise of Smith's personal idol, screen legend Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962 at age 36. Like Monroe, Smith rose from a troubled background to gain worldwide fame as a sex symbol.
Born Vicki Lynn Hogan in Texas and abandoned by her father, she dropped out of high school and ended up working in a fried-chicken joint.
Stripper when she met her billionaire husband
She married her first husband, Billy Wayne Smith, at age
17, had a child by him and was divorced two years later, moving
to Houston where she began working in a topless bar.
It was as a stripper that she met elderly oil billionaire
J. Howard Marshall. She was 26 when they married; he was 89.
By then, Smith's popularity had exploded as she became
Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Year and began modelling for
the fashion line Guess?
She also made her film debut in the
big-screen spoof Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.
Marshall died 14 months after they married, and Smith spent
much of the following decade battling members of his family
over his estate. In May 2006 the US Supreme Court ruled that
Smith could pursue her case in federal court.
Anna's wildly fluctuating weight
In the intervening years, the tabloids chronicled Smith's
wildly fluctuating weight. A somewhat bloated Smith hit cable
television in 2002 with her own reality series, The Anna
Nicole Smith Show.
As the series drew to a close in 2004, Smith landed a new
role as spokesperson for the diet supplement TrimSpa and dropped
much of her excess weight.
Death of her adult son
But her renewed fame turned to tragedy in September of last
year when her son, Daniel, then 20, died in the Bahamas three
days after Smith gave birth to her infant daughter. An inquest
into his death has been set for March 27.
Smith then became embroiled in a paternity suit over the
infant girl with ex-boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, who claimed to
be the child's father.
Smith insisted that her lawyer and
husband, Howard K Stern, was the girl's father.
Those battles and the legal dispute over her share of
Marshall's fortune will presumably go on without her, and
perhaps provide more fodder to the tabloids.
|
