Anna Nicole Smith loved to be naked, and being naked is what she did best. Anna was like a parody of her own stereotype, the Texas stripper, a
big blonde blow up doll, dumb as a post, the laughingstock of Hollywood. She’ll forever be seen as the train wreck gold-digger who wasn’t sure who fathered her child. The fat jeans model junkie who took advantage of an 89-year-old man, married his money, was unfaithful, gluttonous, and voracious for drugs, food, and sex.
Her overdose death in 2007 shocked no one, and nor did the infant grab that brought a bunch of Baby Dadas and a grandmother out of the woodwork. Of course, these people cared about Anna’s child,, and not at all about the possibility she could be worth half a billion dollars. The saga of Anna’s fated fortune, from her second husband the oil tycoon, had been going on as long as we could remember. By the time she died, it was just another event in a long saga of her tabloid stories.
In 1994, New York Magazine featured a picture of the world’s dumbest blonde in cowboy boots and not much else, digging into a bag of cheese puffs. Anna had no idea that the words White Trash Nation would be emblazoned across the page. She’d been under the impression that she’d be shown as an all-American girl, and the magazine argued that yes, she had. It wasn’t a nice trick to play on a dimwitted bimbo, but the fact remained that nothing could be closer to the truth. It was a few months after her wedding to octogenarian J. Howard Marshall, or rather, to his fortune, or so they said. And when she fled the honeymoon bed for a trip with her bodyguard lover, her motives were absurdly transparent.
Or were they? To the day she died Anna was big, blonde and stoned in court, fighting for her money. J. Howard’s son was trying to keep it from her- or, more realistically, keep it for himself.
Maybe no one cares for my two cents on the issue, but too damn bad. Aside from a few million men with their pants around their ankles, a few bewildered exes, and a daughter who will never know her, there’s no one left to speak Anna.
And it’s my job to ask this: why does everyone feel sorry for poor J. Howard? Is the public so sexist that they think a billionaire oil tycoon, a Yale law professor, no less, was the hapless, helpless swindle victim of a simpleminded stripper? J. Howard is not the first and nor will he be the last man to throw his money at a naked woman. Why in the world would anyone assume that a big shot lawyer wouldn’t know that the wife young enough to be his great granddaughter would be good for half his money? Certainly he didn’t expect to live forever, and he was clearly old enough to decide for himself whether to marry. The man was not a fool, and I doubt her extracurricular activities were a big surprise to him.
The truth of the matter is that J. Howard was a man who frequented a peeler bar on a daily basis in his wheelchair, threw thousands of dollars around, was nearing death, and had his heart set on heaven on earth. He lavished Anna with flashy gifts, plied her with hundred dollar bills, and begged her to marry him.
This was no shotgun wedding- Anna turned him down repeatedly, because she wanted to make a name for herself in, er, nude modeling. Though he dangled his billions in front of her for nearly three years, she ran off and landed the Playboy photo shoot that would catapult her to celeb status. She lived the playbunny life of fancy clothes and champagne and drugs and boys, but she talked to J. Howard on the telephone every night out of the kindness of her heart. Finally, she decided why not make an old man happy? Who could say that that, in and of itself, is not love? And if she loved him for his money, did he marry her for her brains and her soul?
Anna’s detractors wonder how they practiced intimacy. None of our business. Did she have to formally have intercourse with him to ‘deserve’ the money? It is not for us to determine what did or did not go on. Marriage takes place all over the world for many different reasons- arrangements, political unions, convenience, immigration, dowry, retaliation, enforcement, bla bla bla. If a brilliant law professor is not capable of deciding to marry, then who is? And why wouldn’t Anna want to do a sweet turn for a nice rich man’s dying days when he spoils her rotten?
Consider the cesspool of trailer trash she inherited in the genetic lottery. It’s easy for us to poke fun at her repellant stupidity and repetitive nudity, but should we? Drugs and alcohol are certainly rampant in Hollywood, where everyone wants to party. But the tragic hot mess of Anna Nicole Smith has its roots a long way from glamourous hedonism. Recall that one of the old-school staple reasons for self-destructive drug use is childhood abuse, the desperate pattern of escapism from grim reality. It goes above and beyond the lure of hot tub parties. Its seeds are planted when your daddy is planting his seeds in your garden, uncommon nowhere, and extremely common in the kind of world Anna grew up in. Don’t you all wonder why she so cruelly and consistently refused all contact of her children with her mother? Classic- mom said nothing. Moral morons wrote all over the net about poor maligned mom Virgie, and how Anna’s drug habit separated them. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Anna was born in 1967 in backwater Texas, the second child to Virgie Arthur. Virgie at 14 had a son with her brother. Oh, sorry, her stepbrother. 
That’s right, a very merry brady bunch and the ensuing bundles of joy. It’s likely she was also the victim of abuse, as the cycle goes, and maybe forced to have her brother’s baby. Later, he was allegedly convicted of child molesting for something else. Though Virgie was the deputy sheriff and worked in law enforcement for most of her life, her private life was not exactly law and order. She had a long string of husbands, perhaps six? and most of them were sex felons. Anna, nee Vickie Hogan, was fathered by Don Hogan. There was some kind of rape scandal involving this man and Virgie’s ten-year-old niece. Dad was exchanged for another Donald, this time Hart, whom Anna maintained raped her from ages nine to 14. She escaped from home to live with a relative.
We all know what happens next in tragic stories like these- Anna became pregnant soon after. She married the boy, Billy, and they had a son named Daniel. He was the true joy of Anna’s life and the most normal player in the trailer trash saga. The rapist step dad had children with another mom- one of those sons was later convicted of kidnapping a paraplegic and using her as a sex slave. Train wreck? It gets worse.
The story from here was the same as every other inbred trailer queen’s story, up until the implants, anyway. Still named Vickie, she failed most of high school and worked in a fried chicken joint, following her story’s stereotype with uncanny precision. And that’s where she got knocked up. Now, Anna wasn’t playing with a full deck. But Billy- he was lucky if he had one or two cards. He was 16, a year younger than Anna, when they married. She left with baby Daniel for Houston not long afterwards.
The pages of the stereotypical drama turn predictably still. Anna- well, Vickie- worked at Wal Mart and Red Lobster, trying to make ends meet for her and her very beautiful baby. One day she passed by a nightclub flashing a neon dancer in cowgirl boots. Anna went in, showed her assets, and began dancing. This was her calling, and her true gift, and her patrons were dumbstruck by her big blinding blonde beauty. She was sweet, stupid, and sensational without her clothing. Sadly, she felt insecure with her pert B cup boobs, and decided to take her career to the next level with massive breast implants.
Enter J. Howard Marshall, barely able to sit up in his wheelchair. Every day he came to watch the mesmerizing Anna. He paid her hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars just to sit topless near his wheelchair and they talked and giggled the day away. He drowned her in gifts. Not every stripper is even lucky enough to make a living, and Anna had never seen so much money. She was still a total hick, with no idea how to manage what was coming in, and she blew it on baby and on bling. J. Howard was begging her to marry him before he died, but Anna had other beaus and other plans- she wanted to fulfill her lifelong dream. She wanted to be a playboy bunny just like Marilyn Monroe.
Like many little girls, and like most raped and orphaned girls, Anna looked up to spectacular sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, who was a molested orphan who became a legend. An unconscious empathy takes place between victims, but Anna couldn’t have understood how Marilyn was deeply intelligent, because she herself could barely read. She did see the rags to riches, the glamourous transformation. She wanted to be a breathless blonde bunny, and a famous actress-model.
Now the early ‘90s in fashion was a long way from bodacious, and the kinder of Anna’s cronies advised her to abandon embarrassment and continue to entertain in Texas, where everything was bigger and better. Ironically, it was J. Howard who encouraged her dream of modeling. Though he wanted to provide for her, she wanted to make it on her own. And so Barbie put her five-inch stilettos on and stormed into the offices of Playboy magazine. Against all odds, she strode out with a contract.
In fact, the photographs of Vickie- this was still her name in her first magazine appearance- were of that breathless blonde beauty that had seldom been seen since her idol Monroe, or Jane Mansfield. Anna was unbelievably photogenic and loved the camera. She was larger than life, and stood out from the other models by more than her big Texas hair. Layout schedules were bumped so that Anna’s nudie pics would be featured sooner than planned. J. Howard had been wooing an unknown stripper- now he was begging for America’s flavour of the month.
Her celebrity was instant, and in keeping with the stress, Anna’s drug and alcohol use went up. So did her consumption of food. She went from big boned to bigger, and gossip started. Anna could also guzzle several bottles of champagne and her lack of decorum and daftness quickly became as legendary as her helium ta-tas. Though she filled out her Guess Jeans with unending bootyliciousness, stunning her naysayers with a wildly popular and fully clothed modeling contract, her life had begun to spin out of control. By then she had known J. Howard for almost three years, and spoken to him every night on the phone, even at the peak of her fame. And she thought he would be a calming and sweet force in her chaotic life, and that she would make an old man a happy one.
Their wedding stirred a media circus, of course, as he sat crumpled in a white tux, shriveled in his wheelchair, and Anna dwarfed him in voluptuous white, endless yards of it, massive puffed sleeves, with her legendary mammaries going down the aisle before her.
Anna did make him happy for the last year and a half of his life, though by now she was a razor’s width from the edge. J. Howard couldn’t even get out of his wheelchair, never mind save her from the overdoses, excesses, and pain that her past and her exposure brought her. She was far too unsophisticated to handle the press attention for Goldie gold-digger, and too damaged not to take all the media fat jokes personally. Anna’s career, reputation, and physical peak tanked miserably. She was out of her mind, and when J. Howard died, she dramatically wore her wedding dress to the funeral. Depressed, she watched TV, ate, and took drugs. More scandals ensued, including bankruptcy, the war with J.’s family because she wasn’t specifically mentioned in his will (neither were they), and the alleged sex abuse of one of her employees, which may or may not have been just a case of drug regret. Anna was in and out of court, fighting for her estate, and in and out of rehab, and in and out of her mind.
Later, Anna was savvy enough to realize in her broke and hazy fugue that if the public loved to laugh at her, then she would let them, and she started her own reality show. The Anna Nicole Show was the highest order of pure
campiness, in god-awful taste, featuring endless boring dioramas of the train wreck crashing, the blimp getting bigger, and an arsenal of queens attending to their reigning trash heap. She stumbled, drooled, and devoured her way back into the public eye, because she desperately needed to pay her outstanding debts for the lifestyle she’d never been able to afford on her own.
Anna had never made a decision to ‘clean up her act’ but unexpectedly and miraculously, she lost 70 pounds and landed a contract with Trim Spa, the diet aid. And although the nature of her strange ongoing relationship with her lawyer slash lover will never be fully understood, she left with the other Howard Stern for Bahamas, to be out of the public eye, and was soon photographed by tabloids with a natural beauty we had never seen before- straight hair, tailored but sexy clothing, and nearly no makeup. She announced with great joy that she was pregnant. The buzz was instantaneous- another bastard heir to the billionaire.
Though Anna’s bewildered boy toy, the jaw droppingly gorgeous and totally effeminate Larry Birkhead couldn’t understand why she took his offspring to be to the island, he understood that she was deeply confused and needed time to put the pieces of her shambles together. Anna was so broke by the time Dannielynn was born, she sold photographs of herself in the hospital, looking exhausted but strangely stunning, with her brand new bundle. Daniel, her handsome son, came from the States to spend the delivery days with Mom, and the broken and bizarre bunch was clearly blissful. Her lawyer Howard Stern was there, too, standing in as the proud new father and caretaker of the newly cleaned up Anna Nicole.
The rest of the story is even weirder. The cheery family reunion was ripped apart when out of the blue, the strapping and healthy 20-year-old Daniel died at his mom’s bedside, right there in the hospital. At the moment of their deepest happiness, embracing a brand new sibling and new start, he was torn from his mother in a mystery overdose of antidepressants and
methadone. It would be no surprise that Daniel was taking prescription antidepressants, given his tumultuous heritage. But even a pill popper has no use for multiple Zolofts. Still, Larry Birkhead said he noticed strange behaviour from Daniel in the few months before his death. Daniel allegedly stole some of his mother’s methadone, and he had hired a private investigator for unknown reasons. (Later speculation buzzed that a Svengali was poisoning Daniel, and that Anna was under his control as well. The truth is, nothing is farfetched when we are talking about a potential half billion dollars, and now one heir was out of the way.)
Anna’s surfacing to sunlight from the maelstrom was brief, and she submerged again into the twilight world, popping more pills than ever before and mumbling to herself, seldom making sense. When she was led zombie like in front of the cameras for a ‘commitment ceremony’ with Howard Stern, the waves began of who was Dannielynn’s real father. The birth certificate said Howard. Anna’s trash talking sister said she had frozen the oil tycoon’s sperm. Larry insisted baby was definitely his, and some said Anna had never had a romance at all with Howard, that she was just his mannequin and his motives were unscrupulous. Others said the commitment ceremony was just to make a few bucks from paparazzi pics, because she was so desperate. Regardless, after Daniel died, Anna was completely emptied, roaming blankly wherever she was prodded. She was way out of it, sick, crazy, strange. Why she was not in a mental hospital for 
rest is unclear, and many still wonder if it was all in Howard’s plan, if that’s why he took her to the Bahamas, away from the laws and the friends who might notice she was fucked. Most of the time, Anna could barely hold her infant, and she was cruelly photographed passed out and dribbling vomit. She was simply the living dead.
The ending of the story was no surprise to anyone. Five months after Danielynn’s birth and Daniel’s death, Anna, while sick in bed, overdosed for the last time.
The DNA circus began full force. Suddenly, Anna’s mom was a glowing picture of maternal concern. Virgie had never been around to help her daughter through the vicious struggles she had bequeathed to her. But now she accepted cash handouts to be photographed sobbing at the grave, and used her law background to move full force into custody battle for the billion dollar baby. And Anna’s grieving ‘husband” seemed remarkably composed in the aftermath, even as it turned out that most of the eleven drugs in Anna’s body had been prescribed in his name, not hers! Immediate speculation began over whether he had eliminated the oldest heirs and now had sole custody of the , conveniently his own flesh and blood. And to be fair, there was nothing outlandish about such theories: Howard’s presence was certainly mysterious, and his role of power over her money and health were obvious starting points for conspiracy.
But that blew up in his face, of course, when it turned out Larry had been telling the truth all along and Dannielynn was his baby. Virgie was outraged that she didn’t get custody of the baby.
Perhaps the details of Anna’s life and death are just the tragic outcome of destiny, larger than life because of her celebrity status. But it’s also clear that wherever there is money, drugs, and sex- and here were all three in spades- there is potential for drama of every kind. Add to that the fact that Anna was easy to take advantage of, an easy target for ridicule, and not in any semblance of control of her life, and you get this brutal tangle.
We may never know, and perhaps no one cares. Society, after all, cares little for whores. The Internet is oozing comments that Anna was nothing but a selfish set of tits and ass who only cared about partying. Does no one care that a girl was in trouble? Never mind that she may have been a victim. One can get away with swindling, target, murder, drugs, and blackmail, as long as the victim is a whore, not a human.
In the end, it is only fitting that little girl lost followed in the footsteps of her heroine, Marilyn Monroe. They had little in common but their trademark red lips, va va voom curves, Playboy cover, and then, cruelly, the circulating photographs of each of them, their bodies blue on the morgue gurney. And so it is that the big boned girl with the big smile and big bank account, larger than life, went from this world. The blow up doll deflated. The end.
Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
pretty, AND popular. Ten years ago, Forbes grumbled that Suze used too many self-promotion tactics, including charitable participation. “A plug for charitable giving earns her huge amounts of free publicity,” lamented William P. Barrett in a story he called Sizzling Suze. “Too bad Orman didn’t include a chapter [in her new book] on “How to promote yourself without spending money on promotion.””
