Los Angeles, Feb 9 (DPA) Anna Nicole Smith liked to compare herself to the Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe, and maybe she was right. She was certainly blond and buxom and if the blanket coverage of her death Thursday by the cable news networks was any indication, she was also an icon of our strange, celebrity obsessed times.Smith, 39, died after collapsing in her room at a hotel in Hollywood, Florida, ending a six-month period that was extremely weird even by her own high standards.It was just last September that the news anchors were reporting that Smith had given birth to a baby girl in the Bahamas. Smith, whose career in recent years centred around a reality TV show highlighting her weight gains and losses, was reportedly overjoyed at the birth.But the celebration turned to tragedy when her son Daniel, 20, flew in to visit her and mysteriously collapsed and died in her hotel room. Pathologists now believe that the cause of death was a lethal combination of antidepressants and over-the-counter drugs.If that drama wasn't enough, a paternity battle quickly broke between her lawyer and companion Howard K Stern and her ex-boyfriend, entertainment photojournalist Larry Birkhead, who steadfastly maintained his contention that he was the baby's father and filed a lawsuit to challenge paternity.Scandal of course was nothing new to Smith, who was born Vickie Lynn Hogan in Houston, Texas on November 28, 1967.Her father and mother divorced before she was two years old and her childhood dream was to be the next Marilyn Monroe. She was married at age 17 to a 16-year-old cook at the small time diner where they both worked. She gave birth to a son in 1986 and after working at Wal-Mart and Red Lobster she took a job at a strip club to support herself and her young son.It was while working at Gigi's strip club in Houston Texas that she met the octogenarian oil tycoon J Howard Marshall, who courted her for two years as she broke into exotic modelling and was named Playboy's Playmate of the year in 1993.She then secured a lucrative contract to replace supermodel Claudia Schiffer as the star of a Guess? jeans ad campaign. She married Marshall in June 1994 when she was 26 and he was 89. Most people believed that she married him for his money. But though she reportedly never lived with him, Smith maintained she loved her husband and that age did not matter to her.Marshall died in August 1995 after 14 months of marriage, sparking a bitter battle for his 1.6-billion-dollar fortune between Smith and his son E Pierce Marshall.The complicated case reached as high as the US Supreme Court but remained unresolved at the time of her death.Unable to access the cash left by her late husband, and after several critically panned movies, by 2002 she jumped on the reality TV show bandwagon with a show that highlighted her bizarre antics and battles with her weight.
(c) Indo-Asian News Service
