Anna Nicole Smith (born Vickie Lynn Hogan): November 28, 1967 – February 8, 2007
The Obituary: Anna Nicole Smith Dies at 39
MIAMI, Feb. 7 — Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy centerfold, actress and television personality who was famous, above all, for being famous, but also for being sporadically rich and chronically litigious, was found dead on Thursday in her suite at the Seminole Hard Rock Café Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla. She was 39 and the cause of her death was not immediately known.
A personal nurse traveling with Ms. Smith called the hotel operator at 1:38 p.m. to report she had found Ms. Smith alone and unconscious in her sixth-floor suite, police officials said. Ms. Smith’s bodyguard arrived a few minutes later, and paramedics who arrived after 2 p.m. tried to revive her with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, they said, but she was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 2:49 p.m. The Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office is to perform an autopsy Friday morning.
A paramedic with the Hollywood Fire Rescue Department told WTVJ-TV that Ms. Smith was not breathing when he and other rescue workers arrived in her suite, and that they tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to restore her heartbeat.
“There was just no way of knowing how long she’d been down before she was discovered,” the paramedic, Capt. Dan Fitzgerald, told the television station. He said Ms. Smith’s companion, Howard K. Stern, was in the room when the rescue team arrived and had provided her medical history.
A lawyer for Ms. Smith, Ronald Rale, said she had complained of flu-like symptoms earlier in the week and was “run down” from her recent troubles, including the death of her 20-year-old son and a paternity suit over her infant daughter. Mr. Rale would not say why she was visiting Florida, but a spokesman for the hotel, a flashy, sprawling complex on Seminole Indian land, said Ms. Smith had stayed there several times since it opened in 2004.
“She was trying her hardest,” Mr. Rale said in a packed news conference at his law office in Los Angeles. “I grieve for Anna Nicole that she had to endure what she had to endure. I just pray that that’s not what precipitated this.”
The product of a hardscrabble Texas girlhood, Ms. Smith, at least in her mature years, was obtrusively voluptuous and almost preternaturally blonde. A ninth-grade dropout, she rose quickly from life as a small-town wife and mother to a high-profile career as a topless dancer; pinup; model; film actress; reality-show star; clothing designer; product endorser; and, briefly but most notably, wife of a tycoon nearly four times her age in a marriage that would eventually propel her to the United States Supreme Court in a fight over his billion-dollar estate.
For writers of gossip columns and supermarket tabloids, Ms. Smith’s life provided unremitting fodder. She often found herself in court, as either the complainant or the defendant. She publicly battled bankruptcy, drug addiction and wild fluctuations in her weight. And she was much in the headlines last fall when, over a three-day period, her second child was born and her first died abruptly.
Ms. Smith was widely known to television viewers as the star of “The Anna Nicole Show,” broadcast on the E! network from 2002 to 2004. The show chronicled the minutiae of its heroine’s daily life, which showed her on visits to her dentists and giving Prozac to her dog. Ms. Smith was also familiar as a spokeswoman for TrimSpa, a diet supplement. (In a class-action suit filed in Los Angeles this month, Ms. Smith and TrimSpa’s manufacturer were accused of false and misleading marketing.)
She appeared in several movies, among them “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” (1994). Her other cinematic credits include “Playboy Video Playmate Calendar” (1993); and “Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Celebration” (2003).
Ms. Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan on Nov. 28, 1967, in Mexia, Tex. Her parents divorced when she was an infant, and her mother, Virgie, a police officer, reared her alone. When she was a teenager, she married Billy Smith, a 16-year-old fry cook. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1986; the couple divorced the next year.
Ms. Smith found work as a waitress, later becoming a topless dancer in Houston. After submitting photos to Playboy, she appeared on the cover of the March 1992 issue. In 1993, she was named Playmate of the Year.
In 1994, Ms. Smith married J. Howard Marshall II, a Texas oil billionaire whom she had met in the course of her dancing career. She was 26; he was 89. Married life was a bounteous stream of clothes and jewelry. Mr. Marshall was a former professor of trusts and estates at Yale Law School .
In 1995, after 14 months of marriage, Mr. Marshall died, setting off a contrapuntal series of legal victories and reversals, which for Ms. Smith included these: fighting Mr. Marshall’s son E. Pierce Marshall for the right to inherit his father’s estate; being awarded $474 million in federal court; having the award reduced to just under $89 million; having it overturned altogether; and appealing the case to the Supreme Court.
In May of last year, the justices ruled that the dispute properly belonged in federal court, giving Ms. Smith another chance to collect millions once her case was heard again. Although E. Pierce Marshall died in June after a brief illness, the case was still pending at the time of Ms. Smith’s death.
On Sept. 7, 2006, Ms. Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn. On Sept. 10, Daniel, Ms. Smith’s son from her first marriage, died suddenly while visiting mother and child in the hospital in the Bahamas. A medical examiner hired by the family found that the death was the accidental result of the interaction of methadone with antidepressants.
Besides her daughter, Dannielynn, Ms. Smith is survived by her companion, Mr. Stern, a lawyer who she said was the child’s father. (Last fall Larry Birkhead, a former boyfriend of Ms. Smith, filed suit, claiming he had fathered Dannielynn.) Information on other survivors could not immediately be confirmed.
Mr. Rale, the lawyer for Ms. Smith, said a court hearing would take place Friday in Los Angeles concerning the paternity issue.
In an interview with Los Angeles magazine in 1994, Ms. Smith was asked whether her rapid success troubled her in any way.
“Oh, no, I like it,” she said. “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, you know, noticed.”
The Thoughts:
The U.S. loves the tired old rags to riches story, and Anna Nicole was the perfect example of just that. However, this story always seems to end in tragedy, if you’re a woman that is.
Anna died from an overdose that was more than likely related to the fact that she was on massive amounts of pain medication from the massive amounts of surgeries she needed to keep her body in socially acceptable standards. She was grieving from the loss of her son who had died mere months before her, also from an overdose. And, on top of all that she had just given birth to a little girl, Dannielynn, who was five months old when Anna died.
Anna died grieving. Penniless. And the laughing stock of all America. Then, when she was unceremoniously wheeled out of the Hard Rock Hotel, with only a burgundy cot cover shrouding her body.
America sat and waited. Fork in hand. Hungry for more.
And we devoured the very last of the dignity she should have been afforded.
Her husband on the other hand, a Haverford and Yale Law School graduate who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune in Koch Industries stock, died peacefully after a long life that involved obtaining anything he ever desired and being married to a seriously wicked hot blonde. How sad for him eh? This poor old man who just wanted to live out his life without being preyed upon. But uh, was he so helpless? A simple dig into how he obtained his money is going to leave you wondering who the real bad guy here was.
Now, I bet if I asked you right now to tell me about Anna you could rattle off some “seriously” (yes in quotes) scandalous stuff, and I bet one of the things you want to say is that she “gained a lot of weight!” How dare she! How dare she eat, and enjoy her body! How dare she not stay thin and pretty so that we can continue to consume her image while simultaneously wasting away in envy. Now, while we were all distracted by loving and hating Anna Nicole, here is where her husband was continuing to acquire his already vast fortune. And I’m willing to bet this information wasn’t at the tip of your tongue.
Howard J. Marshall-once again the frail old man who was ruthlessly preyed upon by Anna Nicole-had a “14.6% stake in Koch Industries, the nation's second-largest private company with some $115 billion in sales [which was] accumulated in the 1950s when he invested in a refining business that ultimately became Koch Industries.” According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute, Koch Industries is one of the top three polluters of America’s air, water and climate.
As an example, Koch “bought Frac-Chem, a top provider of hydraulic fracturing chemicals to drillers. Thanks to the Bush administration’s anti-regulatory agenda – which Koch Industries helped craft – Frac-Chem’s chemical cocktails, injected deep under the nation’s aquifers, are almost entirely exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act.” Oh phew thank God we aren’t like in a serious drought right now where we may eventually run out of safe and clean drinking water in the near future amirite!?
Marshall, ever the savvy businessman, in a move to make even more money as he aged “placed his remaining Koch shares in a Delaware corporation called Marshall Petroleum Inc. Following standard tax strategy, he split MPI into voting and non-voting stock and divided it among his ex-wife, Eleanor (whom he divorced in 1961), and trusts for himself and family members.”
Meaning, homie evaded taxes like a mother effin pro right here. And if you want to know who he cheated, ultimately it’s you all reading this. In case you don’t know how taxes are supposed to work, it’s that people who make more money giiiiive more money, so that places like Flint, Michigan have the tools the need to have luxury items like safe drinking water.
As of 2013 the Marshall family had $112 million in unpaid taxes and interest, much of which the government is still trying to collect. To avoid this, the Marshall offspring, who you will see named in numerous lawsuits against Anna, filed for bankruptcy in a clear abuse of the system to escape their family fraud. ”
G. Eric Brunstad, a Conn, attorney, said in a filing last year, “they are wealthy, solvent individuals who have no need of bankruptcy relief – other than as a convenient means to avoid paying a fraud judgment they can, but simply do not wish, to satisfy.”
So who is the real villain here? Anna Nicole Smith, a single mom who shook what her momma gave her, and created a life where she made money off her beauty by modeling, and then did what every little girl is told to do, marry rich.
Or, is it the “helpless” old man that she clearly duped into marrying her. A helpless old man who alongside another family is responsible for what one could argue is straight up crimes against humanity. Just google the Koch brothers I beg of you.
But that isn’t as easy to digest is it? Anna Nicole is a puff piece. She’s low hanging fruit. She’s a quick fix. Anna makes us forget about the horrors of our own life. We can laugh at her. Ha-ha. You dared to be better but you’re just like the rest of us. And you know what you’re not that pretty anyhow. And then we can just return to living.
Researching Marshall and the Koch brothers? Well that’s a lot harder. First of all, I had to pay to have access to the articles I needed to just give you a couple quotes for this article and when I say I haven’t begun to scratch the surface I mean that. I mean how much can I expect you to really read when you came here for some pictures of Anna Nicole and biscuits?
Like junk food, Anna Nicole fodder is cheap and easy and everywhere. Even after her death she still makes money in ads and click bait for websites.
But the truth is we are in an information food desert, and the good stuff, well they make us pay for that. And in a world where life is incredibly hard and we are bogged down with working, and kids, and aging parents, and wondering how we are going to get clean drinking water, well, why are you going to pay to read about the Koch brothers? There’s nothing fun and sexy about that is there?
I hope you know Anna wasn’t the villain. And she wasn’t a victim either. To say that would be patronizing. She was just a woman like all of us. She waited tables. She had a baby. She just wanted a better life, for her, and her little cowboy.
Tonight, if you dine, I hope it’s on the patriarchy. But, you can make these biscuits too. I picked them to honor the simple things. The time in Anna’s life when she was truly like the rest of us. And I’m willing to bet when she closed her eyes she looked back at the times she waited tables at some crummy Red Lobster and thought, those were the good ol’ days.
The Recipe: Red Lobster Cheddar Cheese Biscuits
Ingredients
1 cup gluten-free Bisquick or regular Bisquick if not gluten-free
1/3 cup plain soy milk or any plain plant-based milk
1/2 cup vegan cheese shredded
1/4 cup vegan butter melted
1 tsp parsley
1/4 tsp garlic salt
1/8 tsp Old Bay Seasoning (optional)
Directions
Start by pre-heating the oven to 450°F (230°C).
Then simply place a cup of vegan Bisquick in a mixing bowl and add ½ cup of vegan shredded cheddar cheese and stir.
Pour in 1/3 cup of PLAIN soy milk or other plant-based milk and mix with a fork, just enough to combine the ingredients. (don’t over stir).
Drop about 1/3 cup scoops of biscuit dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake for 8-11 minutes until slightly golden and dry.
While the biscuits are cooking, mix together ¼ cup of melted vegan butter, a tsp of parsley, ¼ tsp. garlic salt and 1/8 tsp. of Old Bay Seasoning.
Take the biscuits out of the oven. Place them one at a time in the bowl of garlic butter to coat them completely. Serve warm.