IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Clockwise from left: Anna Nicole in 1993; at the MTV awards in 2005; modelling for Guess; with son Daniel and husband Billy Smith in 1986.
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he woman sashayed onto the stage, her blonde hair spilling down towards a pair of voluptuous breasts encased in a pink and silver dress. “You know, this show has been kind of boring,” she drawled into the microphone as she pushed the straps of her dress down to expose two MTV stickers strategically placed over her nipples. While the audience erupted into a cacophony of hollers and wolf-whistles, the laughing blonde lifted her arms above her head and jiggled her naked breasts at the crowd. This was Anna Nicole Smith on the night of March 3, 2005, when she was on stage at Sydney’s Luna Park to present an award at Australia’s first MTV Music Video Awards. It was classic Anna Nicole – bubbly, shocking, headline-grabbing. Like everything she did – posing for Playboy, marrying an octogenarian oil billionaire, starring in her own outrageous TV reality show – she made people sit up and take notice.
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Love her or hate her, Anna Nicole was a force on the media landscape, coming at you with her surgically enhanced 36DD breasts through TV talk shows and tabloid newspapers. Rarely out of the spotlight, life for Anna was one big photo opportunity, but as addiction to prescription drugs took hold and tragedy struck, it was increasingly harder to watch. She sold graphic video footage of her daughter’s caesarean birth to TV news channels and, just days later, after her son, Daniel, overdosed at her hospital bedside, she sold a photo of her with him to a tabloid for a reputed half a million dollars. Anna Nicole craved attention and even in death she got it. In the 10 years since she died, aged 39, she’s been the subject of four sensational court cases, with a supporting cast that included former lovers, an estranged
mother and a histrionic judge. Books, films and an opera have been made about her. It’s everything that she would have wanted. “I’ve always liked attention,” Anna Nicole once said. “My whole life revolves around my breasts. Everything I have is because of them.”
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orn Vickie Lynn Hogan on November 28, 1967, in Houston, Texas, she grew up without a father and with an “evil” mother, a deputy sheriff, who she claimed starved her of love. She was a plain, mousy-haired, flatchested teenager who dreamt of being famous like her idol Marilyn Monroe. She dropped out of school to work at a roadside restaurant, married chef Billy Wayne Smith at 17, but left him, claiming he was abusive, when their son, Daniel, was just a toddler. Still in Houston, she got a job as a lap dancer. She saved her earnings plus, it’s alleged, extra money she made giving blow jobs to pay for breast enlargements when she was 23. She also had liposuction to counteract her love of junk food. A year later, while performing at Gigi’s Cabaret, her new breasts caught the eye of J Howard Marshall, a twice-married oil billionaire. When she told him she couldn’t accept his
She was a plain, mousyhaired, flat-chested teenager who dreamt of being famous like her idol Marilyn Monroe