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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, blonde Texas native, whom the media alternately painted as a bubble-headed naif and a cynical gold-digger with the soul of an adding machine.
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.
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.
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 spokeswoman for the diet supplement TrimSpa and dropped much of her excess weight.
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.
- REUTERS
