Anna Nicole Smith
The autopsy report of Anna Nicole Smith — model, actress, and tabloid fixture, 1967–2007.
Early Life
She was born Vickie Lynn Hogan on 11/28/1967 in Houston, Texas, and raised in the small central-Texas town of Mexia. Her upbringing was working-class and unglamorous: as a teenager she took a job at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken, and at 17 she married Billy Wayne Smith, a cook at the restaurant. The following year, in 1986, she gave birth to her son, Daniel Wayne Smith.
The marriage did not survive her restlessness. By the early 1990s she was a young single mother supporting herself and her son with a string of low-wage jobs, and it was during this period that she began reaching for a different life — sending photographs to Playboy and dreaming, by her own account, of becoming the next Marilyn Monroe, the blonde icon she had idolized since childhood.
Rise to Fame
In 1992, the Guess jeans label chose the unknown Texas blonde to front its famous black-and-white advertising campaign, succeeding Claudia Schiffer as the face of the brand. The campaign made her famous overnight: Playboy named her Playmate of the Year for 1993, and the press — struck by her platinum hair, hourglass figure, and unapologetic sexuality — anointed her the new Marilyn Monroe, a comparison she openly encouraged.
Hollywood came calling with film roles, most memorably a comic turn in Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. But it was her private life that made her a permanent tabloid fixture: in 1994, at 26, she married J. Howard Marshall II, an 89-year-old Texas oil tycoon. When Marshall died the following year, Smith became embroiled in a ferocious inheritance battle with his son over the estate — a legal war that dragged on for more than a decade and twice reached the United States Supreme Court.
The Later Years
By the early 2000s, Smith’s fame had curdled into something stranger and sadder. Her E! reality series, The Anna Nicole Show, which ran from 2002 to 2004, presented her as a slurring, unsteady figure of fun, and the tabloids feasted on every fluctuation in her weight and every erratic public appearance. Behind the caricature, those close to her described a lonely woman increasingly dependent on prescription drugs and surrounded by enablers.
In 2006, her life seemed to turn a corner: on 09/07/2006 she gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn Hope, in a Nassau, Bahamas hospital. But joy collapsed into horror three days later, on 09/10/2006, when her 20-year-old son Daniel — who had flown to the Bahamas to meet his new sister — died in her hospital room of an accidental drug overdose. Smith was photographed weeping over his casket, and friends said she never recovered from the loss.
The Death
Five months later, Smith was staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. On 02/08/2007, she was found unresponsive in room 607. She was rushed to Memorial Regional Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 2:49 p.m. She was 39 years old.
The Broward County medical examiner’s office ruled her death an accidental overdose: the powerful sedative chloral hydrate — a rarely prescribed sleep aid — combined in her system with other prescription drugs, including the anti-anxiety medications clonazepam and diazepam. No foul play was found. What followed was one final indignity: a courtroom battle over her remains, after which she was buried in the Bahamas beside her son Daniel, the child whose death she had never stopped mourning.