A cautionary tale.

The short life of Anna Nicole Smith is a sad one.  Ill-educated and spectacularly beautiful seems to have been a bad combination for her.  Add in drugs, Playboy, and the current oddities of our culture where a person can be famous simply for being famous, and this is what you get.

Anna Nicole was born Vickie Lynn Hogan.  She acquired the Smith from her first husband whom she married at the age of 17.  He was 16.  Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t last long.  By the age of 24, she was a stripper and auditioning for Playboy.

Marriage to a wealthy oil tycoon 62 years her senior resulted in a lengthy dispute about his will with the battle being carried out in the courts and in the tabloids.

Smith made several attempts at an acting career with her performances being critically panned.  Her subsequent reality TV show made her an object of ridicule and was ultimately canceled.   She became a spokesperson for TrimSpa and PETA.

Daniel Smith, the son of her first marriage, died at the age of 20 of a lethal mixture of prescription drugs shortly after the birth of her second child, a daughter.  She herself died five months later, also from a lethal combination of prescription drugs.

The saga continued with the continued court battle over her second husband’s estate being complicated by a battle over the paternity of her infant daughter, and it’s not entirely clear to me where it now stands.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the bankruptcy court of California did not have the authority to decide her claims against the estate.  I’m not sure where this leaves those claims or the surviving daughter.

All in all, this isn’t a Smith story of which we can be proud.

Smith once said she wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe.

Sadly, adjusted for inflation, I think she was.