184 marieclaire.com.au
T
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.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.”B
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, flat-
chested 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 hisLove 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 estrangedShe was a plain, mousy-
haired, flat-chested
teenager who dreamt
of being famous like her
idol Marilyn MonroeIN 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.