Blonde Ambition (15 page)

   I immediately called Anna's attorney, Ron Rale, to ask him about her condition. Since Ron had often spoken on Anna's behalf in the on-going paternity suit, and was a long time friend of Howard K. Stern's, I knew he would be one of the few people who could get immediate access to information about her health. "We've heard she collapsed," I said after momentary pleasantries. "But do you know any more?"

   At 3:38 p.m. EST, I was on the air. I had just finished speaking with Ron Rale, Anna's attorney, who had just gotten word that she had collapsed. He said that he had heard in the last few days that she was not feeling well and had flu like symptoms. She had been woozy, nauseous. His reaction to the latest news: he was frantic. He was calling the hospital and getting more details. He said he hadn't gotten any calls or talked to the hospital yet. I asked if he'd mind calling the hospital again and getting an update on her condition. I told him I'd call back in ten minutes.

   None of us could have imagined the tragic turn of events that Anna Nicole's weird world had suddenly taken. When I got Ron on the phone again, he was notably somber. "Rita," he said, pausing. "She's deceased."

   "Deceased?" I repeated.

   "She's dead, Rita," Ron said, with bewilderment. "Dead."

   "Are you sure?" I asked.

   He was. He'd heard it from the hospital and confirmed it with someone in the room with Howard K. Stern, explaining that Howard was too distraught to speak to him personally. Without hesitation, I asked what any reporter would have in the situation: "Will you go on the air with that terrible news?"

   At first he said no. Then, he said he would in an hour. I told him it was important for people to hear the news first from someone who cared so deeply about Anna. "Would you do it right now?" I asked. Thirty seconds later, after he had composed himself, Ron Rale told the world: "Anna Nicole is deceased."

• • •

My afternoon on-air session was non-stop. I connected with sources and friends of Anna Nicole's during commercial breaks and then went live with them moments later. In the four o'clock hour I talked to David Granoff, Anna's former publicist and close friend to her for ten years. He told me he was "very sad, but not shocked." Remembering that Anna was always in and out of the hospital with so many terrible things happening in her life. He said when he saw her on TV recently that he thought there was no spark anymore. "I kind of had this in the back of my mind that something like this was going to happen." Then, he asked, "What was she found with? A mixture of drugs or something?"

  Just after 4:30 p.m. EST, Seminole Police Chief Charlie Tiger held a press conference and said, "All I know is the nurse called at 1:38 p.m., called the hotel operator.  Only the nurse was in the room at the time." When a question was raised from the throng of reporters about where the bodyguard was, he answered, "He came in at a later time to administer CPR."

   Around 5:15 pm. EST on MSNBC, Captain Dan Fitzgerald from Hollywood Fire and Rescue said in a taped interview with WTVJ that Anna Nicole Smith was found "unconscious and not breathing." He said there is no way of knowing how long she'd been down before she was discovered.

   At the top of the six o'clock hour, I was talking live on the air with Peter Nygard. He said he had known her for ten years, dated her for three, and that they still remained close. "Anna Nicole kept telling me years ago she had a death wish," Peter announced, "that she pictured herself like a Marilyn Monroe and she would die the same way as Marilyn Monroe would, and all of a sudden here we are."

   Around the same time, Alex Goen, the CEO and founder of TrimSpa released to the press a written statement: "Today Anna Nicole Smith's grief stricken and tumultuous personal life came to an end. Anna came to our company as a customer, but she departs it as a friend. While life for Anna Nicole was not easy these past few months, she held dear her husband Howard K. Stern, her daughter Dannielynn Hope, her most cherished friends, beloved dogs and finally her work with TrimSpa . . . Anna knew both the joy of giving life and the heartache of losing a child. We pray that she is granted the peace that eluded her more recent days on earth and that she finds comfort in the presence of her son, Daniel."

   Minutes after the statement was released,
Extra
correspondent Carlos Diaz highlighted on MSNBC that it seemed apparent to him that Alex Goen and his diet pill company, TrimSpa, were immediately trying to take a step away from Anna Nicole. "If you listen to the wording in that statement," Carlos reported, "TrimSpa is saying Anna Nicole Smith 'came to us as a customer.' That to me is very, very gutsy to say it in that way because basically they're already distancing themselves from Anna Nicole saying in essence she's not a spokesperson, she's not an employee, you know, because of the class action lawsuit that's being filed. She came to us as a customer. That to me says, you know, kind of good riddance to Anna Nicole. I find that to be very telling on TrimSpa's part."

   Earlier that week, Anna Nicole Smith and TrimSpa, Inc. had been named in a class action lawsuit alleging their marketing of a weight-loss pill was false and misleading to consumers as well as "deceptive business practices."

   Prior to her death, Alex Goen had already decided that Anna was going to be moved aside by a new face. Alex Goen told
Access Hollywood
that Anna "recognized her story was getting old and we needed some fresh stories."

   "So, she was already going to step down?" correspondent Tim Vincent asked.

   "I wouldn't call it step down," Goen responded. "She was going to share the throne."

The day she died everyone told their story of the special "it" girl from the Lone Star State, with the curvaceous body who became famous for being famous.

   Anna Nicole Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan on November 28, 1967, in Mexia, Texas, a town of little more than five square miles about forty miles east of Waco. The town's motto? "A great place, no matter how you pronounce it." Her childhood was fair to middling. Her mother had a steady job as a sheriff's deputy, if not a steady husband. Virgie had Vickie when she was just sixteen years old, and told me that Don Hogan, Vickie's real father, was abusive. He beat Virgie so bad when she was pregnant with Vickie that Virgie would lay on the floor and crawl in a circle so that the baby would be protected and wouldn't get punched.

   "He did rape my ten-year-old sister and her young friend at the same time when I was married to him," Virgie said. "He was charged and served sixty days in jail and five years probation." He moved out the day that Virgie says she finally fought back after all the abuse. She threw a ketchup bottle at him. He left and never came back. Three weeks before Vickie's second birthday, they were officially divorced.

   Anna ended up with several half siblings, through her mother's and father's marriages, including three half brothers and two half sisters. Her younger half brother, Donnie Hogan, lived with their father in Texas until he was old enough to work. He says their father abused him both physically and emotionally, including making him witness the killing of a neighbor's dog. "He was an alcoholic and worse when he was sober," Donnie told me. "If I hate anyone on this earth, it would be him."

   Donnie, now the father of two twin boys, said that his and Vickie's dad was a devil worshipper and even has a tattoo of a devil with a pitchfork on his arm. "I'd catch him praying to Satan, and saying, 'I have the power of the devil,'" Donnie remembers. The last time he saw his father "he took out a gun and was praying to Satan . . . Dad put a gun to his mouth, to his head, and to others' heads. And then he put a gun to my head."

   After Anna Nicole had become a nationally recognized beauty, Donnie says the two of them cried at least twice together about the abuse they both endured. She told him that she had been physically abused, and claimed her real father and her stepfather molested her. The abuse affected her. "She could never trust anybody," Donnie said

   Virgie says that she does not believe the stepfather ever molested Vickie, but does not know if Vickie's real dad ever did anything to her when Vickie and her father reunited many years later after Virgie's divorce.

   Virgie says she did discipline her daughter, occasionally using a wide, thick leather belt to discipline her. She gave her the last "ass whooping" when Vickie was sixteen. "She didn't come home from school," Virgie remembers, "and I finally found her at a friend's house at 3 a.m. I brought her home and told her to 'bend it over.' And then I whooped her butt."

   Virgie says that otherwise Anna had a decent life, and thinks that Vickie created the "poor pitiful me story" because she thought it "worked better," that rags to riches was a much better story to sell to the media.

   After failing her freshman year of high school, Vickie Lynn dropped out, and began working at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken. In 1984, at the age of 17, she married a co-worker, a fry cook named Billy Smith. They had a son that same year. Virgie picked the name "Daniel"—"Like Daniel in the Bible," she said.

   But Virgie didn't get to name her own daughter. She told me that the woman who would become "Anna Nicole Smith" was supposed to be named "Kathleen Kay." Virgie says she loved that name and had decided on it before the baby was born. When she went into labor, her husband wasn't around, so her own mother went with her to the hospital. While Virgie was asleep her mother filled out the birth certificate. "When I woke up," Virgie remembers, "my mother said, 'I didn't name her what she's supposed to be. I named her after you.'"

   "Virgie?" Virgie asked.

   "No, no," her mother said. "You know how people mess up on your name and call you 'Vickie'? I named her Vickie and I thought it should be 'Vickie Lynn.' I like the way it sounded."

   So, seventeen years later, Vickie Lynn Hogan became Vickie Lynn Smith, mother to Daniel Wayne Smith, wife of Billy. The marriage, however, to Billy Smith didn't go well. They separated shortly after Daniel's birth. Around this time, Vickie was jumping from job to job, including stints at Wal-Mart and Red Lobster. One day, desperate to make more money to help support herself and young Daniel, she followed a sign to her destiny. She said she spotted a "neon lady" on a glowing sign "in high-heel shoes and she had a bikini on and it would flash tiptoe and back, tiptoe and back." It was a sign for a Houston "gentleman's club."

   Her mother Virgie, the sheriff's deputy, thought Vickie was still working at the Red Lobster until Vickie's boyfriend one day told her that she was now stripping. Virgie decided she'd go see for herself. She parked her patrol car right in front of the strip club and marched inside. Her law enforcement uniform drew almost as much attention as her daughter, who was gyrating in "nothing but a g-string" right in front of "some old man's face."

   Seeing a uniformed officer, the manager rushed over to see if there were any problems. "Do you see that woman who's butt-ass naked over there?" Virgie asked him. "Well, that's my daughter. If you don't get her out of here, I'm going to be back every night checking your bar license, and you know what that means."

   Within minutes, the manager had Vickie dressed and Virgie put her daughter in the back of the patrol car and drove her away like a convict. They did not speak for the entire ride home. When they got back to the house, Vickie told her mom that she was making a thousand dollars a day stripping and that she needed the money for her son. She told her mother she'd never make that kind of money at the Red Lobster.

   "My child ain't going to strip," Virgie said, putting her foot down.

   Anna packed her bags and moved out and moved on to other strip joints, where managers didn't know about Virgie's law enforcement uniform. Vickie later took a job at Gigi's Cabaret, but she was considered too plump for the prime evening shifts, so she was relegated to the afternoon.

   But it was while performing there—stripping against her mother's wishes—that Vickie Lynn Marshall was put on her path to stardom.

   In 1991, during one fateful afternoon shift, "Miss Nikki," as she called herself, went over and talked to an elderly customer, billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, who was grieving the recent loss of both his wife and mistress. "I saw a very sick man," Anna has said, "and I just wanted to talk to him." He took an instant fancy to the 23-year-old and extended a lunch invitation for the following day. It would be her last shift at the strip club. The rest is tabloid history.

   The following afternoon, at the end of their lunch, when beautiful "Nikki" announced that she had to get over to the club, Marshall passed across the table an envelope filled with money. And Miss Nikki, the stripper, was no more. "I was back with him the following day," she has recounted in interviews.

   Things took off quickly. Within the week, the 86-year-old had proposed marriage. "I turned him down," she told Larry King. "I said that I had wanted to try and make something out of my life before [getting married]." The unlikely pair developed a caring, simpatico relationship (she thought he was sweet, he thought she was sexy) and he began supporting Vickie and her son Daniel.

   Later that year, a determined Vickie Lynn Smith sent in nude photos of herself to
Playboy
magazine, expressing her interest in becoming a Playmate. According to
Playboy
, the editors were impressed enough to fly her out to Los Angeles for a test photo shoot. The results were mixed.
Playboy
Senior Contributing Photographer Arny Freytag "rejected her Playmate test," believing that "she had a great face, but she was overweight." Marilyn Grabowski,
Playboy
West Coast Photo Editor disagreed, saying, "You couldn't help but be mesmerized."

   Vickie was chosen to be a Playmate, and made her debut on the March 1992 cover. Clad in a dark blue, strapless evening gown with a slit up the front, Vickie quickly captivated attention. Two months later, she became
Playboy
's Miss May and had her first centerfold spread. For her first nude photo shoot, Anna was incredibly nervous. "I couldn't breathe," Anna exclaimed in an interview with
Entertainment Tonight
. "I couldn't eat breakfast. I was nauseated—I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know if I could go through with it." But she did, and her undeniable charisma shined through. On her centerfold mini-biography, she stated that she "wanted to become the next Marilyn Monroe."