Anna Nicole Smith

From Playboy cover to multimillion-dollar contract

Vickie Lynn Hogan was serving fried chicken at a restaurant in Texas before the world decided she should be the next Marilyn Monroe. She was seventeen and had a son to support when she realized that anonymity in a small town didn't pay the bills.

In 1992, her face appeared on the cover of Playboy. It was no accident but a plan carried out precisely by a woman who knew her body was her only bargaining chip. Paul Marciano saw her and decided she embodied the spirit of the Guess brand. The ad campaign put her on giant billboards all over the planet.

The industry already had its new plaything.

But modeling success wasn't enough for her ambitions. She signed multimillion-dollar contracts that pulled her out of abject poverty in just twenty-four months. Her image sold a mix of innocence and sexual aggression that the 1990s devoured eagerly.

Film as a secondary showcase

Hollywood called her soon, but not to give her serious dramatic roles. In 1994, she appeared in Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. Her character was a parody of her own public image, and she played along without conditions.

She also had a small role in the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy. It was a brief appearance in which she played Za-Za, a caricature of the golden age's movie stars. That shoot proved she could meet the technical demands of a big-budget production.

Money didn't bring her peace.

Her film career never really took off in a serious way. In 1995, she starred in To the Limit (a low-budget action thriller) where the script was the least of its concerns. Producers wanted to exploit her name in the home video market and made modest sums outside the United States.

The billion-dollar inheritance

The real scandal came with her marriage to oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall in 1994. He was eighty-nine years old and she was twenty-six. The press fixated on the age gap, and accusations of opportunism filled the tabloids for months.

When Marshall died in 1995, a decades-long legal battle over the fortune began. Anna Nicole Smith was not named in the final will, but she insisted the elderly man had verbally promised her half of his empire.

In 2002, she tried to reinvent herself with The Anna Nicole Show on E!. The show featured a disoriented woman who obviously struggled to form complete sentences. It was a reality show that drew massive audiences fueled by morbid fascination with her obvious physical decline.

Family tragedy ultimately destroyed her chances of professional recovery. In September 2006, her son Daniel died from a combination of drugs while she was visiting him in the hospital after giving birth to her second daughter. That blow was final.

In February 2007, her body was found lifeless in a hotel room in Florida. The autopsy confirmed an accidental overdose from methadone and various anti-anxiety medications.

The legal battle over Marshall's estate went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2011, the justices ruled that her estate was not entitled to the 300 million dollars she was claiming. The case ended with a multimillion-dollar bill for legal fees.