Anna Nicole Smith

When Anna Nicole Smith died three years ago, Entertainment Tonight, the wildly popular American television programme that had bought the broadcast rights to her funeral, boasted that the occasion would “make the Oscars look like a barn dance”. Ms Smith’s two most recent boyfriends, lawyer Howard Stern and celebrity journalist Larry Birkhead, eyeballed each other menacingly across the nave, while Anna’s mother, Virgie, arrived to raucous boos from the crowd.

The dead woman, a 39-year-old former fried chicken waitress from Texas, was dressed in a tiara and a designer ballgown. Upon her bosom was a sprinkle of the ashes of her billionaire husband, J Howard Marshall. The bosom and the billions were the essential props of Anna Nicole’s fame, and, now, in her absence, they are waiting to be redeployed for the Royal Opera House’s forthcoming production: Anna Nicole.

Opera buffs have been noticing for a while that there’s, well, a lot more buff at the opera. Covent Garden’s recent revival of Rigoletto featured a nude orgy scene, while the New York Met has been treated to soprano Karita Mattila performing a naked Salome, and the Sydney Opera House’s 2008 Don Giovanni presented Mozart’s amorous nobleman as “a playboy who parties, beds women and takes drugs”, and had the hero leaping out of a shower clad only in a flesh coloured pouch.

While cries of “Geremoff, Brünnhilde!” are yet to fill the air at Bayreuth, there is no doubt that opera is rapidly losing its inhibitions, and the adaptation of Anna Nicole’s story is likely to take that process significantly further. Created by Richard Thomas, who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, and composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, the work is expected to have its world premiere in London early next year. “Anna Nicole Smith’s tragic life is a classic American tale about celebrity, and the price you pay for trying to escape your roots,” says Thomas. “It’s intrinsically operatic.”

It is arguably something more than that, for Ms Smith’s decade-long rampage though popular culture can be seen as foreshadowing much that we now know and fear about celebrity – an on-demand resource that feeds the dreams of millions of nobodies, swamps television reality and talent shows, and results in polls showing that the ambition of two thirds of British teenage girls is simply to be famous. Richard Roeper, an American journalist who knew Anna Nicole slightly, recalled after her death: “Nobody ever accused her of having any talent and, to be fair, she never claimed to have any. She just acted like a star, and was treated like a star, and the fact that her death had everyone rushing to write about her confirms that on that level she won. She was a star.”

She was born Vickie Lynn Hogan in Houston, Texas. Her mother Virgie – from whom she was later estranged – recalled her keeping a poster of Marilyn Monroe on her bedroom wall and thirsting, even as a child, for stardom, although the best she could do upon leaving school was a job at Jim’s Crispy Fried Chicken restaurant in Mexia, a small town not far from Waco. There she met her first husband, Billy Smith, a kitchen hand, and at 18 had a son, Daniel.

The marriage failed, and in 1991 Anna Nicole went back to Houston, where she worked in a Walmart, then as a topless dancer at a club called Gigi’s. She couldn’t dance, she couldn’t strip, and even Gigi’s, which wasn’t desperately fussed about aesthetics, demoted her from the prime evening shift to lunchtimes.

This was, as it happened, the break she needed. An occasional midday customer was J Howard Marshall II, an octogenarian oil tycoon, whose wife had died some months earlier. J Howard was looking for company, and found it in the comely form of Anna Nicole. “He was kind to me,” she said later, “in a way that no one else had been. And his liver spots turned me on.”

J Howard lavished money on his new friend, buying her a Mercedes sports car, designer clothes, diamonds. When she asked to have her breasts enlarged to an eye-popping 44DD he happily paid for those, too. Thus equipped, Anna Nicole landed a memorable Playboy photo shoot, and with it the first taste of the celebrity she craved.

In 1994, she and J Howard were married, and when he died just 13 months later, aged 89, he left her half of his £1 billion fortune. Egged on by a scandalised media, the old man’s family portrayed her as the ultimate gold-digger – a brassy blonde with cartoon curves and a ready reckoner where her heart should be.

She was rewarded with The Anna Nicole Show, her own TV reality slot – a slow-motion train wreck of a programme that purported to chronicle her own life in all its anarchic tackiness. But as the legal battle over her inheritance unfolded, J Howard’s money remained tantalisingly beyond her reach, and the regular court hearings, the frenzied media attention that surrounded them, and the drugs upon which she was becoming ever more reliant, took their toll.

By the late Nineties she was in pitiable shape – a hyper-inflated parody of the glamour girl she had longed to be. She ballooned to over 15 stone and when she appeared at a bankruptcy hearing – having, ironically, exhausted her finances in the pursuit of her husband’s money – she could barely wobble to the witness box.

Still the shocks came. On September 7 2006, she gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn, by Howard Stern. Four days later, her son Daniel died while visiting his mother and new half-sister in hospital.

On February 8 2007, Anna Nicole was found unconscious in a hotel room in Hollywood, Florida, and was declared dead on arrival at hospital. At a subsequent court hearing to determine custody of her body, the judge Larry Seidlin, burst into tears while delivering his decision, and was rewarded with the offer of his own TV chat show.

The cause of death was recorded as an accidental drug overdose, but many questions linger. One of the more urgent being: what does La Scala have to match this?


It was a long 15 minutes of fame - the celebrity being manufactured by a media which even bought the rights to her funeral. A high price was paid for that fame.

In the end Smith brought comfort to an old man at the end of his life, and she did have a lot more of a stab at a career in films than is suggested here. The long battle over the estate of her billionaire husband continued to the end of her life and remains unresolved between the heirs of the parties first involved.

Had Nicole settled her claims for a fraction of the value first sought, she would have lived in comfort for the rest of her life - arguably the decade and more of litigation accelerated the stress factors which led to her apparent death from accidentally overdosing on prescription medications.

- Thymus Mecauley