America lost one of the great ones today:

Anna Nicole Smith: Now dead.

We’re covering this story since it is likely that most media outlets will ignore it. No doubt the fact that it is sweeps month even televised news will ignore the story that is largely based on a large breasted woman who often posed nude and then married one of the richer men in the world 50+ years her senior. Where’s the story in that?

Click here for Google’s image collection of her. (NSFW).

Anna Nicole Smith, the former Playboy playmate whose bizarre life careened from marrying an octogenarian billionaire to the untimely death of her son, died Thursday after collapsing at a South Florida hotel, one of her lawyers said.

Smith, 39, collapsed and was unresponsive while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino, said the attorney, Ron Rale. She was rushed to a hospital.

Smith had been a tabloid staple even before she became Playboy’s playmate of the year in 1993. Readers were fascinated by her bombshell good looks, her marriage to an elderly billionaire and subsequent court fight over his estate, her weight fluctuations, and last year, the sudden death of her 20-year-old son, Daniel Smith.

A former topless dancer, she made her name squeezing into Guess jeans. She resembled the late actress Marilyn Monroe, a similarity played up in her Guess magazine ads, billboards and department store displays.

In 1994, she married 89-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, the head of oil-based Koch Industries, which is part of a family fortune worth at least $400 million.

He died in 1995, setting off a feud with her former stepson, E. Pierce Marshall, over whether she had a right to his estate.

tags: anna nicole smith

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 2:04 pm by Insider and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.