http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17050167/

She collapsed at the Hard Rock Cafe hotel in Florida and died. Her son died back in September suddenly in her hospital room after she had given birth to her daughter, who is now in the middle of a paternity fight.

Does that mean TrimSpa will take down all those annoying ads from the subways with her pictures on them?! We can only hope so

What a sad life. It seemed that she was starting to get things together a bit, then her son died. I cannot imagine losing a child just days after giving birth to another. Now that poor baby is caught up in a paternity mess.

Sad.

What a sad life this woman has led. But, to tell you the truth, when I saw her on TV the other day, she looked so drugged out. It looked like she could hardly keep her eyes open and she slurred all her words. It'll be interesting to see what the autopsy reveals.

She sort of brought much of this on herself, really. But her poor little child. Very sad.

I'm mourning her the only way I know how. Check the main site.

How did you do that, Stu?! Already in the works or jsut quick at making quizzes?

Y'know ~ I'm not a judgemental sort of person and Miss Smith certainly begged for "judgements" (and rarely ones of the "nice" variety) but I felt unexpectedly sad when I heard that she died. I'll quickly say that I ranked among those who thought, in terms of stardom, she was mostly [entirely?] undeserving, that her judgement(s) in general were both dubious and often downright bizarre. She's not the first to exhibit those or much similiar traits, though, and not all that do end up with a year like her last one was. That seemed just too brutal in so many directions (I was beginning to expect a live feed to the woman's Bahamian bathroom - or wherever she was). I always got the feeling she was just a small-town kid who, beneath all that -um- "stuff" never outgrew that vulnerable "I-need-to-be-loved" thing. Did she go about everything all wrong? Personally, I think so...but I DO have to say that I can't say with a bold clarity that 'she brought this on herself' (but I know many will feel that way). To dismiss a life, start to finish, that way seems as cruel as to say she was just a fool who photographed well (or usually did). There may be some element of truth to both statements but I don't think I'll be using either at this time.
Talk about a mostly gruesome residual to a few decades of odd turns of events, too . That poor five-month old child doesn't look to stand much of a chance at a fair life and doesn't even know how to walk yet. My only hope there is that she learns how to walk with more sensible people than her unfortunate mother managed to find.

I agree she did not deserve to die no matter what she has done in the past. I don't think she led a life I would like my daughters to imulate but it is not for me to judge.

I just wonder if anyone else thinks it's a bit odd that her son died less than 6 months ago and now she is dead too. Is it a coincidence?

And I agree the poor 5 month old that is left behind. I hope they find out who the father is and that he will take care of her. The only good thing is she is far too young to understand any of this and hopefully she will never find out who her real mother is or how she died. We can hope.

I wasn't really surprised to hear about Anna Nicole's sudden death. The last few times I saw her in public, her condition seemed especially jagged and out of control.
I have to agree with the 'small town girl' school of thought, for the most part. ANS was someone with no real talent and extremely bad judgement who happened to photograph well. She died, however, as she had lived - taken advantage of by greedy men, much as she had taken advantage of her wealthy husband. As seemingly dismal and shallow as her life was, I am grieved over the idea of somebody dying so young, and spiritually bankrupt in the bargain. I regret that she [apparently] wasn't able to find any peace before the end of her life.

Gatsby and ktstew have pretty much summed up what I think. I watched a documentary on her life a few years ago, and it looks like she has always been surrounded by people who took advantage of her (many of whom were from her small home town in rural Texas). While she is ultimately responsible for her actions, it does not help to have a bunch of vultures around. I am sorry she had to go through a child's death and that she died so young.

I think the main reason this affected me is that I knew a woman very much like her in Europe. And I discovered she had died in a car accident about a year ago while looking her up on the net. As this woman had kind of touched my life in a small way, Anna Nicole's death struck me as very much alike.

I was out of the States when all the hoopla about Anna Nicole's show began, but occasionally I'd see mentions of her in the press or online and therefore saw her as a kind of cultural icon. I think I assimilated her with another young woman I met in Europe, S.,originally from California, who like her had had her feminine attributes pumped up and tucked in and moulded to a certain type of 'Babe' (in her case, an L.A. type of woman you see in advertising), and left three sons with their respective fathers to follow a 'star' around the world. (she had done this with two others as I found out later). As I had a really close up look at this woman, and saw the way she related to men, using them and yet, getting used, it was very sad to realize about two months ago, that she'd died and the Sports bar where she'd met the 'star' posted an obituary because she had worked there for a few years as a bartender.

Unlike Anna Nicole, S. had been brought up relatively well as I knew her mother and she was quite a nice person and very well read. But, she'd decided early on to take a rather ordinary appearance and make herself a lure to men instead. In some moments she was open and even candid about her boob jobs and other things (she looked a lot like Pamela Anderson with kind of harsh facial features.) I think in some ways, she looked at herself as ordinary looking at the persona she'd created. I saw her in her normal moments which perhaps is what viewers saw on the reality show of Anna Nicole's life. I only saw a few excerpts of her showing off her closets or something and quickly thought, I'm uncomfortable with this. I had already spent quiet moments with the other woman...very similar. We had had coffee at my table and talked about ordinary things. We had eaten chicken wings together, worrying about eating with our fingers, until she said 'hell, there's no French people at this table, let's dig in!' For me, Anna Nicole must have been a bit like this woman.

To me, it's a whole type of person who falls into this sort of life. I just find it monumentally sad that neither woman was able to attain peace.

I keep thinking that a woman who feels it's necessary to survive by creating a version of herself that is so unnatural yet it appears to work on many people, is doomed to live a strange life of looking at her image in the mirror and truly wondering who she is!

This is really sad. It keeps making me cry alot.
It sounded like she was trying the best she could to get through everything. Especially since she was in Florida picking up a boat, and had been talking about the new house being underconstruction.
I pray her daughter will be ok and all. I heard something saying the baby has already learned to say mama.
The other weird thing is that now there is someone else claiming to be the father of the baby.

For the kind of money the child will inherit, I'm sure there will be lots of 'daddies' creeping out of the woodwork.
Sad but true.

The amount of media attention currently being showered on a woman whose best-known "accomplishments" were a marriage to a billionaire octogenarian, a short stint as a Guess jeans model, selection as Playboy's Playmate of the year, and recent promotion of a diet drug, defies logic. Unless, of course, one realizes that mainstream news media are as quick to jump on tabloid-sensational news, in order to make some fast bucks, as Anna herself was quick to shake her booty for the very same reasons. Exploitation is the name of the game, and Anna thrived on it and used it.

This allegedly "small town girl" was actually born in Houston, and according to her mother, grew up not dirt poor, but in a middle class family. Anna supposedly made up the "rags to riches" story because she thought it made her more sympathetic and made better media copy. She did drop out of school in the 8th grade and left home at 16 to live with an aunt in a small Texas town where she worked as a cook and waitress, met her first husband, and gave birth to her son. She soon left hubby, and went on to become a stripper and exotic dancer, which is how she met hubby #2 (the mega-bucks octogenarian). The litigation over his estate has kept her in the media spotlight. For many, she became the symbol of the quintessential gold-digger.

Given a lack of any particular talent, and, according to many, a lack of intelligence, Anna continued to exploit the only thing she had going for her--her physical attributes (the breasts being surgically enhanced and not natural)--to feed her ever-growing appetite for material goods and opulence. When she became too fat for that to work for her, she turned her life into a reality TV series, which showed her as a spoiled, demanding, infantile, self-absorbed mess, who often appeared to be under the influence of some sort of substance. Anna didn't care. It made money, so she could shop--her apparently only true passion. That behind her, she shed her excess weight and emerged as the spokesperson for a diet pill, and, at the time of her death, both she and the company she worked for were being sued for making false claims.

Quite a life. Really worthy of hours and hours of media coverage, isn't it?

Even the genuine tragedy of her 20 year old son's death last September became immediately trashed by her rush to sell her son's last photos for almost half a million dollars while his body still lay in the morgue. Well, perhaps the sale was the idea of her lawyer/confidant/alleged 3rd husband, Howard K. Stern (a man Geraldo Rivera recently referred to as being "a pimp"), but Anna had to agree to it. Yup, never miss an opportunity for exploitation to make a few bucks. Not even, literally, over your dead son's body. That was Anna's true claim to fame.

And now, with Anna herself (and his meal ticket) gone, Howard K. Stern is continuing on in the same great tradition. He rushed to the Bahamas this weekend to be reunited with his "alleged" 5 month old daughter with Anna, and guess what? He took a TV crew with him because he has sold the video and photos of the "happy reunion"--they will appear on E.T. and The Insider next week, and one photo was already in the N.Y. Post. So now the baby, already the butt of media jokes regarding her paternity, is being exploited for more money by Mr. Stern. This poor child doesn't stand a chance.

Should one even wonder about the fact that both Anna and her son both died under sudden, similar, mysterious circumstances, within a few months of each other, with Mr. Stern being a common factor between the two deaths? Not that anyone is accusing him of murder, but his constant presence (and his name on all the bottles of prescription medication in Anna's hotel room) does raise questions about what he knew, and what he might have facillitated, regarding both deaths.

And now Stern and one of Anna's ex-boyfriends are fighting over who owns the house in the Bahamas, and the locks on the doors have been changed twice in the last day--once by each party. And on and on...

Anna's was the story of a rather tawdry life, and she appears to have left behind few genuine mourners. Even her grieving "husband" Howard, has let his tears be photographed in exchange for money, and he has already exploited her baby for the same end, before her body is even out of the morgue.

I suppose this is fascinating stuff in terms of how spiritually and morally bankrupt these characters are in their naked lust for money and media attention. They could be aptly termed "Media Whores". And the soap opera saga of money, sex, mystery, and litigation, that is Anna Nicole Smith's legacy, will continue to spin out in the media for weeks to come. As long as we continue to buy it, the media will continue to give it to us.

The sad part of Anna's death is that no one seems to be genuinely grief-stricken at her loss (at least not so grief-stricken that they can't negotiate a few TV deals ), except, perhaps for her baby. She may geuinely miss her momma. And her photos are already being sold to the highest bidders, and jokes are being made about who's her daddy. In the 5 short months since her birth, her brother and mother have both died under somewhat questionable circumstances, and she's already caught up in the mess her mother made of her life. Let's hope that some day she'll be able to find her own way out of it all. At the moment, that doesn't look too promising.

Shocking and very sad indeed!

Yes, when you look at it with a black-and-white journalistic description (accurate as it is) like that Anna sounds like the most useless human being to darken the Earth with her own shadow. Alas. I just really hope that somebody, somewhere, manages to present her daughter with a better/somewhat balanced image of her Mother on some level. That kid is going to be screwed up enough without the "legacies", sickening as they are, as all there is to know about her parent.

Post deleted by trojan11

The best line I heard was that it stopped the country for a day. This was Anna Nicole Smith, not Mother Teresa. This society gives too much creedence to celebrity. Is it sad, yes. Does it deserve this media circus--no. She's passed let her rest in peace.

I'm glad to see that both of those posts were removed. I didn't follow the life of Anna Nicole Smith closely when she was living. At the time I placed it all in my "who cares?" files. The rural town that she grew up in, isn't far from where I live. I have frequented the chicken restaurant where she worked in her youth several times. A friend of mine told me years ago that she used to come to his house after school to hang out with his sister. I recently asked my friend's mother about it. She told me that she had never met her, and a lot of kids came to their house when she and her husband weren't at home, both being at work during those hours.

Anna Nicole Smith wasn't my idea of anyone's role model. She lived her own life, just like everyone else has the right to live their own lives. I've always thought that it's a good practice not to slam hateful remarks on the deceased. I really don't think that anyone is better than anyone else, whether you are a star, or just a "common Joe".

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I didn't follow the life of Anna Nicole Smith closely when she was living. At the time I placed it all in my "who cares?" files.

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Ditto, but I do hope her little daughter will have a happy life.

Well, I think it's just as easy to put a negative spin on something or someone as it is positive, and none of us knew her or her family personally so I don't think we really have the right to declare something like "she appears to have left behind few genuine mourners."
She and her mother did not have a good relationship, I wouldn't fully trust what they said about each other, seeing as it's colored by their feelings and experiences of that ever so complicated mother-daughter relationship.
It's just rather disheartening to me that people are always so willing to rain judgments on people who have died that they didn't even know. In my opinion, just let her rest.

The media won't let her rest until the public is so saturated with the sordid details and legal complications of her life, and death, that ratings drop or reader interest completely dwindles. But, since the plot continues to thicken on a daily basis, we're not likely to see that happen for some time. Sex, drugs, money, mystery, and legal complications make for a heady brew that titillates and feeds the public's voyeuristic appetite.

When people choose to live in as public a manner as Anna Nicole Smith did, they invite you to scrutinize and judge their lives. They don't really care what you think of them, the point is simply to get publicity because publicity translates into cash in their pockets. Generating publicity was Anna Nicole Smith's vocation, and the source of her income. She wasn't an actress or an entertainer. She wasn't really a working model (except for her long ago Guess jeans stint and her recent promotion of Trimspa). She earned her income largely by getting paid for public appearances, and, in order to command a fee, she had to keep herself in the limelight. She had no particular talents to offer to the public--she was a media "commodity" in life, and remains a media "commodity" in death. She was famous simply for being Anna Nicole Smith, with all the sordid baggage that went along with that image. Since her death, the media, along with her assorted "friends", relatives, lawyers, and paramours, have simply continued to unpack more of that baggage for us, displaying a seemingly endless amount of dirty laundry.

I am not under the impression that anymore is judging Anna Nicole more harshly in death than they did when she was alive. People have always judged her character and morality, mainly because, beyond her physical persona, her exploits and legal conundrums were what she placed before the public--for their consumption, and her own financial benefit. And the judgments made about her were often negative. None of this is new, and nothing has essentially changed since her death.

I did watch Anna's reality TV show, quite a few times, until I just couldn't stomach watching it any more. I watched it to see if there was any hidden substance to this woman. Was there a heart of gold buried inside that well padded chest? Alas, the show did not reveal her to be a particularly nice, or even interesting, person. She was petulant, spoiled, demanding, self-centered, and absolutely dedicated to spending money extravagantly and expecting her every whim to be catered to. And she was surrounded, at all times, by people she paid to be at her beck and call and whom, I thought, she treated rather badly. Her excesses of self indulgence were rather appalling. She seemed to have no genuine relationships and no real values beyond the purely materialistic. It was truly hard to find anything to like about this rather pathetic woman. She seemed out of control and rudderless. And this was the side of herself she wanted the public to see.

My judgments about her were formed before her death, and they haven't changed since her death. I was dumbstruck at the morality (or lack of it) of a mother who could rush to sell the last photos of her dead son to the media for half a million dollars while his body still lay in the morgue.
And it still remains to be seen, by public inquest, whether she, or her lawyer/confidant/lackey/"husband" Howard K. Stern contributed indirectly, or directly, to her son's death by suppling him with some of the drugs that killed him.
It is also hard not to feel that she betrayed her baby daughter by letting the issue of her paternity dangle very publicly in the media, when the issue could have easily been resolved with a simple DNA test months ago. But Anna apparently thought mainly about Anna, and not about her daughter's right to know the identity of her biological father, or the effect the paternity dispute might have on the child once she was old enough to be aware of it.

A public life is open to public judgment. Death does not ennoble a person or erase their character flaws. We can judge people by their actions. Not all actions are, or should be, morally acceptable. If we embrace and accept all morally bankrupt behavior by a celebrity, simply on the basis of their notoriety, we simply reveal how shallow and bereft of values we have become. Judging someone negatively may also be a way of affirming basic societal standards of decency. I have the right to make such judgments, and so does everyone else.

Anna Nicole Smith appears to have been a deeply troubled woman. That does not absolve her of responsibility for the life she led and the choices she made, and, particularly, the impact of her choices on the lives of both of her children.

The tangled web of legalities, liaisons, and money, as well as the questions regarding the deaths of both Anna and her son Daniel, will continue to unfold in the media. And, doubtless, the public will continue to lap it up. Somewhere Anna may be looking down and smiling. This coverage beats anything she managed to achieve during her life.