Anna Nicole Smith: THE ICON NO ONE TRULY KNEW

PEOPLE ASSUMED A LOT ABOUT THE MODEL AND REALITY STAR BORN VICKIE LYNN HOGAN. SIXTEEN YEARS AFTER HER DEATH, SMITH'S FRIENDS AND FAMILY ATTEMPT TO RECONCILE WHERE VICKIE ENDED AND ANNA BEGAN

- JASON SHEELER

Anna Nicole Smith climbed into her son’s coffin and began clinging to his body. As with so many moments in her life, the flashes of a camera trailed her.

It was September 2006. Daniel, 20, had died of an accidental overdose three days after Smith gave birth to her daughter Dannielynn. At the service Smith stood with her boyfriend and attorney, Howard K. Stern, and best friends Pol’ Atteu and Patrik Simpson. “She just couldn’t let him go,” Atteu, 57, remembers. “Daniel was who kept Anna Nicole grounded, and now he was gone.” Remembers Simpson, 54: “Even in her son’s death there was nothing private for her. Everything was a public spectacle.” It was the beginning of the end. Smith died five months later, also from an accidental overdose, at age 39.

Smith’s extraordinary beauty launched her from a small-town fried chicken joint server to Playboy’s Playmate of the Year and the face of Guess jeans. She earned parts in movies, smoldered from billboards and charmed late-night hosts like Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall. In 1994 she married 89-year-old billionaire J. Howard Marshall; she would soon lose him to pneumonia and, later, his fortune in a case tried before the Supreme Court. She suffered a crippling drug addiction, was exploited by those who said they loved her, and claimed her mother abused her. Smith was a constant target of the paparazzi. “It’s terrible, the things I have to do to be me,” Smith liked to say. “You got to give people what they want, baby!”