In the midst of refreshing CNN.com, hoping to find out the cause of Anna Nicole Smith's tragic death, we decided to dig deep into the PAPER archives to see how we covered the blonde, busty model/ actress/ Playmate/ tabloid-darling. Back in 1996, PAPER's Cinemaniac Dennis Dermody wrote a story about Smith's on-screen forays. They weren't always pretty, but one involved Smith moaning in the bathtub and playing with a bar of soap.
God forgive me, but I love monsters. At the movies and in real life, I've spent most of my life working for them, living with them, befriending them and gazing up in admiration as they're destroyed on the silver screen. Anna Nicole Smith, the bodacious, bovine former Playboy centerfold and Guess Jeans model whose life is like a tabloid hayride, is just the kind of monster that fascinates me. Her series of action films, directed by her Svengali, Raymond Martino, are so spectacularly bad that I have become obsessed with them. Not since Chesty Morgan exploded onscreen in Deadly Weapons has there been a star so scarily endowed and so astonishingly untalented.
Anna Nicole Smith -- born Vickie Lynn Hogan on November 28, 1967, in Houston, Texas -- came from humble beginnings: her mother was a Texas deputy sheriff, and in high school the young Miss Anna wasn't very exceptional. "A nerd" is how her cousin remembers her, according to Eric and D'eva Redding's mean -- spirited account of her life, Great Big Beautiful Doll (Barricade Books). But in no time she got married, had a son, got a divorce and began stripping in a topless club in Houston while putting out in the parking lot for extra money to pay for breast implants. Several operations later, she reached the 42DD cup size she has today. She soon caught the eye of the Reddings, who submitted nude snapshots of her to Playboy. When the magazine accepted her for a photo spread, Anna Nicole was informed that she would be flown to Los Angeles and put up at the Playboy Mansion. She was thrilled, until she got off the phone with the photo coordinator and complained to the Reddings: "You lied to me.... They said they're flying me to California!" unshakably convinced that Los Angeles was located in New York.
After her successful Playboy cover and a stint as the Guess Jeans spokesperson (for which her name was changed to Anna Nicole Smith), her public and private life became fodder for tabloid -- TV heaven: her marriage to octogenarian Texas billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, his subsequent death and her headline -- making legal battle with Marshall's sons over his estate; her frequent trips to the hospital in a comatose state brought on by drug and drinking binges; other litigious outings with former bodyguards and housekeepers, who accused her of sexually harassing them; her ballooning weight problem, which forced her to model for Lane Bryant's full -- figured line of jeans; an embarrassing drunken appearance at the Academy Awards and a slot on Howard Stern's show in which he actually took pity on the slurring, slit -- eyed Smith; a quick stopover at the Betty Ford Clinic, from which she escaped when photographers started scaling the walls; and hospital visits for her leaking breast implants, which were announced on the front page of the Globe: "Anna Nicole Smith's Boobs Explode!" Even with all this, she took time from her busy schedule as a public spectacle to turn out movies with Martino, who, according to the Reddings, is a religious nut who's been desperately trying to exorcise the demons from Anna Nicole's troubled soul while filming her nude in cheesy, direct -- to -- video action films.
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