There are so many opinions about Anna Nicole Smith and so many of them are negative. Anyone who has picked up a gossip magazine can tell you something about her, and some will tell you at great length. I always liked Anna Nicole, in the way one can like someone from afar. She reminded me of a little girl lost who somehow got found in a very beneficial way. I sympathized when her son died, and enjoyed the news of her daughter’s birth. I suppose what I really liked about Anna Nicole was the bigger-than-life, damn-you-all-it’s-my-business way she had of conducting her affairs. She had also reinvented herself, creating a fabulously glamorous and beautiful persona.
The news on February 7, 2007, about her passing was sad. Anna Nicole was someone who, like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians, was famous because she was famous. She’d been a very successful model, but it was her personal life and affiliations that made her known. In some ways reminiscent of the socialite of days gone by, Anna Nicole embodied a special classification of “celebrity.” Her fame—or notoriety—became a burden that opened up every sad moment in the last years of her life to public scrutiny, thereby multiplying the personal pain.
Final 24, the series for which Anna Nicole Smith – Her Final Hours was originally produced, bills itself as “a fresh and revealing alternative biography series that unlocks the hidden secrets, psychological flaws and trigger events that led to the tragic deaths of eight global icons.” Incorporating archival material and re-enactments, it examines birth-to-death biographies, with the emphasis on death. In cases where death was due to a violent event (e.g. Gianni Versace) or dramatic accident (JFK, Jr.), the last 24 hours may be just another day in the life, until the life-taking event occurs.
During Anna Nicole Smith’s last 24 hours she was ill, and did not leave her hotel room. She had gone to Florida to buy a yacht, but was too sick with flu to follow through on that plan. She was also suffering from an “intestinal infection” and blood poisoning which was the result of abscesses caused by frequent, self-administered injections of human growth hormone used to help maintain her looks. She had fallen in the bathtub and was weak with illness. She could not even walk to the bathroom by herself; she lacked the strength and needed assistance to get there. If all that weren’t enough, her autopsy revealed the presence of nine prescription drugs at therapeutic levels. Certainly the combination of illness and medication led to cardiac arrest.
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Article comments
1 - tom
Very beautiful and well written review.
2 - Geek Grrrrrl
God, I loved her so much. And she died way too soon. I once wrote an article about her when she died. It seems like all the glamour girls just burned too bright and too fast.
3 - noodlemonkey
First of all, I find the premise of the show a little bit disturbing. Of course, I found almost everything about her life--and those with whom she spent her life--a little bit disturbing...