Outside, they released two white doves into the sky, then she too was gone, blowing kisses as she walked away, oblivious to the tears streaming down her husband's face.
By the time she wed oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II at the White Dove Wedding Chapel in Houston on June 27, 1994, Anna Nicole Smith's rags-to-riches life story was already a soap opera. A former stripper with a failed marriage and a drug habit, the 26-year-old Marilyn Monroe wannabe had risen from Playboy centrefold to GUESS? jeans model, earning thousands of dollars a day and relishing every second of her glittering new life. But it all came screeching to a halt when, after the death of 90-year-old Marshall, she went to court to claim half his fortune, was branded a gold-digger and unceremoniously dumped as a celebrity. "As soon as Howard died," said Anna Nicole, "my story wasn't so pretty."
In a series of legal twists and turns, she never saw a cent and, as the work dried up, her crimson-painted fingers hovered above the self-destruct button. She gorged on junk food - "I went from sex symbol to fat blob" - and popped prescription pills "like candy", until an overdose almost killed her in 1995.
Desperate for the limelight, she was rumoured to have had six breast operations and became an object of ridicule as she drunkenly staggered from premieres to parties, baring her 46DD breasts as the camera flashes popped. By the time she appeared on her reality TV series, The Anna Nicole Show, in 2002, it was obvious she had lost her grip on reality as she wandered around her apartment in a daze, clutching her dead husband's ashes. There was a brief glimmer of hope when she gave birth to a baby daughter in 2006, but tragedy wasn't far away. Just three days later, her 20-year-old son, Daniel, died at her hospital bedside from a suspected drug overdose. Struggling to cope with the grief, her own death wasn't far behind. "I'm probably gonna die at 37, like Marilyn," she predicted in a 2004 interview. She was out by just two years.
Born Vickie Lynn Hogan on November 28, 1967, in Mexia, Texas, she didn't have the most auspicious start in life. Growing up in a house overlooking a rubbish tip, her father left when she was a toddler and her mother, a police officer, left her with relatives while she was at work. At home, Vickie was sometimes so cold she had to wear pyjamas under her clothes and claims her mother used to beat her. Dropping out of school at 16, she got a job waitressing, where she fell in love with chef Billy Smith. They married when Vickie was 17 and set up home in a trailer, but by the time their son, Daniel, was born the following year, Vickie was desperate to leave, claiming Billy was abusive. So one day, she took her six-month-old son and headed for Houston.
Working in lap-dancing clubs, Vickie dreamt of being as rich and beautiful as her idol, Marilyn Monroe, and spent hours emulating her girlie voice and sexy wiggle. She dyed her brown hair platinum blonde and, according to Eric and D'Eva Redding, the authors of her biography Great Big Beautiful Doll (Barricade Books, $29.95), gave blow jobs in the back seats of cars so she could pay for her breast enlargements. In 1990, after reputedly having two botched operations, Vickie got two silicon sacs put into each breast to boost her to a 42DD. A junk-food addict, she also had liposuction to keep her weight down. "We bought her a cake, and she ate the whole thing in less than 20 minutes," recalls her cousin, Melinda Beall, in Great Big Beautiful Doll. "She regained all the weight she'd had sucked out ... $25,000 right down the drain." More alarmingly, Vickie also became partial to a potent cocktail of prescription pills and alcohol, which she indulged in frequently.
Vickie's story might have ended there had it not been for an 86-year-old tycoon with a $1.6 billion fortune and, in his son's words, "a strong yearning for large breasts". When a wheelchair-bound J Howard Marshall II entered Gigi's strip club in Houston late in 1991 and saw Vickie dance, "he got a little twinkle in his eyes" and she got the financial lifeline she'd been waiting for. "Paw Paw" paid for homes in Bel-Air and Houston, lavished her with millions of dollars worth of jewellery and gave her unlimited cash. "Every week, he'd hand me $5000 and say, '"That's your mad money,'" she boasted.
Encouraged by Marshall, she sent her photograph to Playboy and, in 1992, won the coveted centrefold spot. From here, her career skyrocketed - when Paul Marciano, the CEO of GUESS?, saw the pictures, he ousted Claudia Schiffer as poster girl and replaced her with the newly named Anna Nicole. Showered with modelling and film roles, she bathed in the stardom she'd always craved. "I was Anna Nicole, the Cinderella who'd come from poverty to prosperity," she said. "It was probably the most exciting time of my life."
But the fame came at a cost to her mental and physical wellbeing. Gorging on junk food, her weight ballooned to 101kg and, on February 12, 1994, she collapsed at a Beverly Hills hotel after downing a bottle of tequila and prescription drugs. Four months later, she married Marshall. "He truly loved me and I loved him for it," claimed Anna Nicole, but her sentiments didn't stop her abandoning the honeymoon for a photo shoot in Greece. Living in California while her octogenarian husband remained in Houston, she was rumoured to have had several affairs, including lesbian relationships. One female lover recalled how during their affair, Anna Nicole had covered her breasts with paint to decorate one of the houses Marshall had bought her. More lurid allegations surfaced when her former housekeeper, Maria Antonia Cerrato, took Anna Nicole to court in May 1994, claiming she'd been force-fed drugs and sexually harassed.
Anna Nicole's life descended into a circus show. New York magazine featured her on the cover under the headline "White Trash Nation" and at an Oscars party in March 1995, she threw up in front of Dolly Parton before collapsing on a chair with her legs in the air. "Smith was so wasted," wrote gossip columnist Liz Smith, "that Courtney Love, in comparison, was a model of rectitude." The modelling jobs vanished and she was left modelling plus-size clothes on cable TV.
Then, on August 4, 1995, Marshall died of pneumonia. His family had already stopped Anna Nicole's $50,000 monthly allowance, now, they sold the homes he'd bought her and vowed to stop her getting her hands on his billion-dollar fortune. Ordered to stay away from his funeral, she held her own in Houston, wearing a plunging white dress and singing Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings".
Anna Nicole said she did it for her husband because "he loved my breasts". "I don't think she quite understands how funerals work," mocked Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. "When she heard that people would be stopping by to look at the body, she apparently thought they meant hers."
Now adding antidepressants to her list of addictions, on November 5, 1995, Anna Nicole was rushed to hospital at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Los Angeles, after an accidental overdose left her in a coma. Admitting she had been taking more than 100 pills a day and had suffered a nervous breakdown, she checked into the Betty Ford Clinic. "I was fucking bloopers. I talked my way out of that place, but I don't know how. I was lost and didn't know where to turn," she later admitted. With no real friends, Anna Nicole moved into a rented apartment in a dingy area of LA with 13-year-old Daniel and continued her fight to get Marshall's money. In September 2000, she was awarded $474 million, but the ruling was soon overturned. Anna Nicole then plunged deeper and deeper into depression. "People have this notion that I'm this rich woman, but I haven't got any money," she lamented. "At one stage, I didn't get out of bed for six months. I didn't go to the front room or the kitchen, I'd just stay in bed, eat and watch television."
Then, in late 2002, her rollercoaster career took another up-turn with the unexpectedly addictive reality hit The Anna Nicole Show. Transfixed viewers tuned in to see her kissing her purple-haired assistant Kim, feeding Prozac to her toy poodle, Sugar Pie, and asking potential dates if they had ever masturbated over her photo. She was back in the spotlight, but her behaviour began to spiral out of control.
At the American Music Awards in November 2004, she slurred, "Like my body?" as she fondled herself, and the following year, at the MTV Australia Video Music Awards, she pulled down her dress to expose her breasts, showing off two MTV logos that were covering her nipples. She'd shed 38kg, which she attributed to diet pills, but after her death Anna Nicole's long-time stylist, Julien Barcellz, revealed the real reason behind her weight loss. "She had become bulimic," he claimed. "She kept a small wastebasket near her bed."
Something else Anna Nicole hadn't admitted to was that she had been secretly dating her lawyer, Howard K Stern, and on September 7, 2006, she gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn, in Nassau in the Bahamas, where she had been living during her pregnancy. Although Stern was named on the birth certificate, mystery surrounded the paternity of the baby. Photographs showed a make-up-free Anna Nicole looking tired but happy as she cradled the newborn in her arms, yet tragedy was about to strike, when her son Daniel died of a suspected drug overdose while visiting her. Anna Nicole was devastated, crying, "I don't understand why God took him and didn't take me."
Sympathy for the stricken star, however, was short-lived, when she decided to sell the last pictures of the three of them together for a reported $650,000, shortly before "marrying" Stern in a commitment ceremony aboard a yacht. Within days, Dannielynn became the subject of a bitter paternity battle when her former boyfriend, photojournalist Larry Birkhead, claimed he was the real father and got a court order to force a DNA test.
With pressure mounting, on October 30, Anna Nicole was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung and pneumonia, and later that month faced an ignominious eviction from her million-dollar Bahamian mansion by her property developer ex-boyfriend, G Ben Thompson. Anna Nicole's world was crumbling and she allegedly attempted suicide twice - on one occasion Stern found her floating face-down in a pool.
"Everyone in my life has stabbed me in my back or said something bad about me," she told Entertainment Tonight in her last interview, a mere 10 days before she died. "I'm tired, really tired of the fight, but I'm not going to stop the fight until it's done." Rambling and looking fragile, she said she dreamt of her dead son every night. "He comes to me in my sleep, he comes to me in the sky. It's like he's calling me to come to him."
Less than a fortnight later, on February 8, 2007, Anna Nicole joined Daniel, collapsing and dying of a suspected drug overdose while on holiday at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida. She was 39.
The media circus that was Anna Nicole's life did not abate and, if possible, she gained even more notoriety in death than in her short life. With the court case for half of J Howard Marshall II's fortune still unresolved, Dannielynn could theoretically become the heir to a massive inheritance, which makes the pending paternity question even more pertinent. Possible dads quickly emerged, from Stern (who refused to undergo a DNA test and has allegedly conceded he is not the father), and ex-boyfriends Birkhead and Thompson (later discounted as he'd had a vasectomy), to former bodyguard Alexander Denk, and Prince Frederick von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, who claims that he and Anna Nicole had a 10-year affair.
In February this year, lawyers fought over where her remains should be interred, with Judge Larry Seidlin becoming so overwhelmed by his TV courtroom debut that he made "Hamlet-like" introspections about the "beauty and dignity" of Anna Nicole, before breaking down in tears, sending the courtroom antics into YouTube infamy. It was finally agreed she'd be buried next to her son at Lakeview Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Nassau.
At the time of going to press, the drama is far from over and Anna Nicole's name is destined to be top of the news agenda for months to come. "I've always liked attention," she once declared. She certainly got that.
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