An Addict Dies ... Name: Anna Nicole Smith

ANNA NICOLE SMITH: Playboy model and Naked Gun 33&1/3 actress, billionaire's wife and reality TV star is dead.
In the cruel, judgemental world of Hollywood, even the (American) Star Magazine's editor admitted that Anna Nicole, busty, beautiful, very blonde and seemingly naive was truly a lost soul to the very end of her 39 years.

Entire forests of trees have been felled to tell the story from her rise from diner waitress to Playboy magazine model and sometime Hollywood actress. She looked set for life when, in 1994, she married the decrepit and wheelchair-bound 89 year-old Texan oil billionaire J Howard Marshall II. Smart move, girl! Who died a convenient one year later, leaving Anna Nicole in the throes of an ugly lawsuit over who should really inherit the dead man's billion dollar plus estate.

I might add here that in English law a man simply cannot do other than leave reasonable provision for his wife in his will. In fact, without a will his wife would, under ordinary circumstances, inherit everything. So I can't pretend to begin to understand the technicalities of Anna Nicole's legal battle with J Howard Marshall II's son. What I do know is that legal beagles had always said they expected Anna Nicole to win... If only she had lived long enough...

I have always thought (and this is my sincere opinion) that if an old man (and, let's be realistic, he would have to be rich for this ever to happen) meets a beautiful young girl who is willing to be his wife, trophy and constant companion throughout his twilight years, freindly, uncomplaining and a true friend even if the marriage is not based on "love" or "passion" as we normally understand them... and if both parties enter such an arrangement willingly (and obviously knowing the young girl has half an eye at least on his will) ... then good luck to them! Why shouldn't a pretty girl make an old man happy? Why not?? None of us know the ins and outs of the Marshall-Smith marriage. Although the fact that he did not leave her his fortune in a watertight will suggests the "dynamics" of their relationship may be a little more complicated than we first imagine...

Anna Nicole had two children by different fathers. A son, who died a year ago of a reported methadone overdose and a daughter, whose paternity was being contested ...

Methadone... that brings us to the crux of the Anna Nicole story. The woman was an addict! Let's be frank here. A self-confessed 100-pill a day painkiller & tranquillizer popper, who had methadone lying around her house in unlabelled bottles, one of which killed her late son a year before she went ... what else can I say? Nobody dabbles with methadone, at least not for any length of time, unless that person is a heroin addict. Yes, folks. Anna Nicole Smith, blonde, beautiful, immaculately groomed (most of the time) and hardly the sharpest tool in the box ... was a heroin addict.

Surely we have all seen clips of her trolleyed out of her head, singing songs through limousine windows to a press corps who did all they could not to laugh in her face so as not to spoil such fabulous shots.

Yes, at the end of the day, Anna Nicole, for all her white-trash glamorous life-&-death is really one of an innumerable rollcall of the insulted and the injured, the battered and abused, downtrodden, misunderstood, disadvantaged. The misfits and don't fits of the world. She was like every other pill-popper, drinker, crackhead and junkie in the world. She was an addict plain and simple. Maybe her death was not inevitable, but in hindsight there seems precious little choice of other way for her to bow out. So ...

Goodbye Anna Nicole and Goodnight. May you rest in peace at last ...