Anna Nicole's Tabloid Odyssey

After two years of critical mockery and ebbing ratings, E! Entertainment canceled the show. Smith became a spokesperson for a diet drug called TrimSpa, started a column for the National Enquirer and continued to make scenes. Presenting an American Music Award to Kanye West in 2004, she slurred her words and appeared drugged. In 2005 she showed up, minimally dressed, backstage at a Live 8 concert in Philadelphia. While Will Smith began a speech about starving children in Africa, Smith shimmied her silicone breasts for the cameras.

She could, at times, appear almost innocent. She told the tabs that she hated make-up ("it feels like dirt on me"), avoided exercise ("you sweat and get all nasty") and disliked posing nude ("I wouldn't open my legs or nothing. I never used to even let my boyfriend have on the lights"). She longed to have a baby girl and, last September, she gave birth to one, named Dannielynn.

Smith had always doted on her son by her first marriage, Daniel, said to be a sweet, polite boy who liked Mortal Kombat videogames and Japanese animé. Two days after Smith gave birth, Daniel, then 20, came to visit his mother and stepsister in the hospital. That night, he slept in the next bed. Howard K. Stern, Smith's lawyer and confidant, dozed in an easy chair. After 9 a.m., Smith awakened to discover that her son had stopped breathing. A medical expert hired by the family later determined that Daniel died from mixing large doses of methadone with two anti-anxiety medicines.

Less than three weeks later, Smith and Stern shoved off from the Bahamas in a 41-foot catamaran, the Margaritaville, to exchange vows in a non-legally-binding "commitment" service. After the ceremony, Smith wanted to jump in the water, but others worried about the sharks nearby so the party sailed to safer waters, where Smith and Stern, fully clothed, leaped in for the cameras. On "Larry King Live" the happy couple announced that Stern was Dannielynn's father, but a few days later a photographer and ex-boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, filed a paternity suit. ("I can't trust anyone. I get sued all the time," Smith told King.) According to his lawyer, Birkhead was concerned that Smith had been using drugs during the pregnancy.

Smith was reportedly suffering from "flulike symptoms" when she checked into the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel on Monday, Feb. 5. She had often come to the Indian reservation gambling resort in Florida, the last time to watch a boxing match between James (Lights Out) Toney versus Samuel (The Nigerian Nightmare) Peter in early January. On Thursday afternoon she was discovered alone, unconscious, in her hotel room by her personal nurse. Her bodyguard's efforts to revive her with CPR were unavailing, and she was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Instantly, the cable news coverage was wall to wall: television screens filled with old film clips and photos of Smith jiggling, pouting and filing suit; sober-sided legal and medical analysis; pop psychology ad infinitum. A new entry emerged in the paternity sweepstakes: Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband, Prince Frédéric von Anhalt, who claimed a 10-year affair with Smith. A patient but besieged local medical examiner, Dr. Joshua Perper, emerged on Friday afternoon to say there was no evidence of a violent crime, but that the cause of death was still a "medical mystery," with natural causes, an overdose or a combination of the two lingering as possibilities.