Blonde Ambition by Rita Cosby Read Free Book Online Page A

elevator, a hospital employee told him Daniel was dead. Though hospital security was checking everyone who was coming or going, the hospital room, a potential crime scene, seemed to be unobserved.
       When Ben went into the hospital room, Daniel was in the bed and Anna was in bed with him. There was barely six inches on the bed for her to place her body and Ben was worried because she just had a C-section. She was holding him and hugging him, screaming out his nickname, "Pumpkin! Pumpkin!" She was hysterical.
       "The doctors advised us that we should probably check her out of the hospital because the media was going to be coming," Howard said. "And it was going to . . . make the situation even worse." Bahamian law requires autopsies to be performed on any unexplained death, but she refused to leave her son. Before Daniel's body was transferred to the Rand Lab, Anna had to be sedated.
       But before that, Howard grabbed his camera and said, "Let me get a picture." And he started taking photos of Anna Nicole Smith, lying in a hospital bed cradling her dead son.
       The last set of snapshots was not included in the group of photos capturing Daniel's last hours that was sold to In Touch magazine for a reported $600,000 and to Entertainment Tonight  for an undisclosed sum. When Howard listed the pictures with a photo service, they were photos of Daniel's arrival, not of his departure.
       "When we heard that the photos were available," In Touch magazine news editor Linda Massarella told CBS's The Early Show , "my immediate reaction was we have to get them. I want to see that. Everybody is going to want to see that."
       Dan Wakeford, the magazine's executive editor, said he secured the photos from Getty Images, but declined to identify the photographer.
       "It's a loving photo just after she gave birth, with Daniel," Massarella said. "It's the family snapshot, it's the last family snapshot."
       Not quite. The very last photographs were actually held back, but I have personally seen one of these pictures and it is quite disturbing.
       It shows a crying Anna Nicole Smith lying on her right side in her hospital bed. Rather than holding her precious threeday-old daughter, she is instead cradling the dead body of her beloved twenty-year-old son. Her right arm, crooked beneath Daniel's head, is still bearing a bracelet adapted with an intravenous tube; her left arm, wearing a red hospital wristband, caresses Daniel's cheek. His face is as stark white as the hospital blanket pulled up about his neck, and a breathing tube protrudes from his mouth. His eyes are partially open.
       The one I saw is a painfully gruesome photo. How anyone could have taken it during a mother's darkest hour is a question that all who've seen it have asked.

chapter 3

    Life After Death

    Within hours of Daniel's death, Howard overheard Anna tell Ben Thompson, "I probably need to call my momma."
       "Let's wait to call her later," Howard said.
       Virgie Arthur, Anna's mother, like so many other people in Anna's life, had found herself shut out. And Virgie, like so many other people in Anna's life, blamed it on Howard. "He kept all of us from her, not just me," Virgie would tell me shortly after Anna's death. "He kept her whole family away from her. He kept her to himself. People that loved her tried to help her. Those that didn't love her, lived with her and lived off her."
       By the time Anna did finally call her mother's house in Texas several days later, Virgie had already learned from TV news that her grandson was dead. Anna's speech was slurred and Virgie could tell that her daughter was under the influence of drugs. "She was mumbling like a drunk does," Virgie said. "All I got out of it was 'Danny's dead. Momma he's gone he's gone . . . but he's coming back. He's coming back.' And then it sounded. . . . It was like she was in the middle of a sentence and the phone went click. And that's all I got to hear from