Blonde Ambition Read online

  Daniel told Harding that the reason he wanted to go join the military was that he could learn to be a strong fighter, to "be a man and take my mom away from Howard." Then, Daniel's voice turned low, like he was scared someone was listening. "I am deathly afraid of him and very scared for my mother. Howard hates me and keeps me away from her. That's how he treats all my mom's friends. He's made her a prisoner. I want to get my mom out of there."

  Daniel said he wanted Harding to gather all this information against Howard in case Howard came after him physically and so Daniel could use the evidence versus Howard in a court of law. He said he feared what Howard would do to him, and knew that Howard did not like him because he had stood up to him a few times. "It's clear Howard wants me out of the picture," Daniel said. "So he can have complete control of my mom and all the money coming into her hands." In a will that was drafted in 2001, Daniel was listed as the sole heir to Anna's estate, which eventually could reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars if she was victorious in her court battles with the estate of her late billionaire husband, J. Howard Marshall.

  Jack Harding told Daniel he'd take his case, but he would have to go to the Bahamas to investigate. He then told Daniel about his rates. "I normally charge three hundred dollars an hour," he said. "But it would be much more if I have to travel to a place like the Bahamas. You'd have to pay the hourly rate, plus travel, hotel, rental car, and food." He'd have to spend thousands of dollars because he would probably have to be in the Bahamas for several days up to several weeks to question and do surveillance on people, especially on Howard K. Stern.

  The costs, of course, were well beyond what Daniel had imagined. "I don't have any money now," Daniel confessed, "since I am not getting any money coming in, but I am hoping to get some soon and maybe we can start now." He asked Harding if he'd work immediately and get paid later, but Harding explained that he's been in the business for over thirty years and for a project like this he'd need some money up front.

  Daniel was very upset, but understood.

  "So, the last time I saw Daniel," Harding remembered, "was when he walked out the door of the restaurant."

  A month later, Daniel would be dead. Bahamian Police would find Jack Harding's business card in Daniel's pocket, in the clothes he was wearing when he took his last breath.

  Saturday, September 9, 2006

  For most of his life, Daniel Smith was at his mother's side when she needed him. So at 10:25 p.m. on September 9, 2006, two days after she had given birth to his sister, Daniel arrived in Nassau on American Eagle flight 5005.

  Anna had called and told him, "You have a baby sister!" and asked him to come down. Daniel hadn't been feeling well the day he was supposed to fly from Los Angeles to the Bahamas. He told Ray Martino he had a stomachache. But he wanted to see his mother. It had been months since he'd seen her—one of the longest periods of times they had spent apart— and they had always had a very close relationship.

  Anna's brother, Donnie Hogan, said Anna adored Daniel, and had big hopes for her son. "She told me her best success was Daniel," Donnie said. "She was always holding and hugging him. Nothing was more important to her than Daniel.

  "I remember when Daniel was six or seven and we were at her ranch in Tomball [Texas]. Daniel was leaning on a fence, missing his front teeth, and told everyone, 'I'll be a big actor one day,' and Anna said, 'Whatever he'll be, he's going to be a star.'"

  Daniel loved to laugh and to make people laugh. When Daniel was around eight years old, Donnie, Daniel, and Anna were in a car, stopped at a light. There was a homeless man with signs sitting on the corner, and Daniel rolled down the window and asked, "Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?" mimicking a popular commercial on at the time. They all laughed, but Anna quickly told him that those men were less fortunate than he was and that it was not the right thing to do.

  Anna's good friend, Jackie Hatten, used to pick Daniel up from school when he was younger. She says Daniel rarely cursed and always respected his mom, doing whatever she asked, even the laundry. Daniel was intelligent, sweet, and, like many young men, loved video games like Mortal Combat and movies, especially Ben Stiller's Zoolander, about a dimwitted male model whose "spiky black hair" and patented model pose, "Blue Steel," made him the envy of the fashion world.

  Around the time of Anna's move to the Bahamas, stress and depression led to Daniel losing weight—twenty to thirty pounds—and breaking up with a woman he was dating. On July 17, the day before Anna flew to the Bahamas from South Carolina, Daniel was shaking and his heart was racing. He was depressed to the point of breakdown. Ray Martino took him to St. Joseph's Medical Center in Burbank and Daniel was admitted. He spent four days undergoing a battery of tests, including tests for drugs. Doctors found nothing remarkable.

  Daniel told a close family friend that he was depressed and very worried about his mom. Soon after he left the hospital, one of his mother's many doctors, Sandeep Kapoor—the man who wrote her prescriptions for methadone—wrote Daniel a prescription for Lexapro, one of the two antidepressants found in his system when he died. These two drugs were in lethal combination with another drug found in his system . . . methadone, a prescription of which his mother had received less than a month before.

  • • •

  Jackie Hatten spoke to Daniel a couple of months before he died. According to Jackie, Daniel was scared of Howard and all the drugs he kept giving to Anna. He asked Jackie if she would go to the Bahamas with him, saying he was scared to be alone with Howard there. Jackie told him that Howard didn't like her very much and would probably be really mad if she came along. Still, she warned him not to go alone.

  Daniel was under intense stress and told her he wanted to go down to the Bahamas to "save" his mother. He told Jackie, as he would later also tell private investigator Jack Harding, that Howard wouldn't let him talk to his mother and that Howard had cut off communications between them.

  But Howard claimed communications were just fine. He painted the relationship with Daniel much rosier than Daniel had described it to others. "Daniel to me was a great friend, a brother," Howard K. Stern would tell Larry King on September 26, just two weeks after Daniel's death. "I loved Daniel . . . part of me just wishes I would wake up and this whole thing has been an elaborate nightmare."

  Perhaps it was the other part of him that caused Daniel so much angst.

  • • •

  Though Howard suggested during that TV interview that Daniel intended to move to the Bahamas "to stay with his mom and go to school here," even Howard's own friends told me that Daniel never planned to stay there. His plan was to visit for a short while, one to three weeks maximum. Daniel didn't like the Bahamas because he couldn't stand the heat.

  The night before he left, while Ray Martino helped him pack, Daniel asked Ray if he'd go with him, but Ray said he couldn't because of work. Daniel admitted that he was very nervous to go. Ray thought it was just because Daniel didn't like to fly.

  The morning of his flight Ray took him to the Burbank Airport and bought him French toast for breakfast. Before he boarded the flight—from Burbank to Fort Worth, then to Miami for a quick flight to the Bahamas—Jack Harding says Ray told him he gave Daniel "a couple of Valiums" for his nerves.

  "Don't leave me down there," Daniel said.

  "I won't," Ray promised.

  Daniel boarded the plane.

  • • •

  At 10:30 p.m. Howard picked Daniel up in Nassau and drove him to Doctor's Hospital where two days prior his mother had had a C-section delivery. Around 11 p.m. they arrived at the hospital—a modern facility with 72 beds on Collins Avenue in Nassau—and Daniel rushed into room 201 and gave his mother a big hug. Anna introduced Daniel to the baby and handed the little bundle to him, saying to the as-yet-unnamed baby, "Here's your brother, Daniel."

  "Look at her, Momma," he said, his eyes filled with excitement. "She's looking at me!" Daniel was in great spirits. He played with the baby's fingers and held her like sh
e was his own. He was happy, lively, and completely alert.

  Ben Thompson, a former boyfriend of Anna's and the man who owned the Horizons house where she was living, was in the room visiting Anna and her newborn when Daniel got there. He told me that Daniel was "thrilled to death" to be with Anna and to meet his little sister.

  Howard pulled out his camera and took pictures as Daniel and Anna reunited and as Daniel proudly rocked his new baby sister in his arms. "It was great," Howard later said. "It was like one of the best nights that I've ever remembered. I mean Anna was so content. She had her son and her new baby girl, and I was there and it was great."

  Sunday, September 10

  A little after midnight, Ben Thompson left the room so that Anna and Daniel could spend some quality time with each other, and Ben could get some sleep. Shortly after he left, Anna, Daniel, and Howard decided they were hungry. In the Bahamas there isn't much open late at night, so Howard made a food run to a 24-hour mini-mart inside a nearby Esso gas station. He bought chips, soft drinks, and fried chicken strips, Anna and Daniel's favorite. (Ironic, considering Anna had gotten pregnant with Daniel when she was seventeen-years-old and working as a waitress at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken in Mexia, Texas.)

  When Howard returned with the food, they sat around Anna's bed and ate, a late-night celebratory party. There were two hospital beds and a large armchair in her room, and Anna was in the bed closest to the window. The other bed Howard offered to Daniel, but Daniel said he wasn't really that tired and said Howard could take it. The seemingly healthy twenty-yearold was going to stay up and watch some television. Daniel settled into the armchair; Howard took the other bed.

  Since Anna had a C-section just two days before, she was still quite weak and needed help getting to the bathroom, and, according to Howard, Daniel helped her to the bathroom "many times throughout the night."

  "At one point Daniel said to me, 'how come I'm so tired?'" Howard recounted on Larry King Live. "And, in hindsight, I wish that I had seen that as some sort of a signal and seen that something wasn't right."

  Several investigators have indicated to me that the statement was peculiar. Why would Howard have seen a young man being tired in the middle of the night after a day's travel from the opposite side of the continent as "a signal?" Why would that have indicated "something wasn't right?"

  "Unless," as one investigator put it, "Howard knew that Daniel had taken something. Or, more to the point, been given something."

  According to Doctor's Hospital records, a nurse making her rounds noted that at 6:20 a.m. Daniel was attending to his mother's comfort. Subsequently, during the hourly rounds, he was observed to be asleep on multiple nurse visits.

  Shortly after 9:30 a.m., Anna tried to wake Daniel who had moved into the bed with her. Though he appeared sound asleep, he was lifeless. "Howard!" she yelled. "Howard! Daniel's not breathing." Howard jumped out of bed and went to her bedside.

  "I checked Daniel's neck, and I didn't feel anything," he said. "We called the nurses and said it was an emergency."

  At 9:38 a.m., according to hospital records, the nurse was called to room 201, following which physicians on the floor were immediately summoned and straight away initiated CPR. A code blue was called and a team rushed from the emergency room. For twenty-two minutes, resuscitative efforts using Advanced Life Support Protocol continued on the lifeless body of Daniel, without response.

  Though they tried to get Anna to leave the room, she refused. She was hysterical. At some point early in the desperate chaos, Howard called Ben Thompson at the Horizons house and told him, "You need to get to the hospital as quick as you can. It's not good." He also found time to call Ray Martino in California, waking him up, and pleading with him to come to the Bahamas right away.

  Anna moved to the foot of the bed where she grabbed Daniel's leg and kept hugging it. Anna and Daniel often spoke about the Catholic Church, and the Playboy Playmate was known to pray to Mary every day. As doctors tried their last futile efforts, Anna was screaming and praying to Jesus and she was telling Jesus to take her and not take Daniel. It was an awful scene.

  At 10:05 a.m. Daniel Wayne Smith was pronounced dead.

  After the hospital gave up resuscitation efforts, Anna refused to. She screamed "No, no!" and continued trying to revive her dead son.

  "There was an airbag that they were putting air in," Howard later told Larry King. "And she had me doing that and she was pumping on his chest. And I just, you know, I don't know. I'm not a doctor."

  Anna just didn't want to believe that he had died. She wanted to keep going. She insisted they keep trying to bring Daniel back to life. She was screaming so loudly, her desperate cries could be heard down the halls of the hospital.

  When Ben Thompson arrived at the hospital around 10:30 a.m., about an hour after the emergency call came from the room, security was already clamped down. Ben came through the back entrance and when he got off the 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 her."

  It would be the last time Virgie Arthur personally heard from her daughter.

  Sunday, September 10, early afternoon

  From the moments immediately following Daniel's death, until the day Anna died, she was often in a drug haze, a blurry void somewhere between conscious and unconscious.