Ex-model centre stage even in death

By Richard Allen Greene
BBC News, Washington

Anna Nicole Smith cried out for the spotlight in life, and has continued to demand it even in death.

Death has not put an end to the Anna Nicole Smith story

The model's sudden demise on 8 February at the aged of 39 from a cause yet to be determined prompted yet another court battle in a life that had been full of them.

For six days, Judge Larry Seidlin presided over a hearing about who had the right to decide where the larger-than-life celebrity would be buried.

Her estranged mother wanted her laid to rest back home in Texas.

Her partner argued for the Bahamas, next to her son who died last year.

Her ex-boyfriend - who claims to be the father of her infant daughter Dannielynn - suggested she would have wanted a final resting place in California, near her idol Marilyn Monroe.

In the end, a tearful Judge Seidlin metaphorically threw his hands up, ordering that the baby's guardian - a lawyer - make the decision.

'Train wreck' hearing

His ruling came a day earlier than he had promised, putting an end to a frequently bizarre spectacle that transfixed many Americans even as it made them queasy.

An expert on the media compared the hearings to a "train wreck" in the way it forced people to watch in horrified fascination.

Even seasoned reporters say they have never seen anything like the focus on this hearing Enlarge Image

"We all sort of rubberneck as we go by," Lee Wilkins, a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, told the Associated Press.

Six in 10 Americans said there had been too much coverage of the former centrefold's death and its aftermath, Pew Research found.

But about one in 10 said it was the story they paid most attention to in the week after her death - only slightly lower than the combined 13% who named any 2008 presidential candidate as their most-watched news item.

Several cable channels, including Fox, MSNBC, and Court TV, provided non-stop coverage of the hearing.

More than 100 journalists staked out the Florida courthouse where the battle over the body took place, with some setting up as early as 4am.

And Fox News correspondent Phil Keating said a scuffle between cameramen earlier in the week was the most chaotic and violent he had ever witnessed.

Surreal circus

Judge Larry Seidlin certainly provided journalists with quite a show.

Firing off wisecracks, non sequiteurs, insults and compliments in a New York accent undimmed by more than half his life spent in Florida, the 56-year-old judge bristled at the notion that his court had become a circus.

Judge Seidlin appears to have enjoyed being centre stage

And yet he addressed lawyers by the place they came from rather than their names ("Houston", "California"), regularly interjected information about himself and his life into the proceedings, and finally took testimony via a mobile phone's speaker.

"Raise your right hand," Judge Seidlin shouted into the phone one of the lawyers had placed on his bench in the last minutes of the hearing.

It was perhaps the most surreal moment of the hearing, but hardly the only one.

He had earlier compared Anna Nicole Smith to Hamlet's doomed lover Ophelia.

When a witness said he had been driven by his lawyer to see Smith's body, the judge asked: "You trying to save on gas?"

Final word?

Legal experts expressed shock at his behaviour, and a 2004 poll uncovered by the Miami Herald suggested one in five lawyers in his county considered him incompetent.

But he has his defenders, and even some critics say "he always tries to get the best possible results", the newspaper reported.

At least once during the Smith hearing Judge Seidlin appeared not to know his own powers, prompting three lawyers to stand and yell at him to tell him the law in his own state.

He shouted them down, saying: "When I'm talking, the only voice I want to hear is mine."

Minutes before announcing his verdict, he vowed never to speak about the case again.

But given how much he apparently enjoyed the spotlight, few expect Thursday's ruling to be last America hears of Judge Larry Seidlin.

And with the paternity of baby Dannielynn still undetermined, and the question of how much the dead model would have inherited from her late oil tycoon husband still open, America and the world have certainly not heard the last of Anna Nicole Smith.