Virgie Arthur visited Anna Nicole and her son Daniel’s grave to mark the first anniversary of his death. The anniversary of his death is the day after kid sister Dannielynn’s birthday, and Virgie is upset no one from her side of the family was invited, saying “there wasn’t anybody there from Vickie’s [Anna Nicole's birth name was Vickie Lynn Hogan] side of the family”.

Larry Birkhead hit back.

“She doesn’t want to be a grandmother, she wants to be a money manager,” he said. “She can continue to play poor-pitiful-me games to anyone who’ll listen, I’m not buying it.

“Dannielynn has [paternal] grandmothers who are all supportive, you don’t see them dragging me through every courthouse.”

Birkhead also told E! Online that Arthur had ample opportunities to get to know her granddaughter in the wake of his winning custody this spring, but she didn’t seem nearly as interested when there wasn’t a video camera documenting her grandmotherly intentions.

“She stood me up for a Sunday visitation,” he said. “I waited all day, and she didn’t show up or call. Then a few weeks later, I get a note: ‘How’s the baby? Is she getting her first tooth?’

“She had two teeth when she was sitting in front of her in the lawyer’s office. A good grandmother would remember whether her granddaughter’s got teeth or not. She’d also remember to call and come over for a visitation that she scheduled…She can’t remember to call me for visitation, but she can remember to file papers in the courthouse about me.”

E! Online

Virgie also claimed to be the only one to visit the graves of Anna Nicole and grandson Daniel on the anniversary, but Anna’s other ex Howard K. Stern had this to say in response.

“I visited Anna and Daniel twice yesterday under the cover of darkness because I did not want the media to capture my private moments with loved ones. In the early morning, I brought two baskets of flowers from Dannielynn, myself, and others. When I visited again late at night, I found plastic flowers drilled into the ground next to our flowers.

I did not want to take pictures or release any statement concerning my visits. However, Anna’s birth mother brought Splash News with her to the cemetery (or was it the other way around?) and then claimed in an interview that nobody visited Anna and Daniel.

Unfortunately, I have learned to anticipate this type of exploitative expression of alleged love and took the necessary precautions. I sincerely hope that Splash News has the decency not to make this a pattern for all future anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays.

As in the past, I am not profiting from these pictures or this statement in any manner.”

TMZ

The man certainly can make a powerful statement. No wonder Anna Nicole wanted him for a lawyer.

This saga seems like it’s going to go on forever. While Larry Birkhead doesn’t seem shy about making money from Dannielynn’s pictures, at least he isn’t as crazy as Virgie. This is the woman who has two children named Junior, one with her stepbrother, and just doesn’t seem to be able to accept her loss of cash – whoops, I mean custody – gracefully. If she just acted like a civilized person she probably wouldn’t have visitation rights, she could just visit the kid like a regular grandmother.

Picture note by Celebitchy: Here are pictures of the cemetery where Anna is buried, which were published earlier. Thanks to FindaGrave.com. The above picture is an older one of her grave.

Dannielynn’s first birthday passed this weekend, but it certainly didn’t go unnoticed by the 200 guests, and anyone living within 20 miles of Larry Birkhead’s place.

Some guests arrived in limousines and stretch Humvees, bearing large stuffed animals and other gifts. One guest was seen carrying a large pencil drawing of Dannielynn, whose actual birthday was Friday.

“My daughter had a really, really good time,” Birkhead said. “Barney the dinosaur came and gave a special performance. The kids loved it.”

A hot-air balloon shaped as a birthday cake adorned the front yard. Yellow police tape stretched around the yard in the posh Louisville neighborhood, and about a half-dozen off-duty police officers guarded the property.

One guest, Tina Showalter of Louisville, said she had known Birkhead most of his life. Showalter said she left the party about 15 minutes after arriving mainly because it was so crowded.

“Everything is a little frenzied in there,” she said.

Showalter said that in the back yard there was “a huge castle as big as a house,” along with bubble machines and a white carriage.

AP

I hope Larry Birkhead didn’t find the experience too exhausting, because he’s got years of birthdays coming before Dannielynn is old enough to even remember her birthday party. My mother spent hours preparing for my first birthday, making an incredibly elaborate koala cake (it looked like a koala, it’s not a flavour) and inviting all the neighbourhood kids. Then I ate a firstfull of cake and went to sleep, with all the other kids who didn’t cry.

Larry, rest for Dannielynn’s second birthday, because by the time she’s thirteen and wanting to go to Disneyland you’ll be really really tired. Of course, maybe by the time she’s thirteen we’ll all be over the whole Anna Nicole Saga – but somehow I suspect the associated court cases will still be going – and you won’t have to have guests check their cameras at the door to guarantee the exclusive to whatever magazine you are selling the story to.

Glad you had a great birthday Dannielynn, hope your second year is better than your first.

Just when you thought the Anna Nicole story couldn’t get any weirder and/or was over come fresh allegations from an upcoming book about the tragic life of the drug-addicted former Playboy model. OK! Magazine claimed that it had some explosive news about Larry Birkhead, the man who fathered a child with Anna and is now caring for the infant. Since Birkhead may have screwed OK! out of an exclusive photoshoot with the coveted infant, we didn’t think anything they would have to say about him would be all that objective.

It sounded like OK! was going to claim that Larry and Howard K Stern, Anna Nicole’s lawyer and creepy hanger-on, reached some kind of deal outside the courts on the handover of the baby. According to the upcoming book, not only did they make a deal that Birkhead would care for the baby while Stern would continue to control Anna’s estate, they were gay lovers during Anna’s life and she knew about it. If this is true it would explain how they all were able to get along despite both having a supposed romantic interest in Anna:

The bombshell allegations about the steamy relationship between the former Playboy Playmate’s longtime companion Howard K. Stern and her baby’s biological father, Larry Birkhead, come to light in “Blonde Ambition: The Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole Smith’s Death.”

Sordid passages in the soon-to-be released book by former MSNBC journalist Rita Cosby describe how Anna Nicole and her friend allegedly caught Stern and Birkhead with their shirts off and their pants around their ankles in a Los Angeles home.

Jackie Hatten, described in the book as one of Anna Nicole’s closest friends, said the men were engaged in oral sex.

“Their bodies were intermingled,” Hatten says, according to a copy of the book obtained by the Daily News. “It was obvious what was happening.”

The shocking book accuses Birkhead and Stern of cutting a secret deal after Anna Nicole was buried in March, with Birkhead getting custody of Dannielynn in return for Stern being named executor of the star’s estate.

Dannielynn, who turns 1 on Friday, could inherit hundreds of millions of dollars from the estate of Smith’s late husband, oil tycoon Howard Marshall.

Birkhead and a lawyer for Stern both vehemently denied the accusations in Cosby’s book yesterday – and vowed to drag her into court, setting the stage for an ugly legal battle.

[NY Daily News]

Birkhead says he’s going to sue the author, Rita Skeeter Cosby, for making such inflammatory claims about him. Both he and Stern deny that they’re true.

There have been rumors that Birkhead was gay or bi for some time. A guy told The National Enquirer back in April that he had a torrid two month affair with Birkhead in 2000.

Anna is said to have known that these two were lovers and to have wanted a baby so badly that she picked Birkhead because he was blonde and blue-eyed. If this is true, something must have gone wrong with Stern and Birkhead’s relationship, because Birkhead was cut out of Anna’s life after she was a few months pregnant and they seemed genuinely pissed at each other. Maybe Stern wanted more control of Anna and her expected hundreds of millions, was threatened by Birkhead’s status as the father, and made sure that Birkhead was out of the picture.

The book paints a lecherous picture of Stern, known for hanging all over Anna Nicole and long suspected to have not only enabled but to have encouraged her addiction to a medicine cabinet full of prescription drugs.

Stern is portrayed in Cosby’s book as a jealous, money-grabbing control freak who manipulates the erratic blond beauty’s celebrity status for his own financial gain.

As her life spun out of control after the death of her son, Daniel, last September, Stern kept Anna Nicole hidden from friends and forced the heavily drugged model to sign stacks of paperwork, the book claims.

His alleged “goodie bag” of meds – including Vicodin, Valium, morphine and Demerol – were never far from reach.

“He was the pharmacist and [the bag] was the drugstore,” Anna Nicole’s ex-boyfriend Ben Thompson told Cosby.

[NY Daily News]

I could see these two being lovers, but if anyone is responsible for Anna’s bizarre death it’s Stern, not Birkhead. Birkhead wasn’t around for a reason and even if he may have liked guys too he seemed genuinely fond of Anna to me and to be concerned about how her drug addiction would affect their baby. Anna’s campy personality must have attracted a lot of people of ambiguous sexual orientation.

This book may bring renewed interest into the suspicious circumstances leading up to Anna’s untimely death. Stern was found not responsible for Anna’s demise, but given how he enabled her drug addiction and how his response to her death seemed anything but natural, he shouldn’t have gotten away so easily. He may have even had something to do with the death of her son, Daniel.

Larry Birkhead had some kind of deal with OK! Magazine for photos and stories about his life with Dannielynn, the daughter of the late Anna Nicole Smith. OK! thinks he screwed them by letting US Weekly have the photos and story on Dannielynn’s first birthday and they’re pissed. After paying him $1.7 million and doing him a bunch of favors, they’re not about to let him get away without spreading some nasty gossip about him.

OK! editors claim to have some shocking news about Birkhead, implying that he made a deal with the guy who first claimed to be Anna Nicole’s baby daddy, Howard K Stern. Unless he’s thought to have plotted to kill Anna, I don’t see how it can be all that scandalous. Maybe they’re going to claim that they made a deal for the handover of the baby and that there was money involved:

The magazine’s publicist said: “OK! Magazine has uncovered explosive allegations regarding Larry Birkhead, Howard K. Stern and baby Danielynn, prompting the magazine to cancel our exclusive coverage of Danielynn’s first birthday party.”

“The newly obtained allegations are detailed, shocking and potentially incriminating. It makes it impossible for OK!, in good conscience, to promote this family’s highly questionable relationship in our pages.”

Both were locked in a paternity battle over the child before DNA tests claimed to prove Birkhead as the father following the death of Anna Nicole.

OK’s American editor Sarah Ivens said: “My biggest fear is that Larry and Howard may have tricked us all.”

[From the Daily Mail]

Larry says OK! forced his hand, though, by threatening him not to go to a rival glossy after he was on the cover of US with Dannielynn. He said that was bullshit:

Birkhead, who says he didn’t play ball with Us, wrote an email to OK! in which he said, “I was just threatened via email by (the reporter) that OK! would do a negative story on me if I did any stories with any other mags. Ridiculous!!! I am not sure what planet she’s on but I am not going to be threatened. She blew it!”

OK! thought they had a “four-part deal” with Birkhead, while Birkhead thought he had an agreement with them for just the first photos of his daughter once he was awarded custody.

Either way, whatever crap they’ve got on Larry Birkhead can’t really be trusted considering that they’ve got an axe to grind.

It really makes you lose faith in the integrity of the gossip industry when someone can smear the good name of a doting father like Larry Birkhead over a measly couple of million.

In what I guess is a show of class, Superior Court Judge Mitchell L. Beckloff has barred the release of a video of Anna Nicole Smith’s breast augmentation surgery, made in 1994. The request came from her former “boyfriend”/ former attorney/executor of her will, Howard K. Stern. Stern claimed that the doctor taped the operation without Smith’s consent, and he sent it to a Los Angeles memorabilia dealer, Thomas Riccio.

“The surgeon, Surgeon Gerald Wayne Johnson, said he routinely recorded surgeries with the patient’s permission and promised to keep the video confidential ‘during the patient’s lifetime’.

“Dr Johnson said he gave Mr Riccio permission to use the video after Smith died.

“Mr Stern claimed Dr Johnson’s wife and Mr Riccio would share any proceeds from the sale of the video to media outlets.“

[From the Melbourne Herald Sun]

Ew. Just ew. I wish I had something more intelligent to say, but this story makes my visceral reactions take over. Aren’t people done feeding off of Anna Nicole Smith yet? I’m not saying the woman was an upstanding pillar of the community or anything, but you can tell she wasn’t exactly smart enough to protect herself against some of the more unscrupulous people that surrounded her in life. She certainly wasn’t above selling her private family moments and personal medical procedures for a little bit of cash. Remember Celebitchy’s story in November ’06 when Anna Nicole sold her C-section video to “Entertainment Tonight” for $1 million?
I still think it’s sad that people are still trying to take advantage of her. She’s not here to say “Go ahead and see my bob job surgery,” or not. Though with that c-section incident, I guess it’s hard to say for sure if she’d put the kibosh on it. The woman was certainly a riddle. A simple one, more like a knock knock joke, yet a riddle nonetheless.

In other Anna Nicole news, remember that batshit crazy judge who presided over the trial regarding custody of Smith’s body in Florida. Well, Judge Larry Seidlin will be coming to a television near you pretty soon.

“Judge Larry Seidlin, the wisecracking, emotional judge from the Anna Nicole Smith case, is shooting a pilot for his own TV show, ‘Access Hollywood’ has learned.

“The show will be produced by CBS Paramount. No other details were available.

“The lampooning purveyor of justice (dubbed Sideshow Seidlin by the media for his courtroom antics) announced his resignation from the bench in June amid speculation he was negotiating a deal for his own show.

“At the time of his resignation, Seidlin sent a letter to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, stating ‘it is now time for me to devote more of my daily life to my own young family and to pursue the many opportunities that have been offered to me outside the judicial system and I have disregarded until now.’

“Seidlin, 56, is a former New York cab driver who presided on the bench for nearly 29 years.”

[From MSNBC.com]

I wonder if that guy was always a mental case, or if he just put it on for Smith’s trial. He had a bit too much of that infamous New York phenomenon known as the “philosopher cabbie” thing going on. You know, a lot of dispensing more advice than you needed, and more personal information than you ever asked for. Plus that whole thing where he referred to each of the lawyers by their respective states really bothered me. “Shut up California!” “Your motion is denied South Dakota.” Alright I don’t think there really was a South Dakota lawyer there, but you get the point. Seidlin was clearly longing for greener pastures from the moment he was assigned the case. Though his ruling actually was legally sound and made a lot of sense. But I don’t want to give him too much credit, because I think he was just made a good ruling by chance. I don’t think any drawn-out logic went into his decision. So good lucky, Larry Seidlin. I hope your show fails and you have to slink back to Florida with your head in your hands, and your pants around your ankles. Just because that would be extra funny.

Forbes magazine has a list of the top ten most expensive celebrity photographs of the last decade.

1. Shiloh Jolie-Pitt’s first photos – People – June ’06 – $4.1 Million
2. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s wedding – OK! – Oct ’05- $3 Million
3. Eva Longoria and Tony Parker’s wedding – OK! – July ’07 – $2 Million
3. Larry Birkhead with daughter Danielynn – OK! – April ’07 – $2 Million
3. Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt’s adoption photos – People – March ’07 – $2 Million
6. Anna Nicole’s wedding to Howard Stern- People – Sept ’06 – $1 Million
7. Britney’s son Sean Preston’s first photos – People – Nov ’05 – $500,000
7. Angelina and Brad’s first photos as couple – Us Weekly – April ’05 – $500,000
7. Angelina Jolie’s first visibly pregnant photos – People – Jan ’06 – $500,000
10. Anna Nicole Smith’s son hours before his death – InTouch – Sept ’06 – $400,000

Forbes

Interestingly, most of these photos are deals done with celebrities rather than paparazzi selling their wares.

Angelina Jolie dominates this list, but only during her time with Brad. At the time of her first expensive shot, April 2005 when she first started dating Brad, I couldn’t have named three of her movies under pain of torture. But I knew who she had been married to, how many tattoos she had – she’s old hollywood glamour, with a bit of modern crazy thrown in. Just a dash of it, take note Britney!

Close behind Angie is Anna Nicole Smith, which Dan Wakeford, the editor of In Touch Weekly who paid for the number 10 photos, explains that “The death of Anna Nicole’s son was the massive news story of the moment–it consumed the whole nation, and these pictures were so newsy and so emotive,” he says. “This was every mother’s worst nightmare, and through these pictures, America could empathize with what Anna Nicole was going through.”

Unfortunately, he can’t offer an explanation as to how Demi Moore won such a delicious young man at her age, why Anna Nicole Smith lied about the paternity of her baby when her private life had been so public, or even the secret to frizz-free hair on rainy days.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an Anna Nicole Smith story. TMZ is reporting that the California Department of Justice is investigating two of Smith’s doctors. Remember all those years of crazy, half-asleep interviews she gave? Turns out it wasn’t just the Trim Spa! Okay we all knew that, but it appears that the California DOJ knows it too, and is interested enough to take some action.

“Sources tell TMZ the DOJ’s Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement has contacted Larry Birkhead, Big Mo (Anna’s bodyguard) and others. We’re told DOJ is particularly interested in two doctors — Khristine Eroshevich and Sandeep Kapoor. TMZ broke the story that Dr. Kapoor prescribed methadone to Anna under an assumed name when she was eight months pregnant. Dr. Eroshevich ordered a virtual pharmacy of drugs for Anna, five days after her son Daniel died.”

[From TMZ]

Anna’s life was so tragic, and she was responsible for a lot of it. But you can’t help but feel terribly for someone who experienced so much tragedy. I don’t have kids, but I can tell you that God forbid should anything happen, I’d want a pharmacy prescribed to me too. The point of having good people around is that they look out for you during those times, and don’t actually prescribe half the Merck Pharmaceuticals manual to you. Dr. Sandeep Kapoor prescribed a crazy amount of drugs for Anna, including Dilaudid (Hydromorphone), Lorazapam (Ativan), Soma (Carisoprodol), Prexige (Lumiracoxib), and Methadone. Those are all some pretty serious medications, few of which are safe to combine. I can’t help but wonder who in Anna’s circle feels responsible for her death. She was surrounded by enablers. Do any of them really see what role they played in her life? Each person is responsible for their own decisions, and Anna was responsible for her own choices, including the choices to keep a lot of “yes men” around her. But at some point the woman was clearly so out of it. Lots of people, not just one or two, should have stepped in. Hopefully her doctors will be thoroughly investigated, and have their medical licenses taken away if appropriate.

Header Photo from TMZ.

The NY Post is reporting that the disturbing photos of deceased Anna that were run in the National Enquirer were real and not “photo re-creations” as the tabloid claimed. There was a story that Anna’s mother Virgie Arthur went to the morgue to visit Anna and brought a reporter for paparazzi photo agency Splash News with her, so this is entirely plausible.

March 3, 2007 — DESPITE the National Enquirer’s claim that the eerie post-mortem images of Anna Nicole Smith it published were “photo re-creations based on eyewitness accounts,” a source close to the magazine says they were the actual photos of the Playboy playmate’s corpse lying in a Florida mortuary. “We didn’t want to get anyone fired,” an Enquirer operative told The Post’s Braden Keil. Someone with access to the refrigerated drawers scored a big payday after pulling out Smith’s pre-embalmed body and unzipping the body bag for an Enquirer photographer to hurriedly snap her bluish face.

I remember reading on the Splash News website that they had actual photos of Anna’s corpse, which they received a lot of heat for at the time. I wouldn’t doubt that one of the pictures is real, but my take is that the large photo the magazine used for the header image was the photo recreation, and that a less pretty small inset picture (warning: link leads to maybe-real picture) of Anna was real. The header image looks too cosmetic and like Anna is sleeping while the smaller picture seems a little more realistic. I would bet they did it that way so as not to feel guilty about running the actual photo. Either way, it’s despicable.

Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral went on as planned today in the Bahamas despite her mother’s last-minute legal ploy to try to put a stop to it and have her daughter buried in Texas. Not only did Anna Nicole Smith’s mother continue her fight to bury her daughter somewhere else on the day of her funeral, but the father of Anna’s deceased son Daniel had his lawyer send a request to the Chief Magistrate of the Bahamas asking to have Daniel’s body exhumed and moved to Texas. It’s unclear whether the request was related to Anna’s mother’s fight for the body.

Howard K. Stern and Larry Birkhead, who are legally disputing custody of Anna’s child but seem to have reconciled after she died, arrived separately and were seen embracing inside. Anna’s mother was one of the last people to make it to the ceremony, and was met by boos from the crowd gathered outside.

About 100 people attended the funeral while curious onlookers, photographers and news crew clamored for a glimpse of Anna’s send off. It wasn’t cheap for press to get inside the gated community where the church was located. Camera crews were required to submit requests to cover the event and to pay a fee of $2,000 per camera and $5,000 per live feed.

Howard K. Stern says that the funeral was set up according to Anna’s wishes and that “she did have a lot of specific things that she wanted” Anna wore a pink beaded dress she had custom made specifically for her funeral in a prescient or wishful moment, and was donned with a tiara. Pink flowers decorated the church. Her casket was draped with a pink velvet fabric dripping with pink ribbons and feathers. Bobby Trendy wanted to hot glue them on, but according to her wishes he was denied.

Anna’s casket made it to the graveyard at about 1:30 PM EST. She was buried next to her son and with an urn containing some of the ashes of her late second husband J. Howard Marshall, the billionaire octagenarian whose money she was still fighting for when she died.

Howard K. Stern’s eulogy focused on Anna’s “truth,” and how he had a real relationship with her and will miss her. He said she was a smart woman who knew what it took to be famous.

Country singer Joe Nichols sang two songs requested by Howard K. Stern for the funeral, “I’ll Wait for You” and her favorite country song, Dolly Parton’s “Wings of a Dove.”

Anna’s infant daughter Dannielynn was not at the service.

The coroner who examined Anna says that he will be able to come up with a final determination of death within nine or ten days. Another medical examiner, the one Anna hired to examine Daniel independently, says that he doesn’t believe methadone was involved in her death. If he didn’t do the autopsy, it sounds like speculation to me.

Pictures from Entertainment Tonight.

Update: The word “tacky” in the title has been removed. The rest of the article was pretty neutral.