Anna Nicole Smith: America's last White Trash Cinderella

Ten years ago this week, Anna Nicole Smith died — and with her, an era came to an end

On February 8 2007, Anna Nicole Smith died in a Florida hotel room after overdosing on prescription drugs. It was a sad but not entirely unexpected end to a chaotic life.

But after stumbling through a subsequent decade-long pop culture blizzard during which the definition of celebrity has expanded to include anyone with a social media account, it takes a moment to fully recall how famous Smith once was. And it might take another moment to realise the kind of fame she had doesn't happen any more.

Vickie Lynn Hogan was a native of Mexia, Texas (population: 7,000), a high-school dropout, a waitress at Red Lobster and a wife and mother before she turned 20.

A full-figured 1.8m blonde, she looked like a different species from the consumptive androgynes populating the pages of the world's fashion magazines.

Hogan harboured a dream of being the next Marilyn Monroe but spent her days working at Walmart. Two events changed her life. In 1991, while performing in a Texas strip club, she caught the watery eye of octogenarian oil billionaire J Howard Marshall II.

"He asked me to go to lunch with him the following day," Smith recalled. "I said I had to work. He gave me an envelope. And it was the last time I ever danced. It was awful in that place. It was just terrible. And he saved me from that."

In 1992, she mailed pictures of herself to Playboy and, in less time than it takes Viagra to kick in, she was the magazine's May centrefold.

Paul Marciano, co-founder of Guess jeans, caught an eyeful of Hogan - as she was still known - and her pulchritudinous beauty. She was big, she was blonde, she had curves, she fit with the Guess throwback pin-up aesthetic.

The renamed Anna Nicole Smith replaced Claudia Schiffer as the face of Guess jeans. Her photoshoots were imbued with an old-time glamour that made the fashion world sit up and insist they weren't solely in the stick-insect business. Editorials for the swanky likes of Vanity Fair, W, Harper's Bazaar and Italian Vogue followed.

By 1993, she had been crowned Playmate of the Year. Smith was such a legitimate success story that, when New York magazine pictured her filling her face with Cheez Doodles to accompany a story titled White Trash Nation, she sued them for defamation.

Her photoshoots were imbued with an old-time glamour that made the fashion world sit up and insist they weren't solely in the stick-insect business

But the magazine had a point. The US in 1994 was a seething snake pit filled with fame-hungry, mentally unbalanced hillbillies. This was the era of John Wayne Bobbitt, who had his penis severed by his wronged wife. Of Tonya Harding, the scrappy ice-skater who took a hit out on the knee of her wholesome rival, Nancy Kerrigan.

With her incredible trajectory from small-town Texan penury to a gorgeous, glittering fantasy figure posing in glossy foreign fashion bibles, Smith seemed to inhabit a rarefied world where the air was different to the toxic sludge inhaled by the nutcases who exhibited their pain on the performing freak circuit where Howard Stern and Jerry Springer cracked the whip.

But she soon plunged back down into their dirty world. In 1994, Smith, then 26, married Marshall, 89, at the White Dove Wedding Chapel in Houston.

Minutes after the ceremony, Smith blew a kiss to her new wheelchair-bound husband and departed for a photoshoot in Greece. Thirteen months later, he was dead and she was embroiled in a battle with his family over his estate.

The wedding and the endless court battles that followed irrevocably altered the public perception of Smith. The Guess girl who photographed like a 1950s dream was forgotten. The Smith whose weight had ballooned and who slurred and stumbled her way through tabloid TV shows was an entirely different spectacle.

Her passing was met with few teary-eyed eulogies. "What was she famous for, aside from being famous?" sniffed TV morning pundit Joe Scarborough.

Attorney Rusty Hardin, who represented Marshall's son, Pierce, and whom Smith addressed in court with a loud "Screw you, Rusty!" commented: "I did tell her one time, I don't know why you're so upset with me, I've been good for your career."

This is 2017. The original shock jock Howard Stern now conducts empathetic, compassionate conversations with Lena Dunham about body image, with Gwyneth Paltrow about lifestyle choices and with Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell about homophobia. Reality TV is dominated by the affluent Real Housewives. Everyone with a four-figure Snapchat following considers themselves, if not a star, then certainly a brand.

But no one has achieved the kind of trajectory Smith enjoyed. This is an age of dynastic privilege; of Kardashians, Jenners and Hadids who were born into celebrity and achieved what they were entitled to with little effort.

There's no struggle in these girls' success stories, no social mobility; they didn't go from rags to riches, they went from riches to even more riches. Smith was the last White Trash Cinderella.