# Room 607 *A Biography of Anna Nicole Smith* — Legendary Biographies No. 009 - **Subject:** Vickie Lynn Hogan (Anna Nicole Smith) - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 192 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 192 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-050-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-196-3) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/009-room-607.html ## About this book February 8, 2007, Room 607 of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida. Anna Nicole Smith, thirty-nine, is found unresponsive in her bed by her bodyguard. The Broward County Medical Examiner rules the death an accidental overdose of chloral hydrate combined with eight other prescription drugs. She has been a widow since 1995, a Playboy Playmate of the Year since 1993, a litigant in the U.S. Supreme Court since 2006, and the mother of a five-month-old daughter named Dannielynn since September. Donovan Hadley's biography opens earlier — in Houston, where Vickie Lynn Hogan was born in 1967 to a teen-mother waitress — and follows the arc through the Mexia, Texas, childhood, the first marriage at sixteen to a fry cook, the move to Houston and the Gigi's Cabaret stripping years, the 1992 Playboy cover and the 1993 Playmate of the Year, the September 1994 marriage to the eighty-nine-year-old oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, the Marshall death in August 1995 and the fourteen-year inheritance fight that reached the Supreme Court twice, the Howard K. Stern years and the September 10, 2006 death of her twenty-year-old son Daniel in her Bahamas hospital room three days after her daughter's birth, and the bedroom in Hollywood five months later. What emerges is a portrait of a Mexia, Texas teenager whose body the American media apparatus turned into a national object lesson and whose death, at thirty-nine, the same apparatus could not quite stop covering. ## Contents 1. The Girl from Mexia 2. The Architecture of Poverty 3. The Currency of the Body 4. The Old Man and the Girl 5. Playmate of the Year 6. The Marilyn Machine 7. The Wedding and the Will 8. The Oil Fortune Fight 9. The Widow 10. Four Hundred Seventy-Four Million Dollars 11. Marshall v. Marshall 12. The Reality Show 13. TrimSpa, Baby 14. The Spectacle of the Body 15. Three Days 16. The Paternity Wars 17. Room 607 18. What America Did ## Questions **Who is Room 607 about?** Vickie Lynn Hogan (Anna Nicole Smith). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Room 607 — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,352 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 192 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.