Room 607

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.