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Throughout the 1990s, Anna Nicole Smith occupied an especially beguiling position as a second tier celebrity in popular culture. Her outlandish and excessive public life is, in some senses, a particularly American form of celebrity in that she embodies some of the most embarrassing stereotypes of the dumb Southern belle, the white trash gold-digger and the contemporary US fascination with even the lowliest forms of fame. To the rest of the world Anna Nicole Smith may be just a passing confirmation of the ubiquitous nature of American culture (if they are familiar with her at all), but in the USA she is a guilty pleasure, a tabloid spectacle that makes the rules and boundaries of culturally acceptability clear. The former stripper and fried-chicken waitress from Southern Texas first achieved public notoriety as Playboy 's Playmate of the Year in 1993 and through her subsequent modelling work on the extremely high-profile Guess Jeans advertising campaign. In the years that followed, Smith remained a popular subject of media scrutiny and ridicule as her supermodel status spiraled downward into embarrassingly bad film roles, dramatic weight gains and a bizarre marriage to an elderly oil tycoon more than 60 years her senior. But nothing seems to have caught the public's attention more than Smith's recent legal battles over the estimated 450 million dollar estate of her now late husband, J. Howard Marshall II. The likelihood that Smith's inheritance, after only 14 months of marriage, will make her one of the wealthiest women in the USA seems to offend and bewilder many. After all, here is the woman chosen as the cover model in 1994 for New York magazine's feature on 'White Trash Nation', now poised to become a financial powerhouse simply because of her cartoonish sexuality. This trial, and the public's interest in it, are not just about whether the bulk of an eccentric millionaire's estate should be awarded to an estranged son or a gold-digging wife. This trial is about the strict rules of the American class system, and about how those rules are intricately and intimately written onto the female body. The strange case of Anna Nicole Smith demonstrates the tension between the belief that in the USA class is more a matter of financial...