[Elvira]

02-26-06

Anna Nicole Smith goes to Washington
BY HELEN KENNEDY

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Anna Nicole Smith, who has some experience in seducing geezers, will put her skills to the ultimate test Tuesday when her long-running inheritance drama comes before the U.S. Supreme Court.
It isn't every day that the august high court gets a visit from a busty blond ex-stripper, Playboy Playmate, reality show star and National Enquirer columnist.

But Ms. Smith is going to Washington.

"She's really sort of honored and awed that the court agreed to hear her case," said her appellate lawyer, Kent Richland.

"Anybody would feel those kinds of things, but she's had a life where there's been a lot of notoriety," he said. "It should make all of us kind of happy that those kinds of superficial things don't matter to the court."

Smith, whose antics in state court are still being chuckled over in Houston, will be sitting in the spectator's area and won't actually speak. And she won't make the mistake of wearing a hot pink outfit with the word "Spoiled" emblazoned in rhinestones on her most famous assets, as she once did on the stand.

"She'll be demurely dressed," Richland guaranteed.

The would-be Marilyn Monroe has been fighting for nearly a decade to get half the $1.6 billion estate left by her late husband, Texas oil magnate Howard Marshall. She was 26 and he was 89 when they married in 1994. He died of stomach cancer a year later without mentioning her in his will.

Various courts have alternately sided with Smith or Marshall's son, Pierce, who went to extraordinary - and often sleazy - lengths to cut Smith out of any money. One court awarded her $475 million, mainly because Pierce Marshall had falsified documents.

The Supreme Court will sort out the contradictions between the different courts. No matter what it decides, the case will return to the lower court level and drag on.

After 30 years as an appellate lawyer, Richland is facing the prospect of making his first arguments before the Supreme Court. He said he's pretty confident, given that his petition to be heard won a rare unanimous thumbs-up from the justices.

And in a delicious case of strange bedfellows, the Bush administration - in the person of the solicitor general - is stepping in to argue in support of Smith's position.

The narrow issue to be considered by the high court is a desperately dry question of state vs. federal jurisdiction over probate matters.

Missing will be all the dramatic and sordid elements of the case, which once led a district court judge in California to include a footnote in his decision about "the odiousness of the parties involved in this case."

The justices won't be hearing about how Smith, too zaftig to get an evening gig at her Houston strip club, was dancing a day shift when Marshall - too frail to go out at night - was wheeled in. He proposed a week later.

They won't hear how she was the second stripper the old man wooed lavishly: the previous one had died suddenly of facelift complications.

They won't hear Letitia Hunt, the old man's deeply religious nurse, testify that Smith climbed onto her husband's bed as he lay dying, bared her breasts and asked, "Do you miss my rosebuds?" - just before holding up a tape recorder and saying, "Tell the judge that you want your wife to be taken care of."

Marshall's lawyers will not be allowed to mock Smith's claim that she was the light of her husband's life by playing a recording of Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life," as they did during their closing arguments in Texas.

And no one will hear from Smith, who not only wept and rambled incoherently on the stand, but also blurted out "screw you" under cross-examination.

Richland is good-humored about all the interest in his flamboyant client's trip to the stuffy high court, acknowledging an amusement factor in the "weird turn of events."

"We've had calls from People magazine to Nina Totenberg at NPR - the whole gamut. They love the juxtaposition," he said. "It's a kick."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/goss...p-334775c.html