Playboy Magazine, enabler
Enabler of the Month:
Playboy Magazine, which featured Anna Nicole Smith as the May 2007 cover story, continuing the sort of enabling that resulted in her untimely demise. To their credit, she was described from the start as being “moody, very needy, expecting first-class treatment all the time.” According to Playboy’s former Director of Public Relations, Elizabeth Norris, the magazine didn’t do a publicity tour for her first pictorial because she sounded “silly.” Smith, in classic alcoholic fashion, was described as resentful for not getting to do the tour. The story also suggested the need to walk on eggshells when dealing with her (she was “furious” when the centerfold story made her sound like a glutton). Either of these behaviors would have been, to the addiction aware, initial indications of possible early-stage alcoholism. While reversing cause and effect (“here’s someone who wasn’t educated or sophisticated–how could she handle [all that fame]?”), the piece reported she was on prescription drugs early on and that she needed “a glass of wine to loosen up” early in the day, even asking for a second bottle of champagne while on prescription drugs. Examples of her drinking early on included downing a bottle of Cristal Champagne while her makeup artist got her ready and demanding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s while shooting a pictorial. The piece also noted that “her ego grew” and her behaviors became more mercurial over a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately, many young addicts will follow in her footsteps just as she did in Marilyn Monroe’s because of the glorification that Hugh Hefner himself did best to perpetuate: “Anna Nicole was one of the greats. And as long as we have her photos, she will not be forgotten…There’s a sort of immortality in the images she left behind.”
Dr. Khristine Eroshevich, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and “friend” of Anna Nicole Smith, under investigation for authorizing all 11 prescription medications–none in Smith’s name, with eight in her friend Howard K. Stern’s name–found in Smith’s hotel the day she died. More than 600 pills were missing from prescriptions that were less than five weeks old, including 303 chloral hydrate tablets prescribed five weeks before she died (averaging about nine per day) and 62 Valiums prescribed two weeks before she died (averaging over four per day). Both drugs are powerful sedative-hypnotics. The other drugs included a couple of anti-anxiety medications, three muscle relaxants, a migraine med, a diuretic and an antibiotic. The California Medical Board is also investigating another physician, Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, after reports surfaced that he may have prescribed methadone to Smith under an alias, which found its way to her son, Daniel Smith, and contributed to his death in 2006.