The Anna Nicole TAPES
NY Daily News...4/30...GEORGE RUSH & JOANNA RUSH MOLLOY...
Three months after her death, Anna Nicole Smith is about to speak from the grave.
On its way to publishers this week is a pitch, based on hours of never-printed interviews, in which the doomed object of desire talks about everything from her alleged childhood sex abuse to bedroom memories of billionaire husband J. Howard Marshall.
"A lot of people are trying to tell her story," says writer Joyce Wagner. "This is Anna talking about who she was."
Flash back to June 1996. The troubled sex bomb had just gotten out of rehab at the Betty Ford Center. She'd put on weight. Her former nanny's $830,000 sexual harassment suit had forced Smith into bankruptcy.
Thinking she might score a book deal, Smith, then 28, began talking with Wagner, a veteran entertainment journalist. The two grew so close that Wagner became Smith's manager.
"She was very vulnerable," Wagner tells us. "I may have been the only person listening to her then. And it may have been one of the only times when she was totally sober."
The tapes could have a bearing on current events. Wagner played us one conversation in which Smith described running away from her mother, Virgie Arthur, who is now seeking custody of Smith's baby, Danielynn.
It was in the seventh grade. When she returned home, "[my mom] came straight upstairs. Without even asking, 'Why did you run away?,' she started beating the s- out of me. She started kicking me with her boot."
Smith even alleged that Arthur, a deputy sheriff, "hit me with a nightstick." (Arthur's attorney, Debra Rose, didn't return our call for comment by deadline.)
Smith also said someone had sexually abused her. "I don't want to talk about that now," says Wagner. "But this book will explain a lot."
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/r_m/2007/04/30/2007-04-30_the_anna_nicole_tapes.html
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