LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Anna Nicole Smith's private thoughts written in two diaries have been sold for more than $500,000 to a German businessman who planned to sell the information to the media, an auction house official said.
Also Friday, Frederic von Anhalt, the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, who says he fathered Smith's 6-month-old daughter, provided a DNA sample in the ongoing dispute about the paternity of the child. He said he wanted to raise the child if he was the father.
The late Playboy model's handwritten 1992 diary was sold for $282,500 and her 1994 diary went for $230,000 in an eBay auction Thursday, plus a 20 percent buyer's premium.
The buyer wished to remain anonymous but planned to sell the information to various media outlets, then resell the diaries by the end of the year, said Thomas Riccio, a partner in Universal Rarities, the Corona, California-based auction house that handled the sale.
The "soap opera value" of the dairies could be worth more than $1 million alone, including the rights to publish photos of the pages, Riccio said.
Smith, 39, was found dead February 8 in Hollywood, Florida. The cause of her death is under investigation, and authorities plan to release autopsy results Monday.
On Friday, von Anhalt, 59, said he was "almost sure the baby's mine," after having a cotton swab brushed along the inside of his mouth for the DNA test. He added he hopes to gain custody as soon as possible.
He says he carried on a decades-long affair with Smith. A judge in the Bahamas on Tuesday ordered a DNA test on the girl at the request of Smith's ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead, who has also claimed paternity. Howard K. Stern, Smith's companion, is listed as the father on the baby's birth certificate.
Immediately after von Anhalt gave his sample at an Identigene Lab, his lawyer, Edward Lee, called on Stern to do the same. Stern's lawyer, James Neavitt, did not immediately return a call for comment.
Smith's 1992 diary consists of 26 entries from January to August, and the 1994 one contains about 30 pages from January to July, Riccio said. The entries show a moody and complicated woman, Riccio said.
Among the entries was Smith discussing her husband, elderly Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, whom she married in 1994 and who died the next year.
"It was a okay day," she wrote of June 11, 1992. "I had lunch with Howard. Someone ran over my cat yesterday. I was real sad."
In a 1994 entry, she wrote about his illness. "My husbands very weak. Theres (sic) nothing I can do," she wrote. "I want each hour to comfort him with medicines and prayers."
The diaries were offered by a group of investors who bought them from a Los Angeles memorabilia shop owner, who bought them cheaply several years ago when Smith discarded them, Riccio said.
<:> will it ever end :##
Not likely.
Its like the energizer bunny.....Its keeps going and going and going and going and going......
yup on and on and on ::)
never stop as long as media prints the junk
Oh lord ::)
O+O