Saturday, March 24, 2007

Anna Nicole Smith Diaries Fetch $500,000

Two diaries containing Anna Nicole Smith’s private thoughts on “sex, partying and her dead cat” have been sold to the highest bidder for more than $500,000, an auction house official said.

According to AP reports, “the buyer of both diaries, who wished to remain anonymous, was a German businessman who planned to sell the information in the diary to various media outlets and then probably will resell them by the end of the year,” said Thomas Riccio of Universal Rarities, the auction house that handled the sale.

Contradictory to these reports, other news agencies are claiming that the businessman has plans to turn the diaries into a book.

Whatever the case may be, Riccio believes that the German buyer received quite a steal, but then again, that’s his job—make the buyer happy, while pocketing a few bucks.

Riccio claimed, “The ‘soap opera value’ of the 15-year-old information could be worth more than $1 million alone, including the rights to publish photos of the pages which contain numerous misspellings.”

The associated press received some tidbits from the diaries, which contained Smith’s personal and intimate thoughts.

In the first of the two diaries, which sold for $285,000, Anna Nicole wrote, “I hate for men to want sex all the time. I hate sex.”

In the second diary, Smith “wrote about the death of her cat and the illness of her billionaire husband Howard Marshall, who died in 1995 at the age of 90.”

Another partner at Universal Rarities, Jeff Woolf, told press reporters that the demand for Anna Nicole Smith memorabilia has been overwhelming since her death.

“I don’t think I’ve had the luck of being in such a situation, where the timing was really that perfect as far as the peak of someone’s popularity in the news,” he said.