Congratulations, Anna, you have made it! Like Marilyn, you are an icon, irresistible to paparazzi around the globe. If at times your comet has seemed to wobble, look at the newstands this very weekend. Sweetie, you are everywhere.

But, Houston, the city of your birth, we have a problem. You have a putative mega-fortune but it's all snarled up in the US courts. Meanwhile, you may have taken the tragic Monroe mystique too far in the past couple of weeks, your son dying and all.

A little about that court battle for an instant. Husband number two was a Texas oil tycoon named J Howard Marshall. Worth $1.6bn, he showed up at the strip club where Smith worked in Mexia back in 1990. Four years later, the lovebirds married.

He was 89 and she was 26. To say Marshall's family disapproved is an understatement. Relations hardly improved when he died two years later and left her nothing, prompting her court battle for half his estate. Not on your life, the Marshalls said, and still do.

The 38-year-old redefines wacky. In three short weeks she has given birth to a baby girl whose paternity is uncertain. (Two men claim to be the father. ) She has lost a son, felled at the age of 20, seemingly by a cocktail of drugs. And she has gained . . . at least according to news reports yesterday . . . a new husband.

On 7 September, in Nassau, she gave birth to a girl named Dannie Lynn or Dannilynn, depending on which tabloid you read. With the baby's arrival, the paternity spat began. Smith's lawyer and confidant, Howard K Stern, went on CNN to fess up: he is the father. Funny, because the world had been thinking it was Smith's photographer exboyfriend Larry Birkhead. And indeed, it was only hours before he made the same claim.

Meanwhile, Smith had motherhood to master all over again. Three days after delivery, her son Daniel visited her at the Doctor's Hospital in Nassau. He coos over his new half-sister, sits on a bedside chair and apparently dozes off. Except that this young, apparently fit, man actually died.

Late last week the mystery of his death was more or less cleared up. While the coroners in the Bahamas have yet to render an official finding, a private pathologist hired by Smith, Cyril Wecht, said he had found three medications in her son's body and their combination had triggered a fatal heart problem. One of them was methadone, usually prescribed to heroin users to help them fight their addiction. But Smith, for the record, has no knowledge of her son ever using drugs.

Anyone would be distressed by such a combination of circumstances. But Smith's grasp of the conventions of mourning is flimsy and she promptly flogged the last photos of her and Daniel, taken in the hospital room, to a gossip magazine for a reported $650,000. Nice.

Is she at least wearing black and hunkering down with her new offspring? No, she is not.

Rather, she has been wearing white. On Friday came the astonishing news that last Thursday Smith took to a catamaran and, somewhere off Blackbeard's Cay, Nassau, got married on deck.

Husband number three is Howard K Stern. Her estranged mother, Virgie Hogan, offered the most pithy reaction. "I feel sickened. It's not right."

Doing what is right has never been Smith's priority. She does what makes headlines and money.

None of it would have happened without the deceased J Howard Marshall. How much she loved him is open to speculation and is at the core of the now decade-old probate wrangle. She was not with him when he died and according to reports she had dalliances with other men when she was his wife. But he loved her. His biggest gift, aside from many baubles valued at about $6m , was to support her modelling and acting aspirations, including paying for her mammoth enhancements.

Her break came in 1992, when she landed the cover of Playboymagazine. Thereafter she was chosen as the new face of the Guess? fashion house, displacing Claudia Schiffer. She even appeared in some movies, including Naked Gun 33 1/3.

With Marshall's demise in August 1995, her career nosedived as she faced the distraction of trying to get her hands on his money. She claimed her husband had verbally promised her half of his fortune and a Los Angeles court awarded her almost $450m in September 2000. But the oil baron's eldest son, Pierce Marshall, appealed and in July 2001 a Houston court vacated the judgement. Then a year later, she was given $88m, but that, too, was reversed by a court of appeals in 2004.

But Smith was still not done. Her lawyers took the case to the US Supreme Court in Washington. They asked the justices to confirm her right to have the entire case heard in the federal court system in the hope that the rulings of the lower courts, favouring the Marshalls, could still be overturned.

The appearance of an almost demure Smith at the Supreme Court hearing in February this year caused yet another tabloid brouhaha. Meanwhile, lawyers for the Bush administration had made their position known to the seven justices. Fans or not of Smith, they were anxious to protect the jurisdiction of the federal system and urged the court to find in her favour. And it did. The Supreme Court's ruling far from guarantees that Smith will get the fortune she seeks, but it gives her a fighting chance and keeps the case very much alive.

At some point, Smith must have realised that pending an eventual outcome of the case, fresh money had to be made. In the past few years she has had a lucrative stint as spokeswoman for a diet system called TrimSpa, a gig for which she shed 69lbs. In 2002, the E! Entertainment cable channel gave her her own reality television series. But so far-fetched were her antics that the show's audience quickly shrivelled and it became cult viewing only among those who think inane is amusing. In 2004, the series was dumped.

Few of us have experienced as much personal trauma as Smith. Surely, September 2006 was the moment for her to put family and soul before headlines. But that, apparently, just isn't her style and the Anna Nicole circus is still playing, whether we care to watch it or not.