Larry Birkhead revealed the last thing he told Anna Nicole Smith before her tragic death.
“The last conversation I had with her was me pretty much wooing her back and telling her she was in trouble,” Birkhead, 53, said on the Thursday, March 26, episode of Bunnie Xo’s “Dumb Blonde” podcast. “I don’t know that I had a feeling that she was going to be in trouble. I said, ‘If you love that baby, you better get out of there.’”
Birkhead met Smith while she filmed her reality show, The Anna Nicole Show. The model and the photographer quietly dated. Their relationship became public knowledge after Smith gave birth to her and Birkhead’s daughter Dannielynn in September 2006.
When Smith announced her pregnancy, she did not reveal that Birkhead was the father of her daughter. (He was later determined to be the father via a publicized paternity test.)
After announcing her pregnancy, Smith relocated to The Bahamas where she gave birth to her daughter. Birkhead shared on Thursday that he attempted to convince her to come back to the States.
“I didn’t think it was going to end great. Maybe a part of me was trying to scare her back home too in all honesty,” he continued. “But there were plans we were going to meet up at some point when she came home.”
Smith, who left Dannielynn in the Bahamas, briefly returned for a mediation hearing for the case of her late husband J. Howard Marshall’s estate. (Smith was not listed in Marshall’s will but claimed he verbally promised half of his estate upon his death.)
Birkhead claimed that he and Smith’s plans to reunite did not work out and led to more disagreements between the pair. Despite not being on the best of terms during her final moments, Birkhead shared that he and Smith’s bond was strong.
“She cut so many people off in her life and just walked away from them and that was it. There was something that we had that wasn’t always great but it was something that connected us,” he reflected. “It didn’t matter if she was wearing a wedding dress and saying she was marrying somebody else. It didn’t matter what else was going on. She did not say ‘Get lost.’ Numbers changed, emails, all this stuff that was happening … she still found a way to call me in, contact and communicate with me.”
Five months after welcoming her daughter and the death of her son Daniel, Smith was found unresponsive in a hotel room in Hollywood, Florida. She was taken to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. Smith was 39. Her cause of death was an accidental drug overdose.
