Anna Nicole wanted grave by son, says friend

ANNA NICOLE SMITH wanted to be buried in the Bahamas next to her son, her companion said yesterday as he made his court debut in the battle over the former model’s body.

Howard Stern said the 39-year-old used to dream of being interred near her heroine Marilyn Monroe in Los Angeles, but that it was prohibitively expensive.

After 20-year-old Daniel died in September, three days after she gave birth to daughter Dannielynn, a devastated Smith was allegedly determined that her grave should be near his.

Stern told the court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he is fighting Smith’s estranged mother Virgie Arthur over the tragic star’s remains, that she said at her son’s funeral: “If Daniel has to be buried, I want to be buried with him.”

She bought a double-plot for both of them in the Bahamas where she lived, he claimed.

Arthur wants to take Smith’s body back to her home state of Texas. The other character in the legal tangle is her ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead, who claims he, not Stern, is Dannielynn’s father.

“Emotionally she died when Daniel died,” Stern said.

“She initially would not accept that Daniel was gone. This went on for quite some time.”

Smith could not immediately decide where her son should be buried, Stern told Judge Larry Seidlin.

Stern explained that he and Smith became “more than friends” in recent years but she saw other men.

Initially he was merely her lawyer. “It was not exclusive,” Stern said of their relationship.

“It was something we did not disclose to other people. And she had other boyfriends in between.”

But he added: “She was my best friend, my lover, the mother of my daughter.

“She was everything to me, literally everything. My whole world.”