Time Running Out On Anna Nicole Hearing

Medical Examiner Says Judge Must Decide This Week Who Gets Body, Before It Deteriorates

(CBS/AP)  A coroner said Tuesday that despite being embalmed, Anna Nicole Smith's body is deteriorating "much faster than expected."

During a hearing on what to do with her remains, Broward County Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua Perper said via telephone that embalmers who embalmed Smith's body this weekend advised the viewing should be done this week.

"A delay in the next week might create a problem and the face of the deceased might show color changes," Perper said.

Smith's companion, Howard K. Stern, was on the witness stand when Perper's call interrupted the hearing. Stern looked visibly upset, lowering his head on his clasped hands as Perper's voice was heard in the court over a speaker phone.

Stern and Smith's estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, are in a Florida court arguing what to do with her remains, while another hearing in California deals with questions about the paternity of the former centerfold's infant daughter.

The hearing finished for the day by 5:00 p.m. and resumes Wednesday morning.

Under direct testimony Tuesday afternoon, Stern said he and Smith chose a commitment ceremony over a legal wedding because he was concerned about what people would think.

"Anna wanted our marriage to be a legal marriage," Stern said. "I was concerned that people would think that I was making a run for her money."

After the mysterious death of Smith's 20-year-old son, Stern was concerned that if he married Smith, people would think they did it so they wouldn't have to testify against one another in court.

2"Upon the advice of counsel, we didn't want to give any perception of wrongdoing," said Stern. "A coroner early on said the death was under suspicious circumstances, but later retracted that."

Stern said he later found out that his lawyer gave him the wrong advice, because under Bahamian law a husband and wife would still have to testify because Daniel's death happened before their marriage.

Stern's attorney also played raw footage of an interview with Stern and Smith from "Entertainment Tonight." In the October interview, Smith said she was upset that her mother publicly accused her and Stern of killing Daniel.

"First of all she's not my mother, she's my birth mother," Smith said. "Second of all she doesn't know me and she doesn't know my son. She hasn't seen my son since probably he was five years old."

Smith also said that she would never allow her mother near her daughter, Dannielynn. "I would never speak to her again, ever," she said. "She won't touch my child."

According to Stern, Anna Nicole Smith wanted to be buried next to her son in the Bahamas, where she lived. He said she was adamant about burying her 20-year-old son, Daniel Smith, in the Bahamas, where he died just days after Smith's daughter was born there in September.

"Anna and Daniel were inseparable. Daniel was without question the most important person in Anna's life," Stern told Circuit Judge Larry Seidlin.

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Anna Nicole Smith: The Latest Photos

Photos: Anna Nicole Smith

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At Daniel's funeral, "she said 'if Daniel has to be buried, I want to be buried with him,'" Stern said.

Stern said that her son's death in September forever changed Smith. "From the day Daniel died, in a lot of ways, Anna was never the same … she initially would not accept that Daniel was gone," he said.

Without written proof of Smith's own wishes, Seidlin is forced to hear testimony from those who claim to know what Smith wanted.

3Stern said that Smith had always talked about dying young and that, before her son's death in September, she had wanted to be buried near Marilyn Monroe.

"She was pretty much my whole world," Stern said of the model, with whom he said he had a working and intimate relationship. "She was my best friend, my love, the mother of my daughter … my world."

Stern said he and Smith began an intimate relationship in 2000 but that it was not exclusive.

Arthur wants Smith brought home to her native Texas, insisting that despite their estrangement, she has the right to bury her own daughter, not a man to whom Smith wasn't even married.

In Los Angeles, Stern's lawyers also were arguing the paternity issue Tuesday with attorneys for Smith's ex-companion, Larry Birkhead, who says he fathered the girl. That hearing was closed to the public.

Frederic von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, has filed a separate paternity challenge to Stern's claim.

At the Florida hearing, Seidlin first suggested to lawyers that he needed to know who the father was in order to decide the burial issue.

The judge asked Stern, to write the infant's name on a white poster board to illustrate his point. "In the center of this maze is Dannielynn," Seidlin said. He asked the court to consider, "What is in her best interests?"

Ron Rale, an attorney for Smith who also is representing Stern in his paternity case, said the baby's paternity is irrelevant to the burial question.

"You want to have your cake and eat it," Seidlin shot back.

But after a brief private conference with all sides, he said he was going to try to answer the burial question without knowing that.

"It would help the court if I knew who the natural father is to speak on behalf of Dannielynn," Seidlin said. "Right now, the moment's not right."

Since Smith's death Feb. 8 in Florida, the baby has been living with Stern in the Bahamas. The cause of Smith's death is under investigation. She was 39.

Smith was the widow of Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, whom she married in 1994 when he was 89 and she was 26. She had been fighting his family over his estimated $500 million fortune since his death in 1995.