New Owner to 'Flip' Anna Nicole Diaries

Bought just weeks ago, memoirs may sell for a loss

The German businessman who bought the diaries of Anna Nicole Smith last month must have the heart of a Southern California real estate speculator. Just weeks after purchasing the journals at auction, the anonymous new owner is looking to sell them. If they were prime Westside property (or even a bungalow in Van Nuys), such a flip would have meant a handsome profit a year or two ago. Not so today - with real estate and, it seems, with the late model's diaries.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting this weekend that the journals are going on the auction block again, with the new owner likely to lose money on the deal. The paper reports that the new owner has just consigned them to Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, with their auction scheduled for April 14-15. Heritage spokesman Doug Nortime told The Times and The Associated Press that the pre-auction value of the diaries is between $50,000 and $100,000, but could sell for more.

Considering the current owner paid over $500,000 for the journals on eBay just weeks ago, he's likely going to lose a bundle on his parlay.

Why? Turns out the private life of Vickie Lynn Hogan was filled with hearthache, stress, anxiety and all the other difficult emotions regular folks experience, and the life of a "regular person" is not what the current owners wanted when they purchased the memoirs of Hogan's alter ego, Anna Nicole Smith.

When the anonymous buyer - Norwine tells The Times he was a member of a "German conglomerate" - bought the diaries, his stated intent was to parcel out the hoped-for juicy, salacious excerpts to news organizations, publishers, movie studios and others with an interest in the life of the celebrity, who died Feb. 8 in Florida. Yet once the contents had been reviewed, the owners decided to sell them off to collectors or fans.

The AP got an exclusive look inside the memoirs on Thursday. It seems that the public perception that Smith led a sexed-up private life full of the kind of sordid debauchery that made her public persona a tabloid fixture was about as fake as her comic book cleavage. One diary entry reads: "I hate for men to want sex all the time. I hate sexy anyway..."

Another entry reads: "I've been really stressed out lately and depressed and I can't quit eating. I feel like a pig."

Though such private declarations would seem to add a human dimension to the tabloid life of the former model, they're not the kind of stuff for which Rupert Murdoch's going to shell out large.

So at least one speculator is going to lose big in his attempt to profiteer off Anna Nicole Smith. Somewhere, the late Vickie Lynn Hogan has got to be smiling.

(Pictured: An AP phot of a diary entry in which Smith laments the ill health of her wealthy octageneriam husband, J. Howard Marshal.)

As a post-script, please note that it is now our understanding that the current owners of the Anna Nicole memoirs will retain the rights to them. This means that whomever buys them at auction next week will not be able to use the contents for any purpose without permission from the current owners. Therefore, their loss in apparent face value may well be recouped by royalties earned by those using the information contained in the diaries.