Last week, the National Enquirer ran pictures it claimed were "photo re-creations" of a dead Anna Nicole Smith stretched out on the slab. Now, a source close to the Enquirer has told the New York Post that, in fact, the photos were real, and the whole "re-creation" story was cooked up to keep the mortuary worker who conspired with the Enquirer's photographer from getting canned. The unnamed worker was allegedly paid a great deal of money to remove Smith's not-yet-embalmed body from a refrigerated drawer and allow the photog to snap his pics.
The thing about this story is that it doesn't really matter. It's the Enquirer - most people are going to assume the pictures are fake even if they are real. And the kind of flip-flop-wearing fat-asses who buy the magazine probably can't read anyway, so all they see are the pictures of what looks like Anna Nicole dead - no explanation would mean a damn thing to these people anyway. What's sort of odd is that the Enquirer would bother shelling out a ton of money to get real pictures in the first place, when they probably could just make fakes and get away with it. I mean, it's the same ploy one way or the other - you run the teaser on the front-page, not bothering to mention that the pictures are fake, then the reader pages to the story and you lay on them that the photos are re-creations. Seems to me you do this whether the pictures are real or not - so why not save the expense, and the potential for someone at the mortuary to get in trouble (if you really are concerned about that), and just fake them? Can it actually be more expensive to hire a decent photoshop artist than pay off some unethical mortuary employee? Maybe it is. Maybe they saved money by getting the real pictures. Still, seems like kind of a waste of good publicity - to have real pictures of Anna Nicole dead and say they're fake. But, like I said before, it's the Enquirer - no one would believe they were real anyway.
By the way, this picture of Howard K. Stern partying it up with Anna's body after the funeral? Totally real:
