Newsmaker

Zsa Zsa's husband: I might be Smith baby's dad

(AP)
Updated: 2007-02-10 11:23

Los Angeles - The husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor said Friday that he had a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and may be her infant daughter's father.

 

Anna Nicole Smith is shown with her attorney Howard K. Stern and Smith's newborn daughter Dannielynn Hope at home in the Bahamas in this publicity photo released to Reuters by 'Entertainment Tonight' television program November 2, 2006.  [Reuters]

The claim by Prince Frederick von Anhalt comes amid a paternity suit over Smith's 5-month-old daughter, Dannielynn. The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as attorney Howard K. Stern, but former Smith boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father.

"If you go back from September, she wasn't with one of those guys, she was with me," von Anhalt said Friday.

He said he would file a lawsuit if Dannielynn is turned over to Stern or Birkhead.

Von Anhalt, 59, and Gabor, 90, have been married for more than 20 years.

Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor is shown with her eighth husband, Prince Frederick von Anhalt of Munich, in this file photo taken on their wedding day in Los Angeles, August 15, 1986. Von Anhalt had a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and may be her daughter's father, he said. [AP Photo]

Gabor, a onetime sex symbol and star of such 1950s films as "Moulin Rouge" and "Queen of Outer Space," has been in declining health in recent years and suffered a stroke in 2005. She was partially paralyzed in a car crash in 2002.

Von Anhalt, who is Gabor's eighth husband, said he and Smith met in the 1990s when Smith was still married to elderly oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II. He said Smith approached him and Gabor at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

"She was a very big fan of Zsa Zsa and wanted to be like Zsa Zsa," he said. "She wanted to be a princess."

Officials transport a body reported to be that of Anna Nicole Smith by the NBC television network into the Broward County Medical Examiner's office in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida in this television framegrab shot February 8, 2007. [Reuters]

He said the two started an affair soon after, meeting over the years in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. For much of that time, he said, Smith urged him to make her a princess like his wife.

But short of divorcing the actress, he said the only solution would have been adopting Smith. Von Anhalt said he did consider that and even filled out adoption papers, but Gabor refused to sign them.

He said he never admitted the affair to his wife, but that he's sure she knows. She would sometimes answer the phone when Smith called him, von Anhalt said.

"She was a very sexy woman," von Anhalt said. "To have an affair with her is the top, you know."

Von Anhalt's royal credentials have been the cause of speculation over the years. According to stories in the British press, he was born Robert Lichtenberg, the son of a German policeman, and bought his title after being adopted as an adult by a bankrupt daughter-in-law of the last kaiser.