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LOS ANGELES - The battle for Anna Nicole Smith's baby resumed today with a judge refusing to immediately order a paternity test for her former companion, Howard K. Stern, to help determine which of three men fathered the late Playboy model's 6-month-old daughter.
Ten days after a separate legal fight finally resulted in Smith's burial in the Bahamas, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider left open the possibility that Stern may be asked for a DNA sample later.
Photographer Larry Birkhead, a former Smith boyfriend, had asked that Stern be ordered to come to California for a paternity test but Schnider said Birkhead's attorneys did not follow proper procedure in presenting their motion. Schnider will hold another hearing on the issue at the end of March.
Stern is listed as the father on baby Dannielynn's birth certificate but Birkhead was optimistic about his own claim of paternity.
"I've been putting a nursery together so I'm smiling," he told reporters. "I'm in a good mood.
"There's one way to end it. I'm prepared to take the test. I've always been prepared to take the test. If everybody wants to take the test and get it over with and then we have no problem."
Stern and the baby are both in the Bahamas, where they had been living with Smith before her death last month.
Birkhead has been fighting Stern for paternity since Dannielynn was born in September. The child stands to become a multimillionaire if Smith's estate wins a long-running battle to inherit from her late oil tycoon husband.
After Smith's surprising and still unexplained death at a Florida casino hotel on February 8, Frederic von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, also filed legal papers claiming he is the father.
Smith's lawyer, Ronald Rale, who is representing her interests in the case, said the lawyers should bow out and let Birkhead and Stern come to an agreement.
"I think these guys can talk," Rale told reporters after Tuesday's hearing. "I think they can get along."
Stern, Birkhead and Smith's estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, fought for three weeks in the Florida courts over the right to decide where the tabloid star should be buried.
Smith was finally buried on March 2 in the Bahamas, next to her son Daniel, who also died an unexpected death in September, days after Dannielynn was born.
- REUTERS/Nielsen
