Sandra Taylor says her friendship with Anna Nicole Smith helped transform her life and led to her Playboy modelling career. After abandoning plans to study mathematics following her father’s sudden death, Taylor pursued modelling and became a prominent Playboy cover girl during the 1990s.

Taylor met Smith through shared make-up artists and offered her a place to stay when she first arrived in Los Angeles. Smith later encouraged Taylor to meet Playboy representatives, while Taylor says Hugh Hefner subsequently described her as the magazine’s “most sexy model”; she also remembers Smith as kind and devoted to her son, and Hefner as influential in her life.