Battle over body of Anna Nicole Smith rages on

The legal dispute over the final resting place of Anna Nicole Smith continued in a Florida court on Wednesday.

Broward County's chief medical examiner, Joshua Perper, repeated a warning that the former Playboy playmate's body was decomposing quicker than expected and that little time remains before it cannot be given a public viewing for memorial services.

Judge Larry Seidlin promised a ruling by Friday.

Smith's estranged mother Virgie Arthur took the stand on Wednesday, sometimes giving comical answers wanting to "plead the Fifth [Amendment]" when asked her age and breaking down crying at other points.

The Florida hearing is just one legal battle left as part of Smith's legacy. Arthur is fighting to bury her daughter in their native Texas. She also called on Wednesday for the exhumation and reburial of Smith's recently deceased son Daniel in Texas as well.

While visiting his mother in the Bahamas after she gave birth to an infant girl last September, Daniel Smith died of what were apparently drug-related causes.

Smith's boyfriend, lawyer Howard K. Stern, is seeking to bury her in the Bahamas, alongside Daniel. He testified on Tuesday that at her son's funeral there last fall, Smith had insisted on being laid to rest next to him.

Both Arthur and Stern also admitted in their testimony that Smith had once expressed a desire to be buried in California, near her idol Marilyn Monroe.

On the West Coast, more legal wrangling

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, a California judge is presiding over a paternity lawsuit regarding Smith's infant daughter Dannielynn.

Stern is listed on her birth certificate as the baby's father, but Smith's former boyfriend Larry Birkhead has also claimed paternity.

Furthermore, Prince Frederick von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, says he is the father, claiming to have been maintaining an affair with Smith for a decade.

Smith rose to fame in the 1990s as a Guess jeans model and Playboy centerfold, as well as for her relationship with Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, who was 89 when they married in 1994.

He died in 1995 and she had been fighting his family over the estimated $500 million US Marshall estate in the decade since.