FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- All the main players in the battle for Anna Nicole Smith's body are in a Broward County courthouse for the first time.

Judge Larry Seidlin ordered the former Playboy playmate's companion, Howard K. Stern, to appear in court Tuesday for a hearing to determine where Smith should be buried.

Hearing For Anna Nicole Smith's Body Under Way

Stern said he wants to bury the body in the Bahamas next to Smith's son, 20-year-old Daniel Smith, who died Sept. 10, 2006, from a lethal combination of drugs, but Virgie Arthur wants her daughter's body to be buried in her home state of Texas.

Stern told a judge in Fort Lauderdale Tuesday that he and Smith discussed burying her son in Los Angeles, but she was adamant about leaving him in the Bahamas. He died in the Bahamas in September. Stern said that Smith bought two burial plots in the Bahamas.

Without written proof of Smith's own wishes, the judge will be forced to hear testimony from those who claim to know what Smith wanted.

Attorneys for Arthur claim she is Smith's next of kin and therefore has the right to her body over Stern, who claims to be the executor of her will.

"They say he's an executor," said Stephen Tunstall, an attorney representing Arthur. "(But) you are not an executor or personal representative until a court appoints you, and the way you do that, your honor, is you present a will."

Smith's will, dated July 2001, was made public Friday.

The will said the estate should be held in trust for her late son. It does not say where Smith wanted to be buried, but it names Stern as her executor.

Arthur has been present during much of the legal wrangling, but Stern had been conspicuously absent. Stern also asked the judge on Tuesday if he could return to the Bahamas because of his concern for Smith's baby, Dannielynn, and the baby's safety.

Smith, who died Feb. 8 after collapsing at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla., was embalmed Saturday under a court order issued a day earlier.

Attorneys for photographer Larry Birkhead, who claims he's the father of Smith's baby girl, had fought to delay the embalming until an additional DNA sample was taken from her body.

The body remains in state at the medical examiner's facility.