Anna Nicole Smith’s 1994 wedding to J. Howard Marshall captivated fans — and made the icon into a punchline. But 16 years later — and the subject of a new documentary,Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me— perhaps Smith was the one telling the joke.
In 1992, Smith’s extraordinary beauty launched her from small-town fried chicken server to worldwide fame, with fivePlayboycovers and as the face of Guess jeans. Smith then gained small parts in movies such asNaked Gun 33 1/3andThe Hudsucker Proxy.She smoldered from billboards, walked the red carpet atthe Oscarsand charmed late-night hosts likeJohnny CarsonandArsenio Hall.
But the whole time, she was hiding a secret: she was in a relationship.
Wearing a 22-carat diamond at age 26, Smith married an 89-year-old Houston oil tycoonJ. Howard Marshallin 1994. The groom, one of the richest men in America, was wheeled up the aisle behind his bride as “Tonight I Celebrate My Love For You” was played. Doves were released at the end in the empty chapel.
Mitchell Gerber/Corbis/VCG via Getty
“She was adaptable to get what she needed,” says Smith’s friendMissy Byrum, who insists Smith was single-minded in her devotion to providing a good life for her sonDaniel. “But she could be herself with Mr. Marshall and that made her happy.”
Smith — who is now the subject of the Netflix documentaryAnna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me— met Marshall while dancing at a Houston strip club in the late 1980s and went on their first date in 1991.
Byrum tells the story of their early romance this way: “Mr. Marshall’s mistress had just died. [The dancer] went and had a cosmetic procedure done that was supposed to be a routine cosmetic procedure. But it killed her for whatever reason. Lady Walker was her name.”
Byrum continues, “Mr. Marshall was very despondent. So his driver took him into [the strip club] Legs, which is where Nicki was working at the time and she met him. She could tell that he was despondent and everything.”
Anna Nicole Smith.DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Byrum adds, “She would have lunch with him and stuff like that — Red Lobster — but she was trying to keep him a secret from the press after she got her cover. She couldn’t disclose him to Guess or anybody atPlayboy.”
Marshall, Byrum says, paid for some of Smith’s surgeries. “I believe she had already had her third boob job at this point. But Mr. Marshall paid for a fourth. They put two implants in each breast. That’s why they were so big.” Eventually Marshall would buy Smith a car, diamonds and a house in Houston where she and Daniel could live.
Smith’s uncle George Beall says of his niece (who was born Vickie Lynn Hogan): “She really loved him! The way he took care of her and looked out for her. She cared about him a lot. She didn’t want people to think that she was after his money. Aunt Kay and I both said to Vickie Lynn, ‘If you love him, to heck with what people think!'”
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“It frightened her,” Lewis says. “She never told me who it was. She said, ‘Ashley, people, they follow me everywhere I go. Dinner, my friends, they’re right with me.'”
She would get home and report to Lewis, “I lost them. I took lots of cuts and corners.”
The men were possibly working for Marshall, Byrum says, who claims she and Smith would “hide in hotels where Mr. Marshall couldn’t find us and do our crack smoking.”
Byrum — whohad her own intimate relationship and informally marriedthe pin-up in a backyard ceremony in 1993 — says Smith truly loved Marshall, but adds, “she needed more attention than any one person could give her.”
According to Lewis, “Anna spent her life in pursuit of happily ever after.”
The court battle took years and included a slew of mudslinging from both sides, with Smith evenaccusing Pierce of wanting his father deadduring one heated May 1998 testimony. That summer, Smith teamed up with Marshall’s disinherited older son Howard to sue Pierce, alleging that Pierceconspired for 20 yearsto take all of his father’s fortune for himself. Partly because of complications arising from Smithfiling for bankruptcyin 1996, different judgesissued contraryrulings, with Smith winning $474 million, then slashing that to $88 million. The case was appealed all the way to the federal Supreme Court, which ruled in Smith’s favor.
Pierce died in June 2006 at age 67 from an infection before he could successfully prosecute the case further, but his wife, Elaine, continued on behalf of his estate, even afterSmith’s deathfrom an accidental overdosein 2007. In 2010, it was finally ruled that Smith’s estate was not entitled to any money from Marshall’s estate.
source: people.com
