Читать книгу Texas Confidential - Michael Varhola - Страница 22

BEFORE SHE WAS A CELEBRITY OF questionable virtue, Texas native Anna Nicole Smith was a woman of no apparent virtue at all.

Born Vickie Lynn Hogan in November 1967 and raised by various combinations of relatives between Houston and the little east Texas town of Mexia, Smith was pretty much doomed to a life of sordid obscurity from an early age. She dropped out of high school her sophomore year, ended up working at a chicken restaurant in Mexia, and, in 1985 at age seventeen, married sixteen-year-old fry cook, Billy Wayne Smith, and had a child by him (and briefly changed her name to Nikki Hart).

Within a couple of years, Smith left her child lover for Houston where, after a handful of other menial jobs, she started dancing at Gigi’s, a local strip club. She also began to parlay her fleshy charms into a career as a model of sorts (Guess, Lane Bryant), ostensible sex symbol, questionable actress, and decidedly unwholesome media personality, gaining national attention when she appeared in Playboy in 1992 (where she was identified as Vickie Smith) and became its Playmate of the Year in 1993. During this time Smith began trying to emphasize her similarity to bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield (both of whom died young and in tragic circumstances, as would Smith).

New York magazine summed up Anna Nicole Smith pretty succinctly when it made her the cover girl of its August 22, 1994 issue.

In October 1991, while stripping at Gigi’s (now known as Pleasures), Smith also met drooling old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, a man more than sixty-two years her senior who courted, lavished gifts upon, and repeatedly proposed to her.

Marshall’s sons, unable to curtail their father’s skirt-chasing during his life, were certainly not willing to give any deference to the wearers of those skirts after his death.

With an innate understanding for the needs of social mobility, Smith responded to these advances by divorcing her estranged husband and accepting the eighty-nine-year-old Marshall’s withered hand in marriage. From the start, people with small, dirty minds—along with nearly everyone else, for that matter—said the young sex worker had married the mogul for his money, but she denied this and protested that it was a case of true love.

Smith and the octogenarian Marshall never actually lived together during their thirteen months of highly publicized marriage but, upon his death in August 1995, she immediately sought half of his $1.6 billion estate, which she said her husband had verbally promised her in exchange for marrying him.

Marshall’s sons, E. Pierce Marshall and James Howard Marshall III, unable to curtail their father’s skirt-chasing during his life, were certainly not willing to give any deference to the wearers of those skirts after his death, and a lengthy and sordid legal battle ensued almost immediately. It went on for the rest of Smith’s life and involved various judgments for and against her and jurisdictional disputes between Texas, California, and federal courts. And, in a strange twist that no one could have predicted when it was filed, Marshall v. Marshall actually reached the U.S. Supreme Court over a question of federal jurisdiction.

Difficulties followed Smith throughout the rest of her life, to include having to file for bankruptcy as a result of an $850,000 judgment against her for sexually harassing an employee; the tragic drug-overdose death of her son, Daniel, in September 2006; and the scandal over the inappropriate means by which a friend who was an official for the government of the Bahamas had obtained citizenship for her in his country.

There was also the paternity dispute and custody battle over her daughter, Dannielynn, who was born the same month her son died. Fatherhood was variously attributed to or claimed by photographer Larry Birkhead, attorney Howard K. Stern, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, former bodyguard Alexander Denk, or a frozen sample of sperm collected from Marshall prior to his death.

These travails, Smith’s increasingly bizarre behavior, and her dramatic weight gain brought unwanted media attention, ridicule, and stress to Smith, particularly over what would be the last six months of her life.

Probably living on borrowed time from the start, Smith died February 8, 2007, nine months short of her fortieth birthday, from an overdose of nearly a dozen prescription drugs—several of them sedatives—at a hotel in Hollywood, Florida. What did not die with her, however, was the battle over her billionaire former husband’s estate, which was still not resolved at the time of her death. E. Pierce Marshall died as well before it could be resolved, and at this writing it continues on behalf of his widow and Smith’s young daughter.