How to Marry A Millionaire
When stripper-turned-international-sex-symbol Anna Nicole Smith of Mexia married 89-year-old mega-rich oilman J. Howard Marshall of Houston, it was a match that could only have been made in Texas.
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There is scant mention in the video that young Anna Nicole was shuttled between the homes of her mother and her aunt—and no mention that she began life as Vickie Lynn Hogan—but much is made of a gently orchestrated reunion between Anna Nicole and the father who abandoned her as a child. “He’s my daayaady,” she says, cozying up to the abashed man as she smiles kittenishly at the camera. You can’t help thinking how nicely she fits the Playboy mold: She appears to be a girl who is very pretty, not very smart, and who had worked very hard for everything she’s got. “The thing that makes me happiest is being able to do things for my friends and family, especially my son, Daniel,” she says sweetly. Sitting astride a horse in a pasture, she waves her arms beyond grazing cattle toward a hulking brick mansion in the distance. “And this is my ranch I’ve wanted all my life.” No one need know that the ranch was then and is now owned by J. Howard Marshall; that would change the story, complicate the picture. And Anna Nicole smith seems to know absolutely that American men want their sex symbols as pure and simple as the Texas prairie.
Indeed, her fans seemed more than willing to accept the fable Anna Nicole fashioned for herself the one that cast her as the prototypical innocent, the Wal-Mart cashier, the Red Lobster waitress, the woman whose merely average breasts grew to a DD cup in a miraculous blossoming after her pregnancy. She liked to tell reporters that she had quaked before the lens of the centerfold photographer. “I never used to even let my boyfriend have the lights on when we were in bed,” she told a writer for People. “I didn’t want him to see my body or anything.”
The truth is a somewhat seamier but far more credible story that reveals an asset Anna Nicole Smith is not widely known for: shrewdness. She had been a pretty but wild sort of girl in Mexia—“All the guys wanted to go out with her, all the girls were jealous of her,” remembers childhood friend Jo Lynn Aguirre. She was also headstrong and hungry; the young girl who had grown up with every kind of deprivation—physical, emotional, financial—had big but unrefined dreams. “She wanted to be a model, but she didn’t know how to do it,” Jo Lynn says. After dropping out of high school and moving to Houston with her six-month-old baby in 1986, Vickie Smith must have seen quickly that waiting tables at the Red Lobster in Humble was not going to cover her bills.
And so, in 1987, she took the path of so many pretty girls with no education but plenty of drive. She wandered into a men’s club called the Executive Suite, looking for a job as a dancer. The Executive Suite was then the most upscale topless club on the north side, one of those dimly lit, semi-plush places that create the aura of catering to businessmen, offering a limo to and from Houston Intercontinental Airport and various nearby hotels. The manager, a taciturn man with sleepy blue eyes named Terry Allen, sized up nineteen-year-old Vickie Smith and offered her a job. “I could tell she had a lot of potential—she was a pretty girl,” he says. A photographer who did some work for the club at the time recalls cruising the place for girls to photograph for the brochure. In the corner he spied a shy, delicate blond with a heart-shaped face. He asked her if she wanted her picture taken and, he remembers, “She went to stand up and then this immense girl was standing in front of me.” Vickie Smith was a full five feet eleven inches tall. “She definitely stood out among the girls,” he says. “She didn’t have the hard look.”
A year or so later, the photographer bumped into her again. “It’s like someone took her into a laboratory and recreated her,” he says of the woman who was then dancing under the names Nikki and Robin. “She was more sophisticated. Aloof. She was into the program; she was there for dollars and cents.” Onstage, she danced with particular zest to Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” but she learned quickly to save her best work for her well-paying regulars, tucking them into a corner and whispering baby talk while she writhed and wriggled for them alone. “She knew the business and she pushed it to the limit,” the photographer says.
Vickie Smith was at home in the men’s club subculture, with its late nights, big money, hard partying, and anything-goes sexuality. She was making $50 to $200 a day and, like so many girls who had come from nothing, she had trouble holding onto her cash. She enlisted club manager Allen’s help in saving for a breast augmentation—“That’s what she was lacking,” he says; “she needed tits in proportion to her body”—but she was forever taking back the money she’d asked him to put aside. Even so, she eventually found a way to improve her figure; Allen, among others, recalls at least two operations. On one visit to Mexia, she wowed her friend Jo Lynn. “She was absolutely gorgeous,” Jo Lynn says. “She had colored her hair champagne blond. Her body was perfect. She had filled out.”
As the eighties ended, Vickie made the rounds of other north side clubs, places with pseudo-glamorous names like Chez Paris, Puzzles, and Gigi’s. Her good-girl looks made her a natural for club ads—she posed in fake furs and rhinestones or lounging across a Porsche. But real upward mobility was tougher. Vickie tried her hand at the more stylish clubs in singles-dominated southwest Houston—Baby O’s and the Colorado Club—but those places liked their dancers thin. “We considered disciplining her for her plumpness,” says Robert Waters, the owner of Rick’s, Houston’s best-known men’s club. At Rick’s, she was judged good enough for the day shift but not for the nights, which paid better. That rejection may have been the luckiest break of her life, because one day in 1988, a frail, ancient man was sitting in the lunchtime audience. As she would later write in her bride’s book, she was onstage and he was lonely, and they started talking and became very good friends.
The word “oilman” calls to mind a jett rink type, someone coarse, unwashed, and uneducated who gets his way no matter what. By no stretch of the imagination does J. Howard Marshall II fit that bill. In fact, he began life closer to the reverse stereotype, the Yankee aristocrat. A distant relative of Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall, he was born in Pennsylvania in 1905, the son of Quakers, and addressed his elders as “thee” and “thou.” His grandfather had made a fortune in steel, selling out to Andrew Carnegie for around $18 million in 1902, but the family fortune dwindled during the Depression. Young Howard put himself through Haverford, a Quaker school known for academic excellence, and went on to the Yale School of Law, where he rose to the top of his class.
A childhood illness may have been the factor that most shaped Marshall’s psyche and directed him away from the staid life of a Yankee blue blood. He contracted typhoid fever when he was twelve. As he explains in his autobiography, Done in Oil, to be published in December by Texas A&M University Press, “The inflammation had virtually destroyed my left hip joint and about five inches of the bone from the ball and the socket. The doctors said I would never walk again. My mother, a very strong person, disagreed, and, after I’d been on crutches many months she took them away, burned them, and told me to walk. I staggered, stumbled, and fell—but the more I used my hip, the less it hurt.”
Though he would always walk with a limp, Marshall grew up supremely confident, essentially fearless, as fierce at soccer and tennis as he was in debate. He would evolve into a tiny, not unhandsome man with huge ears, a man with a booming voice when angry and with the wicked wit that short men sometimes develop. He was influential and rich enough, and he loved beautiful women and practical jokes. As a young man in Philadelphia, he resented a young deb’s snub so much that he spoiled her debut by printing up 1,500 extra invitations and handing them out on the street. In other words, fate made Howard Marshall wild enough and tough enough for the oil patch.
He landed there, in the Oklahoma fields, in 1931 while researching an article for the Yale Law Journal. It was the beginning of the great East Texas boom. Two years later, while assistant dean of the law school, the 28-year-old Marshall was asked by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to investigate the “hot oil” wars between Texas Railroad Commission regulators and the oil producers who exceeded the legal maximums. In his work Marshall stormed refineries, dodged bullets, and made the kinds of contacts, including the vastly rich geologist Everette DeGolyer, that facilitate later fortunes. He also found his life’s work, which was, essentially, devising ways to regulate what he called the “high-risk, speculative, rough and tumble” oil business without stifling it. Like many classic oilmen, he would become an expert at turning rules to his advantage.
And his country’s. During World War II, after a stint with Standard Oil in California, Marshall served as chief counsel to the Petroleum Administration for War, which ran the domestic oil industry. In 1944 he moved on to executive positions, helping Ashland Oil emerge from independent status to become a major company and, later, greatly expanding the properties and profits of Signal Oil and Gas. At Signal in California, in the fifties, he learned to take an ownership stake rather than a salary increase for his expertise in dealmaking, significantly adding to his wealth.
He was lured to Houston in 1961 to work on the various mergers that would create Allied Chemical. Local oilman Jay Grubb recalls that working with Marshall then was “a pretty fast run, very stimulating, tremendous fin. He’s a guy who worked very hard, made lots of deals, and figured if you made a lot of ’em, you’d make more good deals than bad.” Btu Marshall did not accumulate enormous wealth until he made a deal with Fred Koch in the early sixties. Koch, an old friend from his Washington days, had invented a highly efficient gasoline-refining process and owned what would become Koch Industries, the largest privately held energy firm in the country. The two men had invested in the Great Northern Oil Company’s Minnesota refinery in the fifties, and Marshall eventually folded his interest in it into Koch’s conglomerate, making himself a millionaire hundreds of times over. As he says in his autobiography, “It turned out to be the best deal I ever made.”
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