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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But the deal was not without its price. During the early eighties, when several of Koch’s brothers wanted to increase the company’s growth by taking it public, Marshall, who then controlled 8 percent of the stock, sided with family members who wanted to keep Koch Industries out of the hands of outsiders. His elder son and namesake, J. Howard Marshall III, who owned the stock with him, sided against his father. In order to keep the company private, the senior Marshall bought out his son for $8 million and began an estrangement that continues to this day. Howard Marshall was not one to let sentiment get in his way. Or so it appeared.
By the end of 1982, Marshall was 77 and in the position of many rich, successful men: He was an esteemed member of his particular community, a master of every aspect of the oil business “from exploration to marketing, from the courtroom to the government,” he writes, “and from the major corporations to the independents.” He had his own company, Marshall Petroleum, and continued to be involved in new ventures. But he had no one to enjoy his success with. His first marriage, to Eleanor Pierce, a college sweetheart who, he writes, “never really understood my driving passion for the oil business,” lasted thirty years but ended in divorce in 1961, the year he moved to Houston. His relations with his younger son, Pierce, were testy at best. He had envisioned a happy future with his second wife, Bettye Bohanon, whom he had married in 1961. Tiger, as he called her, had been a true partner who had shared his love of the oil business—she had worked alongside him throughout most of his first marriage—but now she was ill with Alzheimer’s. He was alone.
Then, as Marshall would explain in connection with a lawsuit filed in 1992, love came back into his life after what you might call a hard day in the oil patch. “I landed at the Houston Hobby Airport and driving home, I thought, well, maybe if I had a drink I’d feel better, so I stopped at some little place that I didn’t realize what I was getting into. It was a strip joint—or as the boys call it now—a titty bar. And I walked in and Lady was there. She was one of the strippers.”
Her real name was Dianne Walker—Jewel Dianne Walker—though most of her friends called her by her childhood nickname, Lady. She, too, was going through a particularly hard time. A native of Valdosta, Georgia, she had been in Houston for two years. In 1982 she was facing her fourth divorce—her husband had gone back home to Georgia, leaving her with two daughters and one son to support. She had worked as a secretary, a receptionist, a restaurant hostess, and a product demonstrator, and she wasn’t making anywhere near enough money. So she took the path of so many pretty women with no education but plenty of drive: She became a topless dancer at a place called the Chic Lounge, located on Hillcroft, just off the Southwest Freeway, near what was then the center of the city’s singles scene. She was 42, but you’d never have known it.
It is frequently said that photographs do not capture the beauty of Lady Walker. She had a Southern woman’s flawless complexion and delicate charm, that ability to make everyone, men in particular, want to be in her company. (She liked to tell people that she had had on-again, off-again affairs with Elvis Presley and Pete Rose.) She had a child’s sense of wonder, and when she spoke, her voice was cultured and soft as a caress. “More Georgia peach than Georgia cracker,” explains a fan. She was tall and more than amply endowed, with a tiny waist and legs that went on forever. Since Lady is remembered almost universally for having lived up to her name it is hard to imagine what, exactly, she did at the Chic Lounge that so completely seduced J. Howard Marshall II. But she clearly gave the performance of her career.
According to deposition testimony later given by both Marshall and Lady’s eldest daughter, Cerece Walker, Marshall paid for a private dance that night and returned at least twice. Within a few weeks he had bought Lady a Cadillac El Dorado. “She needed a car,” Cerece explained. And a new house, a model home they bought furnished. And a diamond ring. Howard Marshall, hard-bitten oilman, had fallen utterly, helplessly, totally into the realm of cliché. As he would later testify, “I was blinded by love. I did more or less what she asked me to do, and I don’t make any bones about it. I was a damn fool. But men in love do stupid thinks, and I was sure guilty.” How fully Lady Walker came to return Howard Marshall’s love is the subtext of a lawsuit set for trial this October; that she soaked him financially, with an enthusiasm and artistry bordering on brilliance, is indisputable.
Very soon after that fortuitous first meeting at the strip joint, Marshall did what he always did when he saw something he wanted. He cut a deal: his largesse for Lady’s company. His wife was seriously ill; to Marshall this meant that he could not be seen with another woman in the evening. Lunch, however, was a different matter. Howard and Lady soon established a pattern from which they barely deviated for almost ten years. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday he showed her off at Houston’s finest and flashiest restaurants, crossing the scarlet floral carpet at Tony’s, dining behind the ferns and white latticework at the Rivoli, or sipping coffee under the kind, rosy light at Maxim’s. And while Marshall resembled any number of successful elderly businessmen, Lady was, before long, unmistakable. By the end of 1983, he had given her close to half a million dollars, and she had used it to turn herself into the Lady of her fantasies. Conversation would stop whenever she entered the room in one of her ensembles—the enormous hats that matched the gloves that matched the scarves that matched the shoes—and the diamond that, of course, matched just about everything. “Lady would walk in with her bodyguard, all in white—white fur, white dress,” Betsy Parish recalls. “You could not help but stare at her. She could not quietly have lunch with anyone.”
Lunch would last about an hour and a half. Sometimes the couple dined alone, but more often with a jeweler bearing a new gift for Lady—created by Lady and paid for by Howard—or with Lady’s closest friend and business manager, a women whom both Lady and Howard had chosen for the job. On rare occasions, there were celebrities in attendance, a Roosevelt descendant, perhaps, or John Connally or the über-oilman himself, Oscar Wyatt. Usually, Marshall talked—geopolitics or oil prices, or his recollections of the Yalta conference, Hitler’s bunker, or of sharing a dirty joke with Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas—while his guests listened in awe. During the meal he would pass Lady a handful of blank checks under the table. The one time he passed her a few in plain sight, she was miffed. “Put it in my purse,” she scolded him. “Don’t just hand it across the table.”
He could barely stand to be away from her, and he constructed a fantasy of himself as her protector, the one person who stood between Lady and a poverty she had never experienced but that seemed, always, perilously imminent. “I hope you never need sell it to eat,” Marshall wrote in a note he enclosed with a gift of a gold coin that had come from Saudi Arabia. The American government had briefly minted the coins to pay King Saud for his oil, Marshall told Lady; the king had in turn passed them on to his mistresses. Marshall suggested that his own mistress checked the coin for teeth marks.
There were private jokes about “pin money” versus “jungle money” (spare change versus real deal money) and short mash notes scribbled on the back of travel itineraries, or, once, on the back of an invitation to a dinner the Mosbachers gave for the Bushes. The letters of those years run together to form a river of passion, its source a man whose passion, in earlier times, seems to have been directed elsewhere. “To love and be loved—to a man who has dedicated his life to his work, this is truly life greatest experience,” he wrote in one letter. In another: “In the years to come I hope we will sleep together in the same room, the same bed and wake up in the morning together. And whether your hair is combed and your face without makeup will not diminish my love for the whole lady by so much as a micromillimeter!” And still another: “Yesterday you seemed so distressed, discouraged and lonely. Remember my sweet you are never alone…Let my love hold you tight, lean on me, believe in me, I belong to you.”
A simple arrangement had become a psychological imperative. He would support Lady until his wife died, and then, according to his fantasy, they would marry—at dusk in the Taj Mahal. As he explained in a letter to Lady’s mother, “I would marry her this afternoon…if I were free to and she would have me. I cannot leave an ill wife to whom I have been married. I think it might kill her and I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. Perhaps a time will come. But it cannot be forced.” Sex seems to have been a less than essential part of the bargain: “If a little pat means a Paris hat,” they’d joke in almost Victorian fashion, “who am I to say nay?” In deposition testimony, Marshall cited at least three sexual encounters—one at the Houstonian resort, one in his office, and one in his home—but admitted he and Lady had ended their physical relationship by mutual consent when he was 83. Those close to Lady doubt that there was ever any sex at all. After all, she had a vested interest in appearing to be a lady—pure, delicate, in need to protection.
Lady’s private view of this arrangement is difficult to discern. What remains of her correspondence to Howard is mostly notes written in her florid script on the bottom of sentimental birthday cards. (“Dearest, I shipped the briefcase to Cerece from us knowing that you have a wonderful real elephant briefcase but I had to let you know I was thinking of you.”) She is remembered as a kind of person—she had a sunny wave for everyone, from society scribes to floor buffers at Saks—and her children and close friends say she was indeed in love with Marshall and planned to marry him. He may have been old, but he was entertaining and he knew how the world worked, and he was more than willing to share his knowledge and his contacts with her. Above all, he worshiped her. Even so, in her early forties, Lady was a comparatively young woman, and she made it clear that she intended to get on with her life as long as Marshall remained married. As Cerece Walker would later claim, “I think they were both getting what they wanted out of the relationship, and I think that when they were together that was what mattered, and then when they were apart, they had other things going on.”
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