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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Mostly, Lady shopped. Marshall may have been a multimillionaire, but in 1984 alone she went through $1.2 million of his fortune. “I think a lot of people feel another person inside, but they’re afraid to show it,” she told a Post fashion reporter in 1990. “I don’t mind showing that side. When other women were wearing little ear bobs, I searched forever for a pair of gold hoops. I’ve always been flashy wherever I could flash.” Marshall’s money allowed her to indulge her fantasies in ways that few people could even imagine. A jeweler friend of Cerece’s was basically put on retainer. Marshall made it clear that he did not want to be bothered with any details; Lady was simply to have anything she wanted. Very soon, he began paying $25,000 a month on an account that quickly soared into six figures. She bought, among many other things, a pair of emerald-and-diamond earrings for $50,000. Platinum-an-diamond earrings for $130,000. A $128,000 diamond that was delivered to her in Valdosta. Enough never seemed to be enough. Lady even had the jeweler create fourteen-karat-gold false fingernails, at $5 apiece.
To go with her jewels, Lady picked up Bob Mackie couture gowns at Saks, shopped at Liberace’s furrier in Vegas (she spruced up one fox pelt by adding rhinestone eyes), bought Rolls-Royces and Jaguars that matched her clothes. Marshall bought her a mini-manse overlooking a golf course in Sugar Creek, where she had virtually everything inside and out painted white or gold. Her name was spelled out in tiles on the bottom of the swimming pool, which had been designed by the same artist who did Liberace’s. The man who paid for all this was never allowed to visit. “When I can set foot in his house as Mrs. Marshall, he can set foot in mine,” she liked to say.
It wasn’t just Lady that Marshall supported. “Your family is my family,” he wrote her, and she took him at his word. He helped pay her son’s tuition at Southern Methodist University, and though Lady’s parents sometimes shared her home, he bought property for them in Georgia. Cerece’s wedding in 1987 became, for Lady, a personal triumph. She had always believed that her own early marriage—the proverbial cheerleader-football star union—had been destroyed by in-laws who had seen her as socially inferior; now she could return to Valdosta victorious and rub the whole town’s nose in her wealth. “It was the biggest bash the town had ever seen,” recalls a guest. “She went home in a Rolls-Royce.”
Houston was more forgiving. Few society reporters could resist her flamboyance; except for a handful of River Oaks matrons, no one really cared where her money had come from. But she was still a mistress: Outside of her family, a few close friends, and a growing list of tradespeople, she was alone. And Lady hated to be alone. So on night she was away from Howard, and there were many, she took to hitting singles bars. He may not have needed sex, but she did.
Lady had a lover named Dale Habada when Marshall came on the scene. But by 1987, she had become more refined under Marshall’s tutelage, and she sent Habada packing. “He liked going to strip clubs…She had gotten more social,” Cerece explained. In 1988, however, Lady found another Dale she could not resist. He was Dale Clem, a hunky thirtyish carpenter-shrimper she had met at a fifties-music dance club called Studebaker’s and had hired, with Howard’s approval, as her bodyguard. Testifying in his deposition, Clem recalled Lady’s attire at his job interview. “She was dressed to go out. She was in a pair of leather turquoise pants, a gold top, big earrings, jewelry, ready to go paint the town, I reckon,” he said. “It’s not every day you run into somebody like Lady was, how she acted and carried on. If you’re from a little town of Baytown—it sort of burns your brain a little bit with it.”
She spun her own fantasy for Clem, telling him her money had come from a divorce settlement: The father of the Santa Fe Railroad heir she had married had decided she “deserved something.” Marshall, she explained, was a business manager, a friend. When she and Clem became lovers, Lady turned the younger man into a kind of mirror image of herself. She asked him to give up other jobs to devote himself exclusively to her, and he obliged; there were trips to Las Vegas, fur coats (“Dadgum, what is the name of that place?” he testified, trying to recall a store. “It’s on Post Oak…”), and, of course, diamonds. A Mercedes-emblem ring. A Cadillac-emblem ring. Whenever Clem’s back pocket was empty of cash, she replenished it. How much Howard Marshall knew about the two Dales—“live-ins,” as he would later call them—is now at the center of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. But at the time, he did not make an issue of it. His lunches with Lady continued unabated. She was a willing student, as hungry to learn about oil deals as Paris fashions. As her enthusiasm grew, Marshall signed over more and more of his holdings to her. Sometimes he gave her pieces of his wife’s jewelry; sometimes he offered stocks, bonds, or real estate. He made her the beneficiary of his life insurance policy; he created an oil company, Colesseum, for her. It was as if he could not funnel her money fast enough. “Dear Pierce,” he wrote in a letter he did not show his son until 1991, revealing to him Lady’s existence in a spidery scrawl, “If I predecease you as a father who loves you, I charge you to take care of her in any way she may need, financially and in all ways…I am completely obligated to take care of her!”
But by 1991, Lady had grown moody; she fought uncharacteristically with her family and close friends, and sought psychiatric help. There had been fights with Howard over gift taxes—when Pierce Marshall discovered that his father had never reported the millions he had given Lady in their nine-year relationship, Pierce insisted that he comply with the law, which requires reporting gifts of more than $10,000 a year. Lady was left liable for millions in unpaid taxes. “I found it more than a little shocking that her minimum standard of living required one hundred thousand dollars a month,” Pierce later testified in a deposition. Without telling Lady, Howard briefly closed a checking account he had established for her, causing her to bounce checks all over town. They argued. Sometimes she would retreat to the first house Marshall had bought her back in the old, less complicated days and sit for hours, just listening to the rain on the patio’s tin roof. Maybe she was losing faith that she would ever be the oilman’s wife. Or maybe, as Dale Clem figured, she was just afraid of growing old. It could have been that simple: Lady scheduled a face life for the beginning of July.
For some reason, she rewrote her will the night before the operation, on the back of some pink message slips she put in a vase in her daughter’s room. She left the bulk of her estate to her children. “My personal jewelry divided between my girls Cerece and Starr and the furs likewise,” she wrote, “which are in James Furlan furriers [along with a] sable coat…and a [full-length] black mink coat and full-length white mink coat at Roy La Noble Furrier at Dunes hotel, Las Vegas.” To Dale Clem she left a truck, $30,000, a bracelet with his name in diamonds, and Fancy, their poodle. “I leave all my love to you and will meet you sooner than you know,” she concluded. At 51, she died on the operating table of a congenital brain defect, according to autopsy reports. In the Post obituary she was described as a “socialite.”
Marshall paid for the $52,000 funeral, which included a copper coffin—similar to Elvis’—that was so heavy it had to be driven rather than flown to Georgia. The hearse was trailed by an empty limousine bearing a single red rose. “Lady Dianne Walker,” Marshall wrote in a note he sent to the funeral on July 11, “We both loved poetry and song. Wherever you are I hope you can hear me say once again, ‘I could not love thee half so much, loved I not honor more.’ Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I never loved thee casually. Till we meet again in the next world, you own man, now and forever, Howard.”
The next few months were difficult for Marshall. In late July, he checked into the country’s most exclusive men’s retreat, the Bohemian Grove, north of San Francisco, for a few days’ rest. He returned home only to receive another shock when he learned the contents of Lady’s will. That led to a very unpleasant lunch with Dale Clem at the River Oaks Country Club. Amid the delicate clinking of silverware and the obliviousness of venerable bank presidents and corporate lawyers, Clem spelled out for Marshall his sex life with Lady. Adding to his pain, Bettye Marshall died in September.
He was grief-stricken, but somehow able to act. In February 1992, Marshall, helped by his son Pierce, sued the heirs of Lady Walker—and some of her friends too. He wanted back every penny he had ever given her.
Courthouse records show Marshall to be a man who believes in solving his problems in court. As one attorney inquired in a deposition, citing a previous case in which Marshall had showered gifts on and subsequently sued an employee, “Can you identify a single person who has worked for Mr. Marshall in a personal capacity…who has not been accused of some infidelity by Mr. Marshall?” In this suit, Marshall claimed that Lady had given the appearance of loving him exclusively while carrying on affairs with other men. He further asserted that the gifts he had given her had been given in trust; Lady wasn’t to own them until his death. With the help of friends and family, she had “swindled” him out of his fortune via a series of frauds and kickbacks,
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