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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It was the suit of a bitter man. There is little evidence that Marshall’s gifts to Lady came with any strings attached, and his insistence that she was obliged to remain true to him while he was married smacks of revisionism. Besides, if deposition testimony is to be believed, Marshall would have to have known of the existence of Lady’s lovers. They answered the phone at her home; she told Marshall, in front of witnesses, that as long as he was married she would continue to see other men, and he complained about that fact to at least one of Lady’s close friends. It may be that, until his lunch with Dale Clem, Marshall had turned a blind eye to the extent of Lady’s sexual needs. It may be, too, that his reasons for suing were more pragmatic: He needed to retrieve some $1 million in stock he had transferred to Lady in violation of Securities and Exchange Commission rules, and he could clear up some potential IRS problems arising from unreported gifts. And besides, he had a new deal working. If Anna Nicole’s public pronouncements are true, Marshall was asking her to marry him as early as 1990.
As Anna Nicole Smith has often told reporters, she did concentrate on her career far more than on J. Howard Marshall for at least a few years. Until 1991, he was ostensibly busy with Lady Walker, and she, as Vickie Smith, was making a go of it as a dancer. She thought of Marshall as Lady had initially—as a friend. Sometimes she talked baby talk to him on the phone late in the evening, and one Christmas she gave him two poster-size color portraits of herself wearing a G-string and a lacy transparent top. Sometimes, particularly when she was low on money, she met him for lunch at the River Oaks Country Club. These meetings probably became less frequent after a test shot landed her on the March 1992 cover of Playboy, portraying a demure debutante. (She neglected to tell the screening photographer that she was employed as a dancer—Playboy likes its girls fresh.) By the time she was chosen Miss May of that year, Vickie Smith was busy doing things all Playmates do. She was starring in erotic Playboy videos, pressing her pneumatic breasts into wet sand near a pounding surf, draping herself in black gauze while blindfolded boy toys stood sentrylike behind her. She went on promotional tours, where singing autographs could be a challenge (she spelled “Fred” F-r-e-a-d). And though she would develop the requisite Marilyn Monroe obsession, Vickie Smith was not one to put on airs—she fought with her manager when he thought her clothes were too tight (“I got into it, didn’t I?”) and never minded at all if, when she was out dancing for fun, her breasts popped out of her top.
It was Guess president Paul Marciano who transformed Vickie Smith into Anna Nicole Smith. As has frequently been told, he saw her pictures in Playboy, flew her to a test shot in San Antonio, renamed her, and turned her into a sex symbol. The Guess shots are indisputable the most beautiful photographs ever taken of Anna Nicole, perhaps because Marciano did not lock her into the girl-next-door mold. Fingering the shoulder strap of a clingy black dress or facing the camera squarely in a plunging shirtwaist, she looks like who she is—a rough-edged but not unsavvy blonde who likes sex almost as much as she likes having her picture taken. “She is one of the most awesome people in front of the camera I’ve ever seen,” says a well-known photographer. “She gets into a sexual trance. You could turn the camera on and leave the room and she’d keep on going.”
So, by Christmas 1992, Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t doing badly at all. To celebrate, she invited her family over to her ranch house for a dinner of potato chips with pimento cheese and tuna sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Howard Marshall was present in spirit only. He had paid for the house.
Anna Nicole had never really let Paw-Paw, as she called him, vanish from her life. Perhaps that is why, however distressed Marshall was over Lady’s death, he appeared to have rallied by the beginning of 1992. At least, that was when he and Anna Nicole began to go public. Several months later, Marshall introduced Anna Nicole to his longtime lawyer, Harvey Sorenson, at a dinner at—where else?—the River Oaks Country Club. “She primarily talked about her career with Guess jeans,” Sorenson would later state in a deposition. By the summer of 1992, Marshall had, in Sorenson’s careful words, “made available for her use” the north Houston property—four or five acres of land, a barn, a workout area for horses, a swimming pool, and a single-family residence—that Anna Nicole would subsequently refer to as her ranch. In September Marshall bought another house in north Houston, a two-story contemporary where Anna Nicole made a home for herself and her son.
If the story is beginning to sound familiar, consider what happened next. In March 1993 $123.41 worth of Godiva chocolates and $358,958 in jewelry—precious and otherwise—showed up in Marshall’s Nieman Marcus charge account. There was a brief lull, then, one month later, the couple headed for Harry Winston in New York City. They arrived in the jeweler’s hushed Fifth Avenue salon at noon. Marshall was in his wheelchair, looking chipper. Anna Nicole’s happiness, no doubt, knew no bounds. As one salesperson explains, “She was allowed to pick out what she liked.” That included one 2-carat diamond ring (around $20,000), one round diamond ring ($46,000), one marquise diamond ring ($456,000), one diamond necklace ($493,000), one pearl-and-diamond necklace ($251,000), one diamond bracelet ($273,000), one pair of diamond earclips ($78,000), and one pair of pearl-and-diamond drops ($82,000). In the span of an hour or so, Anna Nicole spent about $2 million, including taxes. Marshall put everything on his platinum American Express card. “It went through in less than ten seconds,” the salesperson says. For Christmas 1993, he spent $293,000 more on jewelry at Nieman’s.
Perhaps Marshall doted on Anna Nicole to ease the pain of some unfinished business. The lawsuits he had filed in February 1992 against the heirs and several associates of Lady Walker, claiming that he had been fraudulently induced to support her, were still unresolved. Lady had left an estate worth $5.8 million, but because of the suit, the assets were frozen; her heirs had no way to keep up expenses, much less pay taxes on properties Marshall had given Lady. Faced with Marshall’s seemingly infinite resources and the zeal of his son Pierce, Lady’s family eventually folded their tents. Marshall settled with the heirs in the summer of 1993. Sources close to the case say he got almost everything back except Lady’s jewelry, the Sugar Creek house, and the house in Georgia. Lady’s Jaguar, Mercedes, Corvette, and two Rolls-Royces were posted for sale on the steps of the Fort Bend County courthouse. Marshall is still fighting Lady’s jeweler—refusing to pay a $500,000 outstanding balance—and her business manager. (They countersued, alleging tax fraud and defamation. But Marshall wasn’t cowed: Before the estate’s inventory was completed, his attorney suggested in a letter to lawyers for the estate that some of the jewelry was cubic zirconia rather than diamonds; his lawyer also intimidated the business manager by falsely claiming to have reported her to state insurance authorities.)
It may have been fortuitous for Marshall that, during this period, Anna Nicole Smith was learning that a celebrity’s upward trajectory can change direction. Yes, she had been offered some okay movie roles—parts in The Naked Gun 33 1/3 and The Hudsucker Proxy helped her land the Marilyn Monroe role in a remake of Niagara—and yes, she had been mobbed by thousands of delirious fans in Japan. But in December 1993 she was sued by a former publicist for breach of contract, and she subsequently settled in his favor; the following February she was rushed to the hospital, suffering from a drug overdose. The figure-revealing scarlet dress Anna Nicole wore to the Academy Awards last spring was much remarked on, mainly because it revealed that she was having a lot of trouble controlling her weight. Then, in May, she experienced the emerging star’s least favorite nightmare: a $2 million lawsuit by a former housekeeper. Among the charges: assault, battery, and sexual battery.
The accusations, replete with suggestions of drugs, hetero- and homosexual sex, and imprisonment, are curious and disturbing enough, given that the housekeeper is a Honduran immigrant who barely speaks English. But they also eerily mirror Marshall’s desire to have a controlling interest in another human being. “You had someone follow Maria Cerrato on at least one occasion,” alleges one legal document directed to Anna Nicole. “You told Ms. Cerrato that you loved her on more than one occasion,” it continues. “You told Ms. Cerrato that you wanted to marry her on at least one occasion.” Among other things, Anna Nicole Smith is depicted as a woman of unruly, insatiable appetites—of all kinds.
Perhaps it was the pressure of these events that drove Anna Nicole Smith to accept one of Howard Marshall’s increasingly frequent proposals last June. Or maybe she just loved him and sensed that his time was short. This is a Houston story, after all, and Houston stories, like Hollywood stories, tend to have happy endings.
Over time, some characters may disappear from the narrative, and others will undergo certain alterations. It’s started already: The dedication to Lady Walker that Howard Marshall had planned for his autobiography went instead to his second wife, Bettye, who is prominently mentioned in the book; Lady, who so craved acknowledgement of her status, is not mentioned at all. Marshall’s fortune is now safely ensconced in a living trust he shares with his son Pierce, whom he gave power of attorney last July, after the wedding.
It is possible to foresee a bitter struggle between Pierce and Anna Nicole once Howard is gone; she could, perhaps, wind up with nothing but a story to tell. But it is far easier to envision her at Anthony’s or the Rivoli or even the River Oaks Country Club, surrounded by an adoring entourage. She will be old, overweight, and overdone, her bust finally in proportion to her body. The semi-nude picture, autographed across her rear with the phrase “Remember Sweet Cheeks,” will have long disappeared from the wall at Rick’s. People will want to be with her, partly because she will be so rich—she will have endowed the J. Howard and Anna Nicole Marshall Center for Plastic Surgery at the Medical Center, the J. Howard and Anna Nicole Marshall Hall of Diamond at the Museum of Natural Science—but mostly because she will be utterly unchanged from her early years. She will have built a whole life without ever really caring what anybody thought—which is, after all, the Houston way.
As she told the viewers of her Playboy video way back in 1993, “In my wildest dreams I never could have imagined the good fortune and luck I’ve had this year. What could possibly happen next?”
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