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.
The romance of Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall II served as the perfect summer replacement series for the O.J. Simpson courtroom drama and held its own against the tragicomedy that was the Lisa Marie Presley-Michael Jackson nuptials. In the minds of most Americans, Smith and Marshall quickly assumed familiar, straight-out-of-the-tabloid roles: She was, of course, the 26-year-old awesomely endowed “supermodel” who rose from a job as a breakfast cook as Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken in dry, dust, dead-end Mexia to become a Playboy centerfold, Guess jeans girl, Playmate of the Year, fledgling movie star, and, finally, wife to one of the richest men in America. He was the 89-year-old wheelchair-bound “Houston oil baron” whose $500 million fortune landed him on the Forbes 400 list and who enjoyed treating his lady love to a supermarket-sweep-style shopping spree at Harry Winston. “God bless Anna Nicole; she found her sugar daddy,” declared professional wag George Wayne on a Geraldo dedicated to “Hot Gossip and Sizzling Celebrity Stories From the Summer of ’94.” The audience, which had just finished carping about Anna Nicole’s weight, IS, and attention span, gave him an ovation.
Since the story was something of an archetypal bombshell, it was natural that Houston, where both protagonists maintained homes, became ground zero in the fight for information. Pat Walker, the owner of the White Dove Wedding Chapel, where the wedding took place, received calls from reporters as far away as Germany and as early as four-thirty in the morning. (“I’ve told you everything I know,” Walker finally wailed to a relentless People reporter. “I don’t know anything else!”) Maître d’s and sommeliers at Anthony’s and the Confederate House—the tony Houston restaurants Marshall was known to frequent—were pumped incessantly for information; the once-invisible African American help at the River Oaks Country Club, where the couple secretly courted in a chandeliered dining room overlooking the golf course, experienced a dizzying rise in status somewhat comparable to that of the price of oil in the early eighties. Houston’s premier gossip columnists competed for scoops in typical fashion. The Post’s Betsy Parish was on the already panoramic dimensions of the tale by reminding readers of Marshall’s previous semi-secret relationship with—and ongoing multimillion-dollar lawsuit relating to—the late, great Lady Walker, arguably the fatale-ist femme in an extremely crowded local field. The Chronicle’s grande dame, Maxine Mesinger, deemed the whole story “overdone” even as she reported on Marshall sightings (at Anthony’s, with his nurse and driver) as well as his drinking habits (watered-down wine) and his apparent change of heart over some end-of-summer vacation plans (he didn’t go).
This tale had something for everyone: sex and money, grit, gumption, and greed, and love in its most complicated, convoluted, and confounding forms. But it was also, at its heart, a Houston story—in its gleeful tawdriness, its inspired profligacy, and its passion for self-creation. If you longed fro the old Houston, if you wanted to prove the place had changed little in spit of booms, busts, and wave upon wave of tidy suburbanites, the love story of Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall made the case.
Pat Walker, the good ol’ gal who runs the White Dove, had just scooted another wedding out the door of her converted pink ranch-style house when a black pickup careered down her pine-shaded drive in a blue-collar neighborhood off North Shepherd. It was Saturday, June 25. “We wanna book a weddin’,” the couple in the truck told her. They wore tired jeans and exhausted T-shirts, but right way they started ordering the best of everything—flowers, cake, you name it—and they wanted it in a hurry. “Money,” they told Walker, “is no object.” Reminding herself that you shouldn’t judge a book, Walker asked to see their marriage license, then gave the couple—relatives of the bride, it turned out—the bad news: Legally, no service could be performed until that piece of paper was 72 hours old. Monday the twenty-seventh at two-thirty would be the soonest any wedding could take place.
On the appointed day, at the appointed time, a very tall, very pretty bride arrived with her blond hair in curlers. A relative immediately began imploring Walker to please, please not call any reporters. “I’m not marrying him for his money,” the bride kept insisting, as if to herself, in a voice that was both frantic and girlish. “He’s been begging me to marry him for over four years. But I wanted to get my own career started first. Have my own money.”
Walker, whose interest in celebrities is refreshingly limited, listened to the young woman go on for a while, but finally she’d had enough. “Well, who are you?” she asked.
The bride stopped putting on her thick false eyelashes, her waist-length gown that had a train, puffed sleeves, a big bow at the back, and what Walker would later describe to People as a “very, very, very low-cut” neckline. “Well,” she said, blinking, “I’m Anna Nicole Smith.” Then she went back to putting on her clothes with the help of her bodyguard, Pierre, a large, handsome African American who wore a green tuxedo with a green shirt and lots of gold and diamonds. “He screamed Hollywood,” says Walker.
While the bride dressed, her little son and nephew, who were serving as ring bearers, killed time by tossing their satin pillows into the air—competing to see who could throw his higher. No one in the small party seemed to mind that Anna Nicole’s 22-carat diamond ring was tied to one of the pillows—not the groom, a tiny but deliriously happy man in a wheelchair who wore a white tux, a white shirt, and white shoes; not his nurse; not his secretary; not even Pierre. Walker thought it strange, particularly since the bride had written in the bride’s book provided by the chapel, “This is the third ring I’ve had—the others were too small.”
Anna Nicole was far more romantic about the couple’s first meeting. “I was on stage,” she wrote under the “How We Met” heading in the bride’s book. “He was in the audience, and he was lonely and I started talking to him and we just started being friends.” And she insisted on a traditional white wedding. “White, white, white,” Walker recalls. “They couldn’t stress that enough.” She had draped the small, sunny chapel with white ribbons (the walls and folding chairs, thank goodness, were already white) and had carpeted the mauve aisle with white flowers. “She walked on white roses,” Walker says of the bride. “Not petals. Buds.” When Anna Nicole Smith stepped down the aisle, she looked to Walker “like a goddess,” albeit one who might have had a stopover in Vegas.
The ceremony included a taped version of “Tonight I Celebrate My Love for You.” The vows were recited, and then the groom, one of the richest men in America, was wheeled up the aisle behind his bride, one of the most famous women in America. Walking out of the chapel into the sunlight, Anna Nicole turned to a cage containing two white doves. It was the specialty that gave the White Dove its name. Together, the bride and groom let the birds go, watching them fly to the freedom that lay just beyond the pines. After a brief reception in a small room adjacent to the chapel, Anna Nicole would do the same: In a disguise consisting of a wig, floppy hat, sandals, and a tight yellow suit, she made for the exit, saying she had a photo shoot in Greece. The groom wept. “Please don’t cwy,” she cooed to Marshall. “Yew know it’s yew ah luv!” Then, with her bodyguard, she was gone.
At that moment, Pat Walker stopped wondering and started understanding. “I think she’s real smart,” Walker says, analyzing her first and only encounter with Anna Nicole Smith. “And I tell that to everybody.”
The rare few who examine Anna Nicole Smith’s 1993 Playmate of the Year video for its biographical rather than erotic content will find the film instructive, and not because the star describes her former home of Mexia as “a small town just outside of Houston.” There, between interludes of Anna Nicole portraying a gambler’s bored babe or Anna Nicole scrubbing clothes on a washboard while wearing a faded housedress over an expensive black bra, is the star-to-be’s official biography. It is the story that she has carefully shaped and endlessly repeated to journalist after journalist, and the then-25-year-old narrates the film like a joyous teenager, tossing her blond hair and dipping her astounding chest, her soft voice carrying the hint of a giggle, her smile rapturous. We see the treeless plains south of Dallas, the appropriately folksy townspeople, the fabled chicken shack where she met her first husband, Billy Smith, at age sixteen. She reminds us that at eighteen she already “had married, become a mother, and gotten divorced. “This is the house I grew up in,” Anna Nicole says, beaming as she gestures like a game-show hostess toward the tiny frame house where she once wore flannel pajamas under her clothes to keep warm in winter, where her aunt Kay Beall slipped her food stamps to buy candy.
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