She's In the Money

When we first met Anna cole Smith, she told us that being a Playmate was "a dream come true." She said she idolized the first woman to appear nude in Playboy, and the proof of that was in the 20 framed photos of Marilyn Monroe that hung on the walls of the studio apartment she shared with her six-year-old son.

That was nearly 10 years ago. Back then, Anna was going by the stage name Vickie Smith, a pseudonym for her real name, Vickie Lynn Hogan. She had moved to Houston from her hometown of Mexia (population 6933), situated some 40 miles east of Waco, where she had worked as a breakfast cook at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken. At 17, she married her high-school sweetheart, a co-worker at the restaurant. By the age of 19, she was a single mother, yearning for a new start as a fashion model and trying to make ends meet by working as an exotic dancer in a club in Houston.

A small-town girl with big-time dreams, Anna wrote on her Playmate Data Sheet that her ambition was "to be the new Marilyn Monroe and find my own Clark Gable." The Gable part was outside our expertise, but we did know a thing or two about launching a career, especially that of a statuesque blonde. At 5'11", 140 pounds, the curvaceous 24-year-old was definitely a looker.

We invited Anna to the Playboy Mansion, her first foray outside the Lone Star State. We put her on the cover of our March 1992 issue and made her our May 1992 Playmate. The following year, she was photographed for the cover of our June issue and named Playmate of the Year for 1993.

We could tell from the beginning that Anna was destined for big things, but no one could have figured how quickly her star would ascend. Not even Paul Marciano, the Guess jeans mogul who, after gazing upon Anna in the pages of Playboy, signed her to a contract to be that year's Guess model, successor to leggy supermodel Claudia Schiffer.

Anna took her first strides toward a movie career in 1994, landing a small role as a girlfriend of Tim Robbins' in The Hudsucker Proxy, a quirky comedy by the Coen Brothers. She followed that with a larger role in Naked Gun 33-1/3: The Final Insult, in which she shared yuks with Leslie Nielsen. She found time to do her third Playboy pictorial, a valentine for our readers in the February 1994 issue.

In 1995, Anna moved her acting efforts into the action genre, receiving top billing in two action thrillers, To the Limit and Skyscraper.

Just three years after her first appearance in Playboy, Anna was a bona fide star. But the biggest role of her life, the one that propelled her into the media spotlight and made her one of the most widely recognized celebrities in the world, was her part in the juiciest soap opera to hit Texas since Larry Hagman and Linda Gray did Dallas. The story had all the key elements—lust, power and greed— and a small but memorable cast: a dying billionaire oil tycoon, a pair of feuding sons and their drop-dead-gorgeous stepmother. The oil tycoon's name wasn't J.R., it was J.H. Marshall II. A Philadelphia native and Yale Law School graduate, Marshall had begun working the oil fields of Oklahoma in the Thirties, eventually moving to Houston and joining the board of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the U.S.

Despite his extraordinary wealth, Marshall had experienced his share of misfortune. In 1961, he divorced his first wife, a childhood sweetheart and the mother of his two sons, and married his assistant, Bettye, whose nickname was Tiger. But Tiger succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. A family dispute led to an estrangement with his older son, J.H. III. In 1982, Marshall took a liking to a dancer named Jewel, and for almost a decade he lavished her with cash and gifts. Jewel died in 1991, reportedly while having a face-lift.

Around that time, J. Howard Marshall became fascinated with another dancer, a towering blonde bombshell named Vickie who worked the daytime shift at Rick's Cabaret. Marshall was in his 80s when he used to show up to catch her matinee performances. He also was wheelchair-bound. With more than 60 years separating them, their relationship raised a few eyebrows and the instant disapproval of E. Pierce Marshall, the younger of J.H.'s two sons and heir to his considerable fortune.

Anna Nicole claims that Marshall proposed marriage to her only a week after they met, but she said, "Honey, let me go make something out of myself first, so people don't look at me as a gold digger."

With her appearances in Playboy and her modeling gig for Guess jeans, Anna did an excellent job of making something of herself.

In an interview, Anna admitted to feeling "a little bit embarrassed" about having a relationship with a man who was old enough to be her grandfather. "He dressed me up, he bought me diamonds, he did everything for me. There was so much love there from him." Over time, she came to feel the same way. "He was my Prince Charming. He saved my life, and I loved him for that."

In 1994, around the time 26-year-old Anna's film career was taking off, 89-year-old Marshall presented her with a 22-carat diamond ring. On June 27 of that year, they were married in a private ceremony at the White Dove Wedding Chapel in Houston.

During their brief marriage, Marshall is said to have bought Anna Nicole more than $6 million in cars, property, clothes and jewels. The Los Angeles Times reported that on Christmas Eve, he played Santa Claus in grand style, arranging to have a truck back up to Neiman Marcus to transport the fruits of a spectacular shopping spree.

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A few weeks later, in January 1995, J. Howard Marshall became seriously ill. His son and heir, E. Pierce Marshall, moved to be appointed his legal guardian. According to one of Anna Nicole's lawyers, the guardianship arrangement permitted her to visit her husband for only 30 minutes at a time.

By the time of Marshall's death, on August 5, 1995, relations between Pierce and Anna Nicole had deteriorated to the point that they held separate funerals, an agreement negotiated through their lawyers.

They also reached an agreement to split his ashes, but it required a court hearing to settle the matter.

For her part, Anna found that there was a high price to pay for her celebrity and her relationship with Marshall. In addition to being raw material for stories mined by the tabloids, she became an easy target for radio DJs and TV talk-show hosts. She earned the dubious distinction of being the subject of two of David Letterman's Top 10 Lists. The first, aired just 10 days after her husband died, featured Anna Nicole Smith's Dating Tips. Among them:

• Prepare a candlelit dinner. If he can blow out the candle, you don't want him.

• Good pickup line: Can I prechew that for you?

Feeling desperate and unhappy in the months after her husband's death, Anna turned to drugs. She reported at one time that she was taking more than 100 pills a day, and her weight ballooned to 200 pounds. She finally sought help by checking into the Betty Ford Clinic, but that did nothing to help solve her newer problem, financial woes. In January 1996, Anna filed for bankruptcy protection in federal court.

But last September, in a decision on her bankruptcy filing, a federal judge in California ruled that Anna was entitled to $450 million, the estimated amount Marshall's fortune increased during the 14 months they were married (that's more than a million dollars a day for each day of her union).

A few days after that ruling, a separate trial began in a county probate court in Houston. Anna claims that her husband made verbal promises to leave her half of his estate. Pierce counters that she is not even mentioned in at least five wills written by his father. His older brother, also demanding a settlement, has testified on Anna's behalf.

With jurisdictional disputes, the certainty of appeals, and questions about the size of Marshall's estate, it's unlikely that Anna will see hundreds of millions of dollars any time soon.

Whatever happens, you can be certain we haven't seen the last of her. In the meantime, enjoy what you see here.