Downtown: Anna Nicole Smith Court Battle
H O U S T O N, Oct. 23 -- Former Playboy Playmate of the Year Anna Nicole Smith has reentered the eye of the storm.
It is her hope that a jury will award her as much as $800 million from the estate of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall, an oil tycoon.
But an injury to her hand has prevented her from being in court every day. When she has been before the jury of two men and 10 women, she often breaks down in tears. She sits with a picture of her late husband on the table just underneath the judge’s bench.
“I’m fighting for my husband and what he wanted me to have,” she says.
The two had no prenuptial agreement. “He just always promised that once we were married, half of everything is mine. That was his promise to me,” says Smith.
But when he died after just 14 months of marriage, she discovered that she was not even mentioned in his will. Nearly everything had been left to the oilman’s youngest son, Pierce Marshall.
So she is suing her stepson. It is a torrid family squabble over an enormous fortune.
A Love Story
Smith met the elder Marshall while she was working as a topless dancer in a Houston strip joint called Gigi’s. She was a single mother trying to make ends meet so she could support her son Daniel.
Marshall, then 86, was taken into the club in his wheelchair.
“He had his gorgeous blue eyes and they got a little twinkle,” recalls Smith. “He asked me to dance for him, and I did.”
For the next four years, he pursued her relentlessly. “He dressed me up, he bought me diamonds, he did everything for me,” she says. “There was so much love there from him. And I just loved him for this.”
Smith says at first she felt “a little bit embarrassed” to be with such an older gentleman, but in time “fell in love with him.”
She claims that Marshall proposed to her only one week after they met, but she declined the offer. “I said, ‘Honey, let me go make something out of myself first, so people don’t look at me as a gold digger. So I have my own identity.”
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