Downtown: Anna Nicole Smith Court Battle

H O U S T O N, Oct. 23, 2000 -- 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.”

Her Rise to Fame

Make something of herself she did — her rise to fame is the most remarkable part of her story. With Marshall’s support, she was able to quit her job as a topless dancer. She was soon spotted by a scout for Playboy magazine, Eric Redding, a photographer who says Smith was a bit clumsy when she was first photographed. But after looking at her surgically enhanced body and her smile, he and his wife soon knew she was a true beauty.

Playboy made her the “Playmate of the Year” in 1992. That led to a modeling contract with Guess Jeans and she soon had bit parts in Hollywood.

In 1994, Marshall presented her with a 22-carat diamond ring. The blond bombshell married a tycoon in a wheelchair in a Las Vegas ceremony.

“He was my Prince Charming,” she says. “He saved my life. And I loved him for that.”

Her marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather — even her great-grandfather — quickly made her the butt of late night TV. In his “Top 10 list” of “Anna Nicole Smith Dating Tips,” David Letterman’s number 10 was “Forget the personal ads, try the intensive care unit.”

When I interviewed Smith, she broke down in tears as she remembered what it was like to listen to those jokes. She says it got worse after her husband’s death in 1996. She says she began abusing prescription medicine, gained an enormous amount of weight and wound up in the Betty Ford clinic.

The Court Battle

She has since lost the weight and gotten back to her modeling career.

But it is not going so well in court. The lawyers for her stepson claim Smith completely neglected her husband during their 14-month marriage. They say they have shocking evidence of Smith having numerous affairs with both men and women during her marriage.

“That’s between me and my husband. It’s nobody’s business,” she says. “Our bedroom life was our business and nobody else’s.”

The jurors may take a dim view of her past, depending on how much Pierce Marshall’s attorneys succeed in getting before them. But in another incredible twist, another court in California that was dealing with her bankruptcy awarded her nearly a half billion dollars last month. The federal judge supported many of her claims and allegations that her stepson interfered with her inheritance.

Pierce Marshall says he intends to see to it that his father’s will is carried out. He says he will appeal the California ruling and it maybe years before Smith ever sees a dime.

If she ever wins half of her late husband’s estate, she insists that the first thing she will do is “Go to church and sit on my knees…and thank the good Lord and my husband.”