You're Wrong About - Anna Nicole Smith

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

Sarah tells Mike how a poor Texas girl made herself into an icon and America made her into a punchline. Digressions include massage technique, “Death Becomes Her” and (obviously) “The Godfather.” Mike sounds even sicker than he did last week.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Do you ever think about how much of reality TV also is the music? It's always like the very light, caper music. And it's like telling you, like, this is funny, this is light. And you're like, aren't I really watching a bunch of people decompensate? Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we save people from what everyone else remembers about them. Oh, I love that. That gives me feelings.

That's kind of what we're doing today, right? Oh, yes. That's so very and extremely much what we're doing today. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffing to Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. And I've decided that I'm going to stop saying the names of various publications that I freelance for extremely sporadically because I am a

writer working on a book about the satanic panic. Oh, yeah. It occurred to me that our listeners should know about this because they're really smart and are out there knowing and doing things all over the place. And I bet a lot of them know some things. Yes. Also, I look forward to doing a sequel to our previous episode about the satanic panic and you can talk about what you were wrong about, which is always the

process of writing something long. Yes, you're right. I feel like writing a book, ideally, is like having a little you're wrong about with yourself. Yeah. So speaking of that for today, we're revisiting the subject of an article that I wrote two years ago, and it's one of my favorite things that I've written because today we're talking about Ms. Anna Nicole Smith.

Yes. And your article is one of my favorite things that you've ever written. Thank you for appreciating my writing on maligned women and for reaching out to me over that so many years ago because I just feel like everything good in my life has come to me in one way or another because of Tanya Harding, because the first piece I ever wrote that was just being like, look, everyone just sees a joke and I see a tragedy was about Tanya Harding. And then this piece about Anna Nicole Smith, which was in Buzzfeed, was the

same thing. And in the process of writing it, I just became so furious on her behalf, which apparently is the only writing process that I know how to have. I mean, or there's just a lot of historical figures where that's an appropriate response. Yeah. This to me is one of those hidden in plain sight stories. We're just like, we made this into a comedy or we pretended that it was a

comedy when on the face of it, we knew that it was a tragedy and we knew that we, the American people on top of whatever else had happened or was happening to her were also abusing this woman. So should we talk about the myth you wanted to bunk? I mean, I've already read your article, so I'm not coming into this as fresh as I do with most of our episodes. No, you're not a newborn lamb. You're like an older streetwise lamb.

Right. I mean, tell me what you know. Tell me what, what you feel like you observed during the time that, that she was in tabloids and on the news. This is also two distinct eras. I'll start with that. She like became famous in the early nineties and then she became famous for being a trainwreck in the early 2000s.

So she had these two moments. Yeah. I mean, that's just what I was going to say in that I met her twice, that you knew her as this distant, perfect, icy figure as a model for guess, I think, or the gap or whoever it was. Yeah, she was the Gaskin's girl. It was a big deal. Yes.

She was like a, she was the shorthand for beautiful woman, the way that we used Cindy Crawford for years. And we met her again, I don't know, 10, 12 years later when she was too human. Yeah. The American public hated her for gaining weight. She was slurring her words. I mean, I remember watching her reality show on Bravo or whatever it was. It was on E.

It was the top rated show on E. And it was so weird. It was so upsetting. Her lawyer was one of the main characters on it. Her son was like this weird spectral presence. Like the little boy ghost and three men and a baby. Yeah. There wasn't really a plot.

It was just her being her and saying, LOL, look how stupid she is as she goes about her life and says sort of dumb blonde type comments. And that was the extent to which we dealt with her as a person was like this silly dumb blonde who said funny things every once in a while. And they were trying to sell it as this, you know, isn't it, you know, kind of a pre Laguna Beach? Like, isn't it funny? Isn't it, you know, she's so tacky.

She's so kooky. You watch it and you're like, this is a woman who just whose life was falling apart and you're just watching it. And it's like watching a cliff crumble into the sea. Right. And they do segments where they take her to like morning zoo shows where the DJ is just like, you know, they're like, Anna, you used to be the most beautiful woman in the world, but then you gained a tremendous amount of weight.

And she's like, I didn't gain a tremendous amount of weight. Seriously, she said that to her face. Yeah. The thing where you're profiting off of like a shameless figure is that you have to in some way be putting them in the stocks and showing your audience that they're superior to them. And that's what that show was about to. Yeah.

So those are like the two zeniths of her fame. She was first this beautiful Amazon glamazon. And then she came back as this universal figure of duration. And then she died in 2007. Right. I remember seeing it in the news and thinking like, yeah. And not because I really knew anything about her life, but because I knew that she was a kind of out of control figure who you just expect is eventually going

to die of some kind of an overdose or a suicide or just something because there there is this whole class of women that the entertainment industry has essentially chewed up and spit out. So should we go back and do the do the Ann and Cole Smith story, the real Ann and Cole Smith story? OK, so we're talking about addressing the central myth that always comes up in our tales of maligned women, which is the myth of female public figure, not human being.

My argument is always female public figure, in fact, human being after all. OK, but also specifically, I want to talk about the story of Ann and Cole Smith as the archetypal gold digger. OK, what do you know about her marriage? There was this dude toward the end of her life who I think was in his 90s, who she married, and I think he died before she died. And there was a whole thing with the family. And I mean, she was the archetypal gold digger, or at least that was the way

that she was framed. Yes. And I also feel like when you look at the relationship that Ann and Cole Smith had with her husband, whose name was J. Howard Marshall, like I think people were drawn to that story because they had that exact thought of like, obviously, we know that these people are only marrying each other, you know, for one reason, he wants her for sex, she wants his money. And inevitably, it was more complicated than that because it was a human

relationship. And it also, I think, was arguably one of the better relationships in her life. What do we know about that marriage? Well, let's start from the beginning. OK. Ann and Cole Smith was born Vicki Lynn Hogan. Well, that's like a better model name. It is, but you know, sometimes you just want to distance yourself from your

birth name. OK. She was born to a 16-year-old mom and to a dad who, according to one account, pled guilty to statutory rape. Whoa. And Ann, I grew up never knowing him. Well, a single mom, single 16-year-old mom. Yeah.

Wow, OK. Who married a few other times. OK. And so, Ann grew up with her in Houston and then was sent to live in Mejia, Texas with family Mejia's two hours west of Houston. I've been there. It's very flat and it's very dry. OK.

This is a quote in a really wonderful article about Ann and Cole Smith that Dan P. Lee wrote for New York Magazine. It's a quote from Anna when an interviewer asks her about her childhood. She says, you want to hear my child life? You want to hear all the things she did to me? All the things she let my stepfather do to me or let my brother do to me or my sister? No way.

All the beatings and the whippings and the rape. That's my mother. Holy shit. So we know she was someone who grew up suffering abuse. She also grew up extremely poor. At times in her childhood, had to steal toilet paper from restaurant bathrooms because her family couldn't afford to buy any. What was her mom doing for work?

She was a deputy with the Harris County Sheriff. What? Yeah, cop mom. So she made that little money working as a cop? Well, she also wasn't necessarily consistently with her mom. OK. So she went to live in Mejia as a teenager. She dropped out of Mejia High at the end of ninth grade, got in a fist fight

with another girl, which may have contributed to her leaving school. So she was like 15, started working at Jim's Crispy Fried Chicken and worked there as a waitress and met a fry cook. And they got together and got married and had a baby. So she also became like a 16 year old mom. Yeah. As she's been talking about how she wants to be a model. You know, she has a stream of being a model and she was kind of an ugly duckling.

Like if you look at pictures of her as a teenager, it's hard to recognize her. If you have like the gas jeans girl in your head. And it's partly just that she hadn't grown into her face and her figure yet. But it's also that you realize looking at pictures of her when she was a teenager, that the person we know as Ann and Nicole Smith was a very consciously constructed persona. OK. She made her body and she made the character that she was. How so?

So when her son Daniel is three months old, she packs up the car and moves to Houston and says that her husband has been abusive. OK. And when she gets back to Houston, she gets jobs at Walmart and Red Lobster, but she's not making enough money. And so one day she goes into a strip club and ask if they have any jobs waitressing and they say no, but why don't you dance? OK.

And so she starts dancing and she's not very good. She gets put on day shift. She's like not a very good dancer. She's she has small breasts. She's considered like way too flat and she's tall. She's almost six feet tall and she's like considered big bone. People actually after she became the gas jeans girl refers to her as Ann and Nicole Smith, big boned gas jeans model.

This is like lobbed at her as an insult in a ways. Wow. Like as a person with big bones, like, look, it's a thing. And what she figures out is that there's not that much money, you know, working the day shift in the kind of places that are going to hire her with small breasts. And this is in the late eighties. So it's also the golden age of the silicon breast implant.

Oh, right. So I have a video for you. So this is Ann and Nicole Smith's video center fold, which Playboy released after she became the Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1993. We're flashing forward a little bit, but we're looking at the end result of Anna's creation of her body. Oh, yeah, there it is. So she's in black and white.

We've got a camera zooming in on her face. She's in a bed sort of rolling around. Oh, she has really big boobs. Wow. Who would watch something like this for 35 minutes, though? Straight men, I guess. Sure. And so her original plan, it appears, is that there's a hierarchy of strip clubs

in Houston, and there's the kind of places like where she starts out working. And then there's a place like Rick's, which is where the high rollers go. Oh, my God. And Houston is a city of tycoons and oil men. OK. So if you're dancing at a gentleman's club where the gentlemen are coming and like brokering their deals and having their good old boy scotches together, then like there's money in those hills, right?

Yeah. And so what she realizes is that she has to cultivate a look. So she gets the blonde hair and she starts saving up for breast implants. Oh, so the blonde hair was not real? Oh, no, no, she had brown hair. She had lovely brown hair. Oh, OK. And so her breasts ultimately take multiple surgeries to create.

And according to the New York magazine piece, contains three pints of fluid. Three pints? Yes. Like think about how much that weighs. And then thinking about walking around with that. I mean, if we had the metric system, this would be easier. But yeah, like a backpack full of books on the front of you all the time. It's exactly like that.

And so she has health issues because of this for the rest of her life. Oh, wow, really? She has pain issues later on, one of her implant ruptures one day. And so her nipple splits open. No way. She has to be rushed to the hospital to fix it. At one point, she develops various lumps in her breasts that might be related and turn out to be benign, but she has to undergo surgery for that.

How does she afford them? You say if you work hard, she would like, you know, she would work at the club that employed her regularly and then go take pick up other shifts at other clubs and take whatever work she could get. You know, she hustled. Yeah, it's it's really quite a ratio out of your story. She came to the big city and she scrimped and she saved and she saved up all her dollar bills until she could afford huge boobs.

An investment in her future earnings. Yes, like a property, essentially, or a first business. Right. And then she got a job at Rick's. OK, so she made it. She made it. She made it to the Big Time Stroke Club. And this is where she meets Jay Howard Marshall.

Oh, so she met him years before all the other stuff. She met him when she was first starting out. She met him when she was a struggling single mom. Wow. OK. Yeah. Yeah. So they're conflicting accounts of this because Dan P. Lee's excellent account says that he meets Anna in 1992 when she's 24. OK.

But Mimi Swartz writing for Texas Monthly actually puts their meeting earlier, has him coming into a club and meeting her earlier than that. OK. But the issue is that until 1991, he has both a wife with advanced dementia and a long time mistress who is also a legendary Houston area stripper named Jule Deanne Walker, also known as Lady. Busy guy. Yeah, I know.

He was also working. Right. In 1991, when his wife dies, he's 86 years old. OK. He looks like the medieval knight who was guarding the Holy Grail into Indiana Jones in the last crusade. Yeah. Like he looks like he needs to be taken care of by professionals.

Right. And he got rich in the oil industry. And then he got extremely rich because he was an early ally of the Koch brothers. And so in the 60s, he ended up with a 14.6% share of Koch industries. OK. So he rode that into a much larger investment. Yes. So his fortune is estimated at about 500 million in the sources I read at the time

that he marries Anna and a billion a few years later. So these things fluctuate. But he's incredibly wealthy. And he's also regarded as a savvy businessman in the Houston business community. Like he's one of the legendary deal makers. OK. He's one of the pioneers of the oil industry. It's not just that he's wealthy is that he's a captain of industry.

He's the kind of person who in America is seen as having earned his money. Yes. So in 1991, his wife dies and lady who is 51 at the time and who he's spent millions of dollars on, especially in the years since his wife has essentially become unavailable to him, dies on the table while receiving a facelift. Whoa. So he's 86 years old and he's lost in the span of a few months, both his wife and his mistress.

OK. And he's devastated and drinking, which like and if you're 86 years old and emotionally devastated, like you can't really go on a bender because. Right. Your body can't handle it. You don't have a good bender margin. Yeah. So what does he have to do but fall in love?

OK. And so because he's so, so frail, he can't go out at night, but his driver takes him to a strip club, some say Gigi's, some say Rick's. OK. In any case, either he goes to a strip club where he sees her for the first time and falls hard for her, or he's suddenly able to focus all of his energies and passions on her and all of his money. And what everyone says later on, this is pretty unambiguous, even when a lot

else is, is that he's just incredibly effusive about how in love he is with her. He loves her. He loves her. He loves her. She is his lady love. She's his precious package. She calls him papa. OK.

He apparently adores her breasts because they were bought to be adored. Right. You know, when they go to Red Lobster and are sexually intimate with each other to the extent that that's possible, he just is utterly effusive and adoring and affectionate and tells her about how he wants to take care of her and her son and make sure that they're provided for forever. And he immediately starts proposing marriage. Oh, wow.

But she's like, no, like, well, I'm not going to marry you. He begins lobbying for her to marry him and works at her for two or three years. Oh, wow. OK. Before she finally says yes. And that, to me, was so surprising when I was first researching this, because I was a kid in the 90s. I grew up with Anna Nicole Smith as someone who was there was always like a VH1

special about her. She was right. She was like the emblem of white trash. Totally. She appeared on the cover of New York Magazine in 1994 as the cover girl for an article about how the epidemic of galloping sleaze was taking over America. Oh, man. She was the poster girl for this.

Yikes. Yeah. You know, once we start looking at that for more than half a second, it just becomes hard to sustain any of this as a joke, because I think the assumption I always had just going on the cartoons that I was offered and that I never cared to elaborate on because I was busy learning algebra or whatever is that, you know, she found this frail little husk of a man and like one of the vampire broads and Dracula just like prayed on him and like sucked the life out of him

like a Siamese with a baby. Right. Totally. That didn't happen. Like it was more like he saw her and fell in love with, you know, I can see that if I were 86 years old and I were old and could feel like the snuffer coming down on the candle of my life with every day, I would just want to like pay the biggest bustiest, most beautiful woman I could find to like put her body next to mine as

much as she possibly would. Sure. Yeah. That's not a bad use of several million dollars. Right. Do we know what she saw in him or did she write or speak about? Oh, yeah. Well, so first of all, he's spending a ton of money on her.

Okay. The day after they meet, they get together and eventually she says, well, I have to go to work and he gives her $1,000 and says, you never have to work again. My lady love. Oh, wow. This is a girl who grew up in a cold house, getting abused, not having any money, any resources, any way to make a better life for herself, aside from a very strategic plan of surgical alterations.

Right. And, you know, not just the money stuff. I mean, that's huge, but like someone wants to take care of her. Right. And here's this guy who's also like, he can't, he's too frail to be any kind of a threat to her. Yeah. Huge win, huge win.

If you're a woman in America, knowing that the person you're marrying physically is incapable of turning abusive at some point is like, it's a consideration we're thinking about, right? Especially for her, you know, it's funny. I was thinking about this and just, you know, what did we want her to do? What would have been the virtuous path that she's a single mom trying to make a better life for her kid and find some stability and she's stripping and she's working all the time and she started taking Xanax and she started taking

benzos and she started, you know, developing dependencies on prescription drugs because she doesn't like her job. She doesn't like the work that she's doing, but she has to do it because it's by far the most lucrative field she could possibly be working in. So her dependency issues have already started. Her work has already started taking a toll on her health, both mentally and physically. And here's someone who wants to lift her out of the coal mine. Right.

Did Americans like an Ann and Nicole Smith in the 90s and say, well, if it were me and if I were this struggling single mom stripper, you know, working at a bunch of different clubs, driving around Houston, strung out on benzos and some old frail millionaire tells me that he wants to take care of me and my son for the rest of my life and buy me jewelry and buy me clothes and tell me how beautiful I am. Like, am I supposed to say, no, you can't. I can't take advantage of you like that. I'm going to go to coding Academy.

Right? Like, what did people want her to do? It feels like it's also really nice to just be adored by somebody. Yes, it is nice. Even without the money, just having someone who is just really attracted to you and really into you and thinks you're really special sounds pretty good. Yeah. And who you can feel in a very real way, like you are like this vital, beautiful,

sexual presence in the life of someone who really, really needs that. Like you would feel valued. What is the nexus of this with her career? What's happening with her career at this point? That's a very good question. So 1991, 92 is a very big time in the book of Anna. Okay. She's also dating a bodybuilder named Clay.

Okay. And also had many intimate and sexual relationships with women throughout her life. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. And Jay Howard Marshall apparently knows about this and doesn't mind her having sex with other people and having relationships with other people as long as he comes first, as long as, you know, when he beckons her, she comes to him. So all of this is happening pre-guess.

Oh, yeah. So anyway, in 1991, her boyfriend, Clay Spires, sends some pictures of her to Playboy because that's, you know, that's what boyfriends do. That sounds like I'm saying it sarcastically because that's my regular tone, but they do. Playboy has discovered a lot of women that way. Interesting. And Playboy's centerfold casting director, Marilyn Grubowski, said that she was

immediately just floored when she first saw Anna and that she was hands down the most beautiful woman she had ever seen outside of makeup. Wow. Okay. Another thing Anna Nicole Smith doesn't get credit for, aside from being a human being, I think she was a great beauty. Sure. She was beautiful in a way that like made it very obvious that this was not organic.

Like I think if you're looking at a picture of Cindy Crawford, you can be like, this is lady just put on a little lip liner and then showed up in a corn field. She's just a natural 10, right? Cause that's sort of the fantasy. And with Anna Nicole Smith, it was like, she clearly had built the body in the image that she was in. Like she had, you know, grown up watching Marilyn Monroe movies and memorized all of her lines and always wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe and to act in

movies like her and to play parts like her parts. And she had bought a Marilyn Monroe on steroids body. I mean, she was discovered actually in a very old Hollywood way because her boyfriend sends the pictures to Playboy. Playboy brings her in, they put her on a cover, she becomes a centerfold. So like immediately, like immediately cover immediately centerfold immediately everything? Yes.

I think you had to like work your way up the ranks from like page 41. And then you get on the cover after people know you a bit more, but wow. It was like, everything suddenly came together for her. Like she'd been saving and saving for these breasts and getting all these surgeries, you know, and she got the hair right and her, she sort of grew into her face cause she has like a big jaw and a big Channing just these great like dramatic bones, you know, she has like sort of a Frank Lloyd Wright kind of a face happening.

And she figured out how to carry herself. She'd been performing for all those years. And also something that everyone who worked with her said is that she gave great face. She was a great model. She was skilled at it. She was good at it. She worked very hard for many years and she became very good at all the

industries that involve projecting sexuality and projecting like figuring out like what is the image that the men in the room want me to give them? And then I'll do it. And I'll do it 50 times in 50 different little ways and I'll do it for hours and hours and I'll give take after take and I'll perform it cause I know how to do it. Yeah. I mean, being a daytime stripper for years is extremely good practice in faking

constant horniness. And that like the man that you're looking at or the camera lens that you're looking at is like the love of your life and the only person that you want in these satin sheets with you. And so she's in Playboy. She becomes the playmate of the year in 1993. Guest Jeans discovers her through Playboy and she becomes the Guest Jeans girl and immediately is on huge billboards across the world.

And in fact, there is a billboard of her in Norway that is alleged to have caused auto accidents when people are distracted by these huge images of Anna, the beautiful 50 foot woman. And the Norwegian parliament debates whether it should be legal to have a billboard of Anna Nicole Smith so prominently displayed to motorists. Yeah. I mean, that does seem slightly overblown, but okay. These are like the details that make up these stories.

Right. She's like her sexuality is like the strongest, most bewitching, you know, she's killing the Norwegians, Michael. And so at this time, like she's making her own money. She's starting to be featured on like entertainment tonight and news magazine shows. She's the guest girl. She's this very sexy, but also very glamorous model.

And she's keeping it quiet that she has this relationship with this Houston oil man, because if people find out about him, they're not going to see her as having made her own way and made her own name. And like, excuse me, she did work for everything that she got. Yeah. And models always do that. They always make themselves seem single or they're always coy about their love lives because it's part of the fantasy, right?

With a model, they have to seem available in some way. Right. That's true too. And also J. Howard Marshall is realizing that he is not able to turn her head the way he used to. Oh, she is making her own money now. Right.

And so he starts upping his spending. Cause he has to compete with guests now. Yes. He has to compete with guests and playboy. Like there are other men trying to fill Scarlett's dance card. Yeah. He takes her to Harry Winston and asks her to pick out whatever she wants and she buys two million dollars worth of jewelry.

You're kidding. Nope. Jesus, that's so much money. Okay. Yeah. He starts pitching more woo and interestingly, she finally accepts. She finally says, yes, I'll marry you. And they got married in 1994 and it's of course huge news and she is relentlessly

mocked and that's kind of the moment when she shifts from an aspirational figure to a joke. You know, she's not this beautiful, glamorous star anymore. You know when like, when you're getting a massage from someone and because your body is so fucked up because you're an anxious person, they're just going through like levels of tension and then they finally seem to find like the bottom of it. And they're like, oh yeah, and they dig their thumb into it. And sure.

This to me is one of those parts is the question of why were we so focused on making this a story where she was the one who had all the power? Right. She doesn't control the money. Everything she has is a gift from him. Right. It's all at his discretion. What we're essentially saying is that her breasts are more powerful than half a

billion dollars. Is this the period where she enters the sort of trough between guess girl and reality TV star? When does the downfall begin? It begins when they get married. Yeah. Because this is when she becomes a joke. Right.

Because she's done something that we can be judgmental of and now we can just wash our hands of seeing her as a human being. Right. Because now she's just a gold digger. She's an archetype. She's a wicked archetype. She's manipulating this poor old man for his money. Right.

No one is ever acting as if Jay Howard Marshall can take responsibility for his own decisions. Right. Even though he's still, he's doing business at this time. He's active in finance. Yeah. He's still a functioning adult. He's still a person doing stuff.

Right. People play it as if it's, you know, either she tricked him or he was so old and infirm or like sexually bewitched that he didn't have a choice. But it's like maybe he made a choice and it was the choice that he'd made before with Lady for 10 years. And it was just to launch a charm offensive at a beautiful, big-breasted woman whose affections he could essentially buy for himself. And also, you know, who was spectacular and grateful and who I'm sure he saw

something in beyond her body because there are a lot of great bodies in Houston. Right. And as I was thinking about this, I was like, why is the gold digger such a maligned figure? Like, why do we hate that person so much? Well, I think it's because it's somebody who's getting money for nothing. Are they, Michael? Are they?

I just think that, like, why do we act like it's harder to be born into a family than it is to fuck someone in that family? Okay. Sex work is a skilled trade. And I do think that's part of this. Like the Ann and Nicole story is also the story of the question of what industry do we believe is more deserving of a big payout, you know, stripping and marrying and having sex for money or being an oil tycoon.

Right. And I personally think that sex work is harder than oil tycoon ship and has a much, much less of a negative impact on the world. That's probably true. To me, I just, I'm not comfortable having any opinion on anybody else's relationships. I think everyone's marriage is a mystery. Fundamentally, to everyone but the two people in the relationship, it is weird and you do not understand it.

And that is fine. It is none of my business. And so I think when you see people that are dating across huge age ranges or across huge class divides or two people that just seem like I don't see any reason why these two people like each other, it's none of my business. That relationship is a mystery to me. My parents' marriage is a mystery to me. Their parents' marriages are mysteries to them.

Circle of life. I just feel like in general, if a 35 year old woman marries a 95 year old man, it doesn't affect me in any way. I don't see why I need to have an opinion on that. Thank you. America, thanks you. The Bimbo community, thanks you. What happens to her modeling career?

When does that kind of completely dry up? I mean, guess was her big campaign. So what happens is that they get married. She becomes a joke. A year later, he dies. Oh, it was that fast? Yeah, he died a year after they got married. Okay.

And for six months before he died, his son, Pierce, was very much in the mix. So J. Howard Marshall goes into the hospital because he has stomach cancer. He's suffering from pneumonia. He's getting general feeble health. And Pierce becomes his guardian. And Anna later argues that Pierce, J. Howard Marshall's son, who's in his 50s at the time, changes his father's will and makes it so that Anna doesn't get anything. And also, she's been living in an apartment that he got for her in LA where

Marilyn Monroe once lived and also a ranch that he bought for her in Texas, where she has horses and livestock and sometimes will have a sheep brought to her apartment in Houston when she can't sleep. So she can have a sheep around to snuggle with, which I find very endearing and moment when I like. So Pierce starts basically kicking her out of those properties. And also J. Howard Marshall for years now has been taking care of Anna's bills. And she's running up about, you know, something in the six figures worth of

expenses per month. Whoa. Yes, it's a lot of money, but for a half a billion fortune. Right. People spend millions of dollars on wine. People spend millions of dollars to own part of a racehorse. Like I just think that buying like an abused single mom, whatever she wants for a few years is like in the scheme of things, not a bad idea.

Right. On the scale of weird rich people bullshit, it's not a 10. It's like a three. Yeah. We have the same rich people bullshit meter. That's great. So Pierce starts essentially separating her from his father's money. He basically gets in as a wedge between them.

He makes it so that she can only visit him in the hospital for 30 minutes at a time and after that she's escorted out by a security guy. Holy shit. And so he starts sending her bills directly to her, which of course she can't handle because she doesn't have income. Right. Like she has the playboy stuff and she has some Hollywood stuff that's kind of happening and the guest money, but like she's not making millions of dollars.

Right. And he's told her, you know, probably dozens, if not hundreds of times that he wants to make sure that she's always taken care of and that she and her son will be taken care of forever. And so after he's released from the hospital, she gets in bed with him with a tape recorder and takes her clothes off and says, do you miss your rose buds? Oh. Referring to her breasts and presents him with her breasts, which presumably he

has missed and tries to get him to say into the tape recorder that he wants to provide for her and her son after he's died. Okay. But he's not really speaking very well. So it doesn't really work. Yeah. And it's like, that moment to me is just like, it's playing dirty and it's playing dirty because someone else started it.

Right. Another thing I thought of kind of looking at how Pierce Marshall was trying to force Anna out of his father's money, that was kind of a miscalculation on his part, I think, because what happens is that J. Howard Marshall dies, Anna gets nothing and she sews and says that she is entitled to perhaps as much as half of the estate and if Pierce hadn't pushed her out and left her out in the cold and not taken care of her, then I don't think she would necessarily have asked for that much.

Like if she'd been given like 20 million dollars, like a decent lump sum or like an allowance or the properties or some, you know, some very small amount of the whole, she very well might never have complained. Yeah. She would have been a relatively cheap problem to resolve. Yeah. Pierce has apparently talked to his father about like, I really don't think you should marry this girl and like, I don't like, what are you doing?

And his father says to him, you're just jealous. Nice. Yeah. And so he forces Anna out and luckily, as it would happen, in 1980, there was a mega feud between the Koch brothers and also within the Marshall family. Okay. Sidebar, you just want to research a playboy, playmate who you love and you end up having to talk about finance.

And so anyway, in 1980, Charles and William Koch are at loggerheads about whether to take their company public. William wants to take it public. Charles doesn't. Jay Howard Marshall and his younger son, Pierce Marshall, side with Charles and William Koch finds an ally and Jay Howard Marshall's oldest son and namesake, Jay Howard Marshall, the third. Weird.

Okay. And so Jay Howard Marshall, the third, teams up with William Koch to try and take Koch Industries public, which doesn't work. But it essentially means that because of this business dispute, father and son never speak again. Geez. And Jay Howard Marshall buys Jay Howard, the thirds, shares in Koch Industries for a few million dollars and then tosses him out.

Okay. And so after Anna also gets left out in the cold, Jay Howard Marshall, the third says, Hey, why don't you and I make things difficult for Pierce Marshall? No way. And sue for our share of daddy's money. Wow. So it's like a survivor situation. They create an ally.

It's called an alliance, Michael. Alliance, sorry. And so this ultimately goes to the Supreme Court. No way. Yeah. The case of Marshall v. Marshall reaches the Supreme Court in 2006. Holy shit.

And Anna, you know, appears and I just like, I love this description. Because it's like, if you gave a robot instructions to do a mad lib of like a boring legal sentence, this is what it would come up with. It comes down to the question of whether federal courts have jurisdiction over probate matters, which are normally decided by states. So it is a federal versus state log jurisdiction question. Jesus, I just fell asleep during that sentence. I know.

What does that mean? I lost you with the word probate. Yes. So essentially, very few wills are contested. Like 1% of wills go to court and probate matters are decided by state courts. But Anna and J. Howard Marshall III take it to a federal bankruptcy court. And so it's a question of who ultimately gets to decide.

Weird. Okay. Yeah. And then what does the Supreme Court decide? What's the result? The Supreme Court decides that, yes, a federal bankruptcy court can have jurisdiction over a contested will. And so they send it down to an appellate court where it then molders until both

Ann and Nicole Smith and Pierce Marshall die. Oh, no way. Yeah. Cause they died fairly soon after the SCOTUS decision. And so then this money is still fought over for years. So it goes back to the Supreme Court in 2011. You're kidding. And the 2011 Supreme Court decision says, and I quote, although bankruptcy

court had the statutory authority to enter judgment on Vicki's counterclaim, it lacked the constitutional authority to do so. Okay. What does that mean, Michael? Nothing. I have no, those are just sounds. I have no idea. But everyone's dead by now.

So it hardly matters. But anyway, there's an article that I read recently about an unfortunate man named Judge Mike Wood, who's a probate judge in Harris County, Texas. And until recently it was his job to preside over Marshall v. Marshall. And so there's basically a lawyer debate over a restraining order involving trusts in some way that I don't understand. And Judge Mike Wood said to those assembled in court, I am going off the

handle officially. I am tired of this case. I've told you that from the beginning. I beg you to recuse me. I don't want to deal with you people anymore. This is ridiculous. And the article I read says, Judge Wood went on to say, I am not going to spend a lot of time cutting at knits and gnats for people that are fighting over 20

billion, 10 billion that they didn't earn. They didn't create this wealth. It was created by a third party and they're just fighting over it. He then declared at the January 11th hearing that quote, it's just not the way I'm going to spend my life. A week later on January 18th, Judge Wood officially recused himself from the case. Nice. Isn't that amazing?

There's something so funny about people just openly hating their jobs. It's always the bleakest thing. That's why I love flying spirit airlines. Did Anna Nicole get any money before she died? So after J. Howard Marshall died and she was cut out of the will and she began this legal battle, she declared bankruptcy. Oh, she did?

Yeah. And declared that she had $9 million worth of debt. Oh, my God. And then she got what works she could, which wasn't that much because she had fallen on hard times. You know, if you become favored by an industry for being a hard worker and being able to show up on time and give 50 great faces, you don't have that many years in you of doing that, especially if the industry you're working

in is doing things to your psyche that you have to numb yourself to. She ends up living with this B movie director who's supporting her and her son in an apartment in LA. She attempts suicide. Oh, no. During the time that she's in the hospital after that, there's the possibility that she might have suffered brain damage. I think because of the amount of time that she went without breathing.

Oh, my God. This is a period during which one of her implants bursts. It's almost like a spell on a fairy tale, right? Because she came to Houston in the 80s, she got her implants in the late 80s. She, you know, started to rise and she got like about seven years worth of the thing that she sold her sanity for, essentially. And then it started to all go away. You know, it's, it's like Ariel selling her voice.

Yeah. You know, it wasn't just that she wasn't getting work. It was that she was one of the many women who lived, you know, her entire life understanding that the only value she held for the world was being beautiful and being sexy and being fuckable and being fucked. Right. And then if she wasn't able to offer those services, she didn't exist. Right.

You know, that like that was what made her an essential worker. Right. Just the incredible anger that the public unloads on women when they become slightly less beautiful or slightly more old. So that it's like, it's not just career. It's this existential thing where like, if you can't stay at peak sexiness forever, like, who are you? Right.

She writes in her diary, apparently, about how she just doesn't even like sex and are always wanting sex and she doesn't even like it. You know, but like, she does it. This is, this is the profession that has been chosen for her by circumstance. Right. And so her substance abuse, as she was worse than she's drinking, she's taking painkillers, anti-anxiety stuff. Later on, like around the time she died, she develops these infected abscesses

because she's injecting herself with weight loss. Oh, no, really? Yeah. Oh, that's so sad. It's like she's one of the women in death becomes her and like, you broker this bargain to like, make yourself beautiful in the way that men want, but then it starts falling apart. Yeah, that's awful.

So when is there, is this before the reality show, after the reality show? This is before. This is all before? She let a long life and she didn't live that long. So E, like, put her on the retainer knowing how troubled she was. Yes. Oh, that's super bad, dude. Wasn't that always the point?

So like, they knew she was addicted to pills and that she had a suicide attempt and that she was broken, all that. And they're like, let's just put a camera in her home 24 hours a day. Yeah. Oh, that's so bad. It's dark as hell. Yeah, dude. It's the spectacle of watching someone barely holding their life together.

And at this time her son, Daniel, is in high school, middle school and high school, and so his friends are seeing his mom being like, drunk and out of it and zonked on TV, just, you know, just dealing with her addictions and with her trauma. They're watching something that only her therapist and her family can see. And it's on cable. Who was that weird lawyer in the show with her that was like with Howard Caistern?

Yes. They met in LA in the 90s and they began this very close relationship that seems like it was something that she, it seems like she was able to trust him because they weren't sexually involved and she kind of had sex with a lot of people without seeming to necessarily want to. And they just had this like apparently non-sexual relationship where he thought she was beautiful and dazzling and wanted to take care of her. And she really needed someone to take care of her.

So that was their relationship, also financial? I don't think he was able to provide for her financially, but I mean, he was able to broker the kind of work that she could get and kind of, I think, also help escort her emotionally through these soul damaging industries that were the only ways that she could work at that time in her life. Jesus, it's so dark. Because what the fuck else are you going to do? Right?

It's like, and so you're just like, you're just selling off little slices of your trauma. You're just like a pound of flesh, no more, no less, right? So what happened with the reality show? I mean, was that it was a rating success, right? It was at first. I think it was like a novelty thing. I think at first the novelty of like watching this out of control, shamelessly was

like super fun, but then like, you sit with it and you're like, this woman needs help and no one's helping her. They're just filming her. So, you know, it's on for a couple of years. It goes off the air. And then what she really wants actually is to have a baby. She and Jay Howard Marshall tried to have a baby. She very badly wanted to have a baby specifically because Daniel was getting older

and getting more distant from her. And the show especially seemed to kind of drive a wedge between them. I mean, yeah. So, you know, he starts developing his own substance dependencies. He starts, you know, staying out and not coming home and not telling her where he is and they kind of did some distance develops between them, basically. Which is really hard because this also was for him, right? Like most stories are at heart.

The Godfather, I believe, and this is one of them. Like she sacrificed herself to give him the kind of childhood that she hadn't had, which was just like a stable, decent one where like, you're not hungry and you're not abused and you feel loved and taken care of. And she couldn't do it. Like she got millions of dollars, but she couldn't make a stable home for her son because no one showed her how or gave her the tools that she really needed to be able to do that.

They gave her other stuff, but they didn't give her that. Did she ever get into rehab for the pills? Yeah, she went to Betty Ford in the mid nineties. She got clean for periods. Like she was on the right track for periods, but just trauma and addiction are ghosts that are very, you know, they never really go away. It's just that ideally they become very small and sort of friendly and just like very rarely tap on the shoulder, right?

It's the choice between the ghost of Christmas past and Casper. There were times when things were more stable and there were times when they weren't. And so in 2006, she finally gets pregnant and gives birth to the baby in the Bahamas. She's with Howard K. Stern. She names him as the father on the birth certificate, although he is not. And Daniel, who's 20 years old at the time, comes down to meet his new baby sister and spend time with his mom.

They, you know, have this time together and they reconnect. And then everyone goes to sleep and sometime in the night he dies. Daniel dies? Yeah. Oh, fuck, why? How are the cause ultimately named as combined drug toxicity? Oh, man, Jesus. Also a way of saying we can't narrow it down to one specific cause necessarily. There's like lots of drug stuff.

But I mean, yeah, he's 20. He's had addiction issues as well. Things seem fine. Jesus. And he just dies in the night. And then Anna just goes right after him. Like how much time goes by? So she dies five months after him.

Fuck. From his death, her condition just deteriorates. Yeah. Like she had been in this sort, you know, this kind of hard one stability. She had this new baby. They had this new family and she just, she gives up. Yeah. You know, her son is dead.

Yeah. And so she's taking clonopin. She's taking Valium. She's taking Ativan. She's taking liquid sleeping medication that she keeps in a baby bottle next to the bed. She has 105 degree fever, which is caused by the infected abscesses that she's developed.

It's not so much a specific cause. It's just her, it's like her, her body is like the blues mobile at the end of the Blues Brothers. Like it does what it has to do. And then at the end, it just like falls apart. Like she just couldn't live anymore. Yeah. God.

And she dies. So what's the actual technical cause of death? Oh, is it an overdose or heart gives out or something? Yeah. The cause of death is listed as accidental drug overdose. God. You know, and I remember the response in the press just being like, yeah, that sounds about right.

Yeah. And also like, you know, we were done with her. It's like when you're a dog and you have a tennis ball and you love to play with the tennis ball and chase the tennis ball and chew the tennis ball, but eventually you've just, you know, nashed it with your sharp teeth for so long. Yeah. It just doesn't even look like a tennis ball anymore. And then your human comes home with a shiny new tennis ball and you just

forget that the earlier tennis ball even existed because you're done abusing it. It is like super fucked up that we had a TV show that essentially documented the addiction that eventually killed her. When you put it that way. And the show wasn't even seen as like a hard hitting HBO. Look at the ravages of fame. Look how difficult it is for people after their fame goes away. No, it was like this cute little show.

Yeah. I remember there was like funny background music. There were like little bits. They had a cute little intro. Yes, they had an animated theme song. If they did like a prestige and in a cold show on Netflix, now it would win a thousand dummies. Yeah, they could use the same footage.

You just have to use different background music. Yes. So what does all this leave us with, Sarah? Well, I want to go back in time to one of the many legs of the long legal battle of Marshall v. Marshall. So while the case is being decided in Texas state probate court, Pierce Marshall is represented by Rusty Harden, who has the opportunity to cross-examine Anna Nicole Smith.

Rusty Harden is a legendary Houston defense attorney. He defended Arthur Anderson for their role in Enron. Oh, convergence. And according to our heroine Pamela Koloff, who profiled him for Texas monthly, he had an unbroken winning streak and felony jury trials when he was a prosecutor. Okay. She writes his closing arguments were pure theater. At the conclusion of a rape trial, he turned off all the lights in the courtroom,

asking the jury to consider the victim's fear in the darkness. But his most famous closing argument capped the sensational case of Cynthia Campbell Ray, who manipulated her boyfriend into shooting her parents at point blank range while she looked on. Rusty recreated the terror of Ray's two young sons who were in the room when the murders were committed, then reminded the jury of Ray's callous comment, they're young, they'll get over it. Rusty repeated her words and discussed writer Clifford Irving, who chronicled

the 1987 trial and daddy's girl, the Campbell murder case, wrote that Rusty then backed away from Ray, quote, as if afraid of contamination. Before concluding his case, he hissed, shame on you, shame on you, shame on you. Wow. Think about someone who learned how to be a lawyer, prosecuting violent crimes, cross-examining a woman who was guilty of marrying a rich guy who liked her. Okay. And then expecting his family to keep his word after he died.

And what's the most amazing to me about it is that her testimony is that she loved her husband. He loved her and she loved him. And he was always kind to her in a world where people weren't. Right. And she's talking about loving him and mourning him and missing him. And Rusty Hardin says, are you taking new acting lessons, Miss Marshall? And she says, screw you, Rusty.

Yeah, that sucks. And that becomes shameless vamp. Anna Nicole Smith attacks man just doing his job. Wait, so she was the villain in that exchange? Of course she was the villain. Of course she's the villain. If she's being attacked on the stand by a legendary prosecutor. Of course she's the one with all the power.

The same as she was when she married that billionaire, Michael. Oh my God. This is what I want to leave you with, that like she was sincerely expressing sadness about someone who had died and who had taken care of her and made her life better and made her feel safe and told her that he would take care of her and make her safe forever. And then he died and his family took it all away from her and left her out in the cold and she tried to get what she had been promised and honor the wishes

of this person who had cared about her. And she is being treated as if she is a murderer. God, I thought this was going to be a story about like how the modeling industry chews people up and spits them out. I didn't know this was going to be sort of a love story gone wrong or like at least a romance gone wrong. Michael, you know that if you told me to research marshmallows for a week, I would find a way to bring it back to being an overzealous prosecutor's

fault or at least an overzealous prosecutor typifying the problem with America. True, true. What to me is so important about that description of Rusty Harden and how he wins his guilty verdicts is this idea that he is taking the defendant and hissing the word shame at her and backing away from her quote as if she's contaminated that he figured out that that's how you win trials. Right. You win a trial by selling the better story.

And the better story in this case is that if there's someone who you as a citizen feel like being judgmental of, then like, yes, have a blast, go for it. And you can apply that to anything. It doesn't have to be a violent crime. It doesn't have to be something morally atrocious. It can be greed or not wanting to be poor anymore. Yeah. You put the person who you want the people to decide against in the position

of like representing what they're afraid of seeing in themselves. Right. And you can get people to hate them. I mean, the fact that we've done it like 50 times, I think is good. Evidence for that argument that it's happened to many other people and that they just can't chew it up and spit out. And then we call them the villain of their own downfall. Right.

This is a story also about the endless and undignified and ridiculous legal battle between a group of impossibly rich people who are as that pissed off judge said fighting over a bunch of money that none of them earned. Yeah. And we chose to see that not as a story about the absurdity of those people, but about Anna Nicole Smith's fault. Right. So maybe like I'm just going to take my broader points and make them into one

big broad point, which is maybe that every time we as a society feel like judging anyone, it almost certainly is either not about them or about things much more complicated than them as individuals. Like if someone emerges as the focal point for our judge mentalness or our anger, it's probably because they're serving as a clue that there's something wrong with the bigger picture. It's not because they're the problem or there's a technical legal battle involving the Koch brothers behind it.

But I mean, what do you think of Anna Nicole Smith at the end of all this? Like, how do you see her as a person? I mean, as we always find in these stories, she wasn't all that important of a part of it in a way. Well, like the Anna Nicole Smith story that we claim to be telling like is not actually about her. Yeah. Yeah.

Before the country has the ability to abuse her. It's like a story about a woman who's involved with a powerful man who makes questionable decisions and then instead of looking at the powerful man's decisions or assuming that he has any control over his own choices. We blame it all on her breasts. Yeah. And also like, I think this is a story about how Jay Howard, about how Jay Howard Marshall succeeded in every way that a man is supposed to succeed in

America and lived the American dream like in as outsized away as Anna lived the dream of getting boobs. And at the end of his life was just like miserable and lonely and didn't really like his kids that much and just wanted to like have a nice stripper lay in bed with him. Seems, seems understandable. If accepting that people want love more than money allows us to stop abusing strippers, then I think we can all let that sink in.

What you want to do, fall in love with who you want to fall in love with and get everything in writing. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.