Vickie Lynn Hogan never finished high school.
The Houston native failed her freshman year before quitting out as a sophomore and working in a fast-food restaurant.
Within eight years, she had changed her identity and emerged as world-famous model and Playboy centrefold Anna Nicole Smith.
The documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, which explores the amazing – and ultimately sad – story of the iconic girl next door-turned-socialite, is hitting Netflix.
Director Ursula Macfarlane told Netflix’s official companion site Tudum that’many prior books and films on Anna Nicole skewed her story.’
This time, she claimed she intended to share the star’s story ‘in her own words.’
Anna Nicole’s story begins in her adolescence, when she worked at that fast-food business. It was there that she met her first husband, Billy Wayne Smith, as the two were selling fried chicken to the people of Houston.
It had the passion that youthful love always has, with Vickie falling hard and fast for Billy.
‘[Billy] was a sweet young man, very timid and shy,’ Anna Nicole’s mum, Virgie Arthur, told the Daily Mail in 2017. ‘It made her mad because he didn’t pay attention to her.’
According to Eric Redding’s 2007 biography Sex Bomb, Anna Nicole said of Billy: ‘He drove me crazy. I chased him and chased him the way young girls do until I finally got him and married him. By then, of course, I wasn’t interested.’
They married in 1985, when she was 17 and he was just 16. Vickie gave birth to their son, Daniel – ‘like Daniel in the Bible’ – Wayne Smith, in January 1995, barely two months after her 18th birthday.
However, just one year later, love’s youthful dream was over, and the couple divorced.
‘I wasn’t allowed to go out of the house or go to the store,’ Anna Nicole recalled. ‘He was so jealous.’
Vickie, a poor single mother, turned to stripping to make ends meet – but her curvy body set her apart from the favoured waif-thin figures of the day.
In 2002, Anna Nicole told Larry King: ‘I tried Red Lobster. I tried Wal-Mart. I tried all these places and I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t. So, I tried this gentlemen’s club, and, you know, I worked there.’
She met the man who would ultimately become her second and final husband, billionaire J. Howard Marshall, while dancing at the now-demolished Gigi’s Cabaret.
The octogenarian petrol tycoon had recently lost his wife and mistress and was in mourning.
‘I was 23, and he was 86,’ she recalled. ‘I saw a very sick man. I just wanted to just talk with him. There was no physical attraction at all. He was very much attracted to me.’
Despite Marshall’s gifts and their friendship, Vickie did not seek a divorce from Billy, despite the elderly man’s requests.
At the same time, she was dating bodybuilder Clay Spires, who recommended she apply to be a Playboy model following an open audition call. By 1992, she appeared on the March cover of Playboy, and just two months later, she was named Playmate of the Month.
Speaking about the opportunity, she said: ‘I am just so happy and thrilled and I am so glad Mr. Hefner chose me and all my fans out there that called out there, thank you. And I am just really, really excited.’
However, it was a part initially intended for Claudia Schiffer that catapulted Vickie into the public spotlight, as she was chosen to feature in multiple Guess Jeans advertisements in 1993.
It was also during this campaign that she evolved into the blonde bombshell known as Anna Nicole Smith.
‘[Fashion designer] Paul Marciano and me and one of his friends – we were sitting around coming up with a stage name, and that’s where [Anna Nicole] came from,’ she explained to Larry King in 2002.
The newly-named superstar, who idolised Marilyn Monroe, went on to work with Vanity Fair, Italian Vogue, and H&M, appearing in billboards for the latter throughout Scandinavia.
Meanwhile, after her divorce from Billy in 1993, Anna Nicole was finally free to marry Marshall, and the pair married in an intimate ceremony with only 11 guests at the White Dove wedding chapel in Houston, Texas, in 1994.
The couple’s large age gap made them ideal tabloid fodder. People magazine declared in a wedding report: ‘The bride wore cleavage. The 89-year-old groom, speaking from his wheelchair, assured the 11 people in attendance that he sure did adore his new 26-year-old wife, for whom he already had purchased $1 million worth of jewellery.’
Explaining why she waited so long, Anna Nicole said: ‘I promised him that I would marry him after I made something of myself, and I got to where I was a name.’
According to New York magazine, the model did not attend any post-ceremony receptions. She informed her new spouse that she was leaving for a photoshoot after they sealed their marriage with a kiss.
The news shocked the old Marshall hard, leaving him’sat in his wheelchair wailing.’
Anna Nicole, on the other hand, had already shown thanks to her second husband. She stated of her marriage, ‘He brought me out of a dreadful environment and was taking care of me and my son, and I loved him for that.’
That same year, Anna Nicole made her feature film debut as the wonderfully beautiful Za Za in The Hudsucker Proxy.
Despite the fact that it starred Tim Robbins and Steve Buscemi, the film was a box office flop – and while Anna Nicole went on to have a role in the smash Naked Gun trilogy in 1994, her ambitions of becoming a renowned actor never came true.
In 1995, the newlywed received her first main role in the action film To The Limit, with John Travolta’s elder brother Joey. The film received mixed reviews and did not help Anna Nicole establish herself in the industry.
Just 14 months after she wed Marshall, Anna Nicole was said to have been left heartbroken when he died in August 1995, aged 90. His death triggered the actress spiral into a life of drugs and booze to cope with her loss.
She recalled in 2002: ‘I got addicted to pain pills and also alcohol when my husband was dying and when he died.’
‘No one has ever loved me and done things for me and respected me and didn’t care about what people said about me. I mean, he truly loved me and I loved him for it.’
Despite their clear affection for one another, there was no mention of Anna Nicole in Marshall’s will, which led to a serious court battle between the model and her late husband’s family.
Always maintaining that Marshall verbally promised her half of his wealth, she insisted: ‘He wanted me to have it and I’ll fight until the end.’
In an interview with ABC in 2000, the star added: ‘I don’t want to be called a gold digger because I’m not. I could’ve married him a week after we met, or two weeks after we met. I could’ve married him years before, and I didn’t… I went out and I made something of myself.’
It was an incredibly bitter battle between Anna Nicole and E. Pierce Marshall, J. Howard’s younger son for the $1.8 billion fortune. Things were so troubled that even the dead man’s ashes were split between them, and two separate funerals were held.
Finally, five years after her husband’s death, in 2000, Anna Nicole was awarded almost half a billion dollars from Marshall’s estate.
In response, E. Pierce Marshall, who claimed that Anna Nicole was only with his father for financial gain, said: ‘I will fight to clear my name in California federal court. That is a promise [she] can take to the bank.’
Indeed, it was a fleeting win, as the verdict was mercilessly overturned within a year.
From there, there was a years-long back and forth, as in 2002, $88 million was offered – but the judgement was reversed once more.
‘I’m gonna fight until the end.’ Anna Nicole said. ‘My husband is worth it. I’ll fight until the end.’
The struggle for the will, however, outlasted both Anna Nicole and E. Pierce Marshall, who died abruptly in 2006 after a short but violent sickness. It wasn’t until 2014 that the lawsuit was resolved, and she was deemed to be due nothing from the estate.
In the midst of this ferocious court struggle. From 2002 to 2004, Anna Nicole featured in The Anna Nicole Show, a three-season E!’reality’ TV show. Howard K. Stern, her lawyer, manager, and soon-to-be partner, as well as Anna Nicole’s son Daniel, made regular appearances.
Following the discontinuation of the programme, Anna Nicole slurred her speech and acted erratically during her appearance at the 2004 AMAs. This behaviour spurred discussions regarding possible drug usage.
Anna Nicole travelled to the Bahamas with her then-boyfriend Howard in order to avoid public scrutiny and the media circus, and she announced her pregnancy on her website in June 2006.
Questions regarding paternity quickly emerged, with Anna Nicole’s prior boyfriend Larry Birkhead, personal bodyguard Alexander Denk, and Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frederic von Anhalt all claiming to be the father.
When her daughter, Hannah Rose Marshall Stern, was born later than expected on September 7, it seemed to put an end to speculation about her father’s identity, freeing Anna Nicole and her family to focus on their future together.
Anna Nicole’s first child, Daniel Wayne Smith, died of an accidental overdose just three days after visiting his mother and infant sister.
Anna Nicole was so distraught when she discovered her son that she had to be medicated. Then, at Daniel’s burial, Howard said she tried to get into the casket.
‘She said that, “If Daniel has to be buried, I want to be buried with him,’” he recalled. ‘She was ready to go down with him.’
Anna Nicole Smith died on February 8, 2007, just five months after the death of her son and following a commitment ceremony with Howard in which they exchanged rings and vows but were not officially married. She died from an accidental overdose, echoing her son’s untimely death.
DNA testing indicated Hannah was not the daughter of Howard K. Stern, Anna Nicole’s live-in partner, within weeks of her death. Instead, a Bahamian judge determined that her true father was Larry Birkhead, the star’s on-again, off-again lover from 2004 to 2006.
Hannah’s name was changed to Dannielynn Hope Marshall Birkhead when Larry was awarded exclusive custody of her.
‘Thank you for the people who got me this far,’ Larry said at the time. ‘Thank you very much. My baby’s gonna be coming home pretty soon.’
Dannielynn began modelling for Guess’ kids’ division when she was six years old, in a full circle moment.
Dannielynn had ‘the same fun spirit’ as her mother, according to Paul Marciano, the company’s co-founder and the same guy who gave Anna Nicole her name two decades earlier.
Dannielynn, now 16, co-owns the Instagram account larryanddannielyn with her father. There, they share life updates as well as periodic tributes to her mother.
They like travelling together and attend the Kentucky Derby every year, where Larry and Anna Nicole initially met.
Anna Nicole Smith and Larry Birkenhead, a two-hour episode from Lifetime’s documentary miniseries Hopelessly in Love, was released in 2020. Larry shared the last time he spoke to Anna Nicole and what she said to him when promoting the show.
She sent me [a message],’ he shared. ‘She said: “Don’t fall in love again,” and then she had a crying face and then she signed off.’
Anna Nicole Smith, like her hero Marilyn Monroe, lived quickly and died early.
While she did not have the happy ending she deserved, she enjoyed a life that Vickie Lynn Hogan could only dream of.
Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me is available to stream on Netflix now.
Source My Celebrity Life.
