From humble small town origins to a tragic early death, Anna Nicole Smith's life was
filled with abusive treatment and deep pain, but also untapped talent and plenty of passion.
Born on November 28, 1967, Anna Nicole Smith was originally known as Vickie
Lynn Hogan. After moving out of the small town of Mexia, Texas,
she decided that she wasn't happy with her birth name, and changed it. As her former friend
Missy Byrum recalled in the documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me:
"She did tell me that she didn't like her name. She said she didn't like Vickie. She said, 'I like
Nicky better.' So I said, 'Okay, if that's what you wanna be called, then I'll call you Nicky.'"
But clearly, "Nicky" wasn't the name that ultimately stuck. During her early modeling
days working for Guess Jeans, Smith was advised to find a stage name that would ring a bell. So
together with Guess co-founder Paul Marciano, she came up with the moniker she's now widely
known by. As for her last name, that was a simple matter of being the surname of her first husband.
Long before she became a famous sex symbol, Anna Nicole Smith was just a little girl
growing up poor in Mexia, Texas. Following her parents' divorce when she was just a toddler,
she lived with her mother Virgie Mae and stepdad Donald Hart. Life was
quite a struggle for young Anna Nicole, partly because of Virgie's allegedly
abusive ways. As Missy Byrum recalled in Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me,
"She was in law enforcement, and she was kind of a tyrant.
She would handcuff her to the bed for days and just beat her mercilessly."
As Smith grew into her teenage years, her relationship with her mother only grew worse.
To tame her increasingly wild daughter, Virgie Mae sent Smith to be with her extended family,
so she lived with her aunt for a good portion of her childhood. According to Smith's uncle George,
at that time, Virgie Mae was worried about her daughter's relationship with a 29-year-old man.
"I had her windows nailed shut so she couldn't get out the windows without me knowing it."
Establishing a bona fide acting career was one of the things that
Anna Nicole Smith could never quite crack. It wasn't for lack of trying,
though. She made her big screen debut in the 1994 Coen brothers screwball comedy The
Hudsucker Proxy. As Missy Byrum recalled in Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me:
"We start screaming. We're jumping up and down. 'Cause
that's her first movie. She's in movies now."
The Hudsucker Proxy led to some more movie gigs, including Naked Gun 33 ⅓:
The Final Insult, To the Limit, and 1996's Skyscraper. Despite all her attempts to
land a breakout role, her acting career ultimately failed to make much of an impact.
In the early 2000s, she attempted to revitalize her career with The Anna Nicole Smith Show,
which premiered on E! in 2002. It was canceled after just two seasons,
though, despite some impressive ratings.
Anna Nicole Smith's 14-month marriage to the much older oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II
was a favorite topic of the tabloids back in the mid-90s. And that wasn't the only husband she ever
had. Back in 1985, she married Billy Wayne Smith, whom she met when she was 17. They both worked
at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken in Houston at the time. According to Anna Nicole's mother Virgie,
her daughter pursued Billy relentlessly. As she revealed to the Daily Mail in 2017,
"He was a sweet young man, very timid and shy. It made her mad because he didn't pay attention
to her. She told me, 'I'm going to get that boy, just watch, he's going to marry me.'"
Sadly, married life was nothing like Smith imagined. She's described Billy
as a controlling husband who never let her leave the house. To deal with the loneliness,
she decided to have a baby, and so in 1986, Anna Nicole and Billy welcomed
their son Daniel. But this didn't really make things better. Billy was allegedly
a very abusive father, so Anna Nicole left when Daniel was just six months old.
Following Anna Nicole Smith's death of an accidental drug overdose in February 2007,
it was revealed in court that she'd struggled with substance abuse. According to Missy Byrum,
she developed an unhealthy relationship with painkillers after undergoing a
breast augmentation procedure. As Byrum recalled,
"It was painful.You know, it was horrible to watch somebody go through that because
it hurts like hell. And that is when she started on her pain pills."
"Valium, Xanax, Lortabs, Vicodin, and, um, the Klonopin."
Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, who treated Smith shortly before her death,
had similar recollections. As he explained to Fox News in 2018,
"She had back pain, she had some issues with her breast implants, and had several
injuries. She had been dealing with pain for many years and had tried to deal with it."
Smith also developed an eating disorder near the start of her career, reportedly
stemming from people frequently telling her to lose weight. As Ursula MacFarlane,
director of Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me, told Vanity Fair,
"Her weight swings were not just about greed or drugs. They were someone who
was suffering with eating disorders, which is obviously psychological pain."
In addition to her two marriages, Anna Nicole Smith was romantically linked to many different
men over the course of her life. One of the most notable was her long-term
affair with photographer Larry Birkhead, which began after they first met in 2003.
"Our love story was so up and down, and it had so many things combined,
but it was a two-year, you know, affair that people didn't really know about."
Birkhead has since been confirmed as the father of Smith's daughter, Dannielynn Birkhead,
who was born in September 2006. While Smith kept her relationship with Birkhead under the radar,
one partner she did show off publicly was Howard K. Stern. They met following
the August 1995 death of her second husband, J. Howard Marshall II. He
was originally working as her attorney for matters regarding Marshall's estate,
but things eventually took a romantic turn. As she once told Entertainment Tonight,
"I kissed him first. He was the shy one. He was like, 'I can't, I can't,' because
he always had to go by the books. I knew I was in love the first time I kissed him."
Smith was also romantically linked to Zsa Zsa Gabor's widower, Prince Frederic von Anhalt,
as well as fashion designer Christian Audigier and her former bodyguard, Alexander Denk.
In July 2006, Anna Nicole Smith relocated to the Bahamas, reportedly to avoid revealing
the true paternity of her soon-to-be-born daughter Dannielynn. According to Bahamian law at the time,
an individual with property valued above $500,000 was eligible to be
granted permanent residence in the country. As Smith reportedly owned a $900,000 mansion given
to her by an ex-boyfriend in the Bahamas, she was subsequently granted permanent residence.
But things took an ugly turn that November, when her ex publicly
claimed that he gave Smith a loan to buy the house. Upon her failure to repay the loan,
he sought a court order asking to gain ownership of the mansion.
The legality of Smith's permanent residence also came under question after photos published by a
local newspaper showed her in bed with Shane Gibson, the then-immigration minister of the
Bahamas who approved her residency. Gibson ended up resigning from his role, and shortly after
Smith's death, he publicly denied granting her her permit based on their personal relationship.
Anna Nicole Smith's death was followed by one big question:
who would inherit her wealth? A few weeks after her passing in February 2007,
it was revealed that she'd left her assets to her late son, Daniel Smith,
who'd died of an accidental overdose at the age of 20 the previous September. Her will
technically made no direct mention of her second child, Dannielynn Birkhead, who was only five
months old at the time. Her attorney and partner Howard K. Stern was named executor of the will.
Stern argued that Dannielynn should be made sole beneficiary of the will. In his court filing that
October, he stated that it was Smith's intention to include her infant daughter in the will,
but she never got the chance to do so before she died. After months of legal back and forth,
a Los Angeles judge granted the petition in March 2008 and made Dannielynn the sole beneficiary of
the estate. Dannielynn's father Larry Birkhead was named a co-trustee alongside Stern.
In the documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me, Missy Byrum made a
bombshell revelation: in 1992, she and Smith began an intimate relationship.
"I was her first female lover, I guess."
Smith and Byrum's romance reportedly evolved into something deeper when
Smith proposed the following year. As Byrum claimed to People Magazine,
"She gave me a set of rings and we got married in the backyard by the pool with
champagne [...] She wanted me to have a baby with her. But I always knew it wasn't
ever going to work out because she was never, ever going to settle down with one person."
When Smith's struggles with substance abuse became increasingly worrisome,
Byrum called things off. While she might have been the model's first female partner,
she was supposedly not the last. Indeed, as fashion designer Pol' Atteu told People Magazine,
"I would say she was fluid. We just did not have a name for it back then."
And according to Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, Smith also had a short affair with
her son Daniel's girlfriend in 2006. As he told the Daily Mail,
"The girl fell in love with Anna,
and the two of them had a brief sexual relationship. It was downright Shakespearean."
This reportedly led to a falling out between mother and son, though
they made amends shortly before Daniel's death.
Following her parents' divorce, a young Anna Nicole Smith became estranged from her father,
Donald Hogan. But after landing a deal with Guess Jeans and becoming 1993's
Playboy Playmate of the Year, she set out to find this missing piece of her
life. So she hired a private investigator who tracked down Donald and Smith's half-brother,
Donnie Hogan. She then invited the two of them to see her in California.
"At the beginning, it was great. I mean, she was excited, we were excited. I mean,
you could tell she, like, wanted a father figure in her life."
However, what was arguably one of the best times of Smith's life soon took a very dark
turn. She confided to Missy Byrum that her father tried to have sex with her.
Donnie was shocked about the attempted rape allegation, but he ultimately knew it was a
legitimate possibility. He also felt the need to warn his famous sister about their dad.
"So it could be true."
As reported by The Guardian, Donald Hogan had a history of sexual abuse against underage girls,
including Smith's aunt and the daughters that he had with his second wife.
To the world, she was Anna Nicole Smith, but behind closed doors, she was just Vickie Lynn,
a woman we barely knew. As her mother Virgie told the Daily Mail in 2017,
"People won't know her as Vickie Lynn like we do.
Her family knows her because they were raised with her. Other people don't,
they just know her as Anna Nicole. Vickie Lynn was a great kid and now she's gone."
Like many celebrities who struggle with fame, it seems that Smith's popularity ultimately
meant losing part of herself. According to Ursula Macfarlane, Smith spent her life trying to live
up to others' expectations of perfection. As MacFarlane put it to People Magazine,
"I don't know if Anna Nicole truly knew who she herself was."
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues,
help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).