Anna Nicole Smith Netflix documentary’s bombshell revelations

Money, drugs, a secret lesbian lover – a new Netflix documentary is full of bombshell claims about doomed Playboy star Anna Nicole Smith.

Anna Nicole Smith made global headlines for marrying 89-year-old billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall in 1994 and pursuing his fortune through the courts after his death 13 months later.

But the model’s quest for fame and fortune led to addiction, the tragic death of her 20-year-old son just three days after the birth of her daughter – and, ultimately, her own accidental drug overdose at the age of 39, The Sun reports.

Smith’s battle with drugs turned her into a “manipulative, egotistical monster” who used Marshall “like an ATM” and invented an abusive childhood because “sad ­stories make money”, according to a new Netflix documentary.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me features interviews with her family, friends and employees, plus archive footage from her late mum Virgie.

Smith in 1999 outside one of her court appearances.

In the program, best friend Missy aka Melissa Byrum, who first met Smith in the strip club where they both worked, claimed the pair had a secret affair when they shared a huge house Marshall bought for the star.

“I was her first female lover,” she said. “I was really in love with her.”

But Byrum said Smith’s pursuit of money and drugs changed her into a “selfish” person with “no compassion”.

The film begins with footage of Smith saying: “I would advise people to follow their dreams. They can come true – I’m living proof.”

But the all-American story of rags to riches that consumed the blonde bombshell also led to her rejecting her family, losing her friends and, ­ultimately, her life.

Shaking with fear

Smith said she wasn’t very popular at school.

Smith circa 2004. Picture: Getty

Born Vickie Lynn Hogan in the small Bible-belt town of Mexia, Texas, she was raised by her police officer mum and stepdad.

She would later claim her mum was a tyrant, and she was subjected to “beatings, whippings and rape” throughout her childhood.

In archive footage, Smith said: “I wasn’t very popular in high school, although I was flat-chested. Now I have curves.”

But uncle George Beal recalled her practising her cheerleader moves in the front garden of their modest home, “waving at the boys going by, trying to get their attention”.

Mum Virgie Arthur, who died in 2018, was shown in the documentary saying: “She loved being the centre of attention. We would go to the mall and there would be 50 men and boys walking behind us.”

At 17, she married local teen Billy Wayne Smith, 16, but she claimed he was “jealous” and locked her in their home while he went out to work.

She fled the marriage when son Daniel, born in 1986, was six months old, moving to Houston and auditioning at the strip club where Byrum said millionaires would tuck hundreds of dollars into the girls’ G-strings.

“In walks this gorgeous girl, and one of the girls said, ‘God, she’s good-looking, but they’re gonna eat her alive,’” Byrum said.

“Anna was very naive. They hired her but she couldn’t dance. She was like an emu trying to fly.”

On a 1994 Playboy cover. Picture: Playboy

In the early noughties she transitioned into reality TV.

Byrum took the newcomer under her wing, but said: “Nobody needed to give her any pointers on how to attract a man. She knew what she was doing.

“Right off the bat she was making a lot of money.”

After revealing her own abusive background to her new friend, Byrum said Smith then claimed her mum Virgie would “handcuff her to the bed for days and beat her mercilessly”.

“She told me she was going to be a famous model,” Byrum said. “She was convinced the only thing holding her back was her boobs.”

At that time calling herself Nicki, Smith saved up and paid for a boob job.

But it left her in pain, and she took prescription drugs including Valium as a result.

It was in the strip club that the then-24-year-old first danced with widower and oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall, then 86, in 1991.

He began to lavish her with expensive gifts, ­including a six-bedroom mansion with stables, a basketball court, pool and a guesthouse.

For two years he begged her to marry him but she refused, saying she wanted to make her name first to prevent “people calling me a gold digger”.

Smith at a 2005 movie premiere. Picture: Reuters

She finally found fame when Playboy magazine picture editor Marilyn Grabowski invited her to do a photo shoot in LA.

But during the shoot, she found the model sitting in the corner, shaking with fear and wrapped in a sheet.

An obsessive Marilyn Monroe fan, Anna had brought along a record of Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend.

Grabowski said: “I put that music on and all of a sudden she changed. She was a different person.”

The cover shots and a spread as Playmate Of The Month led to a lucrative contract with Guess Jeans, with Smith dubbed the new ­Claudia Schiffer.

She later insisted she was not ashamed of posing nude because Playboy “happened to make my dream come true”.

She changed her name to Anna Nicole and got her first movie role, in the Coen brothers’ 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy, followed by Naked Gun 33 1⁄3 the same year.

As her career took off, Byrum moved in to help look after Smith’s son Daniel – and she said she and Smith became lovers. “She had an insatiable appetite for sex,” Byrum said.

Like her movie idol Marilyn, Anna had an obsession with her biological father who she had never met, Eugene Hogan.

After using a private detective to trace him, she flew him and half-brother Donnie Hogan to LA, taking them to the Playboy ­mansion and Disneyland. But the reunion ended badly.

Egotistical monster

Donnie said: “I wanted her to know the truth. My father’s a monster. When I was about 16, he told me he raped his wife’s sister. She was a child.”

Smith later told Byrum that her father Eugene “tried to have sex with her”.

With her drug use spiralling, Smith was rushed to hospital in ­October 1993, after collapsing from an ­accidental overdose.

Byrum said: “She’s turning up to shoots looking haggard. She’s no longer grateful to Mr Marshall. She’s treating him like an ATM.

“You’re watching this person that you love morph into this egotistical monster, a full-blown drug addict. My friend that loved me wasn’t there any more. There was no compassion. So I quit. We were done.”

Still in the grip of addiction, the model married wheelchair-bound Marshall in 1994, but lawyer Kelly Moore denied Smith was a gold digger.

“They were both extraordinary people that other people were always trying to take pieces of.

“Howard and Anna were protection for each other,” she said.

But in a recording of one of her husband’s desperate calls, he was heard begging her to call him, saying: “I love you. I’m trying to find you.”

Smith and Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall, who she married in 1994.

When she finally picked up the phone, she sounded groggy and told him to talk to her tomorrow, as “I won’t remember tonight”.

After just 13 months of marriage, 90-year-old Marshall died, leaving 28-year-old Anna claiming he had promised her half of his $US1.6 billion fortune.

The death sparked a fierce legal battle with the billionaire’s son E. Pierce Marshall, as a court heard she had frittered away at least $US12 million of her late husband’s cash.

Smith explained: “It’s very expensive to be me.”

During the case – which she lost – she began a relationship with lawyer Howard K Stern, who Kelly Moore described as “a low-level lawyer looking for a big payday”.

Left penniless by the judgment, Smith signed up to a reality TV show for E!, The Anna Nicole Smith Show.

She also developed an eating disorder, ballooning to 130kg, and signed a deal with diet firm Trimspa, often eating nothing for days and living on diet pills and drugs.

Onstage at the 2004 American Music Awards.

But bodyguard Maurice Brighthaupt, known as Big Moe, said she milked her drug-addled persona when it suited her, citing an infamous appearance at the American Music Awards in 2004, when she slurred her intro to Kanye West.

“She said, ‘I’m going to do something that everyone will always remember,’” he said.

“Then she got up on stage and looked high, but Anna knew how to work the crowd. Off-camera, she was completely with it.”

Byrum remembered hearing an interview when Smith claimed she had run away from home after being ­repeatedly raped and beaten.

She said: “I was shocked because I knew that was not her childhood. That was my childhood – exactly the way I had relayed it to her.”

Bizarre paternity battle

Brother Donald said their mum was a “sweet, loving person” who never abused his sister.

In archive footage, Virgie Arthur said: “One time I asked her, ‘Why do you tell such lies?’

“She said, ‘I wish you could understand that I make more money ­telling sad stories than I make telling good stories.’”

There was more controversy when Smith got pregnant with daughter Dannielynn in 2005, sparking a bizarre paternity battle between four men. As well as Stern, ­former bodyguard Alexander Denk claimed to be the dad, and in a weird twist, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s ­husband, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, said he had had a decade-long affair with her.

Photographer Larry Birkhead was later proved to be the dad of Dannielynn, now 16, and won custody.

By then son Daniel, who had had ­a breakdown, was sliding into drug addiction.

The day after Smith gave birth to Dannielynn, the 20-year-old visited his mum and baby sister in a Barbadian hospital and, while there, died from an overdose.

Smith once again turned to drugs.

Five months after Daniel died, she was found dead in a hotel room from an accidental overdose.

It was a tragic end that mirrored the death of her idol Marilyn – and one she had predicted herself.

“She told me all the time that she was going to die young,” Byrum said.

“I should have believed it.”

This article originally appeared on The Sun and is republished here with permission

Originally published as Anna Nicole Smith Netflix documentary’s bombshell revelations