Chapter 1The Girl from Mexia

Foreword

I have spent my working life in the midcentury. My beat, for the Guardian and for Sight & Sound, has been the actors and directors and playwrights of the studio decades — the people who built the machinery of the modern screen image on both sides of the Atlantic, and the people that machinery quietly broke. When I told colleagues I was writing a book about Anna Nicole Smith, the response was a particular kind of silence, the silence you offer a man who has announced he is leaving the archive for the tabloid rack. She was not cinema. She was not theater. She was, they meant without quite saying it, beneath the beat.

That was exactly why I wanted her.

Because Anna Nicole Smith spent her entire public life performing the midcentury. The platinum hair, the breathy delivery, "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" played to steady her nerves before her first Playboy shoot — she was a woman from Mexia, Texas, running Marilyn Monroe's script four decades after the studios wrote it, and the culture that watched her do it pretended not to recognize the material. I had spent twenty years writing about what the image factory did to the women of the 1950s, and here was the same factory, retooled for cable and the checkout aisle, doing the same thing in real time, on camera, to applause. I did not come to Anna Nicole Smith as a departure from my subject. I came to her because she was my subject, wearing a TrimSpa sash.

I first took her seriously, I admit, in an opera house. When "Anna Nicole" opened at Covent Garden in 2011, four years after her death, I sat in an audience that did not know whether it was permitted to laugh, and I understood that the not-knowing was the story. An ocean had given me a useful distance from the American coverage — I had watched her from Britain, which is to say through a filter of amused condescension that I did not examine at the time and am not proud of now. The condescension was the mechanism. It took me years to see that.

The research was not what I expected. I had assumed I would be writing about celebrity, and I was, but I kept finding myself somewhere else: in the arithmetic of minimum-wage Texas in 1988, in the filings of a probate war that ran to the United States Supreme Court, in a Broward County toxicology report that lists nine substances with clinical calm and explains nothing. I worked from the public record — the court documents, the press archive, the interviews she gave, the reality-show hours she left behind — and the record kept saying the same thing the coverage had refused to say. She was not stupid. She was poor. Every decision the culture mocked her for was, examined at the point she made it, the most rational one available to a woman with one asset and a child to feed.

What makes her worth a book is not the spectacle, though the spectacle was total. It is that her life is the cleanest specimen we have of a process the culture runs continuously and declines to name: the conversion of a woman into a product, the extraction of the value, the disposal of the remainder, and the laughter that keeps the audience from noticing what it is watching. Monroe's version of the story has been examined for sixty years. Anna Nicole's has been told mostly as a joke. This book proceeds from the conviction that they are the same story, and that the joke was the point — the joke was how we got away with it.

I came to her a critic of an earlier era, expecting a footnote to Marilyn. I leave believing the footnote was the text. What follows is my attempt to read it properly, at last, without laughing.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · The Girl from Mexia

She arrived in the American imagination as a joke. The dumb blonde who married the billionaire. The Playmate who couldn't string a sentence together on camera. The punch line that wrote itself, year after year, until the punch line stopped breathing in a Florida hotel room at thirty-nine and the laughter curdled into something uglier: the belated recognition that the joke had been on all of us, that we had watched a woman drown in public and called it entertainment.

Before there was Anna Nicole Smith there was Vickie Lynn Hogan, and before you can understand what America did to her you have to understand what Mexia, Texas, did first.

Mexia sits in Limestone County, east-central Texas, roughly ninety miles south of Dallas and a considerable distance from anywhere that has ever appeared on a tourist map. The town's name, borrowed from a Mexican general's family, is pronounced "Muh-HAY-uh" by the locals, which is itself a small lesson in how Texas processes its borrowings: taking what it wants, reshaping it to suit. In 1967, the year Vickie Lynn Hogan was born, Mexia had roughly six thousand residents and the remnants of a boom that had come and gone before the Second World War. Oil had been struck in the 1920s, and for a brief, delirious season the town had swelled with roughnecks and money and the particular brand of mayhem that follows both. By the time Vickie Lynn was born, on November 28, 1967, the oil was mostly memory. What remained was the landscape: flat, wide, the kind of Texas terrain that offers nothing between you and the horizon to stop the wind or soften the view. Cotton country. Church country. The sort of place where everyone knows everyone's business because there isn't enough business to go around.

Vickie Lynn was born in Houston, Texas, on November 28, 1967, to Virgie Mae Hogan (later Virgie Arthur), who was herself barely out of adolescence when she became a mother; the family's roots, though, lay in Mexia, the Limestone County town that would define her origins in the public imagination. Virgie was sixteen years old when her daughter was born. She would later work as a sheriff's deputy in Houston, though in these early years she cycled through whatever work was available. The father, Donald Eugene Hogan, born 1947, had married Virgie on February 22, 1967, and would divorce her on November 4, 1969, before Vickie Lynn had reached her second birthday. He was largely absent. He would remain so. As an adult, Anna Nicole would hire a private investigator to locate him, a search that ended badly: she alleged he attempted to sexually assault her upon reunion, and her half-brother Donnie Hogan, her father's son, reportedly warned her in advance that their father was "not the type of guy you want to be alone with." Donald Hogan had a documented history of abuse.

The marriage dissolved quickly, and Vickie Lynn's early childhood became a rotating cast of relatives, temporary arrangements, and the particular instability that poverty imposes on family structure. Her mother eventually remarried, a man named Donald Ray Hart, and young Vickie Lynn carried the name Nikki Hart for years. The stepfather relationship dissolved by 1983. She lived for stretches with her mother, then with aunts and other relatives, then back again. She was particularly close to her Aunt Kay Beall, whom she called "Mama II," and it was Kay who took her in during ninth grade in Mexia, the last school she would attend. Each move was a small upheaval, another set of rules to learn, another household's rhythms to absorb. There was no cruelty in this, or at least no more cruelty than the ordinary kind that accompanies having too many people with too little money trying to care for a child they all loved but none could quite afford.

What we know of Vickie Lynn's childhood comes filtered through the retrospective lens of fame, through interviews she gave years later, when she was Anna Nicole Smith and every detail of her past had become commodity, something to be shaped for magazine profiles or reality television confessionals. The childhood she described was stark. By her own repeated account, the family had almost nothing. They had the particular American poverty that exists in plain sight and is invisible anyway, the poverty of small towns where the houses sag and the yards are bare dirt and the children wear clothes that have been through three owners before reaching them.

She spoke of going hungry. She spoke of houses without reliable heat in winter. She spoke, on occasion and with varying degrees of detail, of sexual abuse, allegations she made against different family members at different times, with enough inconsistency in the details to invite skepticism but enough consistency in the emotional register to suggest that something had happened to her, even if the precise something shifted in the telling. This is not unusual among survivors of childhood trauma. Memory is not a filing cabinet; it is a living thing that reorganizes itself around pain, and the fact that a woman cannot produce a courtroom-ready narrative of her abuse does not mean the abuse did not occur. It means she was a child when it happened, and children do not take notes.

What is certain is that Mexia offered Vickie Lynn Hogan almost nothing in the way of a future. The town's economy was subsistence-level for families like hers. The schools were adequate in the way that underfunded rural schools in Texas were adequate in the 1970s and 1980s, which is to say they provided the minimum required by law and not much more. She was not a good student. Whether this reflected native ability, an unstable home life that made concentration difficult, or the simple indifference of a girl who could see no connection between what happened in a classroom and what was going to happen to her in the world is impossible to determine at this distance. Probably all three. She dropped out before completing high school. In the mythology that later surrounded her, this became evidence of her stupidity. In reality, it was evidence of her circumstances. Millions of American children drop out of school every decade, and the overwhelming majority do so not because they are stupid but because they are poor, or pregnant, or needed at home, or unable to see past tomorrow to a future that education might unlock. Vickie Lynn was poor and would soon be pregnant and had never been given reason to believe that staying in school would change either condition.

She married young. Billy Wayne Smith was a cook at a local restaurant, Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken, a name that belongs so completely to small-town Texas that it almost reads as parody, though it was not. They had met as co-workers; she was waitressing there, he was in the kitchen. They married on April 4, 1985, in Mexia. She was seventeen. He was sixteen. Two children playing at adulthood because no one had shown them what adulthood actually looked like, or perhaps because adulthood as practiced by the adults around them (the working, the struggling, the quiet desperation of small-town poverty) did not look like something worth aspiring to, and marriage at least offered the illusion of something happening, of a life beginning.

Their son, Daniel Wayne Smith, was born on January 22, 1986, in Mexia. Vickie Lynn was eighteen years old. The divorce would not be finalized until February 1993, the formality of legal dissolution lagging years behind the practical reality of a marriage that had ended almost as soon as it began.

She later told interviewers that Billy Wayne had been controlling and abusive, that he monitored her movements, prevented her from leaving the house freely, and was violent toward both her and Daniel. The marriage lasted approximately as long as anyone who has studied the actuarial tables for teenage unions in economically depressed communities might have predicted. By some accounts it was over within a year. She separated from Billy Wayne and returned to Houston, infant Daniel in tow. She had no high school degree, no job training, no family money, and a child who needed to be fed. She cycled through whatever work she could find: Walmart cashier, Red Lobster waitress, food service shifts that paid poverty wages on a poverty schedule. Her mother Virgie provided childcare while she worked, a grudging practical arrangement that at least allowed Vickie Lynn to accumulate the small, hard-won savings that would eventually change the direction of her life.

To understand what happened next, you need to understand what options were available to a young woman in east Texas in the late 1980s, a young woman with no high school diploma, no job training, no family money, no connections, and a baby to feed.

The honest answer is: almost none.

She could waitress. She did waitress. She worked at Wal-Mart. She worked at Red Lobster. These were not careers; they were survival mechanisms, and they paid accordingly. Minimum wage in Texas in 1988 was $3.35 an hour. Even working full-time (which was difficult with a toddler and no reliable childcare), that came to roughly $7,000 a year before taxes. Rent, food, diapers, the thousand small expenses of keeping a child alive and a household functioning: the math did not work. It never works, for women in her position, and the American response to this arithmetic has historically been to blame the women for failing to solve an equation that has no solution.

She heard about better money. In Houston, a city she had visited but did not know, women could make in a night what she made in a week. The vehicle was their bodies. The venues were strip clubs.

Here we arrive at the first of many points where the Anna Nicole Smith narrative demands that we stop and examine our assumptions. The received version goes like this: she was a small-town girl who became a stripper because she was lazy, or trashy, or loose, or whatever adjective the teller's particular moral framework supplies. The implication is always that stripping was a choice made freely from a range of equivalent options, that she could just as easily have become a nurse or a teacher or an accountant and chose instead to take her clothes off because something in her character (some moral deficiency, some excess of carnality, some failure of imagination) drew her to it.

This is, to put it plainly, nonsense. She became a stripper because stripping paid more than Wal-Mart and she had a child to feed. The moral calculus was not complicated. It was, in fact, the most rational economic decision available to her. She possessed one asset that the market valued: her body. She was tall (five feet eleven inches, a physical fact that would define her career in ways she could not yet imagine) and strikingly built. She had large breasts, wide hips, a face that was conventionally pretty in the broad, accessible way that American popular culture has always rewarded. These were not accomplishments. They were genetics. But they were worth more, per hour, than anything she could do at Red Lobster.

She moved to Houston. She began dancing at a club called Gigi's, a gentleman's club in the tradition that Houston, a city of remarkable commercial pragmatism, had elevated to something approaching an industry.

Houston's strip clubs in the late 1980s and early 1990s were not the seedy dives of film noir imagination. Or rather, some were, but others, Gigi's among them, were large, well-lit establishments that catered to the oil and gas money that still flowed through the city. The men who frequented these clubs were not lurking in shadows. They were businessmen, oilmen, lawyers, judges. They came in suits. They tipped well. They expected, in return, an experience that confirmed their status: beautiful women attending to them, the theater of desire performed at close range, the illusion that money could buy not just access but genuine affection.

Vickie Lynn Hogan, who would soon start going by Nikki, learned the trade. She was not, by most accounts, the most talented dancer at Gigi's. Her movements were sometimes awkward; she was tall and had not yet learned how her body could be most effectively deployed. But she had something that the more technically accomplished dancers often lacked: a quality of availability, of warmth, of the kind of undiscriminating friendliness that made men feel she was genuinely glad to see them. Whether this was performance or personality is a question that would follow her for the rest of her life. The answer is almost certainly both, and the inability to distinguish between the two is what made her dangerous: dangerous to the men who fell in love with her, and dangerous to herself.

She worked. She made money. She sent some home for Daniel. She was, by the standards available to her, succeeding. She had escaped Mexia. She was feeding her child. She was surviving.

And then, one night in 1991, an old man walked into the club.

J. Howard Marshall II was eighty-six years old when he first laid eyes on the woman who would become Anna Nicole Smith. He was, by any conventional measure, one of the most remarkable men in Texas, a state that does not lack for remarkable men or for men who believe themselves remarkable regardless of evidence. Marshall had been born in 1905 in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He attended Haverford College, then Yale Law School, where he graduated in 1931 (the depths of the Depression) and where he studied under the legal scholar Wesley Hohfeld's intellectual heirs, absorbing a rigorous analytical framework that he would spend the next six decades applying to the acquisition of wealth.

His career was a masterclass in the American art of strategic accumulation. He served in the Roosevelt administration during the war, working on petroleum policy, an experience that taught him two things that would prove decisive: first, that oil was the commodity around which the twentieth century would be organized; second, that the government's relationship with the oil industry was a negotiation, not a regulation, and that the men who understood the terms of that negotiation could position themselves accordingly. After the war, he moved to Texas and began acquiring oil interests. He was not a wildcatter; he did not drill holes in the ground and pray. He was a lawyer and a financier, a man who understood the value of things and bought them at the right moment. He accumulated shares in Great Northern Oil Company, then in Koch Industries, building a position that would eventually be worth, by conservative estimates, more than a billion dollars.

By the time he walked into Gigi's, Marshall had been married twice. His second wife, Bettye Bohannon, had died of Alzheimer's disease in 1991. He was alone, enormously wealthy, and (this is the fact that everyone who tells this story tends to skip past) he was a man who had frequented strip clubs for decades. Marshall's patronage of Houston's adult entertainment establishments was not a late-life eccentricity triggered by loneliness or senility. It was a lifelong habit. He had, by multiple accounts, maintained relationships with dancers and sex workers throughout his adult life, including during his marriages. For years he had doted on a stripper named Jewell "Lady" Walker, lavishing her with jewelry and cars; she had died in July 1991, the same year as his wife, following a cosmetic surgery procedure. The pattern was established long before Vickie Lynn Hogan.

This matters because the narrative that emerged (the predatory young woman who targeted a helpless old man) requires us to ignore everything we know about Marshall's history and agency. He was not a naive grandfather wandering bewildered into a den of iniquity. He was a billionaire who had been paying for the company of young women for most of his adult life, a man who understood transactional relationships with a sophistication that his Yale Law degree had only refined. He knew exactly where he was and what he was purchasing.

What happened between them on that first night is the subject of competing mythologies. In her telling, he fell in love with her immediately, showered her with gifts, pursued her relentlessly. She described him, in a 20/20 interview years later, as "really, really funny" and "brilliant" — which was accurate, whatever else was also true. In the telling of Marshall's family, particularly his son E. Pierce Marshall, who would spend the next two decades fighting her in court, she identified a vulnerable old man and began a calculated campaign of seduction. Both narratives are too simple. What probably happened is what usually happens when a very young woman with no resources meets a very old man with infinite resources in a setting explicitly designed to facilitate the exchange of beauty for money: a transaction occurred. It was more complicated than a purchase and less romantic than a love story. It contained elements of genuine affection and elements of pure commerce, and the two were braided together so tightly that neither party could have separated them even if they had wanted to, which neither did.

Marshall began visiting the club regularly. He began requesting Vickie Lynn specifically. He began tipping not in the usual currency of strip club patronage (twenty-dollar bills folded into a garter) but in the currency of a man whose wealth operated on an entirely different scale. He bought her gifts. He offered her things. He proposed, by some accounts, almost immediately.

She did not say yes. Not yet. She was twenty-three years old, and whatever else she was (uneducated, unsophisticated, poor), she was not stupid. She recognized what was being offered. She also recognized, with the clarity that poverty gives you about the transactional nature of human relationships, that saying yes too quickly would diminish the offer. This was not scheming. It was survival intelligence. It was the same intelligence that had told her to leave Mexia, to leave Wal-Mart, to go where the money was. She had been trained, by a life that offered nothing for free, to understand the market value of what she had.

She had one asset. She intended to get the best possible price.

But to reduce the relationship between Vickie Lynn Hogan and J. Howard Marshall II to a commercial transaction is to make the same error that the tabloids would make for the next fifteen years. It is to deny both of them the complexity of their actual humanity. Marshall was not simply buying a woman. He was buying time, not in the abstract sense, but in the most literal sense available to a man in his late eighties. He was buying the feeling of being alive, of being desired, of mattering to someone whose attention was not obligated by blood or contract but was freely given, or at least appeared to be. He was buying the illusion of youth, which is not the same thing as youth itself but which, for an old man with unlimited funds, is close enough.

And Vickie Lynn was not simply selling herself. She was selling a performance of affection that was, by all available evidence, at least partially genuine. Marshall was kind to her. He was generous with her in ways that no one had ever been generous with her before: not just financially, though the financial generosity was staggering, but attentionally. He listened to her. He took her seriously, or at least performed the act of taking her seriously, which to a woman who had never been taken seriously by anyone amounted to the same thing. He offered her a vision of herself that was grander than anything Mexia or Wal-Mart or even Gigi's had suggested was possible.

She called him "Paw Paw." He called her his "lady love." The pet names are easy to mock. They are also, if you pause long enough to consider them without the protective shield of irony, rather touching.

This much is certain: by 1991, the trajectory of Vickie Lynn Hogan's life had been altered irrevocably. She had arrived in Houston with nothing: no education, no prospects, no resources beyond her physical appearance and a fierce, inarticulate determination to not go back to Mexia, to not raise her son in the same poverty that had shaped her. She had found, in J. Howard Marshall II, something that looked like a way out.

Whether it was a way out or a way deeper in is a question that the rest of her life would answer.

In the meantime, she needed a new name. Vickie Lynn Hogan was the girl from Mexia, the high school dropout, the Red Lobster waitress. That girl had gone as far as she could go. What came next required someone else entirely.

She had already sent photographs of herself to Playboy, an unusual, self-directed act that bypassed the traditional discovery route through agencies and scouts. The magazine responded. She was invited to pose. She appeared in the March 1992 issue, crediting herself as Vicki Smith, earning $20,750. The May 1992 issue followed: she was the centerfold. She played "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" to calm her nerves before her first Playboy shoot: the Marilyn Monroe anthem, the conscious invocation of the archetype she had already decided to inhabit. Hugh Hefner noticed. Selected her personally. In the summer of 1993, she was named Playmate of the Year, the magazine's highest honor, with a cash prize of $100,000 and a car.

Biology teacher Bob Crider, who had watched her sit through his Mexia High School class without distinction, could not have predicted it. Restaurant owner Steve Hughes, who remembered her as "just another teenager" with "nothing and nobody," could not have predicted it. Nobody in Mexia could have predicted it, which was, finally, the point. Mexia had seen her as nothing. The rest of America was about to see something else.

She was about to become Anna Nicole Smith.

And America was about to discover that it had a nearly infinite appetite for watching what happened to her.