Anna Nicole Smith: Thoughts on a Not-so-Simple Triumph

In defense of dumb blonds ...

A 26-year-old Playboy playmate with an eighth-grade education marries an uncommonly rich 89-year-old oilman. He dies a year later, and she makes a claim to part of his fortune.

You’ve already chosen sides, haven’t you?

Maybe that’s what E. Pierce Marshall was counting on as he contested Anna Nicole Smith’s claim to part of his late father’s fortune. She was nothing but a gold digger, Pierce Marshall claimed, and his father, J. Howard Marshall, had no intention of leaving any of his estate to the former stripper with the Marilyn Monroe fixation.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “The poor old guy, taken to the cleaners by the blond bombshell.”

I was too, until I read the 79-page ruling that federal Judge David O. Carter issued last week in Santa Ana. Carter awarded Smith $44.3 million from the estate, and then doubled it after finding that Pierce Marshall and a family attorney tried to defraud Smith of her rightful share.

If you’re keeping score at home, the former waitress from east Texas who became a Playmate of the Year and a Guess jeans model netted more than $89 million. Not bad for someone whose car was repossessed about the time she met Marshall.

Carter’s narrative is wry and bristling. He didn’t find that Smith had undying love for her husband, who died in August 1995, but neither did he find her to be a calculating temptress.

Rather, Smith was looking for financial security for herself and her son, and it came to her. “What he might lack in youth, vigor and looks,” Carter slyly wrote about Marshall, “he made up for with his great wealth.”

Though the latter part of Carter’s ruling becomes a blistering assault on Pierce Marshall and attorney Edwin Hunter, it’s the first half that illuminates the human nature at the core of the case.

The answers, Carter concludes, lay not in Smith’s heart and soul but in those of the aging oilman with the Yale Law School education and the immense fortune.

In 1961, Marshall divorced his first wife. Later that year, he remarried. Though Pierce Marshall was his father’s best man, the other Marshall son has said he believes his father and new bride had had a long-running relationship during his parents’ marriage.

During that second marriage, Marshall met “Lady” Diane Walker. As Carter wrote: “Feeling the need for a drink after a day at the office, Marshall went to a strip joint.... Lady Walker was one of the strippers who took everything off for [him] in return for his generous dollar bills. Thus, at the age of 78, he began his pursuit of Lady Walker.”

Marshall showered the stripper with gifts and cash, to the tune of $2 million a year. The affair ended when Walker died in 1991 from complications from a face lift.

Marshall was devastated. He called her death the most tragic thing that ever happened to him. Coincidentally, his second wife also had died that year, after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet Marshall bounced back quickly. Three months after Walker’s death, Marshall went to the afternoon strip show at Gigi’s in Houston. He repeated the pattern he had employed with Lady Walker--this time with Anna Nicole.

When she danced in front of him, he tried to grab her breasts. He was 86. They had lunch the next day; he gave her $1,000 in cash, and she quit her job. From then on, Carter found, he plied her with cash and gifts.

Three years later, in 1994, Smith had established her modeling career and had become Playmate of the Year. Only then did she agree to the last of Marshall’s multiple marriage proposals.

Carter had to determine whether Marshall intended to leave Smith anything. In ruling that he did, Carter wrote, “Their lives were intertwined in need, driven by greed and lust. Nevertheless, the court is convinced of his love for her. [Marshall] referred to her as the ‘light of my life’ and the lady that saved his life.”

As for Smith, Carter was more cautious. Marshall “used his money to get [her] to fall in love with him, and in her own way, she loved him.”

Smith testified for three days in Carter’s court. “Her illiteracy is striking,” he wrote. Still, he ruled, her testimony was credible.

Far from feeling sympathy for Marshall, Carter notes that he spent much of his adult life writing off gifts to his mistresses as business expenses, hiding and manipulating his assets and assiduously avoiding paying income taxes.

Ultimately, Carter found that the blond bombshell made life fun for the decrepit tax dodger and that he intended to make right by her.

Sure, she could have walked away, but I refuse to judge her.

To the contrary, I’m cogitating: For $44 million, I’d marry an 89-year-old guy.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.