Netflix’s “Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me” (streaming now) eerily opens with the late model encouraging the audience “just to follow their dreams.” “They can come true,” she says. “I’m living proof.” And for a time, she was.
The buxom blonde met billionaire J. Howard Marshall at a Houston strip club in 1991, where she was dancing to finance a better life for herself and her young son.
Marshall supported the ambitious Smith as she made her name − even if it wasn’t the one she was born with (Vickie Lynn Hogan). Smith posed in Playboy, modeled for Guess and acted in ’90s comedies like “The Hudsucker Proxy” and “Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult.”
“You Don’t Know Me” director Ursula Macfarlane rejects the notion that Smith was a gold digger and hopes her film can change viewers’ opinions of the bombshell, who died in 2007 at age 39.
“I would like people to come away with more empathy for her, more understanding, perhaps fall in love with her a bit, as I think us, the filmmaking team have, and show that she was complex,” Macfarlane tells USA TODAY. “If we can get to the point where people understand her better and just don’t judge her as much, then that will make me very happy.”
Here are some of the key revelations from the documentary.
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A friend identified as “Missy” met Smith when the aspiring star nervously auditioned at a Houston strip club. “She reminded me of an emu trying to fly,” Missy remembered of the audition. But Smith was hired.
Missy says Smith believed a breast augmentation would help launch her modeling career. But Smith developed a dependency on pain killers after the procedure, says Missy. “Valium, Xanax, Lortabs, Vicodin and the Klonopin,” she lists. “From that time on, she was always taking them. There was nothing she could do to stop it.”
Missy, who says she was also romantically involved with Smith, ended their friendship because she couldn’t bear to watch the star turn into “an egotistical monster” and “a full-blown drug addict. There’s no way around it. She’s taking a lot of drugs.”
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The documentary shows Smith on the phone speaking to an unidentified person about two movies she’s interested in that would be in production at the same time, “The Mask” and “Naked Gun 33⅓.”
“It’s got Jim Carrey in it, that funny guy,” Smith says of the 1994 comedy. Smith said she loved “The Mask,” but not the studio’s offer for the lead female. “This is embarrassing. They offered me $50,000,” Smith says. “I love it, and I think it’d show more of my acting ability.”
The role went to Cameron Diaz, then an unknown. And Smith acted in the third “Naked Gun” installment.
Anna Nicole Smith allegedly treated billionaire husband J. Howard Marshall ‘like an ATM’
In 1985, as a teen living in the small Texas town of Mexia, she wed Billy Wayne Smith, a cook at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken, where she waited tables. The two welcomed son Daniel Wayne Smith the following year and divorced in 1993. Shortly thereafter, Smith walked down the aisle for a second time.
Both Smith and her groom, 89-year-old oilman Marshall, wore white when they married at the White Dove Wedding Chapel in Houston on June 27, 1994. Smith, 26, wore her golden hair in loose curls and a ballgown with a low-cut sweetheart neckline. She held her bridal bouquet of cascading white flowers in her left hand and the hand of her groom, seated in a wheelchair, with her right hand.
The documentary shares recordings of Marshall attempting to reach his bride by phone while they were apart. Missy says in the documentary that she noticed a change in how Smith treated Marshall. “She’s getting to where she’s no longer grateful to Mr. Marshall,” says Missy. “She’s really treating him like an ATM.”
Marshall died a year later at 90, and did not mention Smith in his will. Smith tried unsuccessfully to argue in court she had rights to Marshall’s estate, but was unable to obtain any of her late husband’s fortune. Forbes estimated the Marshall family’s net worth to be $18.5 billion in 2020.
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She ‘didn’t want to live’ after son Daniel died in her hospital room
Daniel Smith traveled to the Bahamas to visit his mom after she’d given birth to his half-sister, Dannielynn, on Sept. 7, 2006. (Dannielynn’s father is photographer Larry Birkhead.) Daniel died in her hospital room from an accidentally lethal combination of methadone and antidepressants Lexapro and Zoloft. He was 20.
Pol’ Atteu, a clothing designer for Smith, says the star was “a wreck” following Daniel’s death. “She didn’t want to live,” Atteu remembers. “Everything that she did was for Daniel. Every single conversation was what she did wrong, blamed herself the whole time. She said, ‘I just want to die. I don’t deserve to be here. It should’ve been me.’ “
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Anna Nicole Smith relied on prescription medication for ’emotional issues’
Her doctor Sandeep Kapoor says in the documentary that he was warned she could be “very manipulative” when it came to managing her chronic back and chest pain. “And when there (were) emotional issues that were happening to her, her pain was worse,” he says.
Smith collapsed Feb. 8, 2007, in a hotel room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood in Florida and was declared dead at the hospital. According to an autopsy obtained by CNN and performed by the Broward County Medical Examiner’s office in Fort Lauderdale, Smith’s death was ruled an accident.
“Vickie Lynn Marshall was a 39-year-old white female who died of acute combined drug intoxication,” the report reads. “Abscesses of buttocks (from drug injections), and viral enteritis (stomach flu) were contributory causes of death.”
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