Anna Nicole Smith: Behind the punchline, a life of beauty and pain
17.05.2023 - 21:23
/ msn.com
Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, a new Netflix documentary about the late model, actor, and television personality, Smith is heard having a phone conversation with J Howard Marshall. The billionaire, her then-boyfriend and eventual husband, was well into his late eighties at the time. “I love you, sweetheart,” Smith says on the audio tape.
“I love you,” Marshall says back. “You’re the light of my life, now and always. ”“You’re the light of my life, now and always, too, honey bunny,” Smith replies.
Smith’s marriage to Marshall became the foundational myth of the persona others built for her. How could this stunningly beautiful, famous young woman – Smith was 27 years old when they married – possibly love a man old enough to be her grandfather?But You Don’t Know Me refuses to cast their union in an entirely cynical light. Yes, the relationship was good to Smith, materially – but she remained determined to build her own wealth, we are told, and turned him down when he first proposed marriage.
“He bought her a car, and he bought her a home, so that she could be stable, and she quit working in topless clubs,” Missy Byrum, a friend and former lover of Smith’s, says. “. .
. He asked her to marry him several times, and she would tell him, ‘No, I’m not going to marry you until I have a name for myself, because I don’t want people calling me a gold-digger. ’”Director Ursula Macfarlane, whose previous work includes the 2019 documentary Untouchable about Harvey Weinstein, didn’t know too much about Smith before she started researching You Don’t Know Me.