How the girl from a topless bar got her man with a bottomless wallet

Comments | Sunday Mirror, Aug 25, 1996 | by COLIN WILLS

At 87, everyone agreed, he was old enough to know better.

But with 400 million dollars in the bank, and rising, oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II was rich enough to do what he wanted.

And what he wanted was to marry Anna Nicole Smith, the 25-year- old blonde whose 42DD silicon bust had propelled her from sleazy anonymity in the cabaret clubs of Houston, Texas, to the cover of Playboy magazine and worldwide fame.

She was a topless dancer, he had a bottomless wallet. But Anna insisted: "I'm not marrying him for his money. He's been begging me to marry him for over four years. But I wanted to get my own career started first."

Even by the standards of Texas nuptials, it was a bizarre ceremony that day in June 1994 at the White Dove Wedding Chapel.

Anna wore white. A long, hand-beaded wedding gown, with train and , of course, a plunging neckline. Her eight- year-old son Daniel wore a white tuxedo and acted as ring bearer.

Traditionally, a bride makes her grand entrance to the ceremony last, but since mobility was not J Howard Marshall's strongpoint, the roles were reversed.

Finally, the groom arrived, a tiny, wizened creature in a tuxedo, a white shirt, white shoes - and a wheelchair.

Anna walked down the aisle on a carpet of white rosebuds, then left for a photo shoot in Greece, leaving Marshall weeping in his wheelchair.

"Pwease don't cwy," she told him, lapsing into the baby talk which had so captivated the millionaire when they first met at Gigi's cabaret.

For America's stand-up comics, the marriage was manna from heaven.

"When he wants sex," one advised, "hide his glasses and put him in bed with a car battery."

"She worships the ground he struck oil on," observed another.

Yet despite the scorn and laughter, those close to her are convinced they loved each other. Anna's cousin Melinda says: "She did love him. I used to spend Christmas with them and she took good care of him." But even Anna Nicole couldn't deny that the money helped. On a good day she could shop for America, and at the New York jewellers Harry Winston they still speak with awe of the day she popped in for a few baubles.

J Howard Marshall beamed benevolently from the wheelchair as his young bride chose a two-carat diamond ring, a round diamond ring, a marquise diamond ring, a diamond necklace, a pearl-and- diamond necklace, a diamond bracelet, a pair of diamond ear clips and a pair of pearl-and- diamond drops.

It was all over in less than an hour and the bill came to $2 million, in settlement of which the old boy happily proffered his platinum Amex card.

But such conspicuous opulence, even on this scale, is nothing new in Texas. What people really wanted to know was: What possible sexual relationship could exist between a 25-year-old blonde with a chest that defied gravity and a dribbling octogen- arian for whom carnal pleasures must, with the best will in the world, be a dim and distant memory?

Anecdotes were not slow in emerging. Anna Nicole has recently spent time in hospital with leaks from her silicon implants, but in those days they were flawless, and J Howard Marshall loved them.

She told talk show host Howard Stern that she would often rub her naked breasts on Marshall's head.

And from the day they first met, Anna Nicole's young and virile boyfriends played second fiddle to the sugar daddy she called "Paw- Paw." Al Bolt, a handsome fireman, suspected that Marshall was paying her for sexual favours.

"I heard later that the old man liked to watch when she was with another girl. He was too old to do much himself."

Clay Spires, another former boyfriend, says Marshall called many times while he and Anna were making love. "She'd tell me to keep quiet while she talked to him."

However Anna Nicole kept her husband happy, there was no escaping the fact that he was now 90, and it couldn't last. Fourteen months after the wedding, J Howard Marshall went to the great cabaret in the sky.

Perhaps the excitement of having his little bald head cradled between the biggest breasts ever to come out of Mexia, Texas, proved too much for his heart to handle.

He died, so to speak, with her boobs on. The epitome of good taste to the end, Anna Nicole wore her wedding gown and veil to the funeral, sobbed as she sang Wind Beneath My Wings and was only talked out of keeping the coffin on a trestle on her patio when the undertaker persuaded her it might slide into the swimming pool.

And for someone who didn't marry for money, she is tenacious in her legal efforts to obtain the estimated pounds 350 million fortune he left behind.

She has turned down a pounds 7 million offer from his son, E Pierce Marshall, and, in a way, that is the story of her life.

For Anna Nicole - whether it's food, drink, sex, drugs, money or bra size - enough has never been quite enough.

From Great Big Beautiful Doll, by Eric and D'eva Redding (Barricade Books, New York).