Anna Nicole Smith: Behind the punchline, a life of beauty and pain

A new Netflix documentary challenges long-held narratives about the late model, actor, and television personality. Clémence Michallon speaks to director Ursula Macfarlane

(Netflix)

Around 20 minutes into 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. She knew the “slightly cartoonish, broad-brush” tale of “the beautiful Texan, beautiful model who married the billionaire and had a tragic death.”

“I said yes [to the film], because I was tantalized,” she tells The Independent in a phone interview. “I started looking into her story, and I realized that it was so complex, and so many of the narratives about her were, if not false, definitely only half-true.The gold-digger accusation, for example. The more I discovered, the more I thought, ‘Wow, this is a woman who’s really worthy of our attention.’ … This was a great opportunity to tell the story of someone who was a human being, and not just an icon.”

This is the film’s first challenge to Smith’s story as told at the time by the tabloids. Then, there’s the other, often forgotten part: after Smith married Marshall, and after Marshall died of pneumonia aged 90 in 1995, Smith did not inherit his fortune. She was not in his will or trust, and while the Supreme Court did rule in her favor in a 2006 decision about federal jurisdiction in the case, she never received the money.

Anna Nicole Smith in an archive video featured in ‘You Don’t Know Me' (Courtesy of Netflix)

You Don’t Know Me suggests that Marshall’s son E Pierce Marshall, who inherited the bulk of his father’s estate before his own death in 2006, maneuvered to keep Smith from receiving any of the elder Marshall’s money.This, despite the fact that it seems clear J Howard Marshall himself wanted Smith to receive her fair due. In an audio clip featured in the documentary, Marshall says he thinks his son Pierce has “overreached a little bit,” and insists he wants Smith “to be supported by me.”

“I discovered that she was so much more than this gorgeous alleged gold-digger,” Macfarlane says. “There was so much more to her than that. She was funny, and witty, and sassy, and smart, but also very vulnerable.”

You Don’t Know Me begins, like Smith’s life did, in Texas. She was born Vickie Lynn Hogan in Houston, and partly raised in Mexia, a small city (population: 6,893 as of 2020, according to census data) between Austin and Dallas. The documentary doesn’t shame her for her ambition. We follow as Vickie becomes Anna Nicole, a nickname given to her by GUESS co-founder Paul Marciano. (“To me, she was Anna, but Anna Smith did not sound right so we did Anna Nicole Smith,” he told PAPER Magazine in 2017. “ At the time, Kate Moss was doing Calvin Klein, and she was 5’7" and feminine and skinny. Anna Nicole was 6 feet tall and bigger than life with boobs and shoulders. I instantly thought of Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita. I thought, ‘She doesn’t even know how beautiful she is.’”)

Production on You Don’t Know Me began in 2020 and lasted two years, wrapping around October 2022 after some pandemic-related delays. That extra time ended up having a silver lining for Macfarlane.

“We wanted to do deep research to make sure we weren’t just interviewing all the people who’d spoken in all the other Anna Nicole Smith books and documentaries,” she says on our phone call. “We wanted to make sure that they were genuine, that they were true friends [of hers], that they really had spent time with her. To find some of this amazing, unseen archive footage – that takes time. Gaining people’s trust takes time.”

Anna Nicole Smith in an archive photo featured in ‘You Don’t Know Me' (Courtesy of Netflix)

We hear from Smith herself, through video and audio clips. We hear from a wide array of people from Smith’s personal and professional lives, including her uncle and her brother. Her promising beginnings are so vividly rendered – a sequence of Smith fielding film offers on the phone, her hair wrapped in rollers, stands out – that it’s possible to forget, for a few moments, the tragic ending to which they inevitably lead.

A shocking episode during which Smith reconnects with her long-lost father stands out. Video footage shows her, in pigtails, embracing her father and her brother, welcoming them into her stretch limousine, excitedly telling them about all her successes, including her spot as Playmate of the Year. “This is my daddy and my brother!” she exclaims, utterly delighted. Later on, Smith invites them to a Playboy party. During that visit, we are told, Smith’s father tried to sexually assault her. It’s a jarring moment – one that embodies the unimaginable highs and brutal lows of Smith’s life.

“What I learned about her was that she was terribly complex,” Macfarlane says. “That there had been things in her life that she’d really struggled with, both psychological things to do with her family, her father. She was dealing with an awful lot of challenges. Then, she became famous and idolized, but also pressured, and raised up and dropped down.”

Macfarlane was also struck by Smith’s desire to be a good mother. Smith had two children: her son Daniel, born in 1986 when his mother was 19 years old, and her daughter Dannielynn, born in 2006, five months before her mother’s death. When Smith died on 8 February 2007 of an accidental drug overdose, aged 39 (less than a month after Daniel’s death, also from an accidental overdose), she was seemingly trying to start a new life, stepping back from the public eye and focusing on Danielynn.

“She had decided to get out of the whole Hollywood machine, have a fresh start, go to the Bahamas, have her baby girl, and have a different kind of life,” Macfarlane says. “It strikes me as very poignant that that was in her mind before Daniel died. And obviously, everything went horrifically wrong.”

Danielynn’s birth gave way to a highly publicized paternity case, with multiple men claiming they might be the baby’s father. Larry Birkhead, a photographer, was eventually confirmed to be Danielynn’s biological father, and awarded custody. He has been raising Danielynn ever since.

Birkhead was approached to participate in the documentary, Macfarlane says, but ultimately declined.

“We actually had quite a few conversations with Larry, and it was always very friendly and very gracious,” she says. “But he had certain conditions, and in the end we couldn’t meet them, so unfortunately, he  wasn’t able to take part.”

Through the voices of others who knew Smith, You Don’t Know Me makes a person out of someone who was, too often, reduced tothe punchline of a cruel tabloid joke.

“I would really like viewers to look at someone who’s seen as an icon, a goddess, and to see her as human with all the things that make up a human: flaws, good points, bad points, mistakes, wonderful qualities, vulnerabilities, all of that stuff,” Macfarlane says. “And I hope they go away having more empathy for her.”

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me is streaming now on Netflix in the US and UK