More than 17 years after his death, the world remembers many things from the story of Anna Nicole Smith (1967-2007), such as his fame that followed his success as Playmate -Model from Playboy Magazine- In the ’90s, her appearances on reality shows had a major impact on her personal life, her marriage to oil millionaire JH Marshal and the tragic death of their 20-year-old son shortly thereafter.
All of this is brought together in an in-depth documentary directed by the filmmaker Ursula MacFarlane titled Anna Nicole Smith: You don’t know me.The title is very appropriate. Few people could really know her or know her real story, Because the same model and actress (she had a role in the movie “Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult”) told stories from their childhood and adolescence that were very different from the real events. At least that’s what Macfarlane’s research makes clear when you approach Macfarlane’s statements Missy, her best friend early in his career and Smith’s own mother: Virgie Mae Hogan.
In front of the media when it became relevant Anna Nicole told the story of a sad childhood, in which she was abused by her mother and portrayed herself surrounded by want. The friend who taught her to dance said when they met on the stage where Smith was trying to break through as a stripper, she was rather telling her story, the same one she had told Smith.
Mother Virgie, who died in 2018, proved to be a very loving woman who denied having financial difficulties and claimed to have given her daughter all the love that was possible. In her testimony, she herself said that she complained to her daughter about why she made up so many stories about a terrible past that she didn’t have. And Anna Nicole had replied that she made more money with sad stories. And that “bad things pay better” was the answer she gave him to justify preferring the media to repeat all these stories about her.
The Horrible Secret of Anna Nicole Smith
However, the documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me brought to light something that wasn’t known, a fact that the director said marked a before and after, including Smith’s emotional breakdown. If something was real, Anna blamed him. Nicole For her mother, it had never been possible for her to get to know her father. Knowing nothing about him, he idealized him and later the star started to smile when he was named playmate of the year 1993, hired a detective to find him.
His real name was Vicky Lynn Hogan and that of his father was Donald Eugene Hogan. In fact, the meeting took place, Anna Nicole met with her father and biological brother Donnie. He invited her to Los Angeles, took her to Disneyland and the Playboy Mansion, where Hugh Heffner threw a party in his honor. But the father brought back a dark story: he had been in prison for raping two minors, one of whom was Anna Nicole’s own aunt. He was also accused of raping his other daughters.
According to the girlfriend to the documentary filmmaker, by the end of the meeting with her father, the model had changed. Missy said the reason for her sadness is that her father tried to have a sexual relationship with her. The friend tells how much she had dreamed of this moment and how deep the disappointment was. (You can read: Kiko from “El Chavo del 8” will be at Comic Con in Colombia).
MacFarlane explained in an interview with Vanity Fair that discovering this detail allowed him to understand many later events in Smith’s life. “If you look at the chronology of his life, it’s the moment when things got out of hand (…). It must have touched him, he’d been looking for a father figure his whole life.
And when it found it, it destroyed it. Months later, Smith was hospitalized for an overdose. She later married him 89-year-old millionaire Howard Marshall (she was only 26 years old) gained a reputation as a “gold digger”.
Marshal died in 1995 and Anna Nicole Smith had to fight an inheritance dispute. The filmmaker expresses his confidence in him. For the documentary filmmaker, just because she loved her husband didn’t mean she didn’t want his fortune, too.
Anna Nicole’s personal life continued to be problematic. Opioid addiction increased (also due to pain from breast augmentation surgery). He had a daughter, Danielynn, for whom he was fighting for custody.
But the death of his son Daniel was one of the last strokes of fate. The young man, who died of an accidental overdose of antidepressant medication, died in September 2006. His mother followed him in February the following year.