ANNA NICOLE SMITH, the former Playboy cover girl accused of being America’s most brazen gold-digger, will try to persuade the US Supreme Court next week that she should inherit millions of dollars from her late husband, a Texas billionaire who married her when he was 89 and she was 26.
The judges of America’s highest court, a more cerebral audience than the stripper-turned-reality TV hostess usually entertains, informed Ms Smith yesterday that they will hear her appeal over the disputed fortune of her late husband, the wheelchair-bound oil tycoon John Howard Marshall II.
The surgically enhanced Ms Smith has been embroiled in a legal battle for a decade over her late husband’s $1.6 billion estate (£900 million). The tycoon’s son, Pierce Marshall, along with most of America, accuses her of being a shameless gold-digger.
If the Supreme Court sides with Ms Smith, the 1993 Playmate of the Year stands to gain as much as $474 million, the amount to which a judge in 2000 said she was entitled. Despite her initial victory, subsequent courts have overturned that decision, and Ms Smith, whose life has descended into a vaudevillian spectacle of weight problems and bizarre behaviour in recent years, has not received a cent from her late husband’s estate. The case has provided rich fodder for gossip columnists, but at issue for the judges is the more mundane question of whether federal courts have the right to overrule state probate courts.
Ms Smith, now 37, met her husband, a crippled, frail billionaire who nevertheless still delighted in the company of buxom women young enough to be his grandchildren, when she was a stripper at a nightclub in Houston. Mr Marshall was a frequent visitor. They married three years later in 1994, with an age difference of 63 years.
It was a union that produced one of the most startling celebrity photographs of the 1990s: Ms Smith, 26, her chest recently enlarged to an eye-catching 36-inch DD, passionately kissing her betrothed, the grey-skinned, wheelchair-bound Mr Marshall, a man who was to live less than a year.
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