Interest surrounding Anna Nicole Smith's life and sudden death in 2007 is being piqued in the light of a new Netflix documentary about her. And while many of us know about her second husband J. Howard Marshall, viewers are wondering about her first marriage and more specifically about Anna Nicole Smith's first husband.
Before Anna Nicole Smith's unexpected death in 2007, she was a household name. A model, actress, and TV personality, she made big career moves like becoming a mainstay model for Playboy in the '90s, as well as modeling for large fashion retailers like Guess and H&M.
Thanks to the new Netflix documentary, aptly titled Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me, audiences are able to get a little more insight into her life, and why the public was and is still so obsessed with the blonde bombshell.
This isn't the first instance of public fascination (and, frankly, exploitation) about the work of a blonde babe, though - following Netflix's controversial movie Blonde, which told a fictionalized story of Marilyn Monroe's life, as well as Pam & Tommy, which dramatizes the story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's marriage (without the real Pamela Anderson's consent), there is certainly enough public fascination about these bombshell women to go around.
Who was Anna Nicole Smith’s first husband?
One of the most objectively fascinating aspects of Anna's life was undoubtedly her timeline of relationships - with most people being particularly interested in her marriage to billionaire J. Howard Marshall. The fascination almost solely is based on the 63-year age difference between Anna and J. Howard (when they married, he was 89 and she was 26).
Her least recognized marriage, however, is her first marriage to her hometown sweetheart, Billy Smith. The two met when Anna still was going by her birth name, Vickie Lynn Hogan, and they married in 1985.
She was only 17 years old when she married Billy, and they had their first and only child, Daniel, just one year after they married.
Their marriage was not long, however, only spanning from 1985 to 1987, when the couple separated, and then legally divorced in 1993.
Anna dropped out of high school at age 14, and while on a shift at a restaurant in her hometown, Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken in Mexia, Texas, she first crossed paths with Billy, who was working as a fry cook there.
Billy was also a drop-out, although was one year her junior - and although Anna was obsessed with him at the time, it took some convincing on her side for him to become interested in her, which is hard to imagine now, seeing as the public's infatuation with her beauty is still ongoing.
Although her relationship with Billy didn't have lasting effects on her career, it did give her two things - her son, Danny, and her stage surname, Smith. The last time Billy was seen in public was at a memorial service for Danny, who died suddenly from an accidental drug overdose at age 20 in 2007.
