Pat Walker owned the White Dove Wedding Chapel where Anna Nicole and Marshall were married and later told the LA Times that Marshall said to him before the ceremony, “I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve made a lot of money. If I can make her happy, I’ve made her happy today.”7 Accounts of Marshall’s behavior during the marriage reveal him to be a scoundrel and a playboy until almost the very end. He was always ready with a perverted but good-natured joke about Anna’s enormous breasts, and he regularly resisted her suggestions that he change his will to explicitly give her his entire fortune after his death. And let us not forget that he was a billionaire by virtue of investing with the Koch brothers. Though Koch was not yet a household name synonymous with corporate interference in campaign finance, their dealings in energy investment were not especially ethical at the time. J. Howard Marshall did his fair share of deals with far more sinister devils than single mothers working in Houston strip clubs.
The marriage lasted fourteen months, ending when J. Howard Marshall succumbed to pneumonia. The ensuing legal battle to keep Marshall’s fortunes away from Anna was headed by his son, E. Pierce Marshall. The ways he tried to prevent Anna from inheriting any of the Marshall fortune were petty in his calmer attempts and pathological in his more spirited ones. He did not simply want Anna away from the Marshall fortune, he wanted to humiliate her in the attempt to get it.
Though much is made of Anna’s apparently shameless family in their attempts to grab a few moments in the spotlight, it was E. Pierce Marshall, the boy who was born into billions and at no risk of losing them, who proved himself the greater monster in this American tale. In a profile on the billionaire boy, Dan P. Lee writes that “E. Pierce Marshall, drenched in bitterness, made what was undoubtedly the most shortsighted decision of his life. He filed a claim against her bankruptcy, arguing that she owed him damages for allegedly slanderous comments she’d made about him. The court was now obligated to determine the truth, and so launched an investigation into their entire history. Another discovery process commenced.”8 Despite being notoriously private, E. Pierce was determined to make a public spectacle of his late father’s third wife and devoted over a decade of his life to keeping her in the headlines. His fortunes were massive and his livelihood was not under threat by any stretch of the imagination, yet he doggedly pursued legal action intended to punish Anna for having the audacity to be a poor girl who used the back door to get in good among America’s more obscene wealthy.
The poverty of the particular pockets of the American South from which Anna came was made real in the urgency with which Shelly tried to enter Anna’s property. The desperation of invisibility was made clear in Donna Hogan’s distasteful but ultimately forgiving account of Anna Nicole’s life. Donnie was nothing short of a saint, if for no other reason than that his book is so short. But E. Pierce Marshall made it necessary for legal teams to make millions of pages of documents available for public record, for public scrutiny, and intended for public humiliation. He is the American Dream made sickly by its own hubris. He is the shameless gold digger, poking at corpses to prove a point. He is the one without taste or class or likely the capacity to reach out to a loved one to say, “I love you, too,” despite geography and tax brackets tearing them apart. He is America’s disgrace.
On June 1, 2006, Anna cheerfully announced on her website that she was pregnant with her second child and would be posting updates about her progress. Within three weeks, E. Pierce Marshall would be dead of a brief but deadly infection. There is a certain amount of poetic justice at the idea of his being literally eaten up inside at the sight of Anna thriving, despite his relentless assault on her legal claims to a portion of the Marshall fortune. But the scope of his true moral poverty was made clear in 2012, when it was revealed that his widow was the fourth-richest woman in America. To have all that money and cling to mere crumbs in comparison because a poor woman from Texas charmed your clever father for a handful of months in the early 1990s is a kind of bitterness I cannot fathom. It seems painful to be that petty. But the death of E. Pierce Marshall was not the end of Anna’s suffering.
Just three days after giving birth to a baby girl in the Bahamas that September, her twenty-year-old son, Daniel, died in the hospital room where she was recovering. The toxicology report stated that a lethal combination of methadone, Lexapro, and Zoloft was the cause of death, but it doesn’t take a pharmacologist to read that list and know methadone was likely doing most of the heavy lifting. Methadone, of course, is a painkiller. The latter two drugs are antidepressants, redirectors of pain more than numbing agents but prescribed to the suffering nonetheless. Despite her most diligent efforts to protect her son against the suffering that plagued her own childhood, Daniel died dependent on a drug combination that appears designed for all intents and purposes to kill pain. Anna was dead within six months from a lethal overdose of painkillers. But not before the public and her own family would hurt her one last time.
Anna’s estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, went on the reliably macabre Nancy Grace after Daniel’s death to all but blame Anna, portentously claiming that Anna might be next. Virgie told In Touch Weekly that she knew it was a murder and added, “Someone has to pay,” for dramatic effect. Of the call she got from Anna to tell her of Daniel’s death, she told Nancy Grace, “You could tell she was clearly under some kind of—of drug because she was very upset. She was mumbling like a drunk does. You know, all I got out of it was that Daniel’s dead.”9 Virgie was right: Anna was on drugs. She had to be heavily sedated after she became inconsolable at the loss of Daniel, reportedly screaming, “No, no,” and continuing to perform chest compressions long after the young man had passed. When she became lucid and had to be informed again of the news, tabloids took it as an opportunity to claim that Anna had “forgotten” her own son died. Texas blondes, you know?