Vickie Lynn Hogan didn’t finish high school.
The Houston native failed her freshman year, eventually dropping out when she was a sophomore and finding work in a fast-food restaurant.
However, within eight years, she had changed her name, and stepped into the spotlight as world famous model and Playboy centrefold Anna Nicole Smith.
With her life story hitting Netflix in the documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, it tells the incredible – and ultimately tragic tale – of the unforgettable girl next door-turned-socialite.
Speaking to Netflix’s official companion site Tudum, director Ursula Macfarlane said that ‘many previous books and films about Anna Nicole twisted her narrative.’
This time, she said, she wanted to tell the star’s story ‘in her own words.’
Anna Nicole’s tale is threaded back in her teenage years, where she worked in that fast-food restaurant. It was where she met her first husband, Billy Wayne Smith, as the pair worked together serving up fried chicken to the people of Houston.
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It had the intensity that young love always does, with Vickie falling for Billy hard and fast.
‘[Billy] was a sweet young man, very timid and shy,’ Anna Nicole’s mum, Virgie Arthur, told the Daily Mail in 2017. ‘It made her mad because he didn’t pay attention to her.’
According to Eric Redding’s 2007 biography Sex Bomb, Anna Nicole said of Billy: ‘He drove me crazy. I chased him and chased him the way young girls do until I finally got him and married him. By then, of course, I wasn’t interested.’
The couple wed in 1985, when she was 17 and he was just 16. Then in January 1995, just two months after her 18th birthday, Vickie gave birth to their son, who they named him Daniel – ‘like Daniel in the Bible’ – Wayne Smith.
However, just one year later, love’s young dream was no more and the couple separated.
‘I wasn’t allowed to go out of the house or go to the store,’ Anna Nicole recalled. ‘He was so jealous.’
When her son Daniel was born, at first, Anna struggled to make ends meet (Picture: Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
As a struggling single mother, Vickie turned to stripping to make ends meet – but her buxom figure saw her stand out against the preferred waif-thin figures of the moment.
Remembering what life was like at the time, in 2002, Anna Nicole told Larry King: ‘I tried Red Lobster. I tried Wal-Mart. I tried all these places and I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t. So, I tried this gentlemen’s club, and, you know, I worked there.’
It was while she was dancing at the now-demolished Gigi’s Cabaret, where she met the man who would later become her second, and final, husband: billionaire J. Howard Marshall.
The octogenarian petrol tycoon had just lost his wife and his mistress and was grieving.
Anna Nicole Smith met famed business tycoon J. Howard Marshall, 89, when she was an exotic dancer (Picture: Gerber/Corbis/Getty Images )
‘I was 23, and he was 86,’ she recalled. ‘I saw a very sick man. I just wanted to just talk with him. There was no physical attraction at all. He was very much attracted to me.’
While Marshall’s lavished her with gifts and they began a relationship, Vickie didn’t seek a divorce from Billy, despite the old man’s pleas.
Around the same time, she was also seeing bodybuilder Clay Spires, who suggested she apply to be a Playboy model after a call out for open audtions. By 1992, she was on the March cover and just two months later, she was crowned Playboy Playmate of The Month.
Speaking about the opportunity, she said: ‘I am just so happy and thrilled and I am so glad Mr. Hefner chose me and all my fans out there that called out there, thank you. And I am just really, really excited.’
However, it was a role originally meant for Claudia Schiffer, that skyrocketed Vickie into the public eye, after she was picked to star in various 1993 adverts for Guess Jeans.
It was also the campaign that saw her transform into the blonde bombshell known as Anna Nicole Smith.
‘[Fashion designer] Paul Marciano and me and one of his friends – we were sitting around coming up with a stage name, and that’s where [Anna Nicole] came from,’ she explained to Larry King in 2002.
