A Star Is Sworn

On the September morning that the trial was to begin in Anna Nicole Smith's challenge of her late husband's will, the air around the Harris County courthouse was so thick with anticipation that at least one observer cupped his hand over his mouth and nose and exhaled in short bursts to see if his breath had been affected. The courtyard at the building's west entrance teemed with reporters: Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight, British tabloids, ABC News, the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News, CNN, AP, local TV and radio, all wanting a word with the 32-year-old former Playmate who received no part of J. Howard Marshall II's alleged $1.6 billion estate. Any threat of a circus not breaking out had been soundly thumped the night before when a California judge had issued, after eight months of inactivity in Smith's Los Angeles bankruptcy case, a $450 million ruling for her against Pierce Marshall, her 61-year-old stepson, claimed creditor, and principle opponent in Houston. How Smith celebrated the news last night was of little importance; the morning after, the headache belonged to Harris County probate judge Mike Wood. Although he was in no way bound by the California ruling, he had to make sure his jury had not been prejudiced before the trial even began.

The day got off to a predictable start, with a pack of fifteen-odd reporters jostling just outside the courthouse door, hanging on defense attorney Rusty Hardin's every word ("I am absolutely shocked that a judge from another jurisdiction . . ."), until, that is, they spotted the buxom plaintiff, looking slim and smart in a black jumper with gold trim, moving in with an attorney from the north. The scrum abandoned Hardin in a heartbeat, running en masse to the other side of the courthouse to make an even tighter circle around the allegedly bereaved widow. "I'm very happy with what came out" was Smith's considered remark about the California ruling. Buoyed by the news, she barely seemed to notice when one of the four boom mikes hoisted above the melee dipped into the crowd and popped her on her alabaster forehead.

After Smith made it safely inside, the mob set its sights on her unlikely ally, 63-year-old J. Howard Marshall III, who was making his way down the sidewalk. Howard Three, as Smith's attorneys like to call him, was also left out of his father's will and thus locked in a feud with younger brother Pierce that was every bit as bitter as Pierce's battle with their stepmom. As the horde locked in, our man from Inside Edition bulled his way to the fore. "Just how big a setback is yesterday's ruling?" he asked, with all the grace of a plummeting boom mike. "This is not a step back at all," said Howard Three's attorney, Terry Giles, somewhat incredulously but politely. "It's confirmation of everything we've been saying for five years." The day's biggest gaffe squarely in hand, the IE reporter shrank from the pack. Later he would admit, "I thought Marshall should have looked sadder"—though he never identified which Marshall he thought he'd talked to.

Inside the courtroom Judge Wood heard arguments about the effects of the California ruling as patiently as he could. He had already devoted considerable effort to maintaining the integrity of the proceedings. With sixty attorneys and parties granted spots in the courtroom, and just as many members of the press trying to get in, he'd issued strict orders about what lawyers could say to reporters (little) and where they could say it (away from the courtroom). He enlisted veterans of last year's Rafael Resendez-Ramirez trial to issue press credentials and supervise a courtroom camera. He would allow nothing under his control to make him the substitute teacher that Judge Lance Ito became during O. J. Simpson's murder trial. But despite all his preparation for a big-splash case (courthouse gossip had him losing almost as much weight as Smith in anticipation of the trial), he couldn't have predicted the screwball thrown from California, and he spent the rest of the morning with attorneys in chambers, questioning potential jurors one by one about what, if anything, they had heard in the night.

Time passed slowly in the courtroom, even by probate standards. Smith conferred with her "personal attorney," a dapper young L.A. lawyer with a sober demeanor no doubt meant to compensate for his name, Howard Stern. She sketched with a blue ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, occasionally checking the side of her drawing hand for ink smudges. She set aside her busywork only to concentrate on a chocolate milk and a candy bar fetched by Stern.

Reporters took the downtime to plug holes in their stories. "What do you call that gold stuff?" the man from the Houston Chronicle asked the woman from the Baltimore Sun, referring to the trim on Smith's outfit.

"I don't know. Is it brocade? Lamé?"

"Maybe it's lamé. Yesterday I pointed out that she was 'wearing clothes,'" he joked, "and the paper seemed to need a little more. You think it's lamé?"

"I can't tell."

"And are those pants she's wearing today?"

"It's a pantsuit."

"Pants suit." He jotted a note.

"Be careful," I interjected. "It's pantsuit, with a singular pant. When women wear them, it's just a pant."

"Pantsuit?" he said.

"Pantsuit," I confirmed.

"Pantsuit—and is her shirt low-cut? Or would you call that medium-low-cut?"

"It's a low V," said the Eastern reporter.

"Low V?" he asked.

"I think the question you want to ask," I said, "is, 'Is her neckline plunging?'"

The Easterner looked at me sideways. "It's a low V."

"Low V?" he asked.

"Low V neck," she said.

"Low V neck," I agreed.

"Low V neck." He made more notes.

By lunchtime the sun was high enough over the courthouse that the herd of journalists milling all morning in the shadows at the west door had moved under the trees closer to the street, like cows finding shade on a sun-ravaged pasture. There they lingered, smoking cigarettes, shooting what breeze could be mustered, and occasionally checking their equipment, the dust-broom boom mikes lying on the ground, the cameras waiting on their tripods to be rushed into action. Suddenly Houston Channel 2 reporter Phil Archer flew from the building, a blur of pinstripe and mustache, anxiously announcing to his photographer, "Pierce may be going to lunch!" The crews were up in an instant, grabbing their mikes, slamming open the locks on their tripods to throw their cameras onto their shoulders and move into place around the immediate perimeter—if you closed your eyes you would have heard a SWAT team secure the area. They waited, cameras and mikes trained steadily at the door. Then silence and more waiting, until the doors burst open, and somebody yelled, "Other side! Other side! Pierce went out the other door!" The pack was off. It ran hard to the right, climbing benches to clear the granite wall at the south lawn, boom men hustling to stay with their cameramen, still photographers clutching their camera bags. Rounding the far corner, a couple of winded stragglers dropped back, but the remainder converged on Marshall, following him around to the end of the block. His comment? "No comment."

When they reconvened at the west entrance, they discovered the ABC crew in the south grass interviewing Eric Redding, the Houston photographer who, along with his wife D'Eva, shot the nudes of Smith that first caught Playboy's eye and co-wrote an unauthorized biography, Great Big Beautiful Doll. Redding's firsthand knowledge of all things Anna Nicolian made him a hot commodity: When the California ruling broke, he did a remote interview with Geraldo Rivera, and while he and D'Eva (yes, it's pronounced "Diva") unwound at Rick's Cabaret later in the evening, he took no fewer than a dozen calls on his cell phone. "Channel Eleven called at ten-thirty and asked how fast I could be available for an interview. I finally had to say, 'Look, I'm here at Rick's with my wife, and she'd kill me if I just left.'" He was at the courthouse as an expert analyst for E! Entertainment's trial coverage.

Finally, at about one-thirty, Judge Wood was satisfied he could impanel an impartial jury, and court was done for the day. Smith and Stern left the courtroom, pausing in the lobby to make sure her car had arrived and to brace themselves for one last pass through the press. Solemnly Stern pronounced his "No comments" as the crowd barreled through the courtyard, sweeping up a small black woman who'd been jogging by. "Good luck, Anna Nicole!" the woman shouted as she and the star struggled to get free of the pack, now spilling out into the street. As a homeless man in a bright orange toupee asked, "Is that that pretty woman who married that rich man?" a Nissan Sentra lightly rear-ended an airport taxi van just in front of Smith's black Lincoln Navigator.