date, no judge in Texas has gone on to use the shoddy wording of the upheld amendment to invalidate the traditional institution of marriage favored by three-quarters of the state’s voters. And, while that will likely never happen, no credit is due to the people who drafted the problematic piece of legislation in the first place.
11
Anna Nicole Smith
BEFORE SHE WAS A CELEBRITY OF questionable virtue, Texas native Anna Nicole Smith was a woman of no apparent virtue at all.
Born Vickie Lynn Hogan in November 1967 and raised by various combinations of relatives between Houston and the little east Texas town of Mexia, Smith was pretty much doomed to a life of sordid obscurity from an early age. She dropped out of high school her sophomore year, ended up working at a chicken restaurant in Mexia, and, in 1985 at age seventeen, married sixteen-year-old fry cook, Billy Wayne Smith, and had a child by him (and briefly changed her name to Nikki Hart).
Within a couple of years, Smith left her child lover for Houston where, after a handful of other menial jobs, she started dancing at Gigi’s, a local strip club. She also began to parlay her fleshy charms into a career as a model of sorts (Guess, Lane Bryant), ostensible sex symbol, questionable actress, and decidedly unwholesome media personality, gaining national attention when she appeared in Playboy in 1992 (where she was identified as Vickie Smith) and became its Playmate of the Year in 1993. During this time Smith began trying to emphasize her similarity to bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield (both of whom died young and in tragic circumstances, as would Smith).
New York magazine summed up Anna Nicole Smith pretty succinctly when it made her the cover girl of its August 22, 1994 issue.
In October 1991, while stripping at Gigi’s (now known as Pleasures), Smith also met drooling old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, a man more than sixty-two years her senior who courted, lavished gifts upon, and repeatedly proposed to her.
Marshall’s sons, unable to curtail their father’s skirt-chasing during his life, were certainly not willing to give any deference to the wearers of those skirts after his death.
With an innate understanding for the needs of social mobility, Smith responded to these advances by divorcing her estranged husband and accepting the eighty-nine-year-old Marshall’s withered hand in marriage. From the start, people with small, dirty minds—along with nearly everyone else, for that matter—said the young sex worker had married the mogul for his money, but she denied this and protested that it was a case of true love.
Smith and the octogenarian Marshall never actually lived together during their thirteen months of highly publicized marriage but, upon his death in August 1995, she immediately sought half of his $1.6 billion estate, which she said her husband had verbally promised her in exchange for marrying him.
Marshall’s sons, E. Pierce Marshall and James Howard Marshall III, unable to curtail their father’s skirt-chasing during his life, were certainly not willing to give any deference to the wearers of those skirts after his death, and a lengthy and sordid legal battle ensued almost immediately. It went on for the rest of Smith’s life and involved various judgments for and against her and jurisdictional disputes between Texas, California, and federal courts. And, in a strange twist that no one could have predicted when it was filed, Marshall v. Marshall actually reached the U.S. Supreme Court over a question of federal jurisdiction.
Difficulties followed Smith throughout the rest of her life, to include having to file for bankruptcy as a result of an $850,000 judgment against her for sexually harassing an employee; the tragic drug-overdose death of her son, Daniel, in September 2006; and the scandal over the inappropriate means by which a friend who was an official for the government of the Bahamas had obtained citizenship for her in his country.
There was also the paternity dispute and custody battle over her daughter, Dannielynn, who was born the same month her son died. Fatherhood was variously attributed to or claimed by photographer Larry Birkhead, attorney Howard K. Stern, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, former bodyguard Alexander Denk, or a frozen sample of sperm collected from Marshall prior to his death.
These travails, Smith’s increasingly bizarre behavior, and her dramatic weight gain brought unwanted media attention, ridicule, and stress to Smith, particularly over what would be the last six months of her life.
Probably living on borrowed time from the start, Smith died February 8, 2007, nine months short of her fortieth birthday, from an overdose of nearly a dozen prescription drugs—several of them sedatives—at a hotel in Hollywood, Florida. What did not die with her, however, was the battle over her billionaire former husband’s estate, which was still not resolved at the time of her death. E. Pierce Marshall died as well before it could be resolved, and at this writing it continues on behalf of his widow and Smith’s young daughter.
12
Sex Toys Now Legal in Texas!
SINCE NOVEMBER 2008, PEOPLE IN Texas have had the right to sell or purchase sex toys of various sorts as desired. Prior to that, however, the Lone Star State explicitly reserved the right to regulate morality and to prosecute people who did not measure up to its lofty standards—which it periodically did.
In 1973, even as swingers, wife-swappers, and disco threatened to destroy the moral fiber of the nation, the Texas Legislature passed the Obscene Device Law, a section of the Texas Penal Code that dealt with obscenity. In part, it also prohibited the sale or promotion of “‘Obscene device[s]’ mean[ing] a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”
Only rarely did prosecutors in Texas presume to enforce the statute but it did happen on a number of significant occasions.
In 2004, Joanne Webb, a former schoolteacher and mother of three, faced up to a year in prison for selling a vibrator to two undercover police officers who infiltrated a private party posing as a married couple.
“It was not a secret in Burleson, a small town near Fort Worth, that Webb sold vibrators, edible creams, and racy lingerie,” CNN reported on the incident. “But not everyone was happy about it…. A few prominent citizens with strong Christian beliefs were angered by Webb and her activities and asked police to investigate.”
A former schoolteacher and mother of three faced up to a year in prison
Webb was ultimately acquitted and the undercover officers were reprimanded for their puritanical fervor.
In 2007, police raided Somethin’ Sexy, a lingerie shop in Lubbock, and confiscated items determined to be illegal under the Texas obscenity law and arrested the clerk working there at the time, who thereafter had to register as a sex offender.
According to the local district attorney’s office, a device met the test for obscenity if someone intended to use it for a sex toy but was okay if they did not.
“If the seller is selling it as a novelty, and the buyer is buying it as a novelty to make fun of, then it probably has not reached the level of an obscenity,” said Assistant District Attorney John Grace, who said a candle was a non-obscene candle if it was promoted for use on a birthday cake, but that the same candle was an obscene sex toy if it was sold for use as a dildo. Based on that thread of logic, purchasing a normal candle and using it as a sex toy would violate the law, while purchasing a vibrator and jamming it on a cake would not.
