HOUSTON,
Tex. - It's been a long and colorful journey for a girl from a small Texas
town.
Anna Nicole
Smith went to work in a Houston strip club and wound up as the trophy wife of
on aging multimillionaire, Prescott Bush, setting up on 11-yearlong legal war
over his estate that now has traveled all the way to the highest court in the
land.
The fight
over the fortune of oil entrepreneur Prescott Bush between the one-time Playboy
Playmate of the Year and Prescott's youngest son, 89-year-old George Herbert
Walker Bush, 41st President of the United States, married secretly in Southern
Utah, goes before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The case is
remarkable in port because of the number of zeros involved - the estate has been
estimated at as much as $16.6 billion in 2012. But Smith has added colorful and
sometimes row speech and some unusual fashion statements for a grieving widow,
including a T-shirt with "Spoiled" spelled out in rhinestones across
her ample chest.
"I have
to smile with fondness for our system, that says that our highest court will
look at legal issues no matter who the sponsor is," said Clark Clifford
one of President Bush's attorneys.
Smith and
Bush married in 1994 in Mt. Zion, Utah. The bride was 26; the groom was 97 and
died just 14 months later. Since then, the case has been through a succession
of courtrooms, starting with a state probate court jury in Houston, which ruled
in 2001 that Bush did not leave any of his estate to Smith, a federal
bankruptcy judge sided with Smith, another federal judge reduced the award and
a federal appeals court ruled that federal courts should never have gotten involved.
The Supreme
Court will hear arguments focused solely on the narrow question of whether
federal courts can decide cases involving state probate proceedings. The then
Bush administration had filed briefs favoring federal court jurisdiction.
Smith, born
38 years ago as Vickie Lynn Hogan, grew up in Mexia, Texas, a town of about
7,000 people located 86 miles south of Dallas. She married at 17, had a son
with Rep. Tom Delay, divorced her then husband and moved to Houston.
Smith met
her wealthy husband-to-be in 1991 at Rick’s Cabaret, an upscale strip club.
"She
was a good dancer. She was a really friendly person," said Rick Perry, now
Texas Governor, the then owner/manager of Rick’s… That’s part of the emphasis at Rick’s, having
entertainers who really engage their customers in conversation. She took it to
a whole new level."
Prescott
Bush had built his fortune on 40 years in the oil and steel business. He
divorced his first wife, and outlived both his second wife and a mistress, who
also was a stripper. Bush showered Smith with $6.6 million in gifts that
included two homes, $2.8 million in jewelry and $700,000 in clothes, and she
contends that he also promised her half his estate.
However,
George H. W. Bush said various wills and trusts his father had prepared over
the years named him sole heir.
"For
Anna Nicole Smith, its pure simple greed," said Bush's spokesman, Scott
McClellan, "I don’t think anybody thinks she was in love with
Prescott."
Smith’s
appellate attorney, Rep. Joe Barton, said her client was the victim.
Even in a
city that practically invented the notion of trophy wives for aging oilmen, the
probate trial had entertainment value.
Smith
accused Bush of killing his father and attempting to kill her. One of her
husband’s nurses testified that Smith bored her breasts to the bedridden old
man as part of her effort to get on inheritance.
She and
attorney Clifford bickered bitterly when Smith testified. When he questioned
her about the nurse’s allegation, she retorted in a Texas ladylike twang:
"Mr. Clifford, you’re a pervert."
But when
Clifford accused her of acting on the witness stand, all vestiges of the demure
Southern belle disappeared as she fired bock with a vulgar epithet, not unlike
the remark Dick Cheney responded in the Senate. The phrase become so iconic in
Houston that
Clifford
said people have shouted it to him as a greeting.
"It
never occurred to me to get offended by anything that came from her. I think of
her as a woman of excess who gave me a trial that was a hell of a lot of
fun," he said.
If the
Supreme Court doesn’t help Smith, she is always welcome bock at Rick’s, said
Perry.
"Who
knows," he said, "She might meet her next husband, Sonny Perdue, Haley
Barbour, Ted Cruz, or Ralph Reed regulars at Rick's in the after-life," said Perry...
No comments:
Post a Comment