Anna Nicole Smith’s friend Melissa “Missy” Byrum claims they had an unofficial wedding.
Model Smith died in 2007 of combined drug intoxication, and was famously married to oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II in 1994, which was her second marriage and his third. This made headlines as J Howard was 89 and Smith was 26 when they married.
But Byrum, who appears in the new Netflix documentary “Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me”, has told “People” they were in a “secret” lesbian relationship and got hitched “in the backyard by the pool” in 1993.
She said: “We became lovers, you know? And I mean real sober lovers – it was a conscious thing.
“She said that she loved me. We’d now been through some bad relationships, both of us, with men. We decided that we just didn’t need men.
“She gave me a set of wedding rings and we got married in the backyard by the pool with champagne.
“I wore the rings. She wanted me to have a baby with her. But I always knew it wasn’t ever going to work out. Because she was never, ever going to settle down with one person.”
Byrum said: “I was not (Anna’s) first female lover. But I knew it would not last. She needed more love than any one human being could give her.”
She met Smith, who she calls “Nicki” at a strip club in Houston in the late 1980s, not far from where Smith grew up, and they soon became friends.
Byrum said: “From the minute I met her, she always told me she was gonna end up being a famous model. And she always told me she was gonna die young.
“She was a princess. If she wanted something from you, you would deliver it. That’s how it worked. Nicki was adaptable and changeable to whatever circumstances were going on in your particular dynamic of a relationship, to get what she needed.
“She started to manifest the character of Anna Nicole back then. She would even pretend to be stupid when she was dancing. I watched her do it all the time. She learned stripping that guys like to think you’re dumb if you’re that pretty.”