‘Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me’ Takes a Maddening Turn in Its Final Minutes

It was Byrum who was beside Smith as she established seniority in the Executive Suite, and Byrum who assumed the role of Smith’s assistant and live-in caretaker for her son as her modeling career began to take off. Byrum also got one of the most intimate views of Smith’s relationship with the 86-year-old billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, who she recalled was hellbent on marrying Smith right after they met at the Executive Suite. But Smith denied him until she felt she’d achieved success in her own right.

“‘I’m not going to marry you until I’ve made a name for myself, because I don’t want people calling me a gold digger,’” Byrum recalls Smith informing him. Still, Marshall helped with making the right connections on her behalf. Not long after they began a relationship, she would nab her first Playboy cover.

In a particularly noteworthy account from Marilyn Grabowski, the Playboy photography editor who made Pamela Anderson a cover girl three years prior to Smith, she describes meeting a winsome albeit timid Smith with little else in hand than a record—Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” She could barely pose in front of a camera, until Grabowski played said record. Smith, she said, gave the performance of a lifetime. The Guess Jeans campaigns, film offers, and comparisons to her idol Monroe soon followed.

“Fame finds people and won’t let ‘em go,” Grabowski dolefully tells us. Fame, as it happened in Smith’s case, did not let go. As soon as Smith became a household name due largely in part to dogged—borderline depraved—paparazzi attention, it seems celebrity’s embrace became a chokehold. Especially as tragedy in Smith’s personal life struck, first in the form of a reunion with her long-estranged father, Donald Hogan, and younger half-brother Donnie.

“She wasn’t getting along with her mother. That’s why she got ahold of our father,” Donnie says. “Everybody wants to look up to somebody.”

Byrum reveals that Smith, at the height of her fame, hired a private investigator to find her father, who she hadn’t seen for 24 years, and flew him and Donnie to Los Angeles for a visit. What began as an optimistic experience for Smith, however, became the first of many blows.

“She told me her father tried to have sex with her,” Byrum relays of the short-lived reconciliation. “She had all these ideas in her head about what he was like and she was just so, so disappointed.”

Not long after, she and Byrum fell out as Smith’s prescription drug use became more frequent. “My friend that loved me wasn’t there anymore,” Byrum tearfully recalls of Smith’s early struggles with addiction. Then, in 1995, Smith’s second husband Marshall died. Many can recall the lengthy trial that ensued and became an exercise in humiliation for Smith, who was portrayed by media—and Marshall’s son, Pierce—as an insatiable glutton who had the gall to demand money she didn’t earn. Those who don’t know her story as intimately are still likely to believe Smith wasn’t just a gold digger, but a successful one—a reputation we’re repeatedly told she sought to avoid. Only, Smith didn’t receive one red cent from Marshall’s estate, worth $1.6 billion, as his son made certain despite his late father’s insistence on taking care of Smith and her son.

“It wasn’t a sexual, ‘Baby, oh baby, I love your body’ type of love,” Smith told the court. “It was a deep, ‘Thank you for taking me out of this hole, and thank you for saving my life and my son’s life…’ That’s the kind of love that me and my husband had for each other.”

“She kept looking for someone else to save her,” Smith’s attorney, Kelly Moore, recalls of the time. From this moment—about little more than halfway through the documentary—to the end, Smith’s sorrows mount and mount to near-suffocation. Her struggles with addiction worsened, as did public scrutiny surrounding everything from her weight, to her dwindling finances and futile attempts to better them (The Anna Nicole Show, Trimspa), to her often erratic behavior.

All of it builds to Byrum’s final revelation in the documentary’s last eight minutes: In short, that some of Smith’s purported origin story—that she was a teenage runaway who’d fled poverty, abuse, and a totalitarian mother—was an exaggeration. Byrum describes watching an interview with Smith made public weeks before she died of an accidental drug overdose in 2007, shortly after the birth of the daughter she had long wanted. In it, Smith alleged physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by her mother, Virgie Arthur, and stepfathers.

“I was shocked, because I knew that was not her childhood coming out of her mouth. That was my childhood,” Byrum says. “That was exactly what happened to me in the way that I relayed it to her.”

“The only person that I ever remember coming to her rescue was her mother over and over and over,” she adds. Other family members, too, affirm Byrum’s account. “They did talk to each other behind the scenes, and they cared about each other,” Donald Hart, Smith’s other half brother, says.

But what’s presented by the documentary as perhaps the most damning refutation comes directly from Arthur in an interview before she died in 2018. Arthur lamented frustration with her daughter for painting a negative—and by her assertion, inaccurate—portrait of her childhood.

“‘I wish you could just understand that I make more money telling sad stories than I do telling good stories,’” Arthur said Smith told her when confronted. “‘If it’s something really bad, I make 50 times the amount of money than I make if it’s good.’”

Frankly, it’s maddening that You Don’t Know Me didn’t just begin here. There’s a chance Smith was telling the truth, and yet, her account of alleged abuse doesn’t seem to be handled in the way it deserves, given that only Byrum and certain members of her family are able to speak to the accusations. Worse yet is that they’re presented in a way—buttressed between multiple disputes and just before the credits roll—that instantly encourages doubt. It’s especially disappointing considering a particularly staggering moment earlier in the documentary sees Donnie learning that their father had tried to have sex with her after they reunited. His knee jerk reaction is one of disbelief, despite the fact that elsewhere in his interview, he refers to their father as “a monster,” and alleges his father once told him he’d raped his wife’s younger sister when she was still a child.

“My dad? Assaulted her? That would be like him. But is it true? It couldn’t be. I was there every step of the way,” he initially asserts. Then he takes a beat. “But you know, I wouldn’t put it past him. I guess I wasn’t there all the time.”

You Don’t Know Me is Blonde-esque in that it fails to care why Smith might’ve felt the need to lie even before achieving fame, and later, infamy. In fact, there are so many allusions to Smith’s self-identified spiritual kinship with Monroe that one can’t help but wonder if the filmmakers are prompting us to ask whether she borrowed more from the icon than her platinum curls to cash in and curry favor; more specifically, an origin story—one punctuated by childhood trauma, exploitation, and a demise so singular to Hollywood it could spawn a hundred documentaries just like this one. If that’s true, then the irony is that Smith needn’t have. Her life was already pretty fucking sad.