A new documentary about Anna Nicole Smith dropped on Netflix — and it revealed she was reportedly in a “secret relationship.”
Melissa “Missy” Byrum, a friend of the late model, claimed in the doc — titled “Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me” — that the two were in a “secret relationship” and got married “in the backyard by the pool” in 1993 after Smith proposed to her.
Byrum and Smith met at a strip club in Houston where they both worked in the late 90s when they became best friends and eventually fell in love, she said.
Their relationship started in 1992, a year before Smith proposed.
“She gave me a set of rings and we got married in the backyard by the pool with champagne… She wanted me to have a baby with her,” Byrum told People. “But I always knew it wasn’t ever going to work out because she was never, ever going to settle down with one person.”
“She needed more love than any one human being could give her,” Byrum added, saying that their relationship ultimately ended over Smith’s addiction to painkillers.
Smith died of an accidental overdose in 2007 at the age of 39, and the doc aims to share the tragic life of the late Playboy.
She famously married billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, then 89, in 1994 when she was just 26 years old — her second marriage and his third.
But Marshall “knew that she was a young woman and needed certain things. He allowed her to have her boy toys or whatever,” Byrum told People.
Due to their age gap, the 1993 Playmate of the Year often faced accusations that she was just with Marshall to inherit his money after he died, which she denied time and time again.
“She really loved him,” Smith’s uncle George Beall told the magazine. “The way he took care of her and looked out for her — she cared about him a lot. She didn’t want people to think that she was after his money. [Her] Aunt Kay and I both said, ‘If you love him, to heck with what people think!'”
Marshall died just over a year after he and Smith married in 1995, and they were together during the last 14 months of Marshall’s life.
This wasn’t the first time Smith went through the death of a loved one. Her son, Daniel, who she shared with her first husband, Billy Wayne Smith, succumbed to an accidental overdose the year before her eerily similar death.
Smith was also romantically linked to photographer Larry Birkhead, with whom she shared a daughter, Dannielynn Birkhead, now 16.
Larry confirmed last month that he and Dannielynn would not participate in the bombshell doc in a statement to The Post, in which he said they are planning their “own special project” for future release.
“We aren’t involved in the Anna Nicole Netflix documentary,” Larry told The Post via email, adding that their own venture would be one with which they “can make sure that the people involved are truly connected with Anna and that we have a certain level of control over the way the story is told.”
Larry added that “it gets tiring” to see projects like this one pop up time and again.
“I just decided to pass on this and do our own project using Anna’s archives that she left behind,” he told The Post. “You can’t get any more definitive than Anna in her own words! So, it was important for me to let Anna tell her own story.”
Larry said that his project will include “Anna’s personal diaries, journals. That is Anna speaking out in everything from life, love, loss of her husband J. Howard Marshall, finance highs and lows. Her thoughts on family and certain friends. They go back way before she was discovered when she was still Vickie Lynn living in Texas.”
Dannielynn was just 5 months old when Smith was found unresponsive in her room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, more than 15 years ago.
“Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me” is now streaming on Netflix.
