Anna Nicole: Tears in Court

By Stephen M. Silverman

07/20/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

With the nearly $450 million settlement she received from the estate of her late husband, tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, in a Los Angeles federal courtroom last week, Anna Nicole Smith can afford Kleenex. And Smith reportedly used plenty of it yesterday in a new trial in Texas, where she and J. Howard Marshall III, the disinherited elder son of Marshall, are suing his younger son Pierce Marshall. Smith and J. Howard are claiming that for 20 years Pierce schemed to make the old man's fortune all his own. Smith, a former Playboy Playmate, married Marshall in 1994, when she was 26 and he was 89. Since his death in 1995, Smith has been fighting Marshall's son Pierce over the $1.6 billion estate. It is unclear what effect, if any, a ruling in the Texas case would have in Los Angeles, where Pierce Marshall is appealing last week's case.