Free Blonde Ambition by Rita Cosby Page A

Brighthaupt, remained unpaid.
       Anna Nicole wasn't handling any money. She hadn't handled her money in years. That was Howard's job. Quethlie Alexis and Nadine Alexie, two nannies working for Anna during the time, say that Anna clearly had a money shortage and that Howard would often put a stack of paperwork in front of Anna when she was heavily drugged and tell her to sign it. On several occasions the nannies heard Anna tell Howard that she couldn't read the papers, and he'd tell her to sign anyway. Howard signed most of the nannies' checks with the name "Vickie Lynn Marshall," and they claim that Dr. Khris Eroshevich, Anna's psychiatrist who often visited, also signed checks right in front of them the same way, using the signature "Vickie Lynn Marshall."
       At least the nannies were being paid. Others were working without remuneration, biding their time and biting their tongues until the Marshall money came in. "I got there the day after Daniel died, September 11," bodyguard Moe Brighthaupt told Fox News. "And up to the day she died, I didn't get paid one cent to work with her. . . . She was going through a lot of legal problems, so you know, I didn't want to bug her with that."
       Moe told the private investigators that at one point he knew Anna had several hundred thousand dollars in her safe in Los Angeles and believes that it was later moved to the Bahamas. Moe would see Howard pay "big wads of cash" all the time to people who'd come over to the house in the Bahamas. He saw "lots of money changing hands at that house." Howard told several close employees that there was no money, but promised there would be once Anna had finally won her battle against the family of her deceased billionaire husband.
       According to Moe, Howard "took care of everything. Her money and her drugs." But Anna's live-in lawyer was also overseeing all the other lawyers who were handling the growing tangle of legal woes for the blonde star. In addition to the case that had been appealed all the way to the Supreme Court over the billion dollar fortune of J. Howard Marshall, the eighty-six-year-old man she had met while stripping, she had the Bahamas residency issues, the looming paternity suit, the "suspicious" death of her son, and, soon, a dispute with dear friends over the house she and Howard were living in.
       The hole was getting deeper and deeper. Or the hill was becoming an insurmountable mountain.

    • • •

    It was Howard that was handling Anna's money as well as her career. He knew what was valuable about the Anna brand and what people wanted to see. And he was always trying to work every angle.
       Anna and Howard's friend David Giancola, the producer of Anna's last film Illegal Aliens , told me, "Howard was always thinking like a businessman. His theory has always been 'make them pay.' Whenever anyone wanted to run even a clip of Anna, he'd always try to get some money from it, saying, 'if they are going to get ratings, we should get dollars.'"
       After Daniel died, Howard was often seen chain smoking in the corner in the Horizons house, on secret phone calls and working on his computer a lot. But the tragedy was now making bankable news. The media and the public wanted, and was willing to pay for, access to Anna's pain, to know what she was going through, to see just how messy the life of America's favorite scarlet letter wearer had become.
       Less than a week after Daniel's death, Howard had made the big-money deal with In Touch magazine. In addition, about four days after Howard closed the In Touch deal, a contract from Entertainment Tonight worth a purported million dollars arrived at their Horizons house. It was a contract that would give them money so that they could bury Daniel, climb out of mounting debt, and a deal that, Howard hoped, would give them some much-needed positive publicity.

    Tuesday, September 26

    Five days after Daniel's death certificate was issued, in advance of the photo