Anna Nicole Smith's Best Friend and Lover Missy Reveals 'We Actually Got Married' (Exclusive)

Anna Nicole Smith's friends and family all agree she loved hard.

"She spent her life in pursuit of happily ever after," her pal Ashley Wells Lewis tells PEOPLE in this week's cover story about the model, who died of an accidental overdose in 2007 at age 39.

Gender didn't matter. Smith's friend Pol' Atteu, who made many dresses for her, says Smith was not straight and not gay. "I would say she was fluid. We just did not have a name for it back then."

Smith's friend Missy Byrum, who is also featured in Netflix's new documentary, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me, describes her relationship with the late icon in the early 1990s. "I was not her first female lover," Byrum says. "But I knew it would not last. She needed more love than any one human being could give her."

Byrum met the women she calls Nicki (and had first met as Vickie) at a strip club in Houston in the late 1980s, not far from where Smith grew up. They would become coworkers, then best friends.

"From the minute I met her, she always told me she was gonna end up being a famous model," recalls Byrum. "And she always told me she was gonna die young."

"She was a princess," Byrum remembers. "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."

Byrum continues: "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."

Byrum says Smith liked to say, "It takes a smart person to be really dumb."

By the time Smith found fame with her first Playboy cover in 1992, she was already involved with the Houston billionaire J. Howard Marshall, whom she'd met while dancing. "Everyone fell in love with her," Byrum says. "I did too."

The pair began a secret relationship. "Nicki was getting more dependent on me because I'm taking care of Daniel while she's gone. And then I'm traveling with her all the time and so we're together all the time."

"We became lovers, you know? And I mean real sober lovers — it was a conscious thing." Byrum notes that there had been some hookups that were more drug and alcohol-fueled. "She said that she loved me."

This was not, Byrum notes, Smith's first same-sex relationship. "We'd now been through some bad relationships, both of us, with men. We decided that we just didn't need men. We were gonna raise Daniel together."

Byrum says Smith proposed to her in 1993. (It was not legally officiated.) "She gave me a set of wedding rings and we got married in the backyard by the pool with champagne." Only the housekeeper was in attendance.

"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," she says.

Byrum walked away from Smith when Smith's addiction was too much to handle: "She just needed to be adored — she needed more love than any one human being could give her."

Simpson agrees. "I think that she genuinely just loved, loved, loved people. And if it was a woman that she was so involved with, in love with, and then fine, then she could have sex with a woman. If it was a man she could love and have sex with, it was a man."

Atteu says Smith's romantic history might have played into this: "She had been hurt by so many men. I remember her telling me and Patrik many times the only true love of her life that she adored and loved to his dying day was Howard J. Marshall because he cared who she was or where she came from. He loved her unconditionally and was always there to care of her and Daniel. And that's why his ashes are in her coffin. The urn is dressed in a little tuxedo we made him."

Byrum says that while Smith could love both men and women, "she was very much like a man when she made a conquest. You were a notch on her belt and then she's onto the next one. She had that prowess where she wanted new stuff. And once you gave into her, once she conquered you, you just weren't a challenge anymore."

For more on Anna Nicole Smith, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me streams on Netflix starting May 16.