J. Holt Smith: The Lawyer Who Married Catwoman and Disappeared Into Private Life

On August 5, 1977, a lawyer named J. Holt Smith married Julie Newmar in what Getty Images photographers captured as a domestic scene — the couple at home in Fort Worth, Texas, the actress who had defined Catwoman for a generation tending plants alongside a man who carried a briefcase to work.

He has no Wikipedia page. His age has never been confirmed in any public record. His first name — the name behind the initial — has never been verified. His career in law is documented only by the professional category, not by any named cases, firms, or accomplishments. After the marriage ended in 1984, he returned to a private life so complete that the question of whether he is still alive has been seriously asked by researchers and left unanswered.

He is one of the most successfully invisible people ever to be briefly adjacent to Hollywood celebrity. And the story of his marriage, his son, and his disappearance is worth telling properly — because most articles about him fill the gaps with invention rather than honesty.

Quick Facts

Detail	Information
Full name	J. Holt Smith (first name — the name behind “J.” — not publicly confirmed)
Also referenced as	John Holt Smith (Masterworks Broadway source)
Birth date	Not publicly confirmed
Age (2026)	Unknown
Birthplace	United States (specific location not confirmed)
Nationality	American
Profession	Attorney / lawyer
Education	Possibly Los Angeles City College (one source; unverified)
Wife	Julie Newmar (born Julia Chalene Newmeyer, August 16, 1933)
Married	August 5, 1977, Fort Worth, Texas area
Divorced	1984 (most consistently sourced date; some sources say 1983)
Marriage duration	Approximately 7 years
Son	John Jewl Smith, born February 25, 1981
John’s conditions	Down syndrome; hearing impairment (deafness); vision impairment
Julie’s age at John’s birth	47 years old
Prior pregnancies	Three miscarriages before John
Post-divorce fate	Not publicly confirmed — no documented death, no documented public life
Wikipedia page	Does not exist
Social media	None verified
Net worth	Not publicly confirmed

The “J.” Problem — What His First Name Actually Is

Almost every article about J. Holt Smith refers to him by his initial. The name behind the J. is not confirmed in most sources.

One source — the Masterworks Broadway biographical entry on Julie Newmar, which is one of the more carefully written accounts of her life — refers to him as “John Holt Smith.” If this is accurate, his full name is John Holt Smith, with J. standing for John.

Another source uses the spelling “J. Hoit Smith” — almost certainly a typographical error for “Holt.”

The “John Holt Smith” identification from the Masterworks Broadway source is the only named-first-name entry in the record. It is not confirmed by primary documentation. It is the most credible available answer to the question of what the J. stands for, and it is flagged here as such — likely but unconfirmed.

Throughout this article, he is referred to as J. Holt Smith as he is known in the public record.

The “He Died in 1984” Claim — Addressed and Rejected

One source — beautyepic.com — states: “They remained married until 1984, when J. Holt Smith died.”

This claim is contradicted by every other source in the record. Alchetron’s biography of Julie Newmar states she “moved with him to Fort Worth, Texas, where she lived until her divorce from Smith in 1984.” The Masterworks Broadway entry says “married to John Holt Smith, a lawyer, from 1977 to 1984.” Classic Film and TV Café: “married to J. Holt Smith, an attorney, from 1977 to 1984.” Multiple additional sources confirm a divorce, not a death.

The logic also contradicts itself. A death in 1984 would make Smith a widower’s counterpart, not a divorced ex-husband. Julie Newmar has consistently been described as divorced, not widowed. The “death in 1984” claim is an error — either a misreading of the divorce year or a fabrication by a content platform generating biographical details without primary research.

J. Holt Smith did not die in 1984. He and Julie Newmar divorced in 1984. His current status — alive or deceased — is genuinely unknown. But the death-in-1984 claim is false.

The Divorce Year Conflict — 1983 vs. 1984

Most credible biographical sources on Julie Newmar place the divorce in 1984. These include Alchetron, Masterworks Broadway, Classic Film and TV Café, The City Celeb, and the film star postcards blog.

Some sources — including the Eleven Magazine and Late Magazine articles specifically about J. Holt Smith — state the divorce occurred in 1983 or even describe the marriage as lasting “until 1983.”

The 1984 date is more consistently sourced across independent biographical references that are not specifically about J. Holt Smith. The 1983 date appears most frequently in articles whose primary subject is Smith himself — which may suggest that a shared error entered circulation through one article and propagated into subsequent ones.

This article uses 1984 as the divorce year, consistent with the majority of well-sourced references to Julie Newmar’s biography.

Who Julie Newmar Is — The Woman He Married

Julie Newmar was born Julia Chalene Newmeyer on August 16, 1933, in Los Angeles. Her father, Donald Newmeyer, was a professional football player — he played for the Los Angeles Buccaneers in 1926. Her mother, Helen Jesmer Newmeyer, was a performer in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1920 and later became a real estate investor.

By the age of fifteen, Julie was performing as a prima ballerina with the Los Angeles Opera. She studied ballet and classical piano from childhood. She attended UCLA briefly before leaving to join Universal Studios as a dancer and choreographer. She was six feet tall — a physical presence that was, in the 1950s, simultaneously celebrated and treated as an obstacle in an industry that did not know what to do with a woman of that height.

Her Broadway breakthrough came with Li’l Abner in 1956, playing the character Stupefyin’ Jones. Her three minutes on that stage were enough to generate serious attention. Two years later, in 1958, she originated the role of Katrin Sveg in The Marriage-Go-Round on Broadway — a Swedish vixen opposite Charles Boyer. She won the 1959 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for that performance. She reprised the role in the 1961 film adaptation, earning a Golden Globe nomination.

Then came Catwoman.

In 1966 and 1967, Julie Newmar played Catwoman in the first two seasons of Batman, the ABC series starring Adam West. She created the template for every Catwoman that followed — the physicality, the purring menace, the sexuality coexisting with real danger. She was, and remains, the definitive version of the character to a generation that saw her first.

She did not appear in the 1966 Batman film because of a scheduling conflict with another production. Lee Meriwether played the role in the film. This is a detail that has never stopped generating discussion among Batman fans — what the film would have been with Newmar in it.

By 1977, when she married J. Holt Smith, her career had diversified. She had invented Nudemar pantyhose and appeared in People Magazine promoting them. She was a businesswoman, an actress, a dancer, a writer, and a figure whose cultural importance was already being recognized and celebrated. She was 43 years old when they married. He was a lawyer in Fort Worth, Texas.

Fort Worth, Texas — Where the Marriage Lived

The Getty Images photographs document the scene: Julie Newmar and J. Holt Smith at home in Fort Worth, Texas, on September 5 of the year they married — 1977. She is tending plants. He is present. They look like a couple in a real house, not a celebrity event.

Alchetron’s biography confirms that Julie “moved with him to Fort Worth, Texas, where she lived until her divorce from Smith in 1984.” Fort Worth was his city, not hers. She relocated from Los Angeles — where her entire career had been built — to a Texas city nearly 1,500 miles away, because that is where he was practicing law.

This is a significant detail. Julie Newmar was a Tony Award winner, a television icon, and an emerging entrepreneur. She gave up the proximity to the entertainment industry that sustained all of that to live in Fort Worth. The marriage represented a genuine relocation of her life around his professional geography.

She stayed for seven years.

Three Miscarriages and a “Last-Minute Baby”

John Jewl Smith was born on February 25, 1981. Julie was 47 years old.

Before John, there had been three miscarriages. Multiple sources confirm this. Julie Newmar has described the losses as agonizing and described John’s arrival as miraculous. She called him her “last-minute baby” — a child who came at the outer edge of her reproductive years, after losses that had made her question whether she would have a child at all.

John was born with Down syndrome. He also has a hearing impairment — described as deafness in multiple sources — and a vision impairment. IMDB’s trivia for Julie Newmar confirms the February 25, 1981 birth date and notes John’s father as “her ex-husband, J. Holt Smith.” He was born during the marriage, three years before its end.

Julie Newmar has been his primary caregiver since the divorce. Multiple sources, including the City Celeb biography and others, confirm that John lives with his mother in Beverly Hills. She has spoken about him with consistent warmth and has never framed his conditions as tragedy — in her telling, he is the most important person in her life, and she has organized her post-divorce years largely around his care.

J. Holt Smith’s Role as Father — Undocumented

This is a gap that deserves to be named honestly.

John Jewl Smith was J. Holt Smith’s son. The boy was born into their marriage in 1981. The marriage ended in 1984, when John was three years old.

What J. Holt Smith’s relationship with John has been since the divorce is entirely undocumented. No source describes custody arrangements. No source describes whether he maintained contact with his son as John grew up. No source quotes him on the subject. His absence from the documented record of John’s upbringing is complete — but whether that reflects actual absence from John’s life or simply the absence of any public record is unknown.

Julie Newmar has raised John. J. Holt Smith’s role, if any, in his son’s adult life is simply not documented.

The Belushi Lawsuit — The Adjacent Event That Tells a Different Story

This is not directly about J. Holt Smith, but it reveals something about the world Julie Newmar returned to after the Fort Worth years.

In 2004, actor James Belushi sued Julie Newmar for $4 million in damages, alleging that she had engaged in “a campaign of harassment” to drive him out of his house — their properties in Bel Air were adjacent. The lawsuit included claims of property damage and defamatory statements.

The case was eventually settled. Julie Newmar has never publicly conceded fault. Belushi moved.

The reason this matters for the J. Holt Smith story: when Julie moved back to Los Angeles after the 1984 divorce, she returned to a specific community, a specific neighborhood, and a specific set of entanglements that defined the next chapter of her life. J. Holt Smith walked out of that world entirely. He returned to law, to private life, and to an invisibility so complete that the most-researched biographical databases in the English language cannot confirm his birth year or his current status.

What Happened After 1984 — The Complete Unknown

After the divorce, J. Holt Smith disappears from the public record entirely.

No professional listing as an attorney has been confirmed. No obituary has been published. No social media presence exists. No public event appearance has been documented. No interview. No comment on Julie Newmar’s career. No comment on his son’s life.

Some researchers have noted that several images labeled “J. Holt Smith” online actually belong to unrelated individuals — a problem that arises precisely because the real J. Holt Smith has left no verified photographic record beyond the 1977 Fort Worth Getty Images photographs.

The question of whether he is still alive in 2026 is genuinely unanswered. He would be, at minimum, in his late seventies or older, depending on his birth year — which is also unknown. There is no death record publicly accessible. There is no life record publicly accessible. He is, in the literal sense, missing from the documented world.

Julie Newmar in 2026 — Her Life Without Him

Julie Newmar is 92 years old in 2026. She was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease in 2008 — an incurable neurological disorder affecting balance and the ability to walk. She has adapted. She continues to write — short stories, magazine pieces, and what has been described as a bi-monthly memoir. She advocated for a ban on leaf blowers in Los Angeles, arguing they are unnecessarily loud.

She lives in Beverly Hills with her son John Jewl Smith, who is 45 years old in 2026.

She has not remarried. J. Holt Smith was her only husband. The seven years in Fort Worth, the three miscarriages, the late arrival of a son with complex needs, and the divorce that ended it — these represent the entire chapter of her life as a wife. Everything since has been organized around John.

She was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Gay and Lesbian Elder Housing organization in 2013, reflecting her sustained advocacy for LGBT rights. Her gay brother John has been a relevant personal connection to that advocacy. Her other brother Peter Bruce Newmeyer died in a skiing accident.

She has been associated with the cultural landscape of Los Angeles for nearly eight decades. J. Holt Smith was seven years of her ninety-two.

What Is Known vs. What Is Not

Confirmed or well-sourced:

• Name: J. Holt Smith (first name possibly John, per Masterworks Broadway)
• American attorney / lawyer
• Married Julie Newmar on August 5, 1977
• Couple lived in Fort Worth, Texas during the marriage (Getty Images, Alchetron)
• Son John Jewl Smith born February 25, 1981 (IMDB trivia confirmed)
• John has Down syndrome, hearing impairment, and vision impairment
• Julie had three miscarriages before John; she was 47 at his birth
• Marriage ended in divorce in 1984 (most credible sources); some say 1983
• Julie moved back to Los Angeles after the divorce
• John lives with Julie in Beverly Hills
• No Wikipedia page for J. Holt Smith
• No confirmed post-1984 public record of any kind

Disputed:

• Divorce year: 1984 (majority of well-sourced references) vs. 1983 (some Smith-specific articles)
• His first name: “John” per Masterworks Broadway; “J.” per all other sources

Fabricated in one source only — should be disregarded:

• “J. Holt Smith died in 1984” — appears in beautyepic.com only; contradicted by all other sources; almost certainly an error

Genuinely unknown:

• Birth date and age
• Full first name (beyond the initial)
• His specific legal career — firm, practice area, cases, accomplishments
• Whether he maintained contact with his son after the divorce
• His current status — alive or deceased — is unconfirmed
• Current location
• Any life events after 1984

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FAQ — 12 Real Questions

1. Who is J. Holt Smith? 

He is an American attorney who married actress Julie Newmar on August 5, 1977. They lived in Fort Worth, Texas during their marriage, had one son named John Jewl Smith (born February 25, 1981), and divorced in 1984. He has maintained total privacy since then and has no confirmed public record of any kind post-divorce. He is one of the most successfully private figures ever connected to Hollywood celebrity.

2. What does the “J.” stand for? 

Possibly John. The Masterworks Broadway biographical entry on Julie Newmar refers to him as “John Holt Smith.” No other credible source confirms this. Every other source uses the initial J. His full first name has never been confirmed by primary documentation.

3. When was he born? 

Unknown. No birth date or year appears in any confirmed public record. His age has never been verified anywhere. He would be, at minimum, in his late seventies or older in 2026 — assuming he is still alive — but this is inference based on reasonable assumptions about the age of someone who was a practicing attorney in the late 1970s.

4. Is he still alive? 

Unknown. No death record has been published. No obituary exists in any searchable archive. No living presence is documented either. His status as of 2026 cannot be confirmed from the public record.

5. Did he die in 1984 as one website claims? 

No. This claim appears in one source — beautyepic.com — and is contradicted by all other sources, which consistently describe the marriage as ending in divorce in 1984, not in Smith’s death. Julie Newmar has always been described as divorced from Smith, not widowed. The claim is an error.

6. Where did they live? 

In Fort Worth, Texas, for the duration of their marriage. Julie Newmar relocated from Los Angeles to Fort Worth when she married Smith in 1977, since his law practice was based there. She returned to Los Angeles after the 1984 divorce and has lived in Beverly Hills since.

7. Who is their son John Jewl Smith? 

John Jewl Smith was born on February 25, 1981 — during the marriage, three years before it ended. He was born with Down syndrome, hearing impairment (deafness), and vision impairment. He is 45 years old in 2026. He lives with his mother Julie Newmar in Beverly Hills. Julie has been his primary caregiver since the divorce and has spoken about him consistently as the central focus of her life.

8. Was John Jewl Smith Julie’s first child? 

Yes, and he nearly did not happen. Julie Newmar experienced three miscarriages before John’s birth. She was 47 years old when he was born. She has called him her “last-minute baby.” IMDB trivia confirms his February 25, 1981 birth date.

9. What was J. Holt Smith’s legal career? 

Unknown beyond the professional category. Multiple sources confirm he was an attorney. No firm name, practice area, notable cases, or professional accomplishments have been identified in any public source. His legal career is confirmed only by category.

10. Did the divorce year happen in 1983 or 1984? 

Most credible independent biographical sources on Julie Newmar say 1984. Several articles specifically about J. Holt Smith say 1983. The 1984 date is more consistently sourced across references that are not primarily focused on Smith. This article uses 1984.

11. What has he done since the divorce?

 Nothing that is documented. His public record ends in 1984. No professional listing, no public appearance, no interview, no social media, no obituary, and no confirmed news coverage of any kind exists for J. Holt Smith after the divorce from Julie Newmar was finalized.

12. Why can’t anyone find information about him? 

Because he has not created any. He was a private individual who briefly became celebrity-adjacent through marriage. When the marriage ended, he returned to private life with such completeness that even the basic scaffolding of a public record — a birth date, a confirmed first name, a professional listing — is absent. In the researched world of 2026, where almost every living adult has some traceable digital or documentary presence, J. Holt Smith’s near-total invisibility is, itself, the most notable thing about him.