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The punch line: in death, as in life, Anna Nicole Smith is a joke. Which is less than she deserves--but not that much less.

Article Excerpt
MY FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD CALLED ME from school to tell me that Anna Nicole Smith had died, and he was laughing. I happened to be at Universal Studios in Burbank, working on a story, when I got the news; once it ricocheted from multiple BlackBerrys to the makeup trailer to the set courtesy of CNN, ABC, and the like, people there were laughing too. My guess is that the news broke a record for the shortest time between the registration of shock and ensuing black humor. "No joke, Anna Nicole Smith DEAD," Vibewire.net reported on February 9, at 8:22 a.m., revealing a clear grasp of the problem. For some bizarre, best-unexplored reason, Richard Nixon came to mind; on that first morning I could hear him saying that we wouldn't have Anna Nicole to kick around anymore.

I was wrong about that, of course. In no time, her death from as-yet-undetermined causes was mirroring her life, which is to say it was an unmitigated disaster: The words "train wreck" conjoined with "Anna Nicole Smith" turned up 135,000 hits on Google a week or so after she was gone. Highlights included the ever-growing list of potential fathers for her then-five-month-old daughter, Dannielynn, and the melodramatic fight over a burial site between Anna Nicole's enervated mother, Virgie Arthur, and Anna Nicole's omnipresent faux spouse, Howard K. Stern, while her body lay rotting at the medical examiner's office. There was some good news: Wal-Mart was interested in a bulk buy of Great Big Beautiful Doll, a biography of Anna Nicole written by Eric and D'Eva Redding, her former manager and his wife, a hair and makeup artist. Others who'd had their piece of Anna Nicole rallied just as quickly. In a story headlined "TrimSpa Moving On Without Anna Nicole," the CEO of the diet pill company, Alex Goen, admitted that Anna Nicole had "helped to catapult the brand" to fame but that its success was "not simply the result of Anna Nicole Smith."

Within days, otherwise intelligent, highly sophisticated people--the kind who visit modern-art museums and read complicated books and know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis--were obsessively floating theories that could make you dizzy enough to beg for Dramamine. One friend speculated about a link between Anna Nicole's death and that of Lady Walker's, the late J. Howard Marshall II's first stripper-lover, who, you may or may not recall, died on a Houston operating table during cosmetic surgery, in 1991. "These were not nice people," my friend said ominously. Another sent me a clip on Anna Nicole's embalming, suspiciously querying, "Why did they need to embalm? She was in a cooler in the morgue." My favorite, however, came from an Austin therapist, who passed on her hairdresser's...

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