Anna Nicole: No talent but the ability to make us gawk

Contrary to prior reports, Anna Nicole Smith served some purpose in our culture, not necessarily a noble one, but a function she continues to provide from the teeming tabloid newsstand in the sky.

She was a distraction, a ceaseless amazement, the trans fat of celebrity junk food.

Her life was a perpetual car accident, the type you slow down to rubberneck on the expressway. It's not something you admire yourself for doing, but you do so just the same. It's human nature to gasp at the wreckage of other people's misfortune and say, "At least I'm not as bad off as that."

Anna Nicole was famous for precisely three things.

The third attribute was paramount: a willingness to do anything to remain in front of a camera. This was essential, given that ANS couldn't act, couldn't sing and, increasingly, couldn't think. And, after all, any woman with some cash and no fear of the knife or of a chronically aching back can grow up and out to become a DDD.

ANS had no qualms, no censor, no remorse. She was a stripper and a modern-day courtesan with, not a heart of gold, but a body of silicone. Her drug of choice wasn't TrimSpa Formula X32 or peroxide but celebrity. Eventually, it seemed like every person in her life who was not on the payroll left her. The only loyalty she knew was from a public panting for cheap spectacle.

Here, she fell down on the job. Anna Nicole was a jeans model and Playboy Playmate who got heavy. Fat was not part of ANS's job description, but it endeared her to the millions of lifetime dieters who feast off tabloid flotsam. (In contrast, Demi Moore and Sharon Stone, now famous solely for being photographed, manage their physical appearance with surgical precision.) The ideal supermarket checkout covergirl - Elizabeth Taylor, Britney Spears - routinely battles the bulge and other accessible demons, preferably woeful taste in swains.

But those women had other talents, or at least once did. Anna Nicole's lone skill was suckling the beast. Most "models" know it is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt. The problem with ANS was that she never shut up.

She was smart enough to land millionaire J. Howard Marshall II, 63 years her senior and 14 months before his death - that's perfect hoochie-mama calculus - but stupid about everything else. Mostly stupid because she wouldn't shut up, while offering ample evidence - ample being the ideal Anna Nicole adjective - that she was spacey and singlehandedly supporting the pharmaceutical industry.

Even professional blondebrities Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie learn to occasionally zip at least their mouths.

That's what expensive "representation" is for, after all, to apply a glossy public sheen where none exists. The Anna Nicole nakedness the public craved wasn't her fleshy pulchritude but her insatiable jones for attention, both of which expanded during her final years.

Anna Nicole laid to rest any distinction between Entertainment Tonight, which appears to maintain an ANS investigative unit, and "hard-hitting" CNN and Fox News. They're all feasting on her like vultures.

At age 39, Anna Nicole had totaled her life. Gore Vidal once said of Truman Capote's death that it was a "good career move." Certainly, her passing is proving good for the news media, an event so seismic as to wipe a vengeful diaper-wearing astronaut off the pages and off the air. No small feat, that.

No wonder, then, that a veritable dumpster of sleaze has come forward claiming to be the father of baby Danielynn. Rumors abound that the hopeful fathers are being paid for "exclusives." Certainly, they have no trouble milking the cameras days after their beloved's death. That's amore.

At last Google, Prince Frederic von Anhalt - a man who is not a prince, most likely not even a "von," but is certainly a gigolo and Zsa Zsa Gabor's eighth husband (and 31 years her junior) - has popped up 846,000 times in his claim of paternity.

There are so many ways to say "I loved you" when the tiny product of that romance comes with a possible $475 million trust.

Isn't it obvious?

O.J. is the father of Anna Nicole's baby.

Such irony. ANS wanted to be Marilyn Monroe, despite a complete lack of talent. Now her death promises more attention than she courted in life. Her ultimate tragedy is that she isn't around to celebrate the sludge of her labors.