Playdate with Death

I have long had a fondness for Anna Nicole Smith. She was a cartoon character living a great American life, a life that one might describe as diamante gothic.

It comes as no surprise to learn that her story has ended in a Miami hotel room at the age of 39. The cause of death has yet to be established, but I'm sure speculation will be rife. An accidental drug overdose would of course be the most satisfyingly salacious ending, while suicide would make for the most operatic final act. Yet her partner says she had a fever the night before she died - perhaps she lived with a bang and died with a whimper?

This is the Anna Nicole Smith story. She was poor white Texas trash by the name of Vickie Lynn Hogan, raised by her mother, married at 17, a mother at 18 and separated at 19. She was a waitress in a fried chicken restaurant turned stripper turned tragic cliché. Her great ambition in life was to be Marilyn Monroe, which is as noble an ambition as any I've heard.

That was never going to happen, of course, but she did follow Marilyn in one all-important regard. 40 years after the great blonde bombshell appeared as a Playboy centrefold, Vickie Lynn Hogan became Playboy's Playmate of the Year 1993. Except she wasn't Vickie Lynn Hogan anymore, of course. Vickie Lynn was consumed and suffocated in the great grand bosom of a new rapacious gilded she-beast, a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon that called itself Anna Nicole Smith.

And she was beautiful. She was. It was a male fantasy, broad-stroke caricature of beauty, of course - healthy curves, platinum curls and bright red man-eater lips like Ursula the Sea Witch - and perhaps none of it was real when you peeled off the slap, but nonetheless, the thing she became was brilliant, blinding and, yes, beautiful.

Being Playmate of the Year isn't the reason most of us came to know about Anna Nicole, of course. We heard about her because of her second marriage - to an 89-year-old oil tycoon who died fourteen months later. She went to court to claim half his fortune, and that's what made her a legend; she was the voluptuous undressed siren who went digging for gold and lured an unsuspecting billionaire to his death. It was the very definition of scandalous, and we were tabloid-bound to disapprove.

Except I couldn't, really. I mean, who deserves to inherit oil money? Who merits that kind of karma? Offspring should inherit something, of course, and every good parent wants their kids to be comfortable, but a $1.6 billion estate buys more comfort than any heir needs. Anna Nicole helped a randy old man to decline into happy oblivion - she probably did more to earn her chunk of change than any of his children. It's worth remembering that J Howard Marshall did not inherit his money; he made it. It was surely up to him how he spent it. I can well believe Anna Nicole's claim that he promised half of it to her, because we all say stupid things when we're horny.

In the event, Anna Nicole never got her hands on her late husband's money. Judges have ruled every which way in the case between Smith and her stepson, and to date the case remains unresolved. Anna Nicole and the son are now both dead, but the battle between their estates will surely lurch and lumber on like a travelling zombie circus.

Still, the scandal made Smith famous, and she was happy to expand to fill the spotlight like the magnificent airbrushed grotesque that she was. She was almost an actress and briefly a reality star, but she was chiefly known as one of those widely hated headline-hogging creatures that just suckle viscous glitter from the fat vinegary tit of celebrity. She came from nothing to become a bigger nothing - a big, fabulous, noisy nothing; a goddess among the hollow.

In what turns out to have been the final act in this great American life, she had her second child in 2006 - a daughter, Dannielynn, whose paternity is still in dispute - then lost her first child three days later, when her son from her teen marriage died of a drug overdose. His death was the second most searched news story of 2006, second to Steve Irwin, but beating the Iraq war.

Barely two weeks after his death, Anna Nicole and her attorney held a committment ceremony as a gesture of their love. They had fried chicken at the reception.

That was a little over four months ago, and one might have thought that, with a new relationship and new child, Anna Nicole was about to embark on a new chapter. Instead, her deeply strange life has come to a very sudden end.

I suspect Anna Nicole will mainly be remembered as a joke or a disgrace. She was Miss Piggy made flesh. I'll choose to reflect on her more fondly, as a glamorous icon of unabashed carnal indulgence - a rare and gratifying example of a person coloured in all the way to the edges. She represented our very worst, but in the very best possible way. I have always loved that there are people like her in the world, and I'm a little sad that she's now out of it.

She never achieved her great ambition, of course. She was no Marilyn Monroe. Yet perhaps she was a Marilyn Monroe for our more grasping, tawdry, voyeuristic age. And in one sense she had Marilyn beat. She outlived her by three years.